ABSTRACT

The philosopher Hans Blumenberg has famously traced the changes that the metaphor of the 'shipwreck with spectator' has undergone in philosophical discourse from antiquity to modernity.5 Sailing and shipwreck as images of 'being' have a venerable history based on the simple paradox that, while human beings live on the earth, they conceptualize life as a perilous sea-voyage and connect their existence with the element water. From classic to early modern times, philosophers emphasized the aspect of transgression involved in challenging the foreign element, a transgression implying the probability of failure or retribution, that is, the probability of shipwreck. With his dictum 'Vous êtes embarqué', Biaise Pascal gives what Blumenberg calls 'the nautic metaphor' a new turn in the early modern period: to live means already to be on board - there is no initial decision to travel since the journey has always already begun. Nietzsche later takes up this thought and carries it to an existentialist conclusion: not only is life a sea-voyage, but we are always already wrecked.