Among the earliest Greek philosophers—now commonly known as the pre-Socratic philosophers—stands Thales of Miletus* (c. 626/623–c. 548/545 BC). Living around 150 years before Socrates, he is often considered not only among the first chronologically but also among the foremost for the quality of his thought. Among his work in geometry, he is remembered eponymously in Thale’s theorem. However, it is not necessarily for the scientific accuracy of his thought that he is still held with some regard. It is also for his attempts at trying to make sense of the world; attempts that missed the mark. For example, Thales thought that the Earth floated on water.
Of interest here is that he held water to be the first principle—or arche—of everything. That is, everything in nature was based on a single elementary substance, which Thales proposed was water. Although it may seem odd to us today, in the ancient world this view became widely influential.
Socrates took a different approach. He questioned how we could be sure about our views. He famously refused to speculate about such matters. Such a proposal as Thales’ would not have fit well with him. However, how much of a speculation is it to suggest that water is the ‘first principle’?
Apart from the scientific basis of water for life (see an earlier post) water has a special place in human experience. This is because of its physiological importance.
Viewed in terms of physics, water is a molecule: one of the most widely known. Many who do not know what ‘H2O’ means in the scientific sense have heard of it and are aware that it relates (in some way) to water.
Water is made of elements—hydrogen and oxygen; it is a molecule and not itself an element. But as a molecule, water does have a fundamental position with respect to life. Indeed, the search for extraterrestrial life typically goes hand in hand with the question of liquid water being present. That is, not just ‘H2O,’ which may be in the form of ice or vapour, but ‘liquid H2O.’
Water provides a physical medium within which the processes that gave rise to life can take place. That is where the processes that characterise life first occurred and now continue to take place. All organisms, whether they are plants or animals, are water-based. No living thing is devoid of water. To be devoid of water is to be lifeless—even dead.
An interesting creature is the tardigrade. This tiny creature can resist considerable environmental extremes—including exposure to outer space—without dying. They can take on an inactive state when put to extremes and return to life afterwards when returned to a normal environment. One extreme that they can withstand is desiccation.
However, as I understand it, liquid water may be lost, resulting in the tardigrade taking on an inactive form called a ‘tun.’ However, despite desiccation, some water molecules remain within the substance of the quiescent tun. This is because of the presence of the sugar trehalose. Indeed, other organisms that can also withstand desiccation also have this mechanism. While this is not the only mechanism available to the tardigrade—for example, it is able to modify certain structural proteins in response to desiccation—water nevertheless has a fundamental place in its continued existence—even when inanimate.
I am not aware of any of the existentialist philosophers ever giving water much attention in human existence. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre briefly discusses the experience of being-in-the-world in relation to the element of water, but this is not a major part of his philosophy. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, uses the image of a river to represent the absurdity of human existence, but again, this is a passing reference rather than a central theme.
Only the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about the symbolism of water in his book Water and Dreams. He explored how water is often associated with purity, life, and the unconscious. However, Bachelard was more of a phenomenologist than an existentialist, and his focus was on the imaginative experience of water rather than its existential significance.
* Mietus was a Greek colony in Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor and so not in the territory that forms modern-day Greece.
