Episode 131 - Water

Transcript

Ellie: 0:14

Hello and welcome to Overthink

David: 0:17

the podcast where we tell you which philosophical ideas don't hold water.

Ellie: 0:23

Or ones that do. I feel like we usually do ones that do more, although we, you know, we can be critical here and there. I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:30

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:32

Today we are indeed talking about water. We're in the middle of our series on the four elements, and as I was thinking about what we might say about water, one thing that I thought about as a place to start is the fact that water is often associated with scarcity, at least these days, and I think that's different from the three other elements that

we're discussing: 0:52

fire, earth and air. Certainly fire we would want less of, as a species. Air, obviously there are a lot of changes that are happening to our air with climate change, and I think the same is true of Earth, but it doesn't sound right to say that we wish there were more air or more earth. Whereas I do think it's fair to say that we wish there were more water. David, you and I both live in California and in general, even beyond California. The demand for fresh water globally is outstripping supply. Many of the water systems around the world are currently overtaxed, and some of them, including here in California, are already really dangerously close to running dry.

David: 1:34

Yeah, I might qualify your claim a little bit because we don't want less fire across the board. Some fire, as we noted in the fire episode, is good fire that we need as a tool for survival, so on and so forth. But as somebody who lives in a peninsula in the Bay area, sometimes I do wish there was more earth, especially in light of overpopulation, right? So more places that are inhabitable where people could lead a good life. But in general, your point is very well taken. That water is a resource that even though it undergoes a natural cycle whereby it replenishes itself in general, we are experiencing a scarcity of it because the kind of water that we need is actually a minority of the water that exists. Right? Like drinkable fresh water. Yeah.'cause in fact, like the oceans are all water. It's just not water that we can use large scale.

Ellie: 2:26

Yeah, you're right actually that seawater levels are rising, you know, as ice melts and that's creating less habitable earth to live on. Okay, so I'll qualify the statement. Thanks for that.

David: 2:36

Yeah, no worries.

Ellie: 2:37

My statement did not hold water.

David: 2:39

You see, we do talk about things that don't hold water, although, you know, right after a big lunch, I feel like I currently hold a lot of it. But another thing that's,

Ellie: 2:48

We can take a bathroom break anytime.

David: 2:51

Um, no, but another thing that's important about water in its configuration relative to human life is that it's also the element that we look for in other planets because it's a proxy for life. So you know all these questions about is there life in other parts of the universe? The first thing that our leading scientists are on the lookout for is whether there are signs of water in those places, because of course we know that water means life.

Ellie: 3:19

In addition to that, it's also the element that humans look for when we're trying to stay alive. Like I'm thinking about the fact that we need water even more than we need food. And so when humans are, say nomadically, moving from one place to another, what's the first thing they're gonna do? Look for a water source. When we're in dire conditions in the outdoors, we're gonna look for a water source.

David: 3:40

And of course that water has to be clean, which narrows even further, the type of water that we can consume to stay alive. And it's important to consider that 80% of all illnesses in the developing world are water related. So yes, water is a precondition for life. But it is also a conduit for illness and pathologies of various kinds. Today we are talking about water.

Ellie: 4:07

How does the fluidity of water give rise to various understandings of the nature and power of this element?

David: 4:14

Why did the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales believe that all is water?

Ellie: 4:20

And how do life's origins on the bottom of the ocean shape our experiences today? Alright, philosophy and water. We're gonna start in a place of ancient China. Oh, David, that's a joke. People say like, you probably don't know this, people say in a place of, in the way they say, I'm in my ex era.

David: 4:43

Oh, I, I don't know. I've never heard that expression. But since you're referring to an actual place, which is China, it just seems literal, right? Like Yeah, I guess we're beginning in China. It sounds like I'm in my 21st century era right now. Like I would not assume that that's a joke.

Ellie: 4:59

Okay. Okay. Valid. Maybe I should say we're gonna start in a place of Dao.

David: 5:05

Okay. Okay. There we go. There we go.

Ellie: 5:07

Yeah. And those who didn't know in a place of, now you know a little bit of terminology that I have, like ruthlessly appropriated from the younger generation. We're starting a place of Dao because numerous verses of the Dao De Jing use the metaphor of water in super interesting, fruitful ways, and in particular, water is used in the Dao De Jing to figure a way of conceiving of power that isn't just like about sheer agential power, the sort of power of non-action, because so much of the Dao De Jing is about disrupting our dualistic ways of understanding things, including the binary between passivity and activity. I want to cite one of the verses here. This is from the Steven Mitchell translation. Anyway, here it goes. You ready?

David: 5:53

Let's do it.

Ellie: 5:54

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard, the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.

David: 6:15

Such a great passage. And here we see one of the rhetorical strategies that is commonly used by Lao Tzu in this text, which is paradox. It is the soft that overcomes the hard, the gentle that dominates the rigid. And for me, what's really interesting about this verse and a couple of other verses is that. Water is used as a metaphor for the Dao because it's seen as having very similar properties and one of those properties is that it can dissolve opposition. So the Dao allows us to go beyond those binaries that you mentioned, Ellie, just in the same way that water can dissolve even the hardest material if given enough time. AndJust to clarify, the Dao in Daoism refers to the way or the path. And in this philosophical tradition from ancient China, it's really difficult to translate actually the Dao because it refers at once to an ontological cosmic truth about the universe. Reality is the Dao, but it also refers to a method and a goal. The Dao is that which you're supposed to follow and that which you want to achieve. So it is at once a truth, a method, and a kind of telos, in an ethical sense of how you ought to live your life. And so the Dao is like water in the sense that it has this, you called it. Power of non-action, Ellie. I also think an appropriate term to use here is a kind of non-striving. Like water, the Dao achieves things through non desire, and the Chinese term for that is wúyù. It is a kind of power in relinquishing or in submission rather than commandment.

Ellie: 7:59

One of the reasons that it can be challenging to offer a pithy definition of the Dao, although you did a really nice job of, of orienting us to it, David, is that it's also non-conceptual. It has to be directly experienced. And this is something that one of the books that we both consulted for this episode and a couple of our other Elements episodes, gets at. This is a book by David Macauley called Elemental Philosophy: Earth, air, fire, and water as environmental ideas. And it's funny, David, when we were looking at this book, we were like, oh, this is actually a book orienting us to the four elements. But from within a continental philosophical idiom, I think a lot of the books that we choose are coming more from analytic philosophy. That distinction may not mean that much to many of our listeners, which is totally fine. We've discussed it in YouTube videos and other places. But just suffice it to say like, there's a lot of continental European influence from this book. Like Heiddeger is the main guy, but he also talking about a number of different ways of understanding the elements from different traditions and Macaulay talks about how the Dao is also like water in the sense that it is best described by a via negativa or like a negative path. It's easier to say what the DAO isn't, than to say what it is. And we also see the same. Is true of water because water has a kind of shapeness to it, and I wanna talk about that in detail. I know you have some thoughts on it too, David, but just before we get into that, I also wanna say that I might actually slightly quibble with your description of the verse I read as being about paradox. Because even though it's absolutely true that there's a lot in the Dao that is about paradox, I don't know that this is really one of the places I would go to for that. I think the claim that the soft overcomes, the hard, that water overcomes what is inflexible is less a paradox and more just like a surprising fact of the universe that the Dao De Jing is trying to point out here. We so often think that the hard is gonna overcome the soft, that we fail to recognize that actually water is more powerful in a way than rock is.

David: 10:01

Yeah. And we did a whole episode on paradoxes.

Ellie: 10:06

Quite some time ago.

David: 10:08

It's been a long time, yet it feels very recent. Uh, a paradox of its own, but I do think there's a paradoxical quality to the putting together of opposites and the privileging of the underprivileged term. And so the idea that the gentle dominates the rigid. Precisely in letting it go, right, that there is action in non-action, that there is power in submission. Maybe it's not a paradox in the technical logical sense of paradox, but it does try to convey a larger truth through

Ellie: 10:38

in the technical sense?

David: 10:39

In, the technical sense of logic, right, of like the definition of a paradox.

Ellie: 10:43

Okay. I thought you said, it sounded like you said technological sense.

David: 10:46

Oh, no, technical.

Ellie: 10:48

Okay. Okay. I you meant to say technical and logical sense.

David: 10:50

I see. Yeah, and that's because Paradox is one of those rhetorical strategies along with negative description and along with metaphor. And that has to do with the fact that the Dao, according to Lao Tzu, is beyond concepts and beyond language. There is no name for it. The only thing that we are told is that it is the Unnamable and Lao Tzu at one point, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it's called. I call it the Dao.

Ellie: 11:19

Okay, so let's then think about how this might connect to the shapeness of water, because Macaulay points out in the elemental philosophy book that water is typically colorless, tasteless, and odorless. It lacks form, but becomes a matrix of form for other things, providing shape, contour, and texture to the landscape, as well as more discreet objects. So the odorlessness and tastelessness of water. Of course, it can be overlaid by other, you know, elements like, tap water in LA tastes pretty bad 'cause some of the minerals that we've got in it. But that's not because of water itself tastes bad, right? Yeah. It's because certain other elements mixed into it tastes bad. And so there's this mercurial character to water that I think distinguishes

David: 12:01

'cause it has mercury and other minerals.

Ellie: 12:05

But it distinguishes it for sure, at least from earth and fire. And of course like air is mercurial in its own way. But I also think in a different way because air can't interact with, say rock in the way that the Dao De Jing is talking about here and have that particular kind of power over it. Air has powers of its own. This is not the air episode, sorry. But anyway.

David: 12:25

No, but I think there is an important difference to capture here between air and water. And that is that both of them are shapeless, but water can take the shape of a container in a way that air cannot. And I think when we think about the elemental character of water, it is, its fluidity. Understood as shapelessness. And I think that that shapelessness is one of the reasons why culturally and mythically, we often associate water with oblivion and forgetfulness because it forgets the shape of the container that it was in the moment it leaves that container and takes another shape, and then it takes another shape. It's a constant reshaping of itself. And for me, this brings to mind the fact that in Greek mythology, this association has a mythic embodiment in the form of the Lethe, which is the, the river of forgetfulness. And Lethe in ancient Greek means oblivion, and it refers to the fact that those who would drink from the river would forget suddenly who they were. I'm really drawn to this notion that water represents forgetfulness as if you're drowning your memories in the deep waters of whatever body of water you're thinking about, whether literal or metaphorical. And the one exception to the shapeness of water, of course, is freezing, when water changes from its liquid to its solid state. Then it takes an actual shape that it retains for a period of time. Of course, eventually ice melts. But the idea there is that there is this one exception to the shape of water. Now, last year I was invited to give a keynote. at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, in Spain.

Ellie: 14:08

Okay. Flex. Dude, I love that museum. There's like no better city for museums than Madrid, but wow, that's, that's amazing.

David: 14:15

They organized this event called Liquid Dreams, and they asked me to give a talk about the dreams and mental lives of aquatic animals, and there was another keynote speaker, a scholar by the name of Anna Secor, who is a feminist geographer, and she gave a fascinating talk about water, freezing into ice and about the forgetfulness of water in the moment that it turns to ice. Basically, her argument, which has since been published as an article in a journal, is that water forgets how to become ice. So if you cool water down, if you drop the temperature, water doesn't automatically freeze as we think that it does, as soon as you get to zero degrees Celsius. In fact, if you purify water of any impurities of like any dust, any minerals, any foreign bodies you can bring water way below its freezing point and it will not freeze. And the reason for that has to do with the physics of freezing. And she points out that water needs a non-water element, like a speck of dust or a snowflake to fall into it when it's the right temperature in order for that foreign body to give it a physical structure that then water will mimic as it forms into ice. And that external element is called a nucleator. So it nucleates it, it gets started, the process of freezing. But she reads this as suggesting that water, even when it is below freezing point, forgets something fundamental about itself. And the way she puts it is that freezing is actually not a given for water. The capacity is there, but since water forgets how to freeze, it needs a reminder from the material world.

Ellie: 16:07

Yeah, it's giving comp lit for sure. I like the, just like the forgetfulness because I feel like to actually talk about forgetfulness, obviously it needs to be a metaphor because it doesn't make sense to say of this element that it either remembers or forgets, but this is fascinating. It needing something more than just like a certain low temperature.

David: 16:25

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It needs low temperature and it needs. A form to mimic, otherwise it cannot generate the form of freezing. The molecules are unsure about how to organize themselves, so of course, unsure in a metaphorical sense. But for Anna Secor, it may be more than metaphor because what she's trying to get at is the idea that there might be an unconscious in the material world.

Ellie: 16:48

Yeah. And that's where I'm like, okay, yeah. I'm not super interested to be honest in that point. I'm very interested in this other point though, that freezing is not a given for water and that it requires this external element. Some sort of otherness to it, right? Yeah. Something around which it can organize itself as solid, and I don't know how connected this is, but something I've also been thinking about is the way that water, its fluidity means that it also has different types of movements or so, like not only different types of shape, but different tempos, paces, ways of flowing, right? Because water moves differently depending on where it is. We can have rainfall, right? Where water is coming down in drops, we can have rivers where water is flowing. Maybe it's flowing fast, maybe it's flowing slow. Maybe it's trickling. We can have lakes where it, you know, when those lakes are still, it's actually not moving at all. Or a still pond. We can have oceans where, you know, maybe there are like these big waves, at least near shore and maybe there's a still kind of glassy look to it out in themiddle of the ocean. So I think we see here that water is the ultimate chameleon. It can be anything from a drop to like tumultuous water that might be cloudy even to being a perfectly still glass mirror-like substance.

David: 18:11

Yeah, and I think that's true when we are focused exclusively on its liquid state, that it is the protean element, par excellence, the one that moves and changes in the most fundamental of ways. But I would say the fact that it also has these states that it can go from liquid to solid to gas, gives us an even higher order sense of its chameleon nature. Right. That it, it has not only changes within a state, but also changes across states of matter. Because I mean, I'd have to think about this more, but I'm pretty sure that it's the only element that has states. Earth can't be anything other than solid air, can't be anything other than air, and certainly fire is just not even an element. Fire's a reaction. It's just like a reaction we talked about. Yeah. So it's the only one that has many faces. Yeah, it's so funny

Ellie: 19:08

with this element series because I feel like there are certain times when we're sort of out of our, so to speak element by veering a little bit into scientific territory and other times where we're veering a little bit into like more metaphorical literary territory. And I'm trying, I'm trying to figure out like how to strike the balance between those two because to your point that sounds right to me, but I'm not entirely sure as a scientist. But I think at least when we're talking about our direct experiences of these elements as humans, which is like as a phenomenologist, maybe something I'm more comfortable with, I think that absolutely has, uh, holds water. I'm gonna keep just saying, holds water

David: 19:46

And if it's wrong, it's water under the bridge.

Ellie: 19:50

Oh my God. Look at us go. Look at us go. Yeah. And you know, we talked about this turning of water into ice. This is actually also just reminding me of, I talked to Trevor this morning about how he's taking saxophone lessons and as with a lot of instruments, your breath will get condensed inside the instrument and then you'll have to like empty it out. And so you go from the, the steam of breath into actual water droplets.

David: 20:19

Oh, wow. From like music to saliva.

Ellie: 20:22

I know, I know. It's actually gross. Sorry guys. Like, so we can cut that out if it's too gross. Today we're just like, look at us. We're like water. We're kind of all over the place too. But, speaking of which, one last point on the water turning into ice from fluid to solid, I think also. You know, with the rising sea tides that we mentioned before, solid turning into fluid. That's a result of the melting of polar ice caps, and so we're actually in a pretty scary time right now. Not with respect to water turning into ice, but actually of ice turning into water, especially given that most of that water is salty or otherwise not potable, right? In fact, 97% of the world's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable. 2% is locked in ice caps and glaciers, and that leaves just 1% drinkable fresh water. But as that small percentage increasingly moves from ice caps and glaciers into the salty water, you know, it's causing further problems for our world.

David: 21:41

According to the mainstream account of the history of Western philosophy. Western philosophy itself begins in Ionia with a meditation upon the elements. Many pre-Socratic philosophers, which is a term that we use to refer to sages and thinkers that we now call philosophers who lived before the time of Socrates.

Ellie: 22:01

Socrates is so important. It's like BC and AD for us. pre-Socratic, post-Socratic.

David: 22:07

many of the people who came before Socrates embodied philosophy in a very specific way, and that is that they sought to discern the rk or the origin of the universe in one idea. They were looking for a principle that could explain the unity of nature, the unity of the cosmos, and many of them chose an element to stand in for this rk, which is why many presocratics are united in the fact that they are material monists. They believe that everything in the universe is one substance. That's their monism and their material monism because they believe that that substance is equivalent to one of the elements. Whether that is earth, fire, water, or air.

Ellie: 22:55

For example, a lot of people interpret Heraclitus as claiming that everything is fire. We talked about that in our fire episode. Anaximenes suggests air as the ultimate element, and Thales suggests water. Nobody actually suggests Earth as the ultimate element as far as we know. I know. But then Empedocles comes along and says there are four roots. So it's not just, it's not material monism, it's material What?

David: 23:21

Pluralism or I guess quatranism. Yeah, yeah.

Ellie: 23:25

Something like that. What he calls the four roots, then in Aristotle become the four elements and that's really where we get this idea of the four elements that we are talking about. We're just like taken for granted in this element series. Even though, yeah, they're sort of arbitrary 'cause they're just like rooted in this, not pres Socratic, but post-Socratic philosophy, by the time we get to Aristotle, 'cause Socrates was Plato's teacher and Plato was Aristotle's teacher. So yeah, Aristotle gives us the four elements, but these really come from the four roots in Empedocles, and as you said, are part of the whole climate in pre-Socratic philosophy of wanting to identify one or more material elements as the original substance.

David: 24:05

And by the time you get to Aristotle, of course the four elements are understood to be equally significant building blocks of nature. And in fact, Aristotle seeks to explain the objects in the material world, things like chairs and tables and animals, not in terms of which RK explains their unity. But in terms of the distribution of elemental matter that they contain, whereas again, with the presocratics, everything sort of becomes reducible to one dominating principle. And of course, the idea that all is air, all is fire, all is water, sounds a little bit silly nowadays because obviously there is a diversity of material forms in the cosmos. But the reason that we do consider the Presocratics as the origins of Western philosophy in many accounts is because these Ionian thinkers really believe that nature is ordered by a single law or a principle, and, this is the important thing I think, that this principle is at least in theory, discoverable by human reason. And so that's why we read them, not just as people with wacky ideas about the metaphysics of the universe, but as philosophers because they believe that recent can explain that, which recent encounters in the world.

Ellie: 25:29

And so let's think about Thales's reasoning here a bit. It's always kind of funny to think about the reasoning of these thinkers because they're writing at a time before philosophy is a thing, and way before natural science is a thing, let alone as distinct from philosophy, right? We definitely don't have a scientific method, and so they're just kind of vibing, like they're looking around at their world and coming up with some ideas, and so Thales goes for water as the core element. At least as far as we know from Aristotle, because we don't actually have any writings from Thales, and so we're taking it for Aristotle's word 'cause Aristotle wrote down some of the things that Thales is believed to have said, and Thales gives two reasons for understanding water as the ultimate element. The first is that all things are nourished by what is moist. Like if you think about the kinds of things that we consume and that other species consume, there's a moistness to them. Second that the earth is floating on water. And I know David, I think you're gonna walk us through that claim a little bit. So should we first say something about what it means to say the nourishment of all things is moist based on this tiny fragment we have, according to Aristotle, because I find this to be a pretty mysterious claim, to be honest.

David: 26:43

That everything comes from the moist?

Ellie: 26:46

Yeah, the nourishment of all things comes from the moist.

David: 26:48

Oh really?'cause I actually find the argument that the earth rests on water way more puzzling. Like the argument that it all comes from the moist kind of makes sense. Tell me how it makes

Ellie: 26:57

sense to you.

David: 26:57

Yeah. So I think it makes sense because if you think about the kinds of observations that these Ionian philosophers are making, they're rooted in the natural phenomena, right? So they don't have telescopes, they don't have microscopes. They are limited to the objects, events, and situations of everyday life. And if you think about the plant world and the animal world, it is the case that germination and birth presuppose a kind of moistness, right? Plants need water to grow and seeds need water to germinate.

Ellie: 27:31

Animals need water too.

David: 27:33

Yeah. And they come from wet environments, like an egg or amniotic sac. And so there is no living organism that grows from a completely desiccated place. And that's why we often associate deserts with the absence of life and places that are more wet and moist as teeming with life. And so for me, that's actually a perfectly reasonable argument, especially when that's all you have to go on in order to develop a theory that is all encompassing about the universe.

Ellie: 28:06

Okay. I think I was thinking about nourishment less in terms of the environments from which we come and more in terms of how we sustain ourselves and for that, it seemed a little bit less clear to me that we need moistness. I mean, I can eat dry foods, right? But of course then I have saliva that's helping me chew them and swallow them. We as humans do need moistness in order to nourish ourselves. But, so maybe I'm talking my way out of that. This is again, where I'm like, guys, I don't know. I'm loving this Overthink four element series, but this is a moment where I feel like we need to bring the scientists in.

David: 28:40

Well, but think about dry foods,

Ellie: 28:41

which we, we will do a bit later. We we're not like, yeah, yeah,

David: 28:45

But stay with the dry foods point for a minute because are dry foods really dry or are they just less moist than they would be in their natural state? Because when we dry foods, we just extract some of the moisture in order to preserve them. But I think a truly dry food would be something that's burned to a cinder and at that point becomes inedible. So most of the things that people would eat at this point in time would be things like fruits, vegetables, grains, all of which have a degree of moistness in them.

Ellie: 29:18

What about my freeze dried strawberries?

David: 29:21

I don't know that they are fully, I don't, I think they,

Ellie: 29:24

This is where we need the scientific perspective, you guys.

David: 29:28

Yeah. But also like Thales didn't have your freezer. Thales didn't have your freezer. I know. Not me.Yeah. I'm

Ellie: 29:35

like Googling, do freeze dried strawberries have any moisture? And you're like, Ellie, it doesn't even matter. We're talking about Thales right now, and they didn't have freeze dried strawberries back then.

David: 29:43

I dunno what to say. I'm really surprised that you are doubting the idea that there is some moisture in the things that we eat.

Ellie: 29:51

Okay? Okay. I found a 2015 article saying Freeze dried powders exhibit a very low moisture content. That is indeed what I like assumed I might find, is that it's just a really low moisture content and not no moisture at all. Maybe we'll give Thales the win on this one and yeah, we'll take the L for like not sufficiently understand or I will.

David: 30:14

Yeah, no, you'll take the L on this one, but I think you can take the W on the next point, which is that the earth floats on water, much like wood floats on a river, which is another argument that he makes for thinking about water as playing this fundamental elemental role. Wait I want you

Ellie: 30:34

to talk about that. But can I just quickly specify. I said it was a 2015 article. It's actually not, it was originally published in 2002 and it's from a journal called Drying Technology. We love it. We love a good ref. Okay, so go ahead. Tell us about Yeah, this second rationale.

David: 30:50

And just to reiterate, we don't have any writings from Thales himself, so kind of hard to know exactly what he was thinking because we just get like a sentence in Aristotle referring to this argument from Thes. And in his book on the Heavens, Aristotle says, this is a quote. Some say that it, the earth rests on water. This is the oldest account we have inherited, and they report that Thales of Miletus gave it. It rests because it floats like wood or some other such thing. For none of them is by nature, such as to rest on air, but on water. And so the idea here is that the earth needs some element to support it physically to remain stable, given the stability that we see in the natural world. And since we know that like things fall through air, if the earth was in the air, it would be falling and we would feel like we are forever falling, which is not the case. Ergo, the earth is supported by water. QED. This is such a wild,

Ellie: 31:59

yeah, it's such a wild idea. I love it. It's just like you really see how the origins of philosophy are just like indistinguishable from myths, you know? Okay, so if the earth is supported by water, then what is that water supported by? As we said before, water itself is shapeless, so it would need to be in a container in order to hold the earth stable.

David: 32:20

So this is exactly Aristotle's critique of Thales, which is a reference to an infinite regress problem in his thinking, okay? That if you think that the earth rests on water and both of them are heavy elements that fall, then what is holding up the water? Is there more water? Is there something else? And so, according to Aristotle, this is a whole in Thales's logic. But you know, that's as far as he goes in talking about this argument, he then moves on to talking about other things connected to the heavens.

Ellie: 32:50

Yeah, this claim definitely holds no water. I'm like really testing how many times we're gonna say this. However I can see how, at least I can imagine, I mean, I can't really know, but of course. But I can imagine how humans who didn't have access to scientific method, just like vibing around, would find this view appealing. Because even if it's easy to critique as Aristotle does, he wouldn't have mentioned it well after Thales's death, if Thales hadn't had a big influence, like if this view hadn't had a big influence. Right. That's why Aristotle is mentioning it in this book on the heavens. And of course from a modern vantage point, one of the appeals of this is that we literally do emerge from water, but Aristotle didn't have access to that knowledge, nor did Thales. Certainly though it's easy to see that we're made up of a lot of water, that we require water in order to sustain ourselves. And also I love this kind of fluidity or shape-shifting character of water and can see how that also might have been appealing from a pre-Socratic perspective. Indeed, one thing that I found is that the romantic poet Novalis describes our bodies as molded rivers.

David: 33:57

Ooh, my body is not a temple. My body is a bent river. But I really like thinking about how the origins of philosophy get articulated in many historiographies of the discipline. And one thing that stands out for me is that, you know, you have these pre-Socratic philosophers making grand, unifying theories about the universe, and immediately they are met with philosophical opposition in the form of refutations objections, questions at the hands of those who follow them. So you have Aristotle raising questions about the logical soundness of the arguments of Thales, but also before Aristotle, Plato had expressed some concerns about the approach to philosophy that is embodied by Thales and in the Theaetetus, which is his book on epistemology on theory of Knowledge, Plato gives us an anecdote that has become emblematic of his general attitude towards the Presocratics here focusing on Thales. He says in the Theaetetus. Once while Thes was gazing upwards while doing astronomy, he fell into a well, a clever and delightful thrash, and serving girl is said to have made fun of him since he was so eager to know the things in the heavens, but failed to notice what was in front of him and right next to his feet. So the idea is that Thales is, this meta physician is so drawn to a unifying theory of the cosmos that he can't really see the real world for what it is. And so while Gazing at the stars, he falls into a well. The theory of philosophers is having their head in the clouds goes back very long way.

Ellie: 35:46

Also, I'm just like loving to picture that as being the origin of the's idea that all is waters. He met with the water at the bottom of the well. He was like, it's not about the stars, it's about this.

David: 36:00

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Ellie: 36:24

One of my absolute favorite things to do is be in water. Swimming, floating, splashing around. Absolutely love it. Love going to the beach. My friend Roshni calls mer-Ellie when I'm around water 'cause I just like turn into my mermaid self. I hate being

David: 36:45

in water. Because I hate water getting inside me. I hate it in my eyes. I hate it in my mouth. I really dislike drinking either sea water or pool water. But above all, I despise with an existential hatred, the feeling of water inside my ears. I am a terrestrial creature for a reason.

Ellie: 37:08

Yeah. When I went over to your new house, you had never used this incredible bathtub you have, and I was like, dude, if I had that bathtub, I would be using it all the time. In fact, my mom only takes baths. She never takes showers. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. I come from like a little family of water babies, you know, we're, we're Californians too, so we love our water. But yeah, I just, like, love the sensation of being immersed in a body of water, especially on my hands. My friend Ally loves the feeling of water in her armpits.

David: 37:36

Oh really? That's so specific. And that that speaks to some kind of kink

Ellie: 37:42

Girl. Of course, of course. You would go there, David. You wouldn't just let it be a pure thing. I'm gonna let it be a pure thing. And I'll say I love swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, pools, et cetera, et cetera. But, For me, there is nothing better than being in the ocean. And I think the reason for that is the sense of expansiveness, not being able to see what's beyond the horizon, just being completely immersed. It's giving Moana. I do love that Moana feeling, and I think that also speaks to the feeling of freedom that we might have when we're on the open water. So moving a little bit from swimming to being in a boat. You know, it's like so satisfying and delightful to be in a boat. And I wanna distinguish that conceptually, that feeling of freedom that we have when we're swimming, but close to shore or on a boat, on the surface of the water versus the feeling that we might have in deep water, which for me brings up extreme fear of the unknown. The fear of the unknown about what's underwater. Right. So there's an exciting unknown From Moana to Jaws. Yeah. Well, I mean it's, it's also still in Moana. Yeah. More or less. More or less, I would say. Right. Like there's an exciting unknown. When we're on the open water and a scary unknown when we're in it, and I think to some extent this speaks of our primal fear of returning to water because it's not the element that we live in, right? We live off of it, as we talked about before, right? But we live on the earth and we live in the air. We don't live in the water well.

David: 39:11

And that is a gear that we share with other non-human primates because one way in which you can keep, for example, chimpanzees and bonobos in an enclosure is by just building a moat around the enclosure because they will not go into the water. They are deeply, deeply afraid of water.

Ellie: 39:28

Interesting.

David: 39:29

Um, and they're not very good swimmers. And in fact, one of the big questions in the evolution of our species that some people have described as a kind of madness that separated us from the other apes is, how our ancestors ever conquered islands? How did people go into islands? Because it means that one of our ancestors, one of these pre-modern humans, with a fundamental fear of deep waters, must have dared to go on a kind of raft and landed on an island defying all common sense that we still can't really make sense of.

Ellie: 40:05

Dude, I love us. I mean people like, there's a lot to complain about with humans, but, you know, I love humans at bottom, and this is one amazing thing about us. I remember reading this really great history book about early boat building in Asia and the way that it led to humans occupying the Hawaiian Islands, for instance. It was a book about Hawaiian history and just being like, can you imagine that courage of just like building this thing? Sailing out to sea. And seeing what happens.

David: 40:35

Well, and that's because the deep ocean is always a sign of the unknown. And this is encapsulated in the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon in the early modern period, which is of course a book about like the new spirit of daring to go beyond the past. The cover is a ship heading directly into the open sea passing right in the middle of the pillars of Hercules. So it is precisely that scene right of the boat that is taking off into an unknown and we never know whether they're gonna come back. But in some sense, we recognize that the going is the essence of our humanity. Humans are the animals that dare to go there, you know, to infinity and beyond as. Toy story,

Ellie: 41:20

whichever number would put it. You don't have to reach for Toy Story. David, you've got the Moana song right there.

David: 41:30

I know, but you know, Ellie, I actually wonder whether you, so you associate with Moana, this girl that goes into the ocean and likes being in the water, and I think it has to do with the fact that you grew up in California around the ocean. If I were to choose a female protagonist to represent my relationship to water, it probably would be Ophelia, from Shakespeare, you know, who like dies in a creek and she's just like at the bottom, dead in a mysterious, under mysterious circumstances. And it is because I grew up in a landlocked place. For me, the ocean was a thing that you visited once every two years. And it was always an object of dread, because I once almost drowned in my first visits to the beach. And so that panic never left me. And in fact, my partner always makes fun of me because when we go on vacation and, you know, like we, we'd be like in a beautiful beach in the Mediterranean and I'm like, I'm not getting in the water period. I'm having a great time, but I'm not even dipping a toe in that soul crushing, primal element.

Ellie: 42:31

Interesting. Well, I'm sorry that you had that near drowning experience. And there's a lot of cultural valences to swimmers versus non-swimmers too. I mean, definitely my family, like a lot of our Indian family members don't know how to swim, or even if they do, they don't really like to. Whereas like, my sister, I'm not even the big swimmer of the family. My sister was on swim team, water polo. Her teenage job was to teach literal babies how to swim. It's actually fascinating. Yeah. If you just kinda like throw babies in the water,

David: 42:57

They know how to swim. Yeah. They learn. Well, because they're already. They're already swimming in the womb.

Ellie: 43:03

Well, okay. Not when they're like fully developed, like, you know, the way they're, when they're learning at six months, but no, they have like a reflex for, you know, not swallowing water and stuff. So anyway. Um, yeah, I've heard that it can be nice to get babies like accustomed to swimming from a young age because it plays to their natural instincts and then they don't develop that fear anyway. I know you've been wanting to talk about the science and how life originates in water. So tell us a bit about that.

David: 43:29

Well, so even though I said, I'm a terrestrial animal for a reason, the truth is that all terrestrial animals originated in the water. The origins of life are in ancient waters. And when life eventually developed into sentience or mind. That also took place at the bottom of the ocean floor. You know, there are different accounts of this among philosophers of biology and evolutionary theorists. Some people trace the origins of animal sentient to the Cambrian explosion that took place roughly 500 million years ago. Other people say that it started even earlier in the period preceding it, which is called the, uh, Aryan. But all accounts agree on the point that consciousness begins in the water and only later makes its way onto land giving rise to terrestrial species, right? Like insects and cows and giraffes, and of course humans. But this origin story means that we carry in us traces of our oceanic, fishy past. So there is this book that talks about this, it's called Your Inner Fish by the biologist Neil Shubin. He points out that there are a ton of similarities between our bodies and the bodies of fish that point to our common origin that are similarities in bone structure. For example, between our limbs. Like our hands and feet and the fins of fish. There are similarities in the earliest stages of embryological development in mammals and fish, and also the structure of the human ear. If you really trace back its evolution, it leads you directly to the jaw bones of ancient fish. And so there is an inner fish that we carry within us, And Macauley, the author of Elemental Philosophy, he says that this is, for example, why our eyes have to constantly be bathed in salt water to function properly because they evolved

Ellie: 45:33

originally in an aquatic millieu.

David: 45:36

Yeah. Like that's why if your eyes get dry, that's a problem. Because our eyes need to replicate a little bit, that aquatic environment that was their original home.

Ellie: 45:48

Yeah. Well, and as somebody who suffers from dry eyes and recently asked your partner who's an eye specialist. What to do about that, he was like, oh yeah, what happens?'cause I get like these dry eye attacks where I start like uncontrollably crying and it's actually dangerous if I'm on the freeway. So he was like, you need to preemptively use eyedrops because the problem is when your eyes are already dry, they try to overcompensate by creating liquid, but it doesn't have enough saline in it.

David: 46:12

That's right. It's not salty enough. Yes. And it's not just the eye because our entire body, kind of like the sea itself, needs to stay within a certain range of salinity in order to function. And when I was reading this in the Macauley book, it reminded me of this book by the philosopher of biology, Peter Godfrey Smith, who talks about this connection between modern humans and ancient fish in his book Metazoa. It's so good. It just like walks you through the evolution of sentience, uh, sort of step by step. And he points out that when we, like animals left the ocean, life became really difficult and we had to fight a new set of challenges on land that we didn't have to face before that. Number one, gravity. Obviously, it's harder to move on land than it is in the pool or in the ocean, right? Another one is reproduction. How do you reproduce in a dry environment when your reproductive system is used to an aquatic environment? And Godfrey Smith points out that that's why we recreate the sea in our reproductive p rocess, right, like the egg creates a little oceanic environment in the case of birds and the amniotic sack in mammals recreates that ancient aquatic environment that is necessary for the reproduction of the species. One last example that I'll throw into the mix here, 'cause I thought it was really quirky and really fun, is that. When we were fish, all you have to do in order to ingest food is sort of like open your mouth and suck in and that will pull in water with other little fish that you want to eat if you're a big fish. But all you have to do is essentially a sucking motion. But when you exit the ocean and you're on land, you can't just suck air in and hope to be fed. You suddenly have to chew, and more importantly, swallow, you have to force food down your throat. In a really

Ellie: 48:25

unnatural way. See, Thales was right. We need that moisture. Yeah, we need that. Moisture or else, you're gonna

David: 48:32

choke right before you fall into the well. And so the point is that one of the things that we are vulnerable to, which is choking, is actually an effect of us having left this womb of the ocean in which we originally took shape.

Ellie: 48:48

Well, so all of this is super interesting. I read Metazoa, actually, I read Metazoa on a beach vacation in Mexico a few years ago. So speaking of water, it was apropos and I didn't remember a lot of these details. Speaking of my forgetfulness, I'm just really like running in circles today. Huh? Can I keep coming back to the same jokes and references? But this is making me wonder if some of the stuff we said earlier about the shapeness of water actually only pertains to the way that we experience water on land, because we talked about how water needs to have a container and in order to take shape. And even though that's true underwater, when we were underwater creatures, we didn't experience water that way. We actually experienced it as we do air now. Right? Yeah. Like there's that phrase, what's that phrase?

David: 49:33

Like a fish outta water?

Ellie: 49:35

No, actually, not that phrase, there's something about, I don't know, like maybe it's not even a phrase, I'm forgetting it now, but it's something like the air that we breathe. Yeah. It's not a phrase, it's just an idea. I'll just put it in my own words. The air that we breathe is invisible all around us, of course, right? But when we used to be aquatic creatures, the water we swam in, the water we existed in, that was invisible to us too. Like you don't know that water is fluid, if water is the element in which you're living. And this way that we have of relating to water as creatures now on land where we are noticing water for what it is, we're not taking it for granted the way that we take for granted air, or maybe even in some context, earth or ground, also ultimately leads to our conceiving of water as a natural resource, and there's a book that I, I'm so sorry I'm mentioning this because I didn't actually end up having time to really consult it in the way that I would've liked, but it's a book called What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction by Jamie Linton, which is basically all about how we tend to abstract water from its social, geographical, and so forth, context, which is precisely what we are doing by virtue of having this in a four elements episode. So, sorry, Jamie Linton. We're doing exactly what you don't want us to do, but I think we could say that, you know, in terms of our having become so far removed from our origins as creatures within the water, we've also given rise to this way of understanding water as a natural resource, which I think we can think about in actual material terms. We can also think about in terms of an abstraction as just like H2O.

David: 51:11

Yeah. And aside from abstracting water, I think. It also means that we carry within us a kind of attraction to water that maybe is the result of this ancient past. At least, this is the view of the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi, who argues that the original trauma of all humans, of course, is birth, but birth is an exit from an oceanic environment. And he means that both in terms of, literally we are exiting from the amniotic sac and we are entering a dry world. But he argues that we do carry the legacy of our species' exit from the ocean and onto land, and he says the human being's most fundamental trauma is desiccation.

Ellie: 52:02

Psychoanalyst love to talk about what the human being's most fundamental trauma is. I'm curious about why he considers it to be desiccation, because certainly I think to talk about the trauma of birth makes a lot of sense. Like there's no denying that going from the environment that we have when we're fetuses to suddenly being born into the world fundamentally shapes who we are. And I think it's fair to consider that a trauma. I'm just wondering like is desiccation what? Why not? Enclosure versus, you know, openness. Why not being tied to your mother's body versus being out in the world? Like I dunno, yeah, there's maybe different ways of thinking about that, but yeah, so the exit from the Oceanic environment, desiccation. So maybe our fundamental trauma as a species then too would be moving away from our fishy nature and getting desiccated. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, zoom meetings, and more. Thanks to those of you who already do

David: 53:05

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_Pod. We'd

Ellie: 53:21

like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.