Human life is bounded but its destination is not obvious. It is invented as the journey goes on. ‘What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’ These questions which, for Kant, guide human existence have often found a literary expression in the seafaring journey, ever since Odysseus set out from Ithaca. Human existence ought to have direction. Yet the beginning of genuine thought, says Socrates, is puzzlement. Dante gets lost midway through the journey of life. Or, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘I do not know my way around.’ What is the importance of being lost in founding the self? What is the role of the horizon in, paradoxically, defining man?
These are the questions we will tackle as we travel with Homer, Defoe, Keats, Coleridge, Melville, Poe, Conrad, and Kubrick.
