Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a philosopher who declared himself to be of a "double nature", a thinker in fields of knowledge as diverse as the epistemology of science and the metaphysics of poetic imagination, demands a reading of the duality and complexity of his life and work. The purpose of this article is therefore to investigate the dialogical relationship between the epistemology of science and the metaphysics of poetic imagination, two opposed, competing, and complementary traits of Bachelard's philosophy, often expressed by the epithets of "diurnal" and "nocturnal". To study the relationship between these two directions in Bachelard's thought, we start from the analysis of the ambivalence of the following pairs of concepts: epistemological obstacle & material imagination, and psychoanalysis of knowledge & phenomenological method, which structure, theoretically in the case of the former pair, and methodologically in the case of the latter pair, his epistemology of science and his metaphysics of poetic imagination. The results allow us to say that the joining of Bachelard's scientific epistemology and poetical metaphysics is represented in his concept of the "24-hour man". This complex, androgynous man, reader and thinker of the scientific ideas and of the poetical genesis, seems to be an image of the reconciliation of the antinomies expressed by the diurnal and nocturnal facets of the Bachelardian philosophy. Expanding on the imagetic analysis of the "24-hour man" through a myth-analytical hermeneutics, we find the two semblances of Bachelard's philosophy configured, respectively, in the myths of Apollo-Prometheus and Dionysus.
Gaston Bachelard; Epistemology; Metaphysics of poetic imagination; "24-hour man"