SOURCE: Slattery, Dennis Patrick. “Imagining the Stuff of the World: Reflections on Gaston Bachelard and Ivan Illich.” New Orleans Review 12, no. 3 (fall 1985): 81-7.

In the following essay, Slattery finds parallels between the philosophy of the imagination in Bachelard's Water and Dreams and Ivan Illich's H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.

Have we forgotten the elements of the world, those aspects of the world's body that connect us to things on a level more intimate and important than that of simple possession? And culturally, have we moderns become suspicious of, if not overtly distrusting of, the imagination and its place within the ecology of culture? This ecology is also related to culture's language which may have suffered a similar fate. Roberts Avens has recently written that “beginning with nominalism in the 14th century and culminating in Wittgenstein and Sartre, we have witnessed an eclipse of the magic function...