Gaston Bachelard and the undergraduate curriculum: A defense of the arts and the humanities based on the primacy of images

This study is a defense of the intrinsic value of the arts and the humanities in the undergraduate curriculum based on the primacy of images in these fields, taking Gaston Bachelard's poetics (philosophy of images) as the given.;The study begins with a review of the utilitarian apologies for the arts and the humanities and argues that these defenses deny the intrinsic usefulness of these fields of study by relating them to conceptual fields, and make the arts and the humanities mere service fields to more "practical" endeavors. Instead, this defense must stem from an epistemological cogency that demonstrates a difference in the mode of knowing that these fields instill, which Bachelard's poetics provides.;Bachelard's conceptual epistemology is explicated.;This study shows that Bachelard's poetics begins as an investigation into the manner in which matter is poeticized and thus becomes a potential obstacle to science. His intent early is to bracket these poeticized notions of matter. What he discovers is that poetics are imagistic in nature and that images are related to soul. As such, images defy conceptual definitions. Rather, he describes them as the free-floating, dynamic interactions of the subjective with the objective so that the objective is valorized, that is, given qualities of warmth and form through lived experience. The arts and the humanities are expressions of those images which engage the student in the dynamics of images. Consequently, these fields make of students co-creators of their worlds, re-living the valorized world of the Bachelardian teacher. Moreover, when the images touch on the archetypes of humanity by being "cosmic images," that is, by reliving the unity of objective and subjective which stems from childhood, the student is co-creator of a world with communality. The student, through these images, enriches his being. The lessons of the arts and the humanities are ontological rather than ontic.;This is the basis for a defense of the arts and the humanities which addresses the phenomena themselves. The arts and the humanities are valuable fields in the undergraduate curriculum because they teach us to image well, to be co-creators of our world, to enrich our being. With this in mind, some further areas of research are suggested. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)...