![]() In the first period, mankind is subject to the forces of the sea, which are believed to be expressions of divine will. 2 In this geocentric epoch, planet Earth takes center stage. Joachim Radkau has called the period beginning around 1970 “the age of ecology,” others talk about “the great acceleration” around 1945 that catapults the Earth into a new geological era called the Anthropocene. Technocentrism has only intensified since the nineteenth century, but a new planetarianism whose perspective is geocentric emerges in the second half of the twentieth century. After this period of religious orientation and supremacy, an anthropocentric perspective in which humans challenged for and occupied the center prevailed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a technocentric perspective characterized by the dominance of a technological mode of being replaced it. The first paradigm, which dominated until the mid-fifteenth century, is theocentric. ![]() Questions of clarity versus detail aside, the four maritime world pictures should first and foremost be regarded in their operational capacity and valued by their potential to serve as models of analysis. But rising above the muddy waters of daily history bring clarity. Abstractions like the one I am about to perform-extracting world pictures of “oceanic thinking” from historical periods-always entails the loss of historical details, nuances, and ambiguities. While the paradigms are serial and chronological, they never exist in their pure form but overlap and interpenetrate throughout history. To anticipate the main argument of the first part, the historical framework comprises four different paradigms in which the components of gods, humans, technology, and nature constitute variable hierarchies among themselves. The other is a reading of Herman Melville’s modern epic, Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851), that aims to show how the four different world pictures coexist in the novel. One is a delineation of a history of four maritime world pictures through multiple sources. This first chapter is divided into two parts. In this chapter, I analyze a selection of exemplary representations of the sea drawn from some of these sources, aiming to outline the paradigmatic semantic shifts of the ocean in the cultural history of the West. The changing interpretations take the form of symbolic representations of the sea in a variety of sources ranging from religious texts, poems, epics, and prose stories to paintings, movies, diaries, logbooks, travelogues, and treatises of history, natural history, and philosophy. As humanity changes through the centuries, so do conceptions of the sea. With the briefness of human lives follows a fundamental mutability of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. What is constantly changing is man.” 1 If claims about the ocean’s constancy can be challenged in the light of climate change, microplastic, and the Anthropocene, Michelet does have a point in singling out the radical difference in temporal scale between the ocean and human history. Michelet, author of the influential and poetic La Mer, points to the ocean’s substantial solidity and claims it is humans and their perception of the ocean that change: “The element which we call fluid, mobile, and capricious, does not really change it is regularity itself. The sea’s fluctuating appearance has been subject to multiple interpretations throughout human history. For centuries, humans considered the substance of the sea to be unchanging and regarded its form as constantly changing. In Western history, from Greek-Roman antiquity to the present, the sea has served as a horizontal screen on which humanity’s cultural imagination has projected its changing social and metaphysical phantasms.
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