DECISIVE ROLE BEFORE AND AT THE TIME PHILOSOPHY BEGAN

 

Water, as can be seen from these few examples, played a brilliant role before and at the beginning of the history of the philosophy.  It seems to have been perfectly suited to becoming a natural, physical symbol of 'being' par excellence.  It was simply going to have to act as a key concept and metaphor in metaphysics.  Precisely because water and 'being' can be reduced to a lack of attributes, qualities and shapes, they exemplify what existed at the beginning, the necessary substrate (hypokeimenon, according to the Greeks) from which attributes, qualities and properties were able to appear.  In this way, water was seen as the primary matter of being, the very substance of life or, at least, its original, maternal womb.  

From a conceptual standpoint, water and being both come to mean ‘proto-shape’ metaphorically.  This includes the initial, incipient shape and also the final, conclusive one.  On the one hand, it is the simplest denial of the assertion that nothingness does not exist.  Turning around the knowing confusion of that wording so that it is positive, the idea is to assert that there is indeed being or existence, that it is so indefinite and empty of concrete qualities, that it is the closest thing to nothingness, to the abyss.  From mythic, pre-Socratic origins, being and water are thus called to stand metaphorically for the alpha and the omega.  They point to a starting point that is so basic and foundational that it barely seems to allow for any shape at all.  It seems empty and thus, in a manner of speaking, practically nothingness.

 

Being or nothingness?

 

Glossing the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic, we could say that water along with its related metaphors (its metaphorologism) approximate the metaphysical category of 'being', because it tends to pure, empty formlessness.  In other words, primeval water—insofar as it takes no specific shape in contrast to plural 'waters'—seems to have lost all form whatsoever.  Thus it contains nothing available to intuition or thought, unless it be, as Hegel claimed, 'pure, empty intuition or thought itself‘.  That would equate it to the ontological concept of 'being'.  Our problem bubbles up from that very point.  If we turn from consideration of specific meanings of plural 'waters' to singular 'water' in its utter formlessness, embodying empty intuition, there is nothing in it available to thought beyond what Hegel again terms mere 'empty intuition or thought'.  Therefore, when we abandon speaking of 'waters' and determine to speak of 'water', a part of the language fails to work.  We find ourselves facing a non-theme, condemned to a difficulty so primary, immediate and shapeless that it cannot be treated as a subject. As a non-theme, it threatens to become 'nothingness, nothing less than nothingness itself.'

 

It is no surprise, therefore, that just as 'being' has been ignored, so too has water suffered a similar oversight.  It has hidden and differentiated itself (as Derrida would say) behind the veil of plural, metaphorical 'waters'.  That is, it lies behind the specific phenomena, things, watery entities.  Water has ceased to be one of the grand subjects of  philosophy precisely to the extent that our gaze has turned instead toward to the rich ‘waters’ of our culture, its symbols and metaphors.  Of course, this has brought a certain enrichment that has fed poets and scholars, but it has also brought some impoverishment since, as Bachelard says, ‘Water is, in that case, an adornment of landscapes; it isn’t really the 'stuff' of dreams.’^[1]

 

From such a fertile cosmological start with the pre-Socratics, metaphors related to 'waters' have multiplied, whereas 'water' has been reduced to a kind of nothingness.  It has lost all of its features.  Likewise, as Heidegger noted of 'being', metaphysical oblivion soon descended upon ‘water‘, while literal or metaphoric ‘waters’ gave rise to much thought.  (The more precise and the more distinctive the ‘waters‘ were, the better!)  After Thales of Miletus, the other Miletan philosophers significantly chose to privilege elements other than water as primary matter.  Anaximenes opted for air and, later, Heraclitus put fire first.  Thus, we can already see an early warning sign of the fate that we would later befall water, under the dominant metaphors of the West.  Employing that marvellous capacity of the pre-Socratics to yoke what was most abstract, transcendent and sublime to what was most concrete, everyday and down-to-earth, Heraclitus would assert that a soul is destroyed when it gains humidity (losing dryness), and behaves literally like a drunk.  ‘A man when he is drunk is led by an unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, having his soul moist’.  Heraclitus adds, ‘For souls it is death to become water ....’^[2].  Anaximander very shrewdly chose to sidestep commonplace references to construct a new, more abstract concept: the ‘apeiron’ or the Indefinite, without boundary, limit or definition.  He raises to the level of a concept the formlessness that his master Thales of Miletus had already intuited of that lowly, colourless, odourless, tasteless, transparent, but ever present and necessary stuff, water.

 

This concept resonates behind the Aristotelian definition of matter as hyle, which gives concrete shape to any form in space-time (according to the medieval schoolmen, or Scholastics).  Yet while this shapeless material substrate is what makes anything (including form) actually real, it itself remains mere abtract potential….  In this sense, water is the material of life, as we understand it. It lies behind all life, and all living ‘form’ necessarily relies upon it.  For this reason, there is scientific consensus that the best way to seek signs of intelligent life in the universe, better than awaiting some coded message, is to set out after water, H₂O, that colourless, tasteless, odourless liquid without which such prideful ‘intelligent’ life as ours would not be possible.

 

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^[1] Gaston Bachelard Water and Dreams:  An Essay in the Imagination of Matter, Dallas:  The Dallas Institute Publications, 1999.

^[2] GS Kirk and JE Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, 1957: 205.  Fragments #234 and #232. Fragment #233 is also of note: ‘A dry soul is wisest and best.’ 

“Metaphorologism of Water (a Praise)” de Gonçal Mayos, Capítulo 2 de Disasters  and Socio-environmental Conflicts: violence, damage and resistance de André Luiz Freitas Dias; Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês; Brunello Stancioli e Lucas Furiati de Oliveira (Organizadores), Rio de Janeiro, MC & G Editorial, Fundo PROAP do Ministério Público Estadual – MG, 2020, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-65-89369-08-0