The Man Who Opened the Sea

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, childhood wonder, and the practical question of how we ought to live

When I started first grade, almost all the boys wanted to become policemen or firefighters. Those were occupations one could understand. The policeman had a uniform. The firefighter had a helmet and a red truck. When the teacher asked me, I said that I wanted to become an oceanographer.

I still remember the slightly puzzled reaction.

An oceanographer?

Where had I got that idea from?

The answer was Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Cousteau opened up a world that seemed to me almost more alien than outer space. Together with the people on board Calypso, he took cameras beneath the surface of the sea. The colours, the fish, the coral, the wrecks, and the slow-moving human figures gliding through the water entered our living rooms. The sea was no longer merely the blue surface one saw from the shore. It had an inner life.

Cousteau was a naval officer, explorer, filmmaker, author, and investigator of the sea. Together with the engineer Émile Gagnan, he developed the Aqua-Lung, which gave divers far greater freedom of movement underwater. Calypso became a research vessel, film studio, and symbol of exploration.

But perhaps Cousteau's most important contribution was something else.

He taught us to see.

To go and see

There is a simple attitude in Cousteau that I still recognise: one must go and see.

Not merely read about the world. Not merely construct theories about it. One must approach it, remain with it, and allow it to show itself.

That is also a good starting point for practical philosophy.

Philosophy begins with questions and concepts, but practical philosophy cannot remain there. It must return to the world. What do our ideas mean when they encounter another human being? What happens to an ethical principle when we face a concrete choice? What happens to our understanding of nature when we actually see what we are doing to it?

Cousteau went down into the sea.

It sounds simple enough. An explorer of the sea must investigate the sea. But Cousteau did something more. He made present a world that most people would never be able to visit.

What we had previously only known existed, we could suddenly see.

And what we see makes a different kind of claim upon us.

The illustration was developed by OpenAI/ChatGPT after a childhood drawing from me.

The child in the diving bell

I still have a drawing from my childhood.

At the top there is a ship. A long cable descends through the water to a diving bell on the seabed. Fish swim around it. A jellyfish drifts a little higher up.

And inside the diving bell sits me.

When I look at the drawing today, it is tempting to read my whole later life into it. One should be careful about that. The child who made the drawing knew neither his future nor the words that would later be used to describe him.

Many years later, I was diagnosed as autistic. I do not want to read the childhood drawing as a diagnostic document. But I do recognise something in it: the absorption, the pleasure of entering a bounded world and remaining there long enough to understand it.

Perhaps that same quality later became a strength in research.

Without it, I might have become a fisherman instead of a researcher.

That would not have been a bad life either.

But in a strange way, perhaps I remained in the diving bell.

From knowledge to responsibility

Cousteau gradually became more than an explorer.

The world he helped us to see also proved to be vulnerable.

Here an important movement takes place. First we ask:

What is there?

Then we ask:

How does it work?

But sooner or later a third question appears:

What does our knowledge mean for the way we ought to act?

It is this question that leads us from science to practical philosophy.

Science can describe how a coral reef works. It can measure temperature, oxygen levels, biodiversity, and pollution. But science alone cannot decide what we ought to do with this knowledge.

The final question is an ethical one.

Anyone who explores the world long enough may discover that exploration creates obligations.

One cannot simply say:

Now I know.

Another question follows:

What do I do with what I know?

Here lies the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

The technology that opens and threatens

There is, at the same time, a paradox in Cousteau.

Technology made the sea accessible.

Diving equipment gave human beings greater freedom underwater. The camera made the sea visible. The ship made distant regions accessible. Modern science could investigate a world that human beings had previously observed mostly from the surface.

But the same technological civilisation also acquired ever greater power to destroy what it discovered.

This is one of the great practical-philosophical problems of our time.

We often ask what we can do.

Far less often do we ask what we ought to do.

We can fish at greater depths. We can extract resources from the seabed. We can transport enormous quantities of goods across the oceans. We can alter ecosystems that human beings only a few generations ago scarcely knew existed.

Our capacity grows.

And with it, our responsibility.

Cousteau stood in the middle of this paradox. Technology made exploration possible. But exploration also made the destruction visible.

The practical-philosophical question arises precisely here:

When we become capable of more, do we also owe it to the world to think more carefully about what we do?

Wonder before knowledge

When I sat in front of the television as a child, I naturally did not think in these terms.

I did not think about environmental ethics.

I did not think about the ambivalence of technology.

I did not think about practical philosophy.

I looked.

That was enough.

Perhaps Cousteau's greatest gift to my generation was precisely wonder. He showed us a world that had existed all along, but to which we had never had access.

Aristotle connected the beginning of philosophy with wonder. Before the world becomes a problem to be solved, it is something at which we marvel.

It is easy to lose this when knowledge becomes professionalised.

We collect data. We publish results. We build theories. We discuss method.

But before all of this lies a simpler question:

What is this?

Cousteau managed to preserve something of the child in the researcher.

He could show a fish as though no one had ever seen a fish before.

He could descend into the sea as though the world had not yet been fully discovered.

Philosophy needs that attitude too.

What lies beneath the surface

I never became an oceanographer.

Life took another direction.

But I am not sure the early fascination disappeared. Perhaps it merely changed its object.

Cousteau explored what lay beneath the surface of the sea. Later, I came to work with questions in which the surface did not always tell the whole story either.

Human beings, experiences, and actions must also be examined more closely. The first thing we see is not necessarily the most important. Nor is our first understanding necessarily our final one.

One must come close enough.

One must remain long enough.

One must be willing to discover that reality is not as one had imagined it.

In that sense, there are different seas.

And there are different diving bells.

Seeing changes the observer

We often imagine that the researcher stands outside what is being studied.

He observes.

He records.

He describes.

But someone who truly sees does not necessarily return unchanged.

Experience does something to the observer.

Something similar seems to have happened to Cousteau. The sea gradually went from being a world to be explored to also becoming a world that had to be defended.

Discovery led to responsibility.

Practical philosophy moves in much the same way.

From the world to the human being.

And back again.

What do I see?

How do I understand it?

What does this understanding do to me?

And now that I have seen—how ought I to live?

The boy in first grade could not formulate these questions.

He only knew that he wanted to become an oceanographer.

The other boys wanted to become policemen or firefighters.

The teacher looked at him with some puzzlement.

Somewhere far away, Calypso continued to sail, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau opened the sea to a boy who had already begun to sense that the world was larger than what could be seen from the surface.

I never became an oceanographer.

Nor did I become a fisherman.

I became a researcher.

But perhaps I never entirely left the diving bell.

In my own way, I am still sitting down there.

Looking.

Exploring.

And asking what what I find demands of me.