"There is no original truth, only original error"
About this Quote
Bachelard’s line lands like an insult to the ego and a love letter to science at the same time. “There is no original truth” punctures the romantic fantasy of the lone genius delivering pristine insight from nowhere. What looks “original” in knowledge-making, he suggests, is usually the mistake: the first clumsy reach, the seductive simplification, the confident myth that later thinkers have to dismantle. The jab is deliberate. It frames error not as an embarrassment but as the engine of intellectual progress.
The subtext is Bachelard’s larger argument about epistemology: reason doesn’t smoothly accumulate facts; it breaks with itself. He wrote in a moment when physics and chemistry were repeatedly humiliating common sense, forcing new concepts (relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical thinking) that made older “truths” look like intuitive folklore. In that setting, originality becomes suspicious. Novelty often means you’ve slipped free of inherited constraints, but also that you’ve slipped into a new illusion. The mind loves first drafts.
The sentence is also a warning aimed at philosophy. If you treat truth as an origin point - a pure foundation - you’re likely smuggling in unexamined metaphors, habits, and social authority. Bachelard flips the heroic narrative: what’s historically “original” is the obstacle, the cognitive blockage that must be named before knowledge can move.
It works because it’s compact, paradoxical, and slightly cruel. It doesn’t flatter the reader; it recruits them into a discipline: value revision over revelation, method over mood, and humility over the romance of being first.
The subtext is Bachelard’s larger argument about epistemology: reason doesn’t smoothly accumulate facts; it breaks with itself. He wrote in a moment when physics and chemistry were repeatedly humiliating common sense, forcing new concepts (relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical thinking) that made older “truths” look like intuitive folklore. In that setting, originality becomes suspicious. Novelty often means you’ve slipped free of inherited constraints, but also that you’ve slipped into a new illusion. The mind loves first drafts.
The sentence is also a warning aimed at philosophy. If you treat truth as an origin point - a pure foundation - you’re likely smuggling in unexamined metaphors, habits, and social authority. Bachelard flips the heroic narrative: what’s historically “original” is the obstacle, the cognitive blockage that must be named before knowledge can move.
It works because it’s compact, paradoxical, and slightly cruel. It doesn’t flatter the reader; it recruits them into a discipline: value revision over revelation, method over mood, and humility over the romance of being first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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