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Abstract

Recent times have seen an emergence of cold-water sea swimming as a popular pasttime for increased numbers of people in coastal regions. Within this paper, we seek to outline the philosophical relationship between water and society, right back to Thales. From this we continue through anthropological sources to highlight the relationship between culture and the sea throughout much of human history. Sociology offers only piecemeal theoretical bases for this relationship. Here, the concept of liminality is deployed as a mechanism through which we can interpret human-water relations. On from this, the concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’, coined by French intellectual Romain Rolland, is discussed to situate how the experience of swimming might offer one among many means through which we can return to the world as it is given to us, in a Nietzschean sense, and in doing so return at once to an experience of the eternal borne from presence.

Keywords

liminality liminoid nature oceanic feeling philosophy sea swimming water

Introduction

From its earliest formations, mainstream sociological theory has been primarily concerned with the development of analytical frameworks which can assist in the depiction of social phenomena associated with modernity, and due to this has adequately outlined the coercive, adverse, and pessimistic forces and circumstances which govern contemporary society from a political, economic, institutional, bureaucratic, and technological perspective. The circumstances of modernity have vast negative consequences for human well-being, despite pro-enlightenment narratives of reason, science and humanism as having led us to a level of civilisation never before achieved. Disillusionment with regards to economics, disease, authoritarianism, geo-politics, and the ecological crisis (amongst other things) are routinely outlined within the public sphere with the discourse of crisis ever increasing, imposing itself on the human spirit.

Nihilism, to Nietzsche, is the rejection of the world as it is given to us. Society exists within this world, and as such the world informs the construction of society. While the sober pessimism of much sociological theory shall continue, and with warrant, there is now a need to ensure that societal interactions with this world, as it is given to us, are included in the theoretical literature. This essay will outline, the foundational principal of water within philosophy, liminality as a conceptual frame through which human-water interaction can be understood, the phenomenological dimensions of sea swimming, and the positive liminal experience of interaction with water using a conceptual metaphor taken from French intellectual and mystic Romain Rolland’s concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’. A movement towards the increased importance of bringing human experience into sociological theory, searching to depict the essence of life in some form or another, is evident (Horvath and Szakolczai, 2018; O’Connor, 2014).

Theories of Humans, Water, and the Sea

Water has played a central role in planetary existence and human history. It is argued that three billion years ago the earth existed as a pre-continental water world (Johnson and Wing, 2020) and that a genetic lineage can be traced back 540 million years to ‘saccorhytus’, a prehistoric sea creature. Since prehistory, human life has often been inextricably linked to the sea despite its uninhabitable nature. Recent discoveries in Monte Verde, Chile, have shown the link between human life and coastal environments. They highlight the importance of seaweed to human diets and move beyond the long-held mainstream theory of the Clovis settlement and inland migratory patterns as the first in the Americas (dated to 13,000 B.P.). The human experience of sea-interaction draws us to it. Even today, close to 10% of the world’s population live in coastal environments – like frogs around a pond – and close to 40% live within 100 kilometres of the coast. Thales of Miletus, regarded by Aristotle as the first philosopher within the Greek tradition, outlined that the primary, singular, and original principle of nature was water.

Thales sees water in the abstract as the origin of all things, the source from which everything emerges. His concern was with finding a singular point from which the complex diversity of phenomena and their interconnections could be interpreted, not simply as an element which enables life but also as a force which could shape the earth (Schultz, 1980: 16). The centrality of water, and with this the sea, to Grecian culture can be represented through numerous mythological figures prior to the emergence of Greek philosophical thought. From Pontus as the embodiment of the sea, to Poseidon as the ruler over it, the geographical circumstances of Grecian life gave way to a central influence of relationships to the sea in mythic thought. The oceanus was the earth-encircling freshwater river in Greek mythology, relating in some form to Thales’ later notions of a foundational principle. The importance of water and the sea is similarly illustrated in locations throughout the world. In Ireland, Lir is the personification of the sea. Further European examples of the mythological importance of the sea can be found from Celtic contexts to Norse myths, amongst others. Beyond a European perspective, mythological depictions of gods and goddesses related to the sea can be found in North and South America, Asia and Oceania.

Overseas travel has played a crucial role in more recent history of human culture, acting to enable culturally diverse populations to form immediate contact with one and other, through exploration, pilgrimage, migration, and trade (Abulafia, 2019). Marcel Mauss provides an outline of the importance of the sea as an enabling factor in Polynesian gift-relations, supporting solidarity of some form between diverse communities and populations. Malinowski’s (1922) classic ethnography of the Trobriand people in northeast New Guinea is intricately linked to human interactions with the sea, and the small remote seafaring community based on the Puluwat Atoll in Micronesia is described by Gladwin (1970). Anthropology has connections to the sea across several of its classic works. More broadly speaking, however, the sea plays a relatively minor role in the canon of anthropological investigation. Calls have emerged for anthropology and other studies concerned with culture to give greater attention to human relationships with the sea as ‘seas and oceans form a highly dynamic world in which one can stumble upon fascinating and surprising sociocultural phenomena that one does not easily expect there and that therefore deserve our scholarly attention’ (Balkenhol and Swinkels, 2015: 7).

The claim has been made that anthropological figures such as ‘Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Margaret Mead treated water, paradoxically, as atheoretical, a substance on which to meditate when they were not building social theory’ (Helmreich, 2011: 133). From a recent standpoint in philosophy, there is a suggestion for the transference from an understanding of our place in the world to meet the fluid dynamics in which it is contextualized, as a form of ‘fluid philosophy’, continuing with the work of François Laruelle and ‘exchanging our being-in-the-world for a being-in-water’ (Chiaroni, 2016: 108), or what Laruelle defines as non-philosophy. Similarly, Bauman draws on the fluid metaphor in his conceptual development of liquid modernity, whereby solid states have eroded in the contemporary world. Liquids do not locate in space or are bound by time in any similar form to solid states. For Bauman, modernity is orientated through continuous change, with Laruelle seeing non-philosophy as founded on a level of axioms beyond philosophical interpretation, not striving as with standard philosophy to unify water and earth (or thought and body). Both Laruelle and Bauman are accepting of the flux dynamics at play.

Across disciplines, water has been grasped as an elemental force which can provide insights to move beyond established and entrenched domains. In general, a naïve understanding of the ocean exists within contemporary sociology whereby beyond the utilitarian provision of food, energy, transport, etc., it is a sphere which is unrelated to social life (Hannigan, 2017). The preponderance of the social sciences fails to represent the importance and vastness of the sea. There are, however, emergent examples of deep engagement with the topic. In anthropology, the recent work of Hastrup and Hastrup (2022) calls for interdisciplinary investigations of ‘waterworlds’, which move beyond isolated ethnographies. The earlier work of human geographers Anderson and Peters (2016) push back against the de facto terrestrial nature of their discipline.

The work of Dening (1980) uses the metaphor of islands and beaches to connote how we create our identities through the construction of boundaries in his ethnohistorical account of the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. In the contemporary case, there are examples of research exploring belonging through shared ocean interaction (Britton and Foley, 2021; Whyte, 2019). In contrast to this relation to identify at boundary spaces, Carl Schmitt (Connery, 2001) presents a binary dichotomy between land and sea in modern society, instigated through spatial explorations from the 16th century onwards. The sea as such comes to be represented as an offshore void (Cocco, 2013). For other figures, however, the social pact borne out of life at sea has been interpreted beyond this voided classification.

The late philosopher Michel Serres, whose work in recent times is receiving increased attention beyond his native France (Boland, 2022; Paulson, 2000; Szakolczai, 2021), originated from a seafaring family and the role of the sea often appeared within his writing. Sailing and the sea appear in Genesis (Serres, 1995a), alongside the importance of the sea to La belle noiseuse. Noise, from the archaic French translation related in some form to contention, is evoked with its etymological connections to nautical, navy and nausea. The background noise of the sea is used as an example where, ‘that placid or vehement uproar seems established there for all eternity’ (Serres, 1995a: 13). The Natural Contract (Serres, 1995b), again includes the centrality of water and sea within his philosophical thinking, including reference to seafarers and Galileo. Moving beyond Plato and the metaphor of the ship as a model for governance, Serres discusses what he deems exceptional about this model is the potential for withdrawal from the ordinary life on land which ‘holds seagoers to the law of politeness, where “polite” means politic or political. There is a localness, being-there, when there is leftover space’ (Serres, 1995b: 40). The social pact borne out of the life of a seafarer was, to Serres, uniquely influenced by its siting on the water. Recent sociological work has used water and the sea as a means through which the investigation of power, politics and governance can be situated (Castro, 2005).

Moving back to classical sociology, its formation as a discipline has been heavily oriented towards society as represented through experience on land, most often with reference to the urban. Some examples beyond this do, however, exist. The work of both Tönnies and Elias investigates seafaring as a human activity. Marx and Weber, too, make some reference to maritime occupations within their work, yet deeper engagement of societal interactions with the ocean on a theoretical level, or with a land/sea dichotomy, are missing (Hannigan, 2017). The un-institutionalized ‘sub-discipline’ of maritime sociology is in many cases orientated around occupational interactions with the sea, or ‘life at sea’, much like representations within classical sociology. There is, however, a broader range of human interaction with the ocean which must be further explored. Recent scholarship has seen an expansion of interest in maritime pilgrimage (Chenganakkattil, 2023; Katić and Blaće, 2023; Perdiki, 2021). For Goethe, following in the thinking of Thales, all is born in water, and all is sustained in water. The Aegean Festival draws upon sea deities such as Thales, Nereus, Galatea, and Proteus. As Kerényi notes, ‘everything here is full of Sea’ (Kerényi, 2004: 10).

As such, the sea forms a setting of drama both within ancient mythology and the modern myth of Faust. In contrast, modern utilitarian representations of the human-ocean relationship fit within a Smithian economic frame, failing to move us towards an understanding of experiential dimensions of the ocean. To understand society, we must ‘analyse it not only in terms of what it is, but what it has separated itself from: those framing realities which continue to exist beneath the phantasms generated by technology, communications media and consumption’ (O’Connor, 2014: 48). A separation has been present between society and the sea within both classical and contemporary mainstream sociology, despite the lived reality of humans’ relationship to it: one both of fear and joy. Early human emotional connection to the ocean is one characterized by the unknown and by fear (Cocco, 2013). This connection on an emotional level can also relate to nostalgia, to play, and to exploration (Hodgkin, 1997). The concept of liminality can be applied to human interaction with the ocean to move beyond an atheoretical approach and frame this relationship in a more constructive manner.

Beyond the Liminoid

As the antithesis of terrestrial life, the sea generates a sense of fear. Beaulieu (2016), in outlining the centrality of the sea in Grecian antiquity for food and transport, war, commerce, science, and religious rituals, also contends that the sea was both at the centre of Greek life yet also its limit. The sea in this regard was a source of a great deal of reward yet simultaneously the embodiment of danger. This unknown void can, however, act to bring forth some clarity, in a liminal process: ‘for us the ocean is the unknown and dangerous – where the ocean begins is where the land animals’ living environment ceases. Hence it is precisely in relation to this alien sphere that humans show who they are’ (Schultz, 1980: 5). Liminality is defined as having three phases: separation, limin and reaggregation. In the liminal phase of the process, at the centre, previously concrete social meanings dissolve, leaving no established guidance to assist in emerging from separation. This leaves people to fend for themselves and to re-emerge in society in a changed state. Liminality has been reanimated through recent scholarly work, beyond the foundations of Turner and its later development by van Gennep, as a master concept within the social sciences which can assist in understanding the transitory nature of contemporary dynamics and the fluidity of social life.

For Turner, modern consumerist societies have led to the disappearance of liminal experiences to be replaced by ‘liminoid’ moments, in which this sense of uncertainty can be entered into in a fabricated form, through art and leisure, in a performative manufactured way. As noted by Thomassen and Balle, ‘the liminoid has no reference to the rhythms and cycles of nature and human life, as was the case in premodern ritual. The out of ordinary is decoupled from calendrical, biological and social structural cycles’ (Thomassen and Balle, 2012: 85). Thomassen and Balle give an account of the negative implications of our search for experience through liminoid moments, moving beyond the positive depictions offered by Turner. Using bungee jumping as a useful reference point, they outline the use of ‘kick experiences’ as morsels consumed through our hunger for experience, yet ones in which no formative impact is achieved for the subject. Any sense of interaction with the transcendental becomes impossible through the liminoid pseudo-experience. Such liminoid moments are devoid of any real sense of existential danger or fear beyond the artificial creation of an experience which presents the subject with the perception of being in a state of in-betweenness, in a manufactured and controlled environment. The contemporary rise of adventure tourism often meets this human desire for the liminal whilst presenting instead rather a liminoid moment, in opposition to premodern ritual.

Similarly, liminality has been applied further to experiences of tourism through ‘seascapes’, and in particular the notion of ‘cruises to nowhere’. These tourism experiences are gaining increased popularity and are built around debauchery, drinking and sex. In this context the sea operates as a non-place (Augé, 1996), where boundaries are transgressed, and the limitless horizon becomes the space through which hedonistic escapism from any grounded reality can be actualised. These cruises to nowhere, as opposed to offering a space through which people can inhabit their identity, operate as an escape where people are placed with strangers for a short period of time, usually a few days, operating as a liminoid playground (Rink, 2020: 392), far removed from Serres’ (1995b) insights on the politic dimensions of seafaring social pacts. With a lack of any true sense of destination, the ship itself becomes the destination and the sea then a void space upon which the liminoid experience can take place. This interaction with the sea is at odds with the experience of transoceanic travel which formed the societies and cultures which now so readily indulge in such liminoid activities.

Taken further, the idea of permanent liminality (Szakolczai, 2000) can be applied to modernity whereby a phase of the liminal process continues indefinitely. It has been argued that we are now living in such an age, with America, as the heart of contemporary Western neoliberalism, as an ideal type for understanding such permanentization of liminality. In an age of permanent liminality, whereby the crisis order has gained primacy as a continuous and perpetual condition, an emergent trend has manifested whereby socio-economic elites are preparing for the collapse of the social order through establishing bunker retreats, transhumanist initiatives, and interplanetary exploration projects, as a means through which this crisis state, a permanent state of liminality, could be escaped from. One such example can be found through the Seasteading Institute, a floating offshore community funded by libertarian transhumanist billionaire Peter Thiel and led by the grandson of key modern neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. The Institute sees the ocean as ‘humanity’s next frontier’, where transgressive economic and governance arrangements will be established, in keeping with libertarian ideals and a Randian individualist techno-optimism. This rejection of the world as it is given to us is aligned with similar projects towards planetary colonization promoted by other figures at the forefront of the digital economy. The fictional depiction of a post-apocalyptic seafaring society in the film Waterworld provides a suitably crass parallel, which ironically was one of the most expensive yet poorly received Hollywood productions in history at its time of release in 1995.

The argument has been made that building new governance configurations at sea can act as a means through which policy can be improved and economic competitiveness enhanced (Friedman and Taylor, 2012), with floating casinos and pirate radio stations offered as examples of historical precedents for gaining freedom through operating at sea. This implicit sense of freedom which the founders espouse, whether actual or figurative, renders the project into a void space, removed from any established modes of being. In this way the ocean is perceived as a blank canvas, a space of experimentation in which anything is achievable, all underpinned by a techno-utopian optimism for new structural forms of social organization.

Despite the negative implications of these topics- liminoid pseudo kick experiences, ‘cruises to nowhere’ in an oceanic void, or the sea as a site of placelessness through the dystopian enclave libertarianism of the Seasteading Institute- the sea also remains operative as a truly liminal space. One in which through the separation from terrestrial life – to the source – one can be reaggregated back into the previous order in a new state. There remains a space through which liminality can be applied to genuine human experiences, as formative on the human spirit, and as such, human interaction with the sea through swimming is an important area of investigation which has been neglected as trivial within established social theory. Here, historical understandings of swimming will be applied alongside contemporary salutogenic benefits, situating three phenomenological dimensions of sea swimming within the conceptual framework of liminality.

Swimming Historically and Contemporarily

Water has been well referenced within psychology as being a landscape feature which predominantly evokes strong levels of preference in people (Ulrich, 1983). The positive aspects of human-water interactions are experientially self-evident and have been studied at great length across numerous disciplines. There is, however, a more emergent appreciation for the salutogenic benefits of sea swimming across a range of fields, often informed by direct experience. Its increased popularity can be seen around the world, for example, in the UK membership of the Outdoor Swimming Society, which has risen from a few hundred in 2006 to over 70,000 at the start of 2019 and continuing to rise (Bates and Moles, 2023). Swimming, or more specifically cold water swimming, has emerged in recent popular thought as both a psychologically and physiologically invigorating experience, if not reduced to yet another ‘extreme sport’. The Ice Swimming World Championships represents such a reduction to a ‘kick’ experience, with competitors covering 1 km in 2.5°C temperatures, with one participant suggesting that the sensory experience is akin to ‘someone . . . pulling out your fingernails with pliers’ (McCoy, 2018). Despite this emergent niche trend for the extremization of swimming, the standard form is more a re-emergence. Earlier notions of the benefits of sea swimming can be traced to 400AD and Hippocrates. Both Plato (‘the sea cures all ailments of man’) and Euripides (‘the sea washes away all men’s illnesses’) were aware of the therapeutic benefits of the sea aligning with Hippocrates’ focus. Thalassotherapy emerged in the 20th century with French biologist René Quinton (Pereira, 2018) claiming seawater to be the ‘vital liquid’ which could be used to treat a range of different conditions through administering a saline serum.

It has been suggested that throughout the Middle Ages in Europe human beings’ ability to swim was greatly limited up to and until the publication of ‘The Human Stroke’ by Nicolas Wynman in 1538 (Knechtle et al., 2020). Despite this, in 1933 László Almásy, a Hungarian explorer, discovered a cave in the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Sahara Desert in southwest Egypt that contained rock paintings which have been interpreted as depicting people swimming. The cave art is assumed to be as much as 10,000 years old, with later evidence of human swimming found in ancient Assyrian, Greek and Roman societies. While any earlier evidence is not available due to obvious archaeological limitations, it is quite natural to suggest that swimming may well have acted as an activity of life throughout human history, despite the species having no innate ability to perform the action. While Western culture has often perceived the ocean as an alien sphere of danger through the vast expanse and uncertainty which it represents, this is not to assume that water was avoided absolutely. In ancient Egypt there are records of swimming instructors on the banks of the Nile, and in Assyria illustrations where swimmers were depicted in the front crawl. In Greece, as referenced by a law thought to have been established by Solon of Athens, all boys in education must know both their letters and how to swim. In Rome, both Cassius and Caesar have been noted as accomplished swimmers. On from this, the suggestion has been made that the decline of swimming in the Middle Ages can be attributed to the centrality of asceticism within European culture at the time (McManamon, 2021).

Leonardo da Vinci, as a polymath exploring a vast array of topics throughout his life, was greatly interested in swimming. During this time, it came to be expressed as an art, linking back to previous understandings which emerged from Greek and Roman culture. This moves beyond the position which swimming held in society during the ascetically orientated Middle Ages. Da Vinci, as a principal figure during the Renaissance, engaged with swimming through his drawings, his writing on the nature of swimming in relation to eels and dolphins, and a number of inventions he developed such as equipment designed for underwater breathing and webbed gloves. Another feature of this writing on swimming was his interest in the fact that humans, in contrast to other mammals with feet and toes, lacked this innate ability to swim, with it instead needing to be learned.

It has been found in recent studies (Harper, 2022) that getting into water under 20 degrees centigrade on a regular basis can have a significant physiological effect on the body. The initiation of a stress response when getting into cold water enables a swimmer to develop an adaptation to cold, reducing the sympathetic response to stress. Swimming in cold water has also been linked to reduced levels of inflammation and exposure to cold constricts blood vessels and provides a workout for the cardiovascular system. With relation to inflammation, links have been made between cases of chronic inflammation and depression (Harper, 2022). Alongside the individual health benefits there are wider salutogenic benefits associated with sea swimming. One often referenced within the literature is the building of social connection through swimming (Britton and Foley, 2021) whereby communities are created around the activity. While communities can be created around any trivial act, it is important to note the centrality of an outdoor experience as a shared foundation for community building. A contemporary lack of connection to the outdoors, with many ‘now living only indoors’ (Serres, 1995b: 28), creates a neglect of the world. For Serres:

theory, philosophy, and urbanity leave out vast parts of the world, of experience, and the past – and yet these same things are being objectively left out by the sociotechnical construction of experience for so many people that it may be unrealistic and even utopian to suppose that they should be interested in the great outdoors of time, space, life, and matter rather than in the city of culture, society, and spectacle. (Paulson, 2000: 216)

The creation of communities of the outdoors, in this case related to sea swimming, presents the potential for experience beyond its sociotechnical construction. Another associated salutogenic benefit which can be attributed to sea swimming is related to a reharmonizing with nature. Recently, greater numbers of people in coastal environments have taken up cold water sea swimming. With this, the expanse of positive implications has been experientially felt across three factors: health, social, and connecting to nature.

Following on from these three factors, three key dimensions have been outlined in reference to the benefit of sea swimming (Denton and Aranda, 2020). Firstly, the transformation, through which swimmers’ experience of themselves is changed through the process, provides a heightened state of perception whereby the body becomes central to consciousness. A sense of becoming absorbed into the present state is referenced by swimmers, alongside it acting as an escape from the established order. It is suggested that these transformative potentials are more strongly felt over time. Secondly, connection as an experience of sea swimming is referenced. A relation is made here between a connection to the sea, connection to others, and a connection to place. Connection to others can increase enjoyment due to the dangerous nature of sea swimming, with others providing safety. This has been contrasted with terrestrial nature-based activities where isolation is often deemed preferable (Edensor, 2000). Finally, re-orientation is outlined in the analysis, whereby the interaction between swimmers and the sea seemed to disrupt ‘habitual perspectives and patterns and this allowed a different and refreshed way of seeing the world’ (Denton and Aranda, 2020: 657).

Continuing with the work of Denton and Aranda, in quoting the work of Foley (2017), swimming is experienced as relating to both the primeval and the ancient. It also contains an element of play, relating to the work of Huizinga and play as a foundational element in civilization. This re-orientating dimension can illuminate the sense ‘that you are in contact with something far more powerful than oneself. Considering oneself as a part of something larger than oneself, rather than being at the centre, can helpfully offer a different perspective to one’s life . . . no longer “in charge” of the material world but instead directly experiencing the impact it can have’ (Denton and Aranda, 2020: 657). Re-orientation can also direct us towards the experience of participation whereby one has the ‘means to be capable (both externally empowered and internally able) to secure the possibility of living a real-life and at home to members of one’s own community’ (Horvath and Szakolczai, 2018: 201). Across these three dimensions a relationship can be drawn with the conceptual lens of liminality. The process can be understood as such: leaving our established grounding on land (separation), followed by a process of transformation (limin) across the salutogenic benefits and an emergent sense of presence, followed by re-orientation (reaggregation) whereby habitual perspectives have been disrupted and one emerges with an illuminated sense of the world.

Liminality in this way can be used to conceptually enliven the experience of sea swimming, beyond interpretations of liminoid (Thomassen and Balle, 2012) experience often proliferated within contemporary culture.

The Oceanic Feeling

As Silicon Valley alchemists present technological meta-realities as a means through which one can retreat from reality (Boyle, 2021), modes of thinking and being which enable one to be in the world, in a Heideggerian sense, become increasingly important. To Heidegger, the concept of being is central throughout much of his work, understood using the expression ‘Dasein’, meaning literally being-there with ‘there’ taken to mean in the world. Hoppen, in outlining the importance of a philosophy of presence, shows how in an age in which ‘oneself no longer needs to engage with oneself’ (Boyle, 2021: 2), as such a contradiction to human experience, the surreal post-truth dynamics of the public realm and the current limitations of political discourse can be investigated through philosophers of presence as she outlines them, in keeping with the Platonic sense of true being. Applied across the three phenomenological dimensions of sea swimming, presence is a primary element in the act. Despite this, however, the technological meta-realities remain pervasive, even with relation to swimming.

The continued trajectory towards the automation of a vast expanse of human life, in the sense of an unreal reality, can be highlighted by the tragicomic development of technologically informed modes of swimming. The augmented reality system, AquaCAVE, was developed in Japan as a technology for ‘enhancing’ the experience of swimming. The system uses goggles with a ‘liquid-crystal’ display while swimmers are immersed in a swimming pool surrounded by ‘rear-projected acrylic walls’ to provide them with a ‘stereoscopic projection environment’ where they can explore a range of computer-generated environments from coral reefs to outer space (Yamashita et al., 2016). Although positioned as an alternative to pool swimming, the substitutionary essence of technological development inherently implies nothing is sacred. Moving from the somewhat incredulous to the concrete, the rise of ‘wearables’ such as smart watches has impacted upon the experiential dimension of sea swimming for the initiated. These technologies use sensors such as GPS, heart rate monitors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes to provide the user with data related to their swimming activities. The centrality of presence to the experience of sea swimming as outlined through the three phenomenological dimensions, and the impact which ‘wearables’ and data may potentially have on it, should be considered seriously. Humanity’s perception of reality, as has been previously discussed, can be obscured by technology (Germain, 2017).

It is important to remain cognizant of the implication of accelerated technology and the implications it holds over any aspect of society which is being explored. Parallel to this, the current reality is one which can still be positively understood. For now, the practice of sea swimming has gained great interest in the last few years, both in practice and science. In seeking to add to emergent explorations of swimming from a theoretical level, the concept of the oceanic feeling provides an overarching framing from which the previously discussed phenomenological dimensions and their relationship to the concept of liminality can be understood further. The notion of the oceanic feeling invokes the metaphor of the ocean and was developed by French novelist and mystic Romain Rolland in a letter sent to Sigmund Freud. The term was coined to connote a representation of the feeling of the eternal. As Rolland stated, ‘it would be dangerous for the philosopher and man of action to ignore the many occurrences of the oceanic feeling throughout the world’ (Maharaj, 2017: 488). While Freud popularized the concept and related it, as was so often the case, to the Oedipus complex and the idea of infantile regression, Rolland provides a more interesting interpretation, as the originator of the concept. He viewed the oceanic feeling as the true source of religion, related to the unconscious in an archaic sense (Maharaj, 2017; Parsons, 1998). We can relate the eternal, as Rolland outlines it, to the unlimited, or liminality. Within the Greek language we can see this as aperion, the unlimited, a foundational word in Western philosophy. Anaximander, Thales’ student, saw aperion as central to his theory as a basis for arche, or the first principle. Anaximander, just as Thales, was from Miletus, the ancient port city, living at the boundary between land and sea. The ocean feeling is premised on the relationship of these two central concepts of the first philosophers of the Western tradition: water and the eternal.

Interestingly, the oceanic feeling has been taken up at a cursory level as a sense of oneness with the world; Rolland viewed it rather as a permanent feeling with a phenomenological basis which was rather indefinite. The oceanic feeling was, to him, a relatively widespread phenomenon, rather than a niche occurrence amongst disparate individuals. Rolland, in unresolved debate with Freud, understood the oceanic feeling to be prolonged, constant, and durable. He stressed its proactive and transformational nature (Saarinen, 2014). Within Civilization and its Discontents, Freud outlines Rolland’s interpretation of religious sentiment as such:

[it] consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself [Rolland] is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion. (Freud, 2015: 11–12)

The proactive and transformational core of the oceanic feeling as understood by Rolland, and its relationship to a feeling of connection to the eternal, uses the ocean as a metaphorical tool. The oceanic feeling, inversely, can be used as a conceptual metaphor from which we can seek to situate the phenomenological dimensions of swimming as they are understood through the prism of liminality.

Conclusion

While the salutogenic benefits of sea swimming have been outlined through this paper, the marine-ecological crisis must also be referenced; an estimated 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean each year and debris found at sea has accumulated to such an extent that gyres have formed around sea-current patterns, the biggest of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is twice the area of Texas; a third of global fish stocks suffer from overfishing, which has devastating impacts on marine ecology; and continued ocean acidification is increasingly impacting ocean organisms and marine ecology. A leviathan oceanic future seems perilously close. Previous work has sought to outline the oxymoronic core of proclamations towards ‘saving the planet’ whilst simultaneously being disconnected from it in a human-nature schism as untenable (Boyle, 2020). Over two-thirds of this issue is related to the ocean.

In Plato’s Gorgias, the argument is made that swimming could be understood as a form of knowledge, yet its importance should not be overstated (McManamon, 2021: 14). In The Republic, Plato uses swimming as a metaphor for the pursuit of logic: ‘then we, too, must swim and try to escape out of the sea of argument’ (Reeve, 2004: 141). Perhaps we can go one step further, using the metaphor in a literal sense. Due to the contemporary proliferation of societal wildfires, in a disturbed and disrupted state of unreal reality the experience of swimming might offer one amongst many means through which we can return to the world as it is given to us, and in doing so return at once to an experience of the eternal borne from presence.

The foundational principle of water is clearly outlined in early Western philosophy. Humans’ relationship to coastal and marine environments is an important part of the historical lineage, yet despite this it is theoretically absent from much of contemporary sociology. Using the case of swimming, liminality can provide a conceptual frame through which human-water interaction can be understood and applied to the phenomenological dimensions of sea swimming. The central importance of presence within swimming can act both as a means through which reaggregation can occur and the experience of the eternal can be understood, metaphorically akin to Rolland’s concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’.

Footnotes

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Evan Boyle

Evan Boyle is a postdoctoral researcher with the MaREI Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine research and the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University College Cork. His research focuses on community engagement on energy transitions and transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability. Currently, he is investigating public participation in renewable infrastructure development in both Ireland and internationally. Other current research interests include transdisciplinary methodologies, blue spaces/nature immersion, and liminality/festivals.

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The Oceanic Feeling: Experiencing the Eternal through Swimming

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theories of Humans, Water, and the Sea

Beyond the Liminoid

Swimming Historically and Contemporarily

The Oceanic Feeling

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iD

References