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This article aims to show how the 2024 publication of Ricœur’s Course on Imagination (Chicago, 1975) leads to a reassessment of Ricœur’s position with regard to Bachelard and allows for a comprehensive reinterpretation of the deep relationships that unite their philosophies of imagination. In this course, contemporary with The Rule of Metaphor, Ricœur continues, on the one hand, to acknowledge his debt to Bachelard, as he had done in The Symbolism of Evil: he sees in Bachelard’s Poetics what opens the way to a conception of creative imagination as a dimension of language rather than as a trace of perception.
On the other hand, however, he moves from a hermeneutics of symbols to a hermeneutics of texts, which leads him to develop a critical stance toward Bachelard’s approach to imagination. Because he now conceives the poetic image as metaphor (that is, as heuristic fiction) rather than as symbol, Ricœur establishes a fundamental analogy between scientific imagination and poetic imagination, which directly opposes the separation between poetry and science claimed by Bachelard.
Beyond this disagreement, however, the article concludes by emphasizing the profound convergence of the two thinkers in their analysis of the ontological power of poetic imagination. Not only do Ricœur and Bachelard conceive creative imagination as an increase of being and an augmentation of reality, but they both affirm the primacy of act over representation, situating their philosophies of imagination within the horizon of an ontology of act. In this sense, it is not enough to think of the creativity of imagination in terms of language by rejecting the ontological primacy of perception; insofar as it illuminates and nourishes our action, this creativity must also be placed at the very root of our psyche and our acting.