Na wodach wielkich i niespokojnych. Wokół metaforyki akwatycznej i nautycznej

The objective of this article is to briefly describe the ways in which aquatic and nautical metaphorics functioned in the seventeenth-century literature and philosophy in regard to meta-scientific discourse. The paper’s compositional frame is the reference to the interwar writings of Juliusz Kleiner. Firstly, I point out that the category of “life” along with the metaphors of “water” and “fluidity” he used, were ontologised and, in fact, refer to the undifferentiated domain of primal factuality that is located beyond the symbolic registers, ahead of the hermeneutic moment. Secondly, I hold that figures and concepts which appear in Kleiner’s writings, not necessarily refer solely to the French and German modern philosophy at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, as the sources of analogous conceptualisations: figurative and conceptual are to be found also within the seventeenth-century British meta-scientific discourse.The article’s axis is an analysis of selected writings of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and William Shakespeare concerning the ways they applied aquatic and nautical metaphorics. Auden, Wystan Hugh. The Enchaféd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber and Faber, 1985