Shipwreck with Spectator Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Hans Blumenberg, The MIT Press, 1997)
We frequently think of our life as a journey, on the model of a seafaring voyage. Ever since high school, I have recalled the line from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: "Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue, man comes to nothing in the end." When I worked for IBM, they once had a motivational slogan: "No wind blows in favor of that ship which has no port of destination".... I remember wondering whether I was past the middle of my journey, when, at about age 33, I read Lionel Trilling's novel: The Middle of the Journey.... Hans Blumenberg's essay: Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (The MIT Press, 1997), explores this familiar metaphor/cliché deeply, in a number of different directions:
	e are embarked, Pascal wrote -- always already at sea, with no land or harbor in sight.... (p.3) [S]olid ground is the appropriate place for men to live.... (p.12) "But beware the crash. There are thousands who are wrecked in port." (p.15; for more about this admonition, see the film: "Das Boot")
	[I]t will be one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price that must be paid in order to avoid the complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible. Through this figure is expressed a justification of... the passions against which philosophy discriminates: pure reason would mean the absence of winds and the motionlessness of human beings who possess complete presence of mind. (p.29) Being becalmed is lethal to life; the sail must be filled by the driving winds of the passions. (p.64) This life is in fact kept going only by means of things that can also be fatal for it.... (p.34) The harbor is not an alternative to shipwreck; it is the state where the pleasures of life are foregone. (p.35)
	"Sailors like to talk about their shipwrecks, but is there any port in this world? People shipwreck everywhere, even in a small brook" (p.37, HB quoting Voltaire).... Curiosity is a form of sensibility from which the slightest danger tears us away, forcing us to be concerned with ourselves alone. (p.39) For this reason, the theater illustrates the human condition in its purest form.... Only when the spectators have been shown to their secure places can the drama of human imperilment be played out before them. This tension, this distance, can never be great enough. (p.39) A curious people is a great honor to its government, for the more fortunate a nation is, the more curious it will be.... And the key to everything lies in the security, in the unsuffering condition of the curious being. (p.40) [This resonates with something Bertolt Brecht pointed out: Contrary to cliché, the land that has a hero must be deeply unhappy; only the land that does not need a hero is happy.[fn.112e]] [T]he old estrangement, introduced by Hesiod, between a man who cannot resist the seductions of the sea and another who quietly returns to his land and does not reject the little cares of a limited existence. p.56) [And yet: "Peregrinatio in stabilitate", or, as the early Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci said: "To go on an adventure, one does not need to leave one's native town."] Living with shipwreck (p.73) What happens on the sea... is as if it did not happen.... (p.58) [I felt this way on trans-Pacific, 12 hour+, air flights -- They felt like time outside of time.] "It was maintained that the path had been opened, forgetting that in earthly things a path can very rarely be spoken for, as the water that is dislodged by a ship instantly flows in behind it, so also error, by the law of its nature, when eminent minds have once driven it aside and made room for themselves, very quickly closes up again behind them." (p.58) Both progress and sinkings leave behind them the same peaceful surface. (p.59; emphasis added) Finally, recall that historically the metaphor of the stream of time was used destructively by Francis Bacon in attacking the assurance that truth was to be the daughter of time; out of this stream, only what was light enough not to sink into the river has reached our present position.... (p.87) Man leads two lives, one concrete and the other abstract. In the first, he is "prey to all the storms of actual life, and to the influence of the present, and must struggle, suffer, and die like the brute." In the second, he stands next to, if not over, himself, with the miniaturized outline of life's path before him. (p.60) "If there is no attainable solid ground, then the ship must already have been built on the high seas; not by us, but by our ancestors. Our ancestors, then, were able to swim, and no doubt -- using the scraps of wood floating around -- they somehow initially put together a raft, and then continually improved it, until today it has become such a comfortable ship that we do not have the courage any more to jump into the water and start all over again from the beginning." (pp.77-78) It strengthens the inclination, on that comfortable ship, to once again become the spectator of those who possess and want to spread the courage to leap into the water and start all over from the beginning, possibly counting on returning to the undamaged ship as the last preserve of a despised history. (p.78) "The man who relies on a straw will sink, whereas a solid plank has saved many a human life." In any case -- so it should surely continue -- as long as one cannot expect a rescuing ship.... Can we ever move beyond the plank? (pp.74-75) But the sea evidently contains material other than what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks? (pp.78-79) Aside: Aesthetics and the Ethics of the Spectator (p.26) Only God can be a true spectator, and he has no interest in this role. Nevertheless, the late Middle Ages -- forgetting Aristotle's doctrine of the exclusiveness of the unmoved mover's self-preoccupation -- made God into a spectator of the theater of the world. As if God had interrupted his eternity only for that purpose, all creatures became for him, as Luther put it, "masks and mummers" in a "game of God's, who has allowed them to exalt themselves a little bit." (p.27) [This recalls the ending of Martin Heidegger's essay "The Principle of Reason", with its "royal child... [that] plays... because it plays... The play is without 'why.'" (PoR, p.113): "Es gibt".] Leisure is the basis of culture.   Return to brief quotes about time (it's About time).   Spectator (Misu Maine Coon cat).   A life's journey begins: The Voyage of the Mimi. Read about some of my experiences growing older (aging). Read Medieval morality play: The Summoning of Everyman. See  five kinds of schooled fools (from Sebastian Brandt's Ship of Fools, 1494). Watch the show?   Think  about War from the Grassroot Perspective (Hermann Friedrich Honold).  [View intro!]   http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/sq/shipwreck.html Copyright © 2003 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net (2006-05-19 ISO 8601) 19 May 2006CE v03.03