This is a study of a seafaring metaphor as a “paradigm,” that is, a model open to multiple actualizations. By tracing the history of these actualizations, the author discerns changes in the way human beings have imagined their relation to what the philosopher Edmund Husserl called the Lebenswelt, or life-world. He notes that one of the most pervasive actualizations of the life-as-sea-voyage metaphor includes a spectator who observes the distress of those at sea from the safety of dry land. For the author, this spectator embodies theory (the Greek word theoría derives from theoros, “spectator”) and thus raises the question of what a theoretical perspective on the world entails.

From Steven Rendall’s Translator’s Introduction to Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1997 (first published in 1979), pp. 1-2.