The Sea

A Philosophical Encounter

David Farrell Krell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350080539
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350076730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature

Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. The sea cradles and soothes us, we visit it often for solace and inspiration, it is familiar, being the place where life ultimately began. Yet the sea is also dark and mysterious and often spells catastrophe and death. The sea is a set of contradictions: kind, cruel, indifferent. She is a blind will that will 'have her way'. In exploring this most capricious of phenomena, David Farrell Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hölderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.

The Sea explores the significance in Western civilization of the catastrophic and generative power of the sea and what humankind's complex relationship with it reveals about the human condition, human consciousness, temporality, striving, anxiety, happiness and mortality.

1

Let Ourselves Be Cradled

… And always

Our longing soars into the unbounded. But much is

To be kept close. And we need loyalty.

But forwards and backwards we will

Not want to look. Let ourselves be cradled, as

On the swaying skiff of sea.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, “MNEMOSYNE”

Perhaps I may be forgiven for reproducing a note from a recent journal of mine, written during one of my many stays in the southern portion of the ancient island of Thira, today’s Santorini, which is the topos of this entire book:

On my back, floating in the sea at Ormos Balos, feeling the waves ripple beneath my head, back, and limbs, I have the sense not that I am swimming or sinking but that I am levitating, rising out of the watery element into the aerian. The feeling is enhanced when I close my eyes. Weightlessness, as though Hölderlin’s “bobbing barque” or “swaying skiff” has become a space capsule. The land that can be so rough on our feet, ankles, knees, and hips, so jarring and jolting to our joints, gives way to weightlessness. On our backs in the sea, when it’s not too rough, it’s a little bit like dreams of flying, without looking ahead or behind to see what is making the psychoanalysts smile so contentedly—their couch itself having now become the bobbing barque or swaying skiff of our bodies.

As unspectacular as the note is, if only because it has to do with touch, not spectacle, it is the inspiration for my entire meditation. I confess to being embarrassed about it. On my back, floating on or in the sea? It seems so unadventurous, so unheroic, so utterly passive. Embarrassed? In Spanish that means pregnant.

The Aegean Sea plays an important role in Goethe’s Faust II, in a scene Goethe worked on toward the very end of his life. At the culmination of the second act, in a scene set in a “Rocky Cove of the Aegean Sea,” the Tritons and Nereids prove that they are more than mere fish by swimming off to the isle of Samothrace in order to fetch the Cabirian gods. Why? They hope that these ancient gods, the “Great Gods,” as they are called on Samothrace, will be able to help one of the central figures of Act II, namely, Homunculus, the “little human” or the “seed of humankind,” to become a full-fledged human. For Homunculus, who is all spirit and no body, hovers ghostily in an alchemist’s retort; yet he, or it, would love to become embodied and thus fully human. Some say that modern Western humanity, for all its science and philosophy, and for all its technical achievement and redoubtable power, is precisely in the position of Homunculus—a feisty spirit encapsulated in a glass container.

The Nereids and Tritons, returning from Samothrace, announce that they have brought these Samothracian gods to the rocky cove not only to help Homunculus incarnate but also to celebrate the sea in a festival of peace. It is as though all the warships that plow the waves of the historical Aegean are now to be demobilized, and as though peace is the deeper meaning of the deep.

Homunculus, meanwhile, is underwhelmed by the sight of the Cabirian gods, who are, as Schelling says, dwarf-like gods of yearning and mourning. How could the languorous, languid, languishing deities of Samothrace, consumed as they are by their own longing and apparently powerless to help themselves, help him get a body?

They’re all ill-shapen, seems to me,

Botched clay pots is all I see;

Yet now the wise men gather round

And crack their pates on what they’ve found.

ll. 8219–22

Strange words, impertinent words, from an upstart spirit in a bottle. Indeed, the spirit of humankind, amoeba-like, itself seems ill-shapen, or to have no shape at all. When Proteus first espies Homunculus, he cries, “A little dwarf that glows in the dark!” (l. 8245). The word Zwerglein is the clue to Goethe’s motivation for calling on the Cabirian gods to help with his homunculean task. For among the most telling characteristics of the Cabiri is their pygmy-like size. In Goethe’s play, the Telchines arrive from Rhodes and the Daktyls from Mount Ida, to join forces with the Cabiri of Samothrace—all the dwarfish smithy gods of Greece who guard the secrets of technology descend on that rocky cove of the Aegean.

Yet in the end it is the wisdom of Thales, the Neptunist philosopher, that prevails: the only way Homunculus will be able to inherit a body is to immerse himself (itself?) in the fecund sea, in order there to assume and pass through all the myriad forms of organic life, to evolve through eons of time in the direction of a still remote humanity. At the end of the scene, the radiant beauty of Galatea, who suddenly appears on Venus’s half-shell, captivates the spirit of humankind, who is now all afire, himself (itself?) all Sehnen or longing. All the elements, melting now into the elemental brine, combine over vast ages of time to provide Homunculus, the spiritual seed of humanity, the body that it craves. “For thus rules Eros, who began it all!” (l. 8479).

What could have been more natural for Goethe than to identify the erotic beginnings of humankind with the sea, and the sea with the ancient Greek Aegean? It comes as a bit of a shock to learn that the ancient Greek language has no word for sea. W. K. C. Guthrie explains that the original Achaean Greeks were so landlocked in the Hyperborean north that “the sea” meant nothing to them (WG 97). The word θάλασσα, in the Attic Greek dialect θάλαττα, which gives Buck Mulligan his shout, is in fact a non-Greek word of unknown origin. “Confronted with the Mediterranean,” writes Guthrie, “the Greeks called it ‘the salt element’ (ἅλς),” which, by Freudian-Abelian inversion gives us our word salt (ibid.). Other words employed by the Greeks were “the flat expanse” (πέλαγος), which is equivalent to the Latin word aequor, and πόντος, meaning “the way across,” which is reflected in the Latin pons, “bridge,” πόντος being reminiscent of the Greek πόρος, “narrow strait,” that which enables a maritime crossing (ibid.).

It may be that Guthrie has learned some of this from Albin Lesky’s classic work on the subject, The Greeks’ Path to the Sea. Lesky recounts the history of the early invasion of Greece by Achaean Hellenes, an Indo-Germanic people from the South Balkans, around 2000–1800 BCE, followed some six hundred years later by the Dorian invasion from even farther north. In both cases, writes Lesky, “the sea confronted the invading Greeks with an entirely new and exciting element of the world; they had to deal with it and accommodate themselves to it” (AL 6). According to the linguists that Lesky has been able to consult, only two ancient languages, namely, das Albanesische und Hellenische, are missing the Urindogermanisches word mari, which gives the German its Meer and the Latin languages their mare (AL 7). In spite of exhaustive research into the word θάλαττα, all one can say is that it belongs to “a pre-Hellenic people” (AL 8–9). Even the great god Poseidon, whom the Hellenes brought with them, is originally a god of lakes and streams, while the Tritons and Nereids are related to sweet Melusine and Undine, all of them figures that the northern freshwater peoples carried with them as they came south and discovered the sweeping expanse of brine (AL 98, 121, 129–30).

Because our histories of Greece usually begin with maritime battles against the Persians, and our histories of Greek philosophy with Ionian Miletus and Ephesus on the southwestern coast of Turkey, we assume that the Greeks are at home on, in, and with the sea. Nothing could be more natural, in our view, than Thales’ exclamation that water is the source of all things, or Anaximander’s speculation that human beings emerged from thorny fish, or Empedocles’ insistence that he himself was at one time a fish.

How should one enter into a topic as vast as the sea? Precisely as one enters the topos of the sea, at least at Balos Bay on Thira, which is to say, carefully. My feet cannot find purchase on these rolling lucky stones; no toes are long enough or strong enough to grip these shifting rocks tossed by the waves as though they were pingpong balls. I struggle to keep my balance, my arms the wings of a frantic butterfly. And, unlike the Caribbean Sea, the Aegean is never quite warm enough. This is no bathtub. Once I am in over my knocking knees, I dip my hands and arms into the chill water, as the cardiologists have urged. Summoning something like courage, and giving up entirely on my fragile feet, I take the plunge. My head “it simply swirls,” my ears hear naught but bubbles, my eyes open on the wonderworld below, and I am surprised to find myself in motion—slow motion—as the stones and pebbles give way to sand and clumps of luxuriant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Key to the Principal Sources Cited
• Introduction
• 1 Let Ourselves Be Cradled
• 2 Amniotica
• 3 Forwards and Backwards—Catastrophe?
• 4 Full of Gods
• 5 The Tears of Kronos
• 6 These Drowning Men Do Drown
• 7 Waves and Drops of Time
• A Concluding Word
• Index
• Copyright