THEl December 24, 1972 the New York Times publishes a photo destined to make history. It is the shot taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts traveling to the Moon, which portrays the Earth. For the first time, the human eye discovers that the planet is a blue sphere, in which is water – and not the mainland – to strike us for vastness.We Sapiens with the Ocean have had a contradictory relationship: it fascinates and scares us, with predatory exploitation we exploit its riches as if they were inexhaustible and we pollute it as if it could, by magic, regenerate like the phoenix. The time has come to rethink our relationship with the water element around us. And to do it we heard the philosopher Simone Regazzoni, who teaches at the Irpa in Milan (Research Institute of Applied Psychoanalysis) and which he dedicated to the topic Ocean. Philosophy of the planet (Ponte alle Grazie).
Simone Regazzoni.
Let’s start with the name: is it more correct to call our planet Earth, or Ocean?
I propose to call it Ocean, but I’m not the first. On the NASA website it is called the Ocean Planet, or Water World (Planet Ocean or Planet Aqua). For twenty years, there has been a tendency to emphasize the centrality of the ocean for our life. Defining Earth as our planet is a reductive vision, linked to humans, and not to all the other biological species that for 80 percent live in the seas. Changing your name is not a habit, but it allows us to become aware of another way of inhabiting this world, that is, hyper-connected with other living beings, as if we were immersed in a large moving ocean bubble, participating in this great flow with all that it is life. A different look can help us change our behaviors. Nature is not something other than us.
Simone Regazzoni: “We are born in a small ocean”
Do we need to re-evaluate the relationship with the oceans because that’s where we come from?
Yes, it is. Evolved species like ours have maintained a trait linked to the origin of life. We are born in an inner sea, a pocket of water which is the maternal womb which, as the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi said, is like a small ocean. There is no future for the planet and for our life if we don’t take care of the water. The increase in CO2 leads to a rise in temperature which affects ocean currents. Just think of the Gulf Stream, which determines the climate of northern Europe. A few more degrees are enough and the planet becomes unlivable. And even though we live far from the oceans, our way of life and our future depend on them and how we treat them.
When did humanity realize the existence of these huge stretches of water?
Ocean, in Greek “okeanòs”, is such an ancient word that it is not Greek. It captures a type of primeval experience that Homer and the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers described very well: for them it is a flowing river, rising from the sea to the sky and then returning to the sea. We today call it the hydrosphere. This gave the awareness of being immersed in a whole that surrounds us, an image that is ancient and also contemporary: the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey by Kubrick shows a fetus in a kind of water bubble in front of the planet Earth, as if they were mirrored in each other. The ancients knew this interconnection well and had called it Okeanos, a mythical figure who was neither male nor female, more powerful than Zeus.
Simone Regazzoni. OCEAN Philosophy of the planet, Ponte alle Grazie224 pages, € 16.00
Is the Greek vision therefore connected to more ancient cosmogonies?
The Egyptians speak of an origin of everything starting from the Ocean. From Mesopotamia comes the oldest known map, preserved in the British Museum, where the world is surrounded by a salty river. The cosmogonies of the Mediterranean area, of oriental origin, present this fluid element, in the making, from which everything comes and remains in profound connection. The first philosopher of history, Thales, knew them and maintained that in the beginning there is water, on which the Earth would flow as if on a well-polished table. He is the first to evoke this image, but already in the myth of the universal flood there is a floating ark-microcosm. This idea of unstable land flowing on something fluid is forgotten, only to re-emerge in recent times with the theory of continental drift. The ancients were not that far from the truth.
The ocean appears monstrous to us, it scares us but at the same time attracts us. Because?
Because in an Earth that today is almost entirely mapped it remains largely unexplored and contains forms of life still unknown to us. It is as if it were an intimate part of us that at the same time is foreign to us. It is a space close to us, but alien and its strength cannot be tamed. Think of the large oil platforms, designed to withstand the currents: they can be wrecked when hit by a tidal wave, a phenomenon that we cannot explain and that also affects navigation. At the same time, it fascinates us because it is the last explorable front of our planet. It is the space that remains for adventure, like the sky.
Melville, genius creator of Moby Dick, what did he want to represent?
Moby Dick is something portentous, not graspable and uncontrollable, which attracts us and scares us. It is a symbol of the ocean that Melville outlines from a painting by Turner, Whalers, where there is a black whale coming out of the water. Both had seen that oceanic space represents that kind of force, which is both an emblem of fullness of life and the risk of destruction. The surfers of the big waves, those of over 20 meters, try not to oppose their energy, but to enter into consonance. It is that life that knows no death, which we experience as the maximum intensity, on the verge of disintegration. It is an immortal life force. We are made from 50-60 percent water.
Diving means returning to our primordial element, “getting in touch with the fish that swims in me”, as she writes.
If we put a baby in the pool, he is not afraid. It is no coincidence that water births are among the least traumatic. We are modified fish: biology tells us so, and the philosopher Empedocles also said that we were fish. Swimming means rediscovering that dimension. In summer, contact with the sea allows us to discharge the tension accumulated in our life as terrestrials. Swimming is a way of thinking: Plato states that not knowing how to write is like not knowing how to swim. Greeks and Romans gave great importance to swimming, which has been lost over time. Only from the nineteenth century did the beach become a place-threshold to get back in touch with a part of us that was removed.
Does the presence of seas on other planets give us hope of finding other forms of life as well?
This is among the most recent discoveries. In our oceans, we have seen that there is a possibility of life even without sunlight and photosynthesis – there are chemoautotrophic bacteria, which derive energy by oxidizing hydrogen sulfide – so even on various frozen planets and moons with oceans under the crust there could be conditions suitable. This also changes our perspective of our planet in the cosmos. The Earth is not at the center of the universe, although mentally we still consider ourselves as such. If we think of an Ocean planet connected to others, it means thinking about the possibility of a biological universe also in our solar system.
His book was conceived in Maupiti, in a coral atoll in French Polynesia. What effect did it have to think of the ocean, surrounded by water?
For me, philosophy is not an abstract discourse. It starts from an experience, a life experience and a biography. Maupiti is a place not yet invaded by tourist resorts, it allows you to experience the weakness of the mainland: you are on a rise of sand that rises a few meters above the water, it is like being adrift in a raft. I found myself in the midst of a teeming with life – corals, fish – with the perception that at any moment that blue expanse with which I felt in consonance can erase what is stable. It was the occasion for a reflection aroused by a living and carnal experience, starting from which to confront myself with philosophical texts.
iO Donna © REPRODUCTION RESERVED