The term “shipwreck” comes from the Latin “naufragium,” itself derived from the combination of the words “navis,” ship (from its Greek “naus”), and “frangere,” “to break.” This etymology indicates that shipwreck is not so much the sinking of the ship, but its immediate (and prior) cause: the impact against an external element that breaks the vessel's structure. Therefore, in Latin, shipwreck always carries the sense of a certain external fate and is attributable to elements partly external to the subjective element (the crew). Furthermore, it involves a degree of mechanical violence linked to the impact, and thus does not imply a melancholic and slow sinking into the waters. Interestingly, “to be shipwrecked” in Latin is “naufragium facere,” which implies, instead, a responsibility, or at least an active attitude, on the part of the helmsman or the crew, in the impact against the ship. Thus, in general, the etymology from Latin suggests that we must likely trace an evolution from an original, violent, and sudden conception of shipwreck as a blow, to the more contemporary one, which emphasizes the slow movement of the vessel sinking in the water. Indeed, the current definition of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) alludes to this more passive paradigm, defining shipwreck as follows: “ Loss or ruin of a vessel at sea or on a navigable river or lake.”

By virtue of this classical understanding as an external and violent action, in Greece a fundamentally negative view of shipwreck prevails, as punishment or a test.
Indeed, if we begin with the punitive paradigm, it is primarily a moral punishment directed at the one who fails, and specifically at hubris. In this sense, the Odisea It constitutes an absolute model of punitive shipwreck that is transmitted to other medieval and modern representations of Odysseus's shipwreck. Probably one of the most interesting and influential reworkings in this sense of the Homeric shipwreck is found in Book XXVI of the Infierno from the Divine Comedy of Dante. This passage narrates how Odysseus's ship, as punishment for the audacity of having sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is sunk off the shores of Purgatory by a god whom Odysseus himself—condemned in Hell—arrogantly calls “that other one (altrui)” (Alighieri, 1915, Inferno XXVI, v. 141). In one of the most complex passages of this Canto, Dante describes Odysseus's voyage as a “mad flight,” in the well-known expression “dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo (we made wings of the oars for the mad flight)” (Alighieri, 1915, Inferno XXVI, v. 145), to draw a parallel with the ascent and subsequent fall of Icarus.

Already in the 20th century, in Primo Levi's novel "If This Is a Man", one of the chapters, entitled "Il canto di Ulisse" (Levi, 1989, 98-103), draws a parallel between the shipwreck recounted by Dante and the experience of the concentration camps, bitterly interpreted as a divine punishment (another "come altrui piacque") to the Jewish people in which all hope is lost.

It is interesting to note that, according to Thales, as cited by Seneca, and Hesiod (in Works and Days , regarding Perses), the god of earthquakes is Poseidon: not even on dry land is it possible to escape his wrath, which pursued Odysseus regardless of his stratagems. An earthquake is therefore shipwreck on dry land. This concept is probably explained by an analogy between the tossing and turning of a ship in a storm and the horizontal shaking experienced during an earthquake.

In Virgil's original reworking of Odysseus's shipwrecks in the Aeneid , a perhaps more positive meaning is introduced, one that was entirely absent from the Greek paradigm and more closely related to the concept of trial. Aeneas is also shipwrecked before his arrival in Carthage and his encounter with Dido. This is a punishment from the gods, but above all, it represents the shipwreck that foreshadows the construction of the great Empire. It is therefore a prodrome, an initiatory trial that must be passed to build a new era. In this same vein, Virgil prophesies in Eclogue IV that "the helmsman will depart from the sea" (Virgil, 1969, 11, v. 38), that is, there will be no sailing (and therefore no shipwrecks) in the mythical era of future happiness (which is, moreover, the era of the Empire inaugurated by the birth of the mysterious "puer," the child sometimes identified with Augustus, sometimes with Christ, and even in other ways). In the same sense, the Book of Revelation of John also presents the new earth and the new heaven with the expression "there is no more sea" ( Revelation 21:1).

The shipwreck of Ulysses or Aeneas has been frequently depicted in Baroque art—examples include works by Dosso Dossi and Agostino Tassi, but also, in the realm of music, Monteverdi's opera "Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria," which opens precisely with the shipwreck of the Phaeacian ship on which Ulysses is traveling. In general, the artistic exaltation of shipwreck (especially in Romanticism) has been studied by Esperanza Guillén in her book * Naufragios: imágenes románticas de la deseos* (Guillén, 2004). To cite just a few paintings particularly influential in the iconography of this concept, one should mention Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa" and Turner's "The Shipwreck." Interestingly, both canvases focus not on the scene of the sinking ship, but on the crew's attempt at rescue using more or less improvised lifeboats. The same compositional scheme (the shipwrecked in the foreground and the shipwrecked ship in a secondary place) is found in Vernet's "The Shipwreck".

Another representation of shipwreck deserves special mention: that which occurs among icebergs, as in the works of Friedrich, Vernet, and Church. Friedrich's painting "The Frozen Sea" is particularly noteworthy, in which the sunken ship appears barely visible among static and monumental blocks of ice. This is one of the few instances where neither the human element of the survivors nor the compositional element of marine dynamism is present. In this image, the failure seems irreversible; there is no hope for the ship's crew. The static nature of polar shipwrecks in Romanticism contrasts sharply with one of the most iconic images of a ship sinking in modern times: the Titanic tragedy. Journalistic, literary, and cinematic accounts of this tragedy emphasize its slowness and gradual progression, as well as the human element (lack of foresight and reaction) in the disaster . In this sense, the ecological philosopher Jorge Riechmann has aptly compared the current inexorable climate crisis to the sinking of the famous transatlantic liner: “to try to maneuver with some skill the Titanic that is inexorably going to sink – but not with the expectation of avoiding the shipwreck, but only of creating better conditions for the rescue of the passengers. And to start now to build more lifeboats, to start organizing forms of solidarity cooperation that can reduce the costs of the shipwreck” (Riechmann, 2015, 45-46).

In modern times, the Greek concepts of punishment or trial persist, but within a more clearly anthropocentric framework, detached from divine intervention. Emblematic in this sense are Shakespeare's dramas, in which shipwreck represents the unexpected catastrophe (implying a lack of foresight or arrogance on the part of the crew) that can generate the most negative consequences: shipwreck as a cause of fortuitous separation (“Twelfth Night”) or as a cause of economic (“The Merchant of Venice”) or political ruin (“The Tempest”). In particular, this last play contains one of the most beautiful odes to shipwreck, the one Ariel utters in his first appearance before the frightened sailors: “Thy father lies in the depths, and his bones are coral. Now pearls are his eyes, nothing in him shall be undone, for the sea changes all into a wondrous good” (Shakespeare, 1998, II, 2050).

The negative paradigm of shipwreck as punishment or trial is countered by the positive view, also present, albeit more marginally, in Greek thought. This perspective has a long history in modernity thanks to Stoicism. This topos likely begins with Zeno of Citium and Aristippus and is later transmitted by Diogenes Laertius and Vitruvius. According to this paradigm, shipwreck is not a misfortune if one preserves one's self (or one's integrity, or one's wisdom). From this safeguarding of the self amidst the shipwreck arises an interesting metaphor and iconology of the life raft (and of oneself as a life raft) that finds its culmination in Montaigne's Essays (“The man of understanding has lost nothing if he has himself” – (Montaigne, 2007, I, 38).

Alongside the metaphor of the life raft, the antithesis of shipwreck has been expressed since Antiquity with the image of the safe harbor, which dispels the uncertainty of “spes et fortuna” (“hope and fortune”), according to the famous but anonymous Latin poem: “Inveni portum. Spes et fortuna valete! Sat me lusistis. Ludite nunc alios” (I have reached port. Hope and fortune, farewell! You have deceived me enough. Now, deceive others). Multiple versions of this poem exist in modern times, with a very complex history of reception: either to embrace it (as in Casanova and Lesage—in their story of Gil Blas de Santillana) or to question it (as in the case of Voltaire and his pronouncement that “there is no safe harbor”).
 
Besides serving as a metaphor for punishment, trial, or even opportunity, in the wake of the (Neo)Platonic tradition, shipwreck becomes a metaphor for danger, both moral and political. For example, in the Enneads From Plotinus we find the image of ships battered by a storm, whose pilots are preoccupied with the vessels and, for that reason, neglect themselves, to the point of forgetting that they risk perishing themselves in the shipwreck. This metaphor is widely revived in modernity, as it introduces the interesting dichotomy between individual and collective shipwreck. The use of this metaphorical device reaches its zenith, once again, in Montaigne, in the passage from his Essays on the story of Atticus, in which he speaks of a “universal shipwreck of the world” (Montaigne, 2007, III, 1). 

The notion of a cosmic or metaphysical shipwreck (but without the moral nuance found in Plotinus) was already present in Lucretius's * De rerum natura *, in two passages: first, when the individuation of figures is likened to salvaging wrecks after a shipwreck (Lucretius, 1962, II, 550 ff.). Second, where, for the Epicurean poet, the birth (properly speaking: the delivery) of individuals is likened to a shipwreck (Lucretius, 1962, V, 222 ff.). In this same vein, in modern times, but clearly indebted to this classical tradition, Pascal makes "being embarked" the metaphor for human existence. This notion, incidentally, is found in the same *Pensé* in which the well-known image of the wager is developed (Pascal, 1963, 550-551). The image of life as a “ship” is revisited by Nietzsche in The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 2019, III, par. 124). In this sense, it is interesting to note that, both within a theistic and a deliberately atheistic framework, the fragility of human life—and therefore its predisposition to failure—is expressed through the image of the sea voyage.

A specific type of collective shipwreck is that related to the metaphor of the political ship, already present in Plato and Aristotle but first systematically treated by Quintilian (with his * navem pro republica* , in 1799, I, 14). This image has a long tradition, which has been studied by Eckart Schäfer in his essay *Das Staatschiff * (Schäfer, 1982). The metaphor of the political ship also finds one of its most interesting aspects in Cicero's * Republic* , with its image of the ruler as a helmsman who plays two roles (that of captain of the ship, but also of passenger), alluding to the fact that rulers are also citizens, and therefore are also directly affected by their eventual failure in managing the state.

Furthermore, the political image of shipwreck cannot be separated (from the very chronicles of the Argonauts' expeditions) from the expression of the success or failure of conquering or imperialist aims. These narratives, obviously, proliferated from the Modern era onward: on the side of success, William Defoe's Robinson Crusoe must be mentioned as an example of colonialism victorious under any circumstances. On the side of shipwrecks understood as irreversible failures, some particularly decisive examples for the formation of what we might call "national consciousness" are Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle Naufragios (1555), or the numerous accounts of the sinking of the Vasa in Stockholm harbor in 1628.

In this same sense, whether for a conqueror or a warrior, the sinking or defeat of a fleet symbolizes a political crisis (and therefore transcends a mere military defeat): examples include the Spanish Armada for Spain, the disaster at Caporetto for Italy, Pearl Harbor for the United States, and the Falklands War for Argentina. The sinking of the Medusa, which at the time received a primarily psychological, journalistic, and morbid treatment, was also used in France for political purposes, given that it occurred in 1816, foreshadowing a swift end to the Bourbon Restoration by Napoleonic nostalgics.

It is important to note that in the Enlightenment, shipwreck broadened these horizons, often becoming interstellar or planetary, as in Fontenelle or Voltaire: in a new version of the punishment for hubris, already present in ancient Greece, the ambition to conquer new planets now leads men to be shipwrecked in space. Specifically, in Voltaire's Micromegas , a constant analogy is drawn between maritime shipwreck (specifically, in the Baltic Sea) and the dangers of space travel.

It is important to note that there is a powerful current that insists on a positive—even openly satisfying—view of shipwreck. This tradition begins with Lucretius, in the prologue to Book II of * De rerum natura *, who recounts the pleasure one feels watching another shipwreck from dry land. This metaphor possesses a strong philosophical significance: the solidity of the self, of one's own solid ground, is strengthened by the distress and shipwreck of others. This image is revived in modern times by Voltaire (as a symbol of human sensitivity and curiosity) and by Kant, with his famous explanation of the sublime feeling based on the metaphor of a shipwreck observed from the safety of dry land. This Kantian example serves to explain how the sublime allows us to move from the aesthetic/sensible plane towards the awareness of our highest destiny: that of knowing ourselves as moral beings capable of free actions, and therefore superior even to the most powerful and majestic works of a mechanically determined nature (Cf. Kant, 2012).

This image from Kant's Critique of Judgment was particularly relevant due to its aforementioned artistic repercussions in Romanticism. One need only consider the name of the main German Romantic movement, clearly indebted to Kant's work: "Sturm und Drang." In this name, the conjunction of the storm and dramatic intensity obviously alludes to a shipwreck. From a poetic perspective, Romanticism also extols the sweetness of shipwreck: either for the possibilities of connecting with the infinite (see Hegel's poem "Eleusis," dedicated to Hölderlin, or Leopardi's "The Infinite," with its well-known ending "il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare (it is sweet for me to be shipwrecked in this sea)" (Leopardi, 2001, 121, v. 15)), or for the wealth of experiences it allows one to accumulate (Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat" is an example of this). This attitude has been termed by Rafael Argullol in the title of his book on these themes: The Attraction of the Abyss (Argullol, 1983).

The aestheticization of shipwreck and the consequent failure led, from the Middle Ages to modernity, to the creation of fully controlled, fake naval battles to reproduce the same feelings described by Kant: some well-known examples are the simulations carried out in the Alcázar of Seville or in the Piazza Navona in Rome.  

Shipwreck is viewed positively in modernity not only because it reassures the viewer, but also because it is indicative of the indispensable motivation that must accompany every human endeavor. An example of this is Voltaire's Zadig , for whom passions are like the wind: dangerous, but without them, one cannot advance. This is all in a completely opposite vein to the Greek paradigm of shipwreck as punishment for hubris , and much closer to Dante's Ulysses's speech to his crew in the aforementioned canto of the Inferno : “considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza” (“consider your origins: you were not made to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge”) (Alighieri, 1915, Inf. XXVI, vv. 119-120).

Special mention should be made of another well-known topos, due to its great influence on the philosophical understanding of failure in modernity and because it constitutes a kind of “synthesis” between the two conceptions (positive and negative) of shipwreck that we have dealt with so far: it is the dictum “Bene navigavi, naufragium feci”, complex and interesting because of the ambiguity of the expression, which can be interpreted in two antithetical ways: “if I was shipwrecked, then I sailed well” or “although I sailed well, I was shipwrecked”.
 
The phrase, according to Diogenes Laertius (1985, XXX, VII, 4), was first used by Zeno of Citium: translated into Latin by Erasmus of Rotterdam (for whom the metaphor of shipwreck is fundamental in his Siculus mare) and popularized by Schopenhauer, who places it at the beginning of Parerga y Paralipomenain the chapter entitled “On the Apparently Unintentional Character of the Individual’s Destiny.” It was taken up by Nietzsche (the “philosopher at sea,” in contrast to Kant) in various places: in the posthumous fragment 3 [19] of March 1875; in paragraph 4 of “The Wagner Case”; in the posthumous fragment 16 [44] of Spring-Summer 1888; and finally in the famous letter to Brandes of May 23, 1888. This motto Latin has recently been taken up again by Franco Volpi to synthesize the trajectory of the second Heidegger (Volpi, 2010), and by Remo Bodei as a characterization of modern existence (from the already cited maritime metaphor of Pascal: “you are embarked”). 
 
Regarding the reversibility of failure, a brief mention must be made of the figure of the shipwreck, as a possibility for recovering what has sunk, what has failed, through epic, technically complex, and always risky adventures. Likewise, it is also necessary to allude to the extremely surprising (or even miraculous) nature of the stylistic-literary device of the return of a ship believed to have sunk (see, in this respect, Dumas's *The Count of Monte Cristo*).

Finally, from a bibliographical perspective, it is essential to emphasize the relevance—for any metaphor of shipwreck—of Hans Blumenberg's work, Shipwreck with Spectator (Blumenberg, 1995). This article owes a debt (not a guilty one) to him; let this mention serve as a tribute on the centenary of the great German philosopher's birth.

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Index of illustrations:

Fig. 1: Jean Louis Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de La Méduse , 1818/1819. Musee du Louvre

Fig. 2: Illustration from The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. With one hundred and twenty original illustrations by Walter Paget . London: Cassell & Co, 189