Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio are two of the greatest French philosophers of the twentieth century. They have many similar characteristics: Phenomenological and the anti-structuralist approach. Cognitive fracture as a key for understanding human behavior. Existence of eternal movement, speed and present. Flight and aviation as key amplifiers of consciousness. Importance of material reality and especially architecture. Negation of Post-modrnism. Poetic writing style. Affinity for physics of relativity. Different characteristics are: Purification versus accident. Psychoanalysis versus technology. Classics against Hyper-modernism.
Bechelard [1884 - 1962] was a senior member of the French Academy of Sciences, and greatly influenced postmodern French philosophers. He contributed greatly to the study of the poetics and philosophy of science. He developed the concept of the "cognitive rift", which is essential for the progress of science out of crises. He has extensively developed the concept of "dynamic imagination", according to which the main function of the creative imagination is to refute existing images.
Virilio [1932 - 2018] was a cultural theorist, urbanist and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings on technology, as it has evolved in relation to speed and power, architecture, the arts, the city and the military. The major concepts he developed are "Dromology" ["Racing"] and "Global Accident". According to them, modern culture, the cyberspace, is instantly virtual. It moves at the maximum speed of light, creating a reality of a uniform world, a huge global city, which is a terminal saturated with detached images and prone to accidents.
For both, fliht and aviation are key to creative thinking. They are a male-female creature alike and the deity in person. The attributes embodied in these concepts becomes for them, automatically and involuntarily, the creative intuition. This is similar to the reliance of many other creators on these concepts as a starting point for thinking. For example, the issue of UAVs stands out today. It has become a tool through which one can review and summarize any human phenomenon. For Bechelard the UAV is another good conductor, an amplifier, for the imagining mind. For Virilio, it is another link in the de-localization and global accident of humanity.
The difference between Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio is the difference between the optimist and the pessimist. Bechelard's point of view is personal and intimate, compared to Virilio's global-cosmic point of view. Bechelard observes in space what the near and familiar reality is, on the personal and private scale. Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. He looks at the world from the outer and unfamiliar space, on the superpersonal scale and on society as a whole. Bechelard is the desire, the passion and the hope. Virilio is the surrender and defeat, the inevitable global accident. In Bechelard the world is as round as a well. For Virilio, the world is as square as a screen. Bechelard is innocent and Virilio is cynical. In Bechelard the world opens up and in Virilio it is closing.
While Heidegger, Virilio's spiritual teacher, view the radio as superficial and a reduction, Bechelard saw it as a possibility for deepening and uniting hearts, a kind of universal utopia. The conversations in cafes are loud, but in the universal world of radio, everyone hears each other, and everyone can listen comfortably.
Clues to Bechelard's critique of the "distressed philosophy", as he called existentialist philosophy, can be found without difficulty in all his writings. The refusal of distress was inconsistent with the fashion order of his time, but Bechelard remained consistent in his positions. Boldness was needed to write, in the middle of the twentieth century, in France, in the days of the existentialist climax, that "distress is false: we were created to breathe well''.
Many writers note the psychic powers that Bechelard's philosophy imparts to those who come through its gates, the healing quality inherent in his philosophy, in the possibility he offers, in which man and the world are in constant poetic dialogue. There is indeed a lot of loneliness in Bechelard's philosophy. This is, without a doubt, a philosophy of the individual, the loner. But he is not alone, he is always in the company of the world. Moreover, he is in the company of the beauty of the world. The natural destiny of dreaming, Bechelard believed, is to see the beauties of the world. You can not dream of ugliness in a reverie. Beauty is not only aesthetic, it also a need of the cognitive, ethical and mentality of the person.
Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. The sorting and comparison based on the classicical writers by Bechelard, alternates with him to the sorting and comparison based on the present reality. Bechelard's point of view is personal. Virilio's perspective is global. According to Virilio, the world has changed. It is not the same world known by classical works and history. It all became a bustling mega city. We can no longer rely on our natural perception. It was completely distorted by the Tele-Media. The original and new poetic image can not exist in the world of electronic consumerism images, which enslave the imagination and cognition. Loneliness is no longer a sacred value. It is mechanical, and stems from the social split into "human points" created by technology.
The words, too, became worthless. Only the oral experience, the continuity that the delay and acceleration in speech are capable of, remained. It is the stops speech can create, by the wisdom of the thinker, in the mind of the listener. Virilio, through his stretched paragraphs, brings back the reader to the beginning of the social consciousness, of the shoutings of primitive man. He does not have a dialogue with the reader, as does Bechelard. There is hom survival for its own sake. No hand caressing. There is a finger that press the destruction button.
Virilio is one of the most prolific and poignant critics of the drama of the modern technological age. The enterprise of his life is an ongoing reflection on the origins, nature, and influences of the technologies that make up the modern and postmodern world. He was particularly interested in military technology, representation technologies, computer and information technologies and biotechnology. The question of aviation as a dystopia is central to his thinking, as aviation is a key factor in the creation of the visual world and the global city, a world-terminal that is negatively interactive. Although Virilio does not ruling out technology, he radically criticizes the ways in which it changes the world, and even the human race. The criticism towards him is that he has a flawed perception, which is too negative and one-sided, and loses the empowering and democratic aspects of new computer and media technologies.
Sources:
Gaston Bechelard. The poetics of space
John Armitage. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews
