Psychoanalysis of Fire

Rating:
Summary: The World is Afire
Review: Forget about The Poetics of Space (for now) and immerse yourself in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Watch Bachelard circle and destroy modern rationality through a proto-rationalistic, Socratic assault on the concept of fire. Bachelard's subject is the 'concept' rather than the real thing, fire itself, the number one immaterial 'substance' prefiguring even light. Read, in amazement, as scientific scrutiny of this primordial phenomenon approaches farce. But pay very, very, very close attention to the section on Novalis, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex", and you'll find Bachelard's genius swooping in for the kill. "These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries." Bachelard is not the prophet of surrationalism for nothing! It is this book (first published in 1938) that locates his critical method at the forefront of philosophical critical idealism. Unlike Ernst Cassirer, Bachelard is more than willing to take the plunge into the abyss of imagination - that Coleridgean imagination that is the mostly unacknowledged source of our collective intelligence.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to a unique writer.
Review: This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to a unique writer.
Review: This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.