Gaston Bachelard (google images)

MANILA, Philippines -- Fr. Jett Villarin, Ateneo’s new president, is a Jesuit scientist and poet who reminds me of my favorite philosopher Gaston Bachelard. He was born in 1884 in the small Champagne town of Bar-sur-Aube in France. A son and a grandson of a cobbler, he struggled to sustain his studies as a postman. He finished Études secondaires at the Collège de Bar-sur-Aube, became a practising physical chemist while teaching physics and chemistry in the same school. In 1930, he taught at the Faculté de Lettres at Dijon. He chaired the departments of history and philosophy of science at the Université de Sorbonne. He was elected to the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques in 1955 and won the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1961.  In the 20 years of his illustrious career, he influenced French philosophy’s most prominent post-modernist thinkers such as Georges Canguilheim, Jean Hyppolite and Michel Foucault. An amphitheater in the Université de Sorbonne is dedicated to him.

The honoris causa of Bachelard is to change the fundamentalist attitudes in scientific teaching by changing the rationalist metaphysics that supports it. From the Jungian psychology of the archetype and the shadow, Bachelard conceived of an ontology that thrives not on reason but imagination. Bachelard lived in the provençal part of France and must have been close to nature. During his times, environmental destruction was not yet a concern but he was well aware of the growing power of science. When science becomes too rational and “scientific,” it objectifies nature. But when science integrates emotion and imagination, its practice becomes humble, wholistic, healing, attuned to the ways of nature, and compassionate. Bachelard shows that the scientist, before he goes to the laboratory, “dreams” of the elements in the most romantic manner, which, if he is aware of it, infuses him with creativity and compassion in his experiments. The man of hard science designed a “pauso” metaphysics  which he called “poetic ontology” of the elements.

 In his book “Water and Dreams,” Bachelard distinguishes between formal imagination  and material imagination. Formal imagination is conceived intellectually whereas material imagination is an idea that comes directly from contact with nature, such as water. Greek philosophers believed that Spirit inhabits all beings. Water, in all its forms and ways, is charged with Spirit and contact with it awakens us to “The Deep” in our souls; we are all mermaids that swim in the water of life. The  material imagination of water gives us the spiritual exercise of fluidity; life flows and carries us in its torrents, throwing us to and fro with no support, and if we are detached and unafraid, we might just be delivered to the white shores of Aslan’s country.

Clear, springtime waters are images of our souls. Narcissus looked into a clear spring and fell in love with himself. In psychology, this is interpreted as narcissism but Bachelard indicates that there is such a thing as innocent love of self. A metallic mirror makes us obsessed with self but the water mirror sees the beauty in the human; the human face is made an instrument of seduction. Water makes our image more natural and fills it with purity and we realize that our beauty is not an end in itself but continues, its destination a mystery. The narcissistic temptation is to say “I love myself as I am” but Narcissus says “I am the way I love myself”. Sublimation does not always deny desire or quell instinct but could also be a form of sacrifice for an ideal.

The human wants to see and seeing is an insatiable need. We do not dream water but water dreams in us. The world wants to see itself in us – a unity of natura naturans and natura naturata. The will to contemplate meets contemplative nature. When we contemplate water, the Spirit that desires  to be carried along is born in our imagination.

The river evokes sexual desires; women are portrayed in paintings as wading nude in it. Water contemplates natural nudity, a nudity in sensual innocence. The swan, in literature, is an ersatz, an image of the nude woman. We adore the swan because we desire the bather.  Honeymooners like to make love in water and couples “feel like doing it” mostly after feeling refreshed from bathing. The swan song, commonly interpreted as  Odette’s song of death, is actually a song of desire, yearning for love.

In horror films, muddy waters are a dumpsite for murdered bodies. The dark water keeps and preserves them, because it wants the bodies to be found. The muddy river kept the ring of Sauron until it was found by Sméagol who became the monster Gollum when “the Precious” corrupted him. In the muddy waters of the dark cave, Bilbo tricked him into possessing the ring until it was passed on to Frodo. When one is stuck in muddy water, we can’t  move on because water absorbs our sorrows and our evil desires. Dead waters allow us to sleep and rest. “It swallows the shadow like a black syrup.” Water is no longer something we drink; it drinks the shadow in us. Water that is mixed with blood becomes heavy water. It reminds us of the sacrifice of liberation: God turned water into blood to threaten Pharaoh into setting Moses and his people free; valorous blood is shed on the waters of Corregidor and Mactan.

Thales thought that water is a prime cosmic element because it is always underneath things that mix. Thermal water is water and fire. Clay is earth softened by water; with it, God had shaped the human by his own hands. Marital union is effected and sustained if water extinguishes the fire of opposites, melting resistant egos into shared love. Water is universal glue.  I studied Zen meditation in Ocean Sky temple in Greenhills and I thought there is something poetic about its name. When the Sky marries the Ocean, its offspring is rain, water that drenches earth with life.

Water is feminine and maternal. All water is a kind of milk and every nourishing drink is mother’s milk. The seawater’s body is soft and warm and embracing; it provides prime nourishment for all beings. Milk is the first sedative; it rocks us to sleep, just like the sea; it gives us back to our mothers for sustenance, but also for renewal. In myth, water begets life and transformation: Aphrodite sprang from the seafoam as we sprang from the waters of the womb, through the vagina, which smells of fish; Moses was taken out of a basket of reeds that flowed on water. Water is womb but also tomb. Suicidal women prefer, over the gun, slashing their wrists in the bathtub because it is a more gentle form of death. In tales of chivalry, a king who dies is put on a boat that flowed on funeral water destined towards the brilliant sun. “All rivers join the River of the Dead.” All deaths are a journey and all journeys end in death.

Water is fountain of youth. Hera renews her virginity by bathing in a pool of water. We are purified by waters of baptism and forgiven ahead of our sins by merciful waters in which Pilate washed his hands. Mother water is our first moral teacher. Impurity and purity play a dynamic relationship in water. A drop of impurity in pure waters pollutes it entirely and a drop of purity in impure waters suffices to cleanse it entirely. In epic films, violent water flagellates the hero’s body and vomits him over to the shore.  Water is the archetype of the unconscious. The leap into water is a wild abandonment into madness; all forms of madness are a gargle of categories; good and bad become neutral in value. Foucault uses Nietzsche’s image of the stultifera navis or the ship of fools in his genealogical treatise on modern madness.  When Jesus walked on water, he was thought to be a ghost first. Peter lost his wits for love of him and jumped into the water. In faith, the apostle walked on water; in fear, he splashed on it.

Finally, water has a voice. Language is the liquid of expression. Writers make their thoughts flow through pen and ink. The blackbird sings like a cascade of water. The sound of water is the music of the spheres, reminding us of what is true, good, and beautiful. Biology teaches us that when we see frog’s eggs, that habitat has started to heal from pollution. When tadpoles hatch from those eggs and become frogs that croak in the swamps under the patter of rain, we hear the voice in the hollow of our souls, calling to us that nature forgives our transgressions, and life begins again through water. For the loving water, we are precious; we should not be left wasted by ourselves.

(Mira Tan Reyes chairs the Department of Philosophy in Miriam College. She served as Secretary of the Philosophical Association of the Philippines and was a research scholar of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.)