The Sea as Mirror: Essayings in and against Philosophy as History

263 Pages·2021·4.767 MB·English

by  Wu Yi

YI WU

THE SEA AS MIRROR

ESSAYINGS IN AND AGAINST PHILOSOPHY AS HISTORY
DIAPHANES
This is an astonishingly brilliant first book by one of the world’s best new philosophical tal-
ents. Prepare to enter an entire world of watery pleasures by a mind that has the fluidity, tidal
mobility and dread abysses of the oceans.
Simon Critchley
Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the
New School for Social Research
Rarely have I have read such an original and beautifully written book that overflows in fresh
insights on every page. Yi Wu takes us on an exciting philosophical and literary sea journey.
This odyssey begins with the Greeks (Plato and Homer) passes on the way to Rome (Plautus),
pauses in Denmark with Hamlet, moves on to Kant and Husserl, and culminates with Virginia
Woolf. At every stage, the sea makes a dramatic appearance.
Richard J. Bernstein
Vera List Professor of Philosophy
New School for Social Research
When Nietzsche, in his Gay Science, urged: “Aboard ship! ye philosophers!” he held up a
mirror to Western thinking. For not already with the view from the coast, but only with the
actual step out to sea, the land-fixed concepts forfeit their solid ground, the cogito proves to be
a fleeting reflex - and philosophy recognizes itself as a mere island in the midst of a maelstrom
of contingency. In her impressive study, Yi Wu embarks a whole crew of great thinkers, as well
as of epoch-making politicians and poets, from Plato to Augustus and Shakespeare, from Kant
to Heidegger and Woolf. Rather than merely providing metaphors, her book is an essay in the
very best sense of the word: the methodologically unmethodical exploration of what might be
called the maritime latency of philosophy.
Burkhardt Wolf
Professor of German and Media Studies
University of Vienna
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Meta-hodos: A Note on Method 11
1 Plato’s Odyssey: Philosophy as Memory Theatre 31

2 Helen 55

3 Times New Roman: Augustan Strategies of
Re-territorialization and Re-founding 85
4 Homeward Double Bound: Tragicomic Mimesis in
Plautus’ Amphitryo 109

5 The Maritime Modernity of Hamlet 131
6 Kant on the Voyage of Human Reason 155
7 Between the Acts 175

8 Husserl on the Task of Philosophy as Historical Reflection 201
9 To the Lighthouse: Meditations on a Project 221

Concluding Unphilosophic Postscript:
Forgetting of Time Un-lost 243

Acknowledgments 253
A Select Bibliography 255
Index 259

There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.

Dylan Thomas,
Where Once the Waters of Your Face

To Seducers-by-morals

META-HODOS

A NOTE ON METHOD
This is not going to be a discourse on method. It will be, at its best, an
apology.
The stern word “method” has a beautiful etymology in Greek: meta-
hodos, “with, across, after” + “way.” The root meaning evokes the image of
a traversal, a passage. Meta-hodos is not a map one consults prior to depar-
ture or a manual one clings to throughout the difficult trip. In a time when
the formation of all knowledge is being called into question, especially
the precarious one of self-knowledge (and rightly so), both the notion of
a method and that of experience have been rendered equally doubtful.
This nihilism of episteme does not leave one empty-handed, but it con-
demns one to the conceit of hermeneutics—of making intelligible what
has fallen into unintelligibility, of making intelligible what perhaps can
never, and should never be made intelligible. Thus one tries, vainly, to re-
iterate the naive, original moments of being the first explorer without a
clue, the surviving traveler who comes back to tell the tale, to draw a fig-
ure. One must first be the colonizer and then the de-colonizer of her own
history. Anything like a journey can only be undertaken, sans the unwav-
ering certainty of the a priori for all the regions it was to pass through,
sans meaning as the transcendental guarantor and denier of experience.
Hence any telling of the history of the journeyings can only be from the
abyss of representation, in a voice fatefully split and not contemporaneous
with itself. This meta-hodos would be the apology of the revenant.
The journeys or journeyings undertaken in the following nine chapters
are above all attempts in understanding. They are attempts to understand
the history of philosophy with that often silent actant, the ocean, without
which the intelligibility of this history would be sorrily compromised, in
my humble view. The depth of conceit of writing a work of philosophy on
the sea as its subject may be fathomed by an analogy of what had come to
pass in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. A
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