Gaston Bachelard Quotes on Truth
Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science gave him a distinctive and provocative conception of truth, and the quotes gathered here present it. Bachelard rejected the idea of a pure starting point for knowledge: there is no first knowledge, he held, since all knowledge is the result of struggle against earlier error, and in his sharpest formulation, there is no original truth, only original error. Truth, on this account, is not discovered intact but won by the correction of obstacles in our own minds, what he called epistemological breaks. In his later work on imagination he allowed truth a different mode of access as well, suggesting that by listening to the ceaseless murmuring of the subconscious one also hears the truth. Drawn from his scientific and poetic writings, these passages present truth as the hard-won overcoming of error.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“Science is the empire of the new.”
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“There is no first knowledge; all knowledge is the result of struggle against earlier error.”
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“All that is decisive in the soul has its source in the imagination.”
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“True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.”
Introduction -
“The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.”
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie)(1960) | Ch. 2, sect. 2 -
“There is no original truth, only original error.”
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire(1988) | A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books