Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.

(Le nouvel esprit scientifique)
Dialectic of Duration. He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically we think the truth as the historical rectification of a long error and we think experience as the rectification of the common and original illusion (illusion première). The role of epistemology in science
Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian sense although he recommended his "non-Cartesian epistemology" as a replacement for the more standard Cartesian epistemology.

He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie française and influenced many subsequent French philosophers among them Michel Foucault Louis Althusser Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique).