“In the haste of daily journalism, a lot can happen that’s directed at the reader’s jaded senses.”
– Hans Blumenberg, “The Iceberg of Fatalism”
When the news broke that a submersible owned by OceanGate Expeditions had advanced into eternal silence, no one turned to philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s 1979 book, Shipwreck with Spectator, the book that reminds us that our planet is named after a substance that is but one-third of its surface.
Were Blumenberg alive, he likely would have had something to say about the Titan. After all, Blumenberg had written about the Titanic and about icebergs, why icebergs became metaphors, as happened with Freud. You can find the essay in Blumenberg’s Sources, Currents, Icebergs collection (2012), and he has more to say about shipwrecks in Care Crosses the River (2010). The Titanic morphed into a metaphor for the interplay between visibility and invisibility in connection with the ship’s ramming a portion of an iceberg that was below the ship’s waterline. Danger: you see it, but are likely blind to how extensive it is. “The visibility of the tip of the iceberg is not enough to outmaneuver it,” says Blumenberg. Danger: you see it, but will likely be unable to avoid it.
The late 19th-century explorer Fridtjof Nansen thought he could use ice to maneuver himself into fame. Nansen set sail to the North Pole, knowing his ship would get lodged in ice, but hoping that in the final stage, the ice drift would carry him to his destination. Blumenberg’s answer to why Nansen would do such a thing: “Humans are risky beings, and not just because they seek frontier-pushing adventures.” That Blumenbergian claim seems a stretch, for instance, because Blumenberg considers few women among the humans who take such risks. Pandora isn’t in the mix, for example, though in the Shipwreck book, Blumenberg points to Fontenelle’s fictive Countess from Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) as someone with “a thirst for knowledge and enlightenment.” Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that no women were aboard the Titan.
“The haste of daily journalism” (Blumenberg had been a newspaper columnist in the 1950s) resulted in extensive speculation. Titan generated all sorts of expression, from class consciousness (“customers” had to pay $250,000 for the voyage—Blumenberg cannot resist linking water and money to liquidity) to anti-semitic theories about the Rothschilds, to comparisons of how some deaths on the sea are treated differently from others, to claims that the disaster served a political conspiracy, to this essay. Some launched into criticism of one passenger’s stepson, who had chosen to go to a concert while a potential rescue was underway. Just as Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships, so the missing Titan launched even more reactions from spectators. To remind us that we’re not the first to behave this way, Blumenberg directs readers to an 18th-century observation by Abbé Galiani, “the abbé-est of all the abbés of the time,” “The more safely the spectator sits there and the greater the danger he witnesses, the more intense his interest in the drama.” The theatricalization of experience distances spectators from those in the shipwreck, which could lead to a sense that we are not responsible for the “characters” we watch.
Shipwreck with Spectator opens with the notion that humans “seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage.” Most make a home on land out of fear of instability, though Blumenberg wants us to remember that in the ancient world earthquakes are part of the sea god Poseidon’s realm. If you have lived in areas where earthquakes are common, you likely know about “soil liquefaction.” The earth under our feet can give way unexpectedly. Sinkholes replicate the horror of drowning at sea.
If you’re still wondering what all this has to do with philosophy, Blumenberg offers a plain explanation: “Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor [and we who weren’t on the Titan are survivors], is the figure of an initial philosophical experience.” To appreciate how the philosophical experience might deepen, Blumenberg turns to Pascal, who suggests “living means already being on the [metaphorical] high seas, where there is no outcome other than being saved or going down.” In other words, we live and stay visible, all the while faced with the possibility of invisibility, becoming bodies not recovered from disaster.
Being a spectator to a sea disaster allows us to engage in a grand, fanciful exchange. Some die, so that I might live. In a section entitled “Rescue by Sinking” in Care Crosses the River, Blumenberg encountered the notion in a 17th-century image at the Wettenhausen Abbey in Bavaria, where there is a painted ceiling emblem with the words Pereant, ne peream. According to the classicist Kurt Lampe, it’s a pseudo-Stoic saying that cannot be found in all of classical Latin. The expression translates, “May they perish, so that I shall not perish.” Nowadays, we call it Schadenfreude.
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
