The oceans are the only direct experience of endless frontiers most humans can access. When you view terrestrial realities from oceanic loci, terrestrial wildernesses too begin to feel like domesticated environments, bounded and contained.
The oceans create a figure-and-ground structure in the human psyche, playing the role of ground in ways we rarely recognize. In conflict, for example, as Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, oceans often determine the structure of the conflict even when naval action is limited or absent.
Imagine a world map with the landmasses punched out. You’d still be left with a single connected surface with holes. Punch out the oceans though, and you’re left with a scattering of disconnected shapes. Mathematically, a figure is often convex (or nearly so — constructing a convex hull doesn’t add much area), bounded, simply connected, and part of a foreground plurality. A ground, by contrast, is usually a singular, non-convex, unbounded, and non-simply connected shape. Though we speak of oceans in the plural, there is but one.
Grounds also induce infinite-horizon temporalities for the psyche. You can keep circling the earth on the oceans along a roughly “straight” great-circle line. On land, you can at best trace loops that never quite feel uncontained.
To view your life from aboard a ship, out of sight of land, is to experience something akin to the overview effect astronauts describe. The ocean is our budget version of outer space.
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One way to understand the spatio-temporal structure of oceans is as a canvas for the infinite game, in James Carse’s sense. There is only one infinite game. It features an endlessly retreating horizon and an imperative to continue play. There are no borders, only holes where the finite games of terrestriality abut the infinite game.
You cannot understand the infinite game of human civilization on the planet — what we might approximate as the cosmopolitan impulse — without centering the oceans. The story of the infinite game is the oceanic story of our species-nature.
To this basic understanding of oceans, we must add the material fact of salinity.
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