Water Worlds

I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing the world in terms of the elements of classical antiquity—earth, water, fire, air, and sometimes aether, the fifth element. This approach is usually associated with the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Thales, who is often credited as the first among them. I recently gave a talk on the metaphysics of water at a conference at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, an especially apt place to debut such a project, for Venice is a city built of and on water. I am embarking on this voyage in collaboration with Sarah Schorr, an American photographic artist, researcher, and educator based in Aarhus, Denmark, whose work can be understood as a series of meditations on light, water, and embodied contemplation. Over the next year, she will be an artist-in-residence at the Center, and her piece, “love in mine” from her 2021 investigation The Color of Water, accompanies this essay. What follows is my own meditation on water worlds, drawing on Thales and the contemporary Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, whose book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, was an inspiration for the Center’s plant consciousness reading group, which in turn led to our new Thinking with Plants and Fungi initiative.

“Thales and those who follow him: there is one world.”

Aëtius¹

Like all of us, I swam before I ever spoke, crawled, walked, or wrote. Like all of us, I am made mostly of water, not dust, as Genesis 3:19 would have us believe. And it is to water that I hope to return. Our flesh—our skin, muscles, and organs—are between 60-80 percent water; even our bones are about a third water.² However, when the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus declared that everything is water, he wasn’t talking about water in the way we presume to measure it.

Thales is often cited as the first of the so-called Pre-Socratics. The views of these early philosophers are preserved in fragments of their writings, and testimonies about them—both of which are preserved by later authors, such as Aristotle. Aristotle says that these earliest philosophers believed that all things come from a single elemental principle or archê, that Thales was the first of them, the founder or archêgos, and that he thought that that principle was water.³ Everything is water, or as a later author put it, “the beginning of everything and its end is water.”⁴ Every single thing that exists in the world, from stones to stars, is in fact water, albeit in a different state. Earth and everything on it (and in it) are water, and it rests on water.

What we experience as the diversity of beings in the world is the result of water taking on different forms and qualities, much as we observe in everyday life with water in its frozen, liquid, and gaseous states. Except that if water is the archê or first principle of all things, then this “archaic” water is not everyday water. Everyday water might be the closest thing we have in the phenomenal world to the watery substrate of everything that exists, but it is not that substrate itself. In other words, there is water, and then there is water.

Thales is also famous for claiming that “all things are full of gods” and, curiously, that magnets have souls.⁵ These thoughts may not be as strange as they first appear. He is said to have observed that a magnet can move iron. And because a soul is something that moves, and thus can move something else, a magnet must have a soul. But Thales probably did not think that magnets were unique in this regard; it is more likely that he thought, based on observation, that if something as seemingly inert as a stone has a soul, then everything must have one. And this is very likely what he meant by “all things are full of gods”: everything has a soul, a psychê. This is the view that we have come today to call “panpsychism”—meaning “everything is ensouled”—a view that has gained renewed currency in philosophical circles in recent decades.

Our English word “soul” comes from the German Seele, a word of uncertain origin, but suspected to have meant “coming from or belonging to the sea.”⁶ The Greek word psychê is also uncertain but is often said to mean, at its root, “breath.” If so, then for Thales everything breathes, or rather, everything is breath breathing. But if everything is water, then this divine breath, this soul “animating” everything, is none other than water, the archê or first principle of all that exists. In short, Thales might well be saying that everything is water, everything is psychê, everything is breath. Beings are not so much immersed in a medium as if they were distinct objects moving through it; rather, they are the medium; we are water surging and swelling into ephemeral forms, and these pulses and fluctuations are that very archaic water breathing, inhaling and exhaling into phenomenal existence.

“Some people think that soul is mixed in with the whole, which is perhaps also the reason why Thales thought that all things are full of gods.”

Aristotle⁷

In 2017, the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia published, La vie des plantes: Une métaphysique du mélange, translated into English in 2019 as The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture.⁸ Coccia is interested in plants in so far as they are world-makers. For him, a “world” is the space in which life emerges and is sustained. Our world is not the universe, nor is it exactly the planet on which we live. Rather, the world is our planet’s habitable climate. Plants made our world in the sense that they transformed the earth’s climate and made possible a commonwealth of breath, in which plants and animals are citizens.⁹ What plants breathe out, we animals breathe in, and vice versa. To breathe is to be immersed in air, a medium of exchange in which, when we inhale, we contain in us, in our lungs, the very same air that contains us; and when we exhale, what we contain in us becomes what contains us. This is the “metaphysics of mixture” of the book’s subtitle, the climatic condition by which plants make possible life, and thus a world.

Coccia insists on saying that we are immersed in air, that “to breathe means to be immersed.”¹⁰ In other words, we need to think of air as if it were water: “The structure of universal circulation is fluid, the place where everything comes into contact with everything else and comes to mix with it without losing its form and its substance.”¹¹ When we realize that air is liquid, that we are immersed in it as in water, then we will also come to understand and experience that to be in a commonwealth of breath is to be in a communion of touch: we are all swimming in, and breathing in and out the same fluid substrate. Coccia writes, “One must first recognize that, from the point of view of what is alive and regardless of its objective nature, matter, which makes us the inhabited world, is ontologically unitary and homogenous despite the difference between its elements and despite physical discontinuity; and this unity consists in its fluid nature.”¹²

This is why, he argues, “the paradigm of any living being” is the fish. Yes, “fish” is the name for a particular group of animals who have evolved to live in, and to breathe, water. But to be a fish also teaches us what it means to be alive, what it means to be any plant or any animal. To live is to swim in and to breathe the same medium—the medium of mixture. In other words, Coccia wants to dissolve the difference between air and water, by having us understand and experience air as fluid, and ourselves as fish in it. If the fish is the paradigm of any living being, then “the sea … [becomes] a metaphor for the world itself”: “The being in the world of each living being should thus be understood starting from the fish’s experience of the world. This being in the world, which in consequence is ours, too, is always a being in the sea of the world; it is a form of immersion”;¹³ “… we would have to describe the world as something composed not of objects but of fluxes that penetrate us and that we ourselves penetrate, of waves of variable intensity and in permanent movement.”¹⁴

“Thales said that … from water … come the motions of the stars”

Hippolytus¹⁵

A later philosopher tells us that what really distinguished the philosophy of Thales—why he possessed wisdom and the other early philosophers only the name “wisdom”—was his practice of “seeing” (theôria). He took the time to see; he cultivated the practice of watching, of observing. What did he watch, and what did he see?

I have spoken about the views for which Thales is most famous—that everything is water, that everything is full of gods, and that magnets have souls. But I wish to share now the story for which he is most famous, one you have probably heard: the philosopher took a walk at night and was so busy watching the stars that he fell into a well. A woman nearby made fun of him, “saying that he was eager to know what was in the sky but did not see what was in front of him and at his feet.”¹⁶ This story is usually marshaled to warn against the dangers of an impractical and otherworldly philosophy—philosophy of this sort is deemed “useless.”¹⁷

What interests me in this story, however, is that it captures Thales practicing the art of seeing, but with eyes fixed not downward to the water at his feet, the principle or archê of everything, but upward to the stars. Why would someone whose philosophy was defined by his views on water be remembered as one who could not take his eyes off the sky? What is the relationship of water to the sky, and to the stars in particular?

Apart from his views on water and souls, Thales is also remembered as an astronomer—perhaps the first—and as an innovator in geometry so as better to observe the stars. He watched and measured the movements of the moon and the stars, especially our very own star, the sun. He was famous for having predicted a solar eclipse, having identified that the moon is illuminated by the light of the sun, and perhaps even having written treatises on the equinox and the solstice. Apart from such solar phenomena, it is reported that “he was of the opinion that everything else was impossible to know.”¹⁸ In other words, in this world of liquid flux, where everything is water, we can only know our star, the sun. But he is also credited with the famous saying, “Know yourself” (gnôthi sauton), along with the admission that it is a “difficult” imperative.¹⁹ And so perhaps to know oneself one must come to know the sun, and the other stars, and that is difficult, but not impossible.

And yet the story of Thales falling into the well has him gazing upward and falling into water. Is the joke on him or on us? Rather than a warning against the pursuit of a useless philosophy, might we understand Thales’ stunt as drawing our attention back to the relationship between sky and water, between the sun and stars and soul, between what is furthest and what is nearest, between celestial heights and earthly depths?

One of the last and most poetic chapters in Coccia’s The Life of Plants is entitled “The Deepest Are the Stars.” Plants have a “cosmic function”: they transform light into life; they change the light of stars into a seething mass of earthly bodies (plant, fungal, and animal) whose endless composition and decomposition piles up sunlight as “the skin of the earth.”²⁰ Soil is solar. The ground on which we walk is not so much firm, as it is firmament, because the Earth “is only a condensed portion of the sky.”²¹ Plants have not forgotten this fact. While they live at the surface of soil and sun, they stretch in both directions: with stem and leaf they look to the sun, they reach for the stars; with root (Latin radix) they dig deeper into the soil in search of water. We, however, have forgotten the stars, mistakenly thinking that in doing so, we will somehow better remember the Earth.

A more radical metaphysics (from Latin radix) must become more solar, more astral. He calls for “a new form of heliocentrism … an extremization of astrology.”²² Philosophy must once again learn to look toward the sky. But “the sky is not what is above,” or not only. Thales, the first philosopher and astronomer, whose wisdom was earned by seeing, understood this all too well. If Coccia is right that “being in the world … is a form of immersion,” then what better way to show that than falling into a world of water while stargazing, like a leaf stretching upward to the sky and a root reaching down to the depths. If the sky is not what is above, then the deepest are the stars. Plants are rooted, but we walk. For walkers, to plant our feet is to fall.