Skip to content

Gaston Bachelard

27 June 1884-16 October 1962

Definition.com

Change is the idea that new doctrines do not develop out of the old, but rather, that the new enveloped the old.

Definition.com

Daydreaming is that which, as part of household activities, serves to keep vigilant watch over the house.

Definition.com

Fire is emblamatic of the desire to change or speed up the passage of time... all that changes slowly can be explained by life while all that changes quickly can be explained by fire.

Definition.com

Fire is the only phenomenon so definitely reflecting at once the opposing values of good and evi.... It shines in paradise. It burns in hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse.

Definition.com

Fire is the prime element of reverie, the first object, the first phenomenon, on which the human mind reflected.

Definition.com

The House shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Definition.com

The Imagination is a faculty for deforming perception's immediacies, thus liberating us from primary and obvious images and offering us the possibility of change and chance.

Definition.com

The Instant is not a mere artifact of the spirit of calculation, but, quite to the contrary, the source of novelty in human experience. The novel and the instantaneous co-imply each other: Novelty is clearly always instantaneous, but the instant itself is always novel forever new, always different, unremissibly other than any other instant, including the instant that precedes the present instant. In sort, the instant offers 'an absolute beginning.

Definition.com

The Instant is representative of a radical new start in each iterations, launching a new event in the history of the world, setting it out to develop on its own. This event comes from nowhere, even if it going somewhere from that moment on.