Sea

Jacques Derrida believed that the universe is liquid, in the sense that everything, always, is fluid, with our notion of a “fixed” anything being rather ridiculous and more an occasionally useful concept than an actual aspect of existence. Meaning, language, and our sense of identity are runny, sloppy, and flowing, constantly, in countless directions, and the fluidity of experience laughs heartily at our attempts to codify beliefs, systematize semantics, normalize mores, and the all too human propensity to confine and constrain the wildness of what is, forever unfolding. The surface of the planet we inhabit is mostly water, and so, too, the human body. But experience is entirely oceanic. “Experience imposes an uncontrolled manifold of intuitions,” Jean-Luc Marion once wrote, “which never stop developing and varying, so that the contingency of the thing or the state of affairs affects the knowledge, which itself becomes variable, changing, and thus uncertain.” Knowledge is bopping, not static; relational and personal, not independent and absolute. Those who wish to fare this life well with honesty and integrity are best to become virtual surfers, adaptive to the tidal twists and turns that continuously come our way, and appreciative of the ebb and flow of all things coming and going.

The sea is beautiful, balletic, frothing and frenetic, and early seafarers millennia ago must have felt such fear, uncertainty, and intrigue as they ventured out upon the open waters of the unknown. Prehistoric Polynesian. Hominin. Antediluvians now lost to time. These ancient adventurers traversed the uncharted, unexplored, untouched, and unnamed. As best they could, they steeled themselves for the strange. And after traveling for many days, weeks, or months, when they finally drew near the shores of a new frontier, I wonder, how did they approach the foreign? The recent history of British colonialism is not an isolated incident. So, perhaps, these sojourners of long ago likewise brought their predetermined intentions, preconceived notions, and premature categories to superimpose on whoever and whatever they encountered. Although, it seems just as likely their approach could have included more than a modicum of meekness and a dash of epistemic humility, reserving initial judgments, and resisting the temptation to pigeonhole novelty too quickly within the confines of their own foreign schemata. Perhaps, the approach was unavoidably a bit of both.

Centuries later, we are not so different. Every day within the liquid landscape that is life most of us cross paths with a stranger. When the crossing is welcomed, whether superficial or deep, brief or long, each person in this crossing elects the wild, braving a new frontier, as each one approaches the shore of the other. Every such crossing is an experience of both the familiar and foreign, and we can never be sure exactly how much of the former or latter ahead of time. If our presumptive emphasis is on the familiar, we are likely to approach the shores of the other with greater ease but also greater error, for this other is not me, not in the least. “Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species,” Gordon Allport observed, and when we assume we already know the life language and cadence of another creature, even human, even before this other has shared a single thought, we run the risk of embarrassment, violence, or outright shipwreck, a dastardly crash upon the shores of the other. Alternatively, if we approach the other with caution and care, gently and curiously—including those we think we know so well; for each of us, in truth, is a new creation, each new day, simply through the trials and tumult of life—we create the conditions for the possibility of a gracious encounter, marked by mutual surprise and edification. There was a word for such an approach in antiquity, namely, “prudence,” from the Greek phronesis, a word mostly gone by the wayside these days, and a largely forgotten virtue, despite being celebrated at least as far back as Plato in his Republic as one of the four cardinal virtues, a foundational virtue for both the soul and the state. It always warms my heart, however, when I encounter another who knows prudence still. The twentieth-century psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke about meeting such a person one day, a rather eccentric, low-key psychologist, “a pure clinician who never wrote anything or created any theories or researches but who delighted in his everyday job of helping people to create themselves. This man approached each patient as if he were the only one in the world, without jargon, expectations or presuppositions, with innocence and naiveté and yet with great wisdom, in a Taoistic fashion. Each patient was a unique human being and therefore a completely new phenomenon to be understood and engaged in a completely novel way.” His great success even with very difficult people validated his adaptive, liquid-like (rather than rigid or orthodox) way of doing things.