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In his book H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich discusses the history of the imagination of water as stuff. Water has not always been H2O, as we might assume being used to our scientific thinking. That it came to be H2O, after once having been mythical water, has a long history.
An essential element of this history is, according to Illich, the invention of the circulation of blood by William Harvey (1628). For it was blood which for the first time gave rise to the idea that a stuff circulates within itself, an idea which in the long run became essential also for city planning. As Illich shows, the idea that we now take for granted, that water, just as it is piped into the city, must leave the city by its sewers is very modern. I quote a longer passage from Illich's text:
The modern idea of a 'stuff that follows its destined path, streaming forever back to its source, was still foreign to Renaissance thought. The concept of 'circulation' and not only its embodiment in the blood represents a profound break with the past. The newness of the idea of circulation is perhaps as crucial for the transformation of the imagination as was Kepler's decision to replace the translucent spheres carrying a luminous planet (in which Copernicus still believed) with the new elliptical orbits traveled by rocky globes. Circulation is as new and as fundamental an idea as gravitation, preservation of energy, evolution, or sexuality. But neither the radical newness of the idea of circulating 'stuff nor its impact on the constitution of modern space has been studied with the same attention that was given to Kepler's laws or to the ideas of Newton, Helmholtz, Darwin, or Freud.
Bodies had always been able to circle around a center. The abstract concept of circular motion had lent itself to influential metaphors. The presence of the center 'altogether at once' at each point of its circle's periphery had been a symbol for God, soul, and eternity. Time too was thought by many schools to pass in circles. The phoenix was the symbol of renewal by fire; Plato described cyclical renewal as a periodic flood. Souls were able to be born and reborn again....