The concept of imagination at Bachelard

Abstract

This article interprets the Bachelardian concept of imagination in the perspective of an aesthetic theory of culture. It shows that imagination is not the mere faculty of image reproduction -like perception-, nor a "second" or derived intellection, but a creative power of the human psyche, capable of generating and transforming the data of perception and of surpassing the judgments of intelligence. Thus, the creative imagination appears to us above all as a dynamism of the consciousness that possesses a certain coherence and regularity due to its link with the flows of materiality. This "material" dynamism of the creative imagination is also closely related to its "volent" or desiring character, in such a way that the imaginative action is capable of "investing" the environment by working with the qualities of things (solidity, roughness, malleability, etc.). It is thus revealed to us that man and his culture are crossed, from beginning to end, by the "unrealistic" function of the imagination: that man is a "fantastic animal" and his culture a "dream job".