Drop #6: “Remember, when commenting on waters, to attach first the experience and then the reason” — Leonardo da Vinci’s Aquawareness
## Leonardo’s Epistemological Revolution
The famous phrase by Leonardo da Vinci “Remember, when commenting on waters, to attach first the experience and then the reason” represents one of the clearest formulations of the epistemological revolution that characterized the transition from the medieval world to modernity. This methodological statement, contained in his studies on water, is not just a scientific principle, but a true philosophy of knowledge that anticipates by centuries the foundations of the modern empirical method and finds surprising convergences with the contemporary approach of aquawareness developed by Giancarlo De Leo.
The Leonardian phrase represents a radical inversion of the dominant cognitive order in the Middle Ages, where theoretical reason and the authority of ancient texts always preceded empirical observation. Leonardo makes this revolution explicit when he states: “although nature begins with reason and ends in experience, we must follow the opposite, that is, beginning as I said above with experience and with that investigate the reason.”
This inversion is not merely methodological, but ontological: while the scholastic tradition started from universal principles to deduce particular reality, Leonardo proposes starting from particular reality (direct experience of water) to ascend to universal principles. As he himself writes: “My intention is to attach first the experience and then with reason demonstrate why such experience is forced to operate in such a way.”
This methodology represents a radical break from medieval Aristotelianism, which dominated European universities through Thomistic scholasticism. Where the Greek philosopher started from essential and deductive definitions, Leonardo insists on the priority of concrete observation. The particular, the accidental, the mutable — everything that Aristotelian philosophy considered inferior — becomes for Leonardo the gateway to understanding nature.
To fully understand the revolutionary scope of the Leonardian approach, it is necessary to place it in the broader context of the development of the modern empirical method. Leonardo presents himself as a transitional figure who anticipated, by almost a century, the great founders of the modern scientific method.
## The Philosophical-Methodological Significance: A Revolution in the Relationship between Experience and Reason
### The Inversion of the Medieval Paradigm
The Leonardian phrase represents a radical inversion of the cognitive order dominant in the Middle Ages, where theoretical reason and the authority of ancient texts always preceded observation. Leonardo explicitly states this revolution when he affirms: “although nature begins with reason and ends in experience, we must follow the opposite, that is, beginning as above I said from experience and with that investigate the reason.”
This inversion is not merely methodological, but ontological: while the scholastic tradition started from universal principles to deduce particular reality, Leonardo proposes starting from particular reality (experience) to ascend to universal principles. As he himself writes: “My intention is to attach first the experience and then with reason demonstrate why such experience is forced to operate in such a way.”
This methodology represents a radical detachment from medieval Aristotelianism, which dominated European universities through Thomistic scholasticism. Where the Greek philosopher started from essential deductive definitions, Leonardo insists on the priority of concrete observation. The particular, the accidental, the mutable — everything that Aristotelian philosophy considered inferior — becomes for Leonardo the gateway to understanding nature.
### Leonardo between Middle Ages and Modernity: The Context of the Empirical Revolution
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in his Novum Organum (1620), systematically formalizes many principles that Leonardo had already intuited and practiced. Bacon criticizes the “idols of the mind” — prejudices that hinder true knowledge — and proposes the inductive method based on systematic observation of nature free from prejudices. The convergence with Leonardo is notable: both reject the medieval principle of authority, privilege direct empirical observation, and propose a rigorously systematic method of investigating nature.
Similarly, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) develops the experimental-mathematical method with his famous sequence of observation-hypothesis-experiment-quantitative verification. Leonardo had already affirmed: “No human investigation can be called true science if it does not pass through mathematical demonstrations,” showing full awareness of the importance of mathematization, although he never fully formalized the mathematical-experimental method as the Pisan would.
However, Leonardo’s position remains unique and in some ways richer: unlike subsequent empiricists, he integrates art, science, and philosophy in a holistic and transdisciplinary approach that anticipates the contemporary demand to overcome the disciplinary fragmentations of modern science. As a prominent scholar notes, “Leonardo never separates art from science, beauty from truth, observation from representation.” This integration represents a model still current and surprisingly prophetic with respect to the epistemological challenges of the twenty-first century.
## The Primacy of Experience in Leonardian Philosophy
Leonardo develops a true epistemology of experience that anticipates by centuries the Galilean method. His conviction that “wisdom is the daughter of experience” does not represent naive and uncritical empiricism, but a structured methodology that recognizes in direct experience the primary source of authentic knowledge.
This approach emerges clearly in his studies on water, where Leonardo observes with programmatic determination: “First I will do some experience before I proceed.” Experience precedes not only chronologically but logically the rationalization, constituting the epistemological foundation of every valid knowledge. Leonardo does not limit himself to passively looking at nature, but interrogates it actively through systematic experiments, precise measurements, and methodical comparisons that anticipate the protocols of modern science.
### The Critique of Authority and the Birth of the Empirical Method
The Leonardian methodology involves a radical critique of the principle of authority that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture. Leonardo polemicizes harshly against those who “dispute alleging authority, do not use ingenuity but rather memory.” This critique invests not only the authority of the ancients — Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny — but any form of knowledge that does not pass through the rigorous sieve of direct experience.
With emblematic force, Leonardo affirms: “Those who fall in love with practice without science are like the sailor who enters a ship without rudder or compass, who never has certainty where he is going.” This maritime metaphor reflects his profoundly balanced vision: neither pure abstract and unfounded theory, nor pure blind practice without principles. Rather, a dynamic synthesis in which experience provides the cognitive material and reason the rudder that orients it toward understanding.
In the specific context of studies on water, this methodology assumes particular relevance. The aquatic element, due to its dynamic, mutable, and processual nature, requires an observational approach that knows how to grasp processes in becoming rather than crystallize static realities according to fixed categories. Leonardo intuits that water constitutes a privileged epistemological paradigm for the new empirical method precisely because it challenges static thinking and requires an adaptive and flexible cognitive mode.
## The Context of Leonardian Studies on Water: Experience as Microscopy of Nature
### Water as “Vehicle of Nature”
Leonardo conceives water not simply as one of the four Aristotelian elements, but as the “vehicle of nature” — a term that in Renaissance Italian designates the vehicle, the means of transport, the universal mediating principle. Water, for Leonardo, is not an inert element among others, but the dynamic principle that connects and unifies all natural phenomena.
In his studies contained in the Codex Leicester, Leonardo develops a profound cosmological analogy: water is “the blood of the earth” that circulates through hidden underground veins, exactly as blood circulates in the human body through veins and arteries. This is not a purely poetic similarity, but reflects a systemic and holistic vision in which micro and macrocosm mirror each other according to common principles of circulation, transformation, and dynamic equilibrium.
This intuition transforms the empirical observation of the aquatic element into a privileged way for understanding fundamental natural laws. Direct experience of water becomes not only a source of hydraulic and engineering knowledge, but an interpretive key to the entire cosmic organization, a window through which to observe the universal processes that govern the becoming of nature.
### The Methodology of Direct Observation
The Leonardian approach to studies on water is characterized by systematic and patient observation that integrates acute sensory perception with rigorous rational analysis. As emerges from his multiple codes and diaries, Leonardo “spent hours studying the details of flora and fauna, the movement of water, the structure of human and animal bodies.” This meticulous, almost obsessive observation allows him to make anticipatory scientific discoveries and represent reality with extraordinary, almost visionary precision.
The crucial methodological innovation consists in transforming daily and casual observation into structured and intentional scientific investigation. Leonardo does not limit himself to passively looking at water, but interrogates it actively through systematic experiments, quantitative measurements, and methodical comparisons that anticipate by centuries the protocols of modern science. His studies document diverse and complex phenomena: wave motion in its multiple manifestations, river and marine currents, the formation of vortices and turbulences, capillarity, hydrostatic pressure, river erosion, and sediment transport.
## Leonardian Experiments: Vortices, Turbulence, and Energy Cascade
Leonardo observed with extraordinary precision fluid dynamic phenomena that modern science would fully understand and formalize only three or four centuries later. His famous and masterful drawings of water vortices, preserved in the Codex Leicester and other manuscripts, show an intuitive and phenomenologically profound understanding of what scientists today call turbulence and energy cascade.
The energy cascade theory, mathematically formulated by Lewis Fry Richardson in the 1920s and perfected by Andrey Kolmogorov in 1941, describes how energy in turbulent fluids transfers from large scales (macroscopic visible vortices) to progressively smaller scales until viscous dissipation at Kolmogorov microscales where motion turns into heat. The process is described by Richardson’s famous rhyme: “Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity, and little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity” — “Big vortices have small vortices that feed on their velocity, and small vortices have even smaller vortices, and so on to viscosity.”
Leonardo observed and empirically represented this very process with extraordinary visual clarity: in his masterful drawings, large vortices progressively fragment into ever smaller vortex structures, in a hierarchical and self-similar cascade that visually anticipates the modern mathematical theory of Kolmogorov, developed four and a half centuries later. His sketches show how an obstacle in the flow generates primary vortices that, in turn, generate secondary and tertiary vortices in a progression that we now know extends through multiple spatial orders of magnitude.
The Leonardian drawings also show an intuitive understanding of the fundamental distinction between laminar regime (ordered, stratified, predictable flow) and turbulent regime (chaotic but organized flow according to hidden principles): Leonardo masterfully represents the transition from geometric regularity to the structured chaos of vortices that characterizes the transition to turbulence. This distinction would not be experimentally formalized until Osborne Reynolds’ classic experiments in 1883, three centuries after Leonardo, when Reynolds introduced the famous “Reynolds number” to mathematically predict the transition between the two fluid dynamic regimes.
Leonardo writes poetically but scientifically: “The water you touch in rivers is the last of that which went and the first of that which comes. So the present time.” In this phrase, he captures the fundamentally dynamic, processual, and temporal nature of the aquatic element — a characteristic that makes it particularly elusive to the static and categorical approach of Aristotelian physics, but ideal for developing a new scientific method based on the observation of becoming and continuous transformation.
## The Phenomenology of Water: From Leonardo to Embodied Cognition
The Leonardian intuition of direct experience as the primary source of knowledge finds deep resonances in the phenomenology of the body developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in his masterpiece Phenomenology of Perception (1945). This text represents a radical break with the Cartesian tradition that had dominated Western philosophy for three centuries.
For Merleau-Ponty, “the body understands” (le corps comprend) — the body is not a simple material envelope of an immaterial mind, but the primary place of knowledge and being-in-the-world. Perception is not passive reception of external stimuli by a disembodied subject detached from the world, but an embodied activity in which the living body “tunes” with the world through motility, senses, and habit.
As Merleau-Ponty masterfully writes: “The body forms part of the subject-world system, in which a sort of tacit dialogue takes place between the demands of the world and the ability to respond to them without the mediation of conscious reflection.” This embodied perception dissolves the traditional Cartesian and Kantian dichotomy between mind (subject) and body (object), between knower and known, reconciling in the concreteness of bodily experience that fracture that had characterized Western thought from the 17th century onward.
The body is not an instrument that a disembodied mind uses to know the world, like a hand uses a tool. Rather, the body is the way itself in which we are-in-the-world (être-au-monde), the primordial means through which we access being. Knowledge emerges from living bodily interaction with the environment, not from an abstract mind that observes from the outside with scientific detachment.
This phenomenological perspective resonates deeply with the Leonardian approach: the observation of water in Leonardo is never detached intellectual contemplation or cold scientific analysis, but an intense bodily immersion in the phenomenon. The researcher’s body — with its acute senses (sight, hearing, touch), its motility and ability to rhythmically tune with phenomena, its sensitive intuition — is a cognitive tool no less important than the rational mind that subsequently theoretically elaborates and systematizes what has been experienced.
### Merleau-Ponty and Incarnated Perception
Merleau-Ponty introduces the crucial concept of body schema (schéma corporel) — not a static and abstract representation of the body, but a dynamic and adaptive organization of motor and perceptual capabilities that continuously modifies and perfects itself in relation to the environment. Through habit and repeated practice, the body “learns” ways of interacting with the world that precede and found rational conceptual knowledge.
Merleau-Ponty’s famous example is the expert pianist: when playing a complex composition, he does not consciously think about the position of each finger on the keyboard, does not mathematically calculate the musical intervals. His hands “know” the music in a way that completely transcends and precedes conscious mental representation. This is embodied, procedural, tacit knowledge — the body knows what the mind cannot express in words.
### The Body as Subject of Knowledge: The Body Schema
Similarly, an expert swimmer immersed in water develops an “aquatic body schema” — an embodied, pre-reflective understanding of hydrodynamic dynamics, fluid resistance, buoyancy, respiratory rhythm synchronized with movement — that cannot be completely translated into verbal rules or abstract concepts. This tacit knowledge resides in the body as motor memory and procedural intelligence.
This dimension of tacit knowledge is central in aquawareness: one cannot “learn” aquatic awareness just by reading theoretical descriptions or listening to verbal explanations, but must necessarily immerse oneself in water and practice, allowing the body to develop its specific intelligence and gradually adapt to the element.
### Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
The feminist posthuman theorist Astrida Neimanis, in her innovative and provocative Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), takes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of water in a radical and transformative direction, affirming that “we are all bodies of water” (we are all bodies of water).
Neimanis develops an “aquatic phenomenology” that dissolves traditional boundaries between observer and observed, internal and external, human subject and natural environment. Our biological bodies are composed of about 60-70% water; this water is not static and possessed, but constantly circulates between our interior and the external environment through vital processes: respiration, skin transpiration, digestion, excretion, sweating. We are not solid, fixed, and self-sufficient entities that passively “contain” a certain amount of water, but aquatic processes in continuous material exchange with the world around us.
This ontological perspective radically transforms the philosophical meaning of aquatic immersion: when we enter water, we are not a solid and impermeable subject entering an alien and “other” element. Rather, water returning to water, recognizing its own fundamental “wateriness” and ontological commonality with the element. As Neimanis writes with philosophical poetry: “Thinking ourselves as bodies of water means recognizing that we are porous, permeable, open, in continuous material exchange with a more-than-human world that precedes and transcends us.”
Aquawareness, in this expanded phenomenological perspective, is not simply a technique of awareness *in* water, but an awakening to our fundamental aquatic nature, an embodied recognition of the ontological continuity between our living body and the surrounding element. Water becomes not only a practical medium for contemplative practice, but an ontological mirror that reveals our fluid, processual, interconnected constitution, permeable to the rhythms of nature.
### From Leonardian Observation to Contemporary Aquatic Embodiment
Leonardo certainly deeply intuited the bodily dimension of scientific observation — his extremely detailed anatomical studies show an almost visionary understanding of the physiology of sensory perception — but his primary focus remained on systematic observation and rational understanding of external phenomena. He observed water vortices to understand their hidden laws, drew waves to capture their underlying geometry, studied currents to design hydraulic works and strategic fortifications.
Contemporary aquawareness, informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and posthuman feminist critique, makes a qualitative epistemological leap: it does not observe water predominantly from the outside but experiences it from the inside through complete bodily immersion, transforming the body itself into a privileged tool of phenomenological investigation and embodied knowledge.
As emerges from contemporary ethnographic and phenomenological research on wild swimming (wild swimming in open natural waters), the experience of deep bodily immersion produces forms of knowledge and awareness irreducible to external observation, however attentive, systematic, and scientific. Expert wild swimmers describe how “when bodily movements synchronize with the movement of water, this leads to a unique and deep connection with nature, to a dissolution of boundaries between self and environment.”
The research identifies haptic experiences — from the Greek haptein (to touch) — felt by the body through direct epidermal contact with water (variable temperature, hydrostatic pressure, fluid resistance, texture of movement) — and somatic experiences — felt inside the body as visceral, proprioceptive, and emotional states — that together produce what Anglophones effectively call the “feel for the water” — an embodied understanding of aquatic dynamics that completely transcends and precedes verbal and conceptual knowledge.
## Giancarlo De Leo’s Aquawareness: The Contemporary Legacy of Leonardian Empiricism
Aquawareness developed by Giancarlo De Leo represents a contemporary and transdisciplinary actualization of the Leonardian methodological principle “experience first, reason after.” As highlighted in De Leo’s methodology, aquawareness “emphasizes intuitive and bodily learning through conscious self-guided exploration rather than the imposition of rigid standardized techniques.” This pedagogical approach directly echoes Leonardo’s insistence on the ontological priority of direct experience over abstract theorization and purely bookish knowledge.
Aquawareness transforms the act of conscious swimming into a living experiential laboratory where, faithful to Leonardian teaching, “experiences are attached first” through direct and participant observation of bodily sensations, aquatic dynamics, constant interactions between the immersed body and the liquid environment. Only subsequently, in a stage of reflection and elaboration, these experiences are rationally reworked to develop deeper understandings, increased awareness, and lasting personal transformations.
As De Leo writes, aquawareness is based on an approach that “values the body as the primary tool of knowledge and transformation” and recognizes in conscious aquatic immersion a unique and almost unrepeatable opportunity to develop forms of awareness that organically integrate physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the human person. Water is not simply the neutral environment in which the practice takes place, but an active co-participant in the process of learning, transformation, and awareness.
### The Principle of “Experience First” in Aquawareness
Aquawareness develops what is defined as “sensory engagement” (conscious sensory involvement): an active, intentional, and conscious involvement of all senses in the aquatic experience that constitutes the contemporary equivalent of Leonardian systematic empirical observation. As in the Renaissance master’s approach, aquawareness “promotes an active, not passive, involvement with the environment. Participants consciously experience the fluidity of water, allowing them to deeply reconnect with their own bodies and with nature.”
This methodology concretely realizes the Leonardian principle of experience as the master of authentic knowledge: water becomes a conscious co-therapist and privileged cognitive medium through which to develop an embodied (incorporated, incarnated) understanding of fundamental physical laws (buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, fluid dynamic resistance), complex bodily dynamics (coordinated breathing, conscious movement, dynamic balance), and psychosomatic processes (psychophysical relaxation, increased mental presence, emotional regulation, development of awareness).
The “sensory engagement” in aquawareness includes multiple integrated sensory dimensions:
– Tactile: the multidimensional perception of variable water temperature, hydrostatic pressure on the body, texture of fluid movement on the skin
– Proprioceptive: the refined awareness of the position, orientation, and movement of the body in three-dimensional aquatic space
– Vestibular: the sense of balance, spatial orientation, and stability profoundly modified by the liquid environment and relative microgravity
– Interoceptive: conscious attention to internal states (heartbeat, respiration, muscle tensions, emotional states)
– Auditory: the filtered and muffled sounds of the underwater environment, breathing rhythms
– Visual: the modified and deformed perception of light and shapes through water, refractive effects
This integrated and conscious multisensoriality transforms every aquawareness session into a rich and varied field of living empirical observation, exactly as Leonardo recommended in his teachings: first the complete and conscious sensory experience, then the rational and theoretical elaboration of what has been directly experienced.
Here’s the difference: actually, in Aquawareness, the time interval between experience (the ‘first’) and reason (the ‘then’) shortens until it reaches zero; reason, then, intervenes ‘during’ (in real-time) but the experience remains pure: ‘reason,’ here, is observation devoid of prejudices (‘pure attention’) and it is dual: one observes one’s own body in the water, and, in real-time, the behaviour of the water itself.
This clarification is absolutely consistent with the evolution that Aquawareness gives to Leonardo’s intuition.
Synthesizing:
In Leonardo:
first the experience,
then the reason which explains.
In Aquawareness:
the ‘then’ shortens until it coincides with the ‘during’:
the experience remains pure and primary, but the observation arises in the present moment, while the experience is happening.
What this means:
It is NOT a subsequent rationalization.
It is NOT ‘theory’.
It does NOT imply judgment.
It is ‘pure attention’:
A form of immediate and non-conceptual reason, a vigilant awareness that neither interferes nor interprets.
And it is dual:
* I observe my body in the water
– posture, supports, balance, micro-adjustments, effect of physical forces.
* I observe the water itself
– how it responds, how it organizes itself, how it supports me or resists me.
This ‘dual awareness’, the simultaneous internal and external dual observation, creates what is often called embodied awareness, an ‘intelligence situated in the water, which arises from the direct contact of one’s body with the physical laws in action.'”
### “Sensory Engagement” as a Contemporary Empirical Method
The sophisticated concept of “dual awareness” (dual awareness) elaborated by De Leo represents a theoretically elaborated evolution of the Leonardian dialectical relationship between experience and reason. This refined cognitive ability to maintain simultaneous and integrated awareness of one’s own internal states (bodily sensations, tactile perceptions, emotional states, thought flows) and external aquatic environmental conditions (temperature, currents, depth, medium resistance) realizes the methodological integration hoped for by Leonardo five centuries ago.
### The “Dual Awareness” as Synthesis of Experience and Reason
In dual awareness, the direct incarnated experience (bodily sensations, sensory tactile perceptions, experienced hydrostatic dynamics) is simultaneously and parallelly elaborated by rational reflection (biomechanical understanding of movements, conscious recognition of universal physical principles, identification of optimal motor patterns, conceptual elaboration). As Leonardo prophetically wrote: “First I will do some experience before I proceed,” aquawareness establishes a dynamic circular process in which experience and reason feed each other in real time without ever losing the ontological priority of direct experience as the primary source of authentic knowledge.
The dual awareness described in aquawareness finds precise neuroscientific foundations in contemporary neuroscientific research on interoception (perception of the body’s internal physiological states) and proprioception (conscious perception of bodily position and movement in space).
Interoception is defined by neurosciences as “the collection of somatosensory and visceral senses that provide continuous information to the organism about the internal and physiological state of the body,” including perception of heartbeat, respiratory rate, hunger sensation, thirst, body temperature, visceral pain, and other complex physiological states. The brain integrates all these multimodal signals in specific neural regions — brainstem, thalamus, insula (particularly the anterior insula), somatosensory cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex — creating a complex, multidimensional, and accurate neural representation of the organism’s overall physiological state.
The anterior insular cortex (AIC, anterior insular cortex) is particularly crucial and fundamental: it is here that interoceptive signals from the body reach conscious and reflective awareness, generating what Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls the “feeling of being.” As contemporary research notes, “interoception is fundamental to human consciousness, emotion, decision-making, and the sense of self.”
In the context of conscious aquatic immersion, interoception acquires unique and enhanced characteristics compared to the terrestrial environment. Neuroscientific research shows that immersion in water profoundly modifies and transforms the proprioceptive and vestibular signals that the brain receives from the organism. The vestibular system, fundamental for bodily balance and spatial orientation, receives ambiguous and contradictory sensory inputs during conscious floating, significantly reducing external sensory “noise” and allowing greater attentive concentration on internal states.
A pioneering study on virtual reality in an aquatic environment has demonstrated that consciously floating participants experience vection (illusion of self-induced movement) significantly more intense and conscious than those standing still on land. This phenomenon occurs because “proprioceptive inputs are systematically ambiguous during conscious floating,” while in an upright position on land the proprioceptive system constantly and automatically provides information on postural stability. Water therefore creates physiological conditions similar to microgravity, increasing neurological dependence on the visual system and interoceptive awareness.
### Neuroscience of Dual Awareness: Interoception and Bodily Awareness
Aquawareness, with its deliberate emphasis on conscious floating meditation and the cultivation of simultaneous awareness of internal and external states, seems to optimize precisely these underlying neurophysiological dynamics. As research on floating in controlled sensory deprivation tanks notes, “by freeing the brain and skeletal system from the force of gravity, conscious floating frees vast amounts of cognitive and attentive energies and broad brain areas to deal with mental, spiritual issues and increased awareness of internal states.”
## Practical Applications: From Leonardian Observation to Aquatic Awareness
Both methodological approaches — the Renaissance Leonardian one and contemporary aquawareness — operate a profound epistemological transformation of apparently banal ordinary experience. Leonardo transforms common and daily observation of water into systemic and sophisticated scientific investigation; aquawareness transforms ordinary and mechanical swimming into conscious contemplative practice and intentional bodily research.
This epistemological transformation occurs through what we can define as a radical “attentional paradigm shift”: from mental orientation toward measurable external results (technical control of water for Leonardo, agonistic performance for conventional swimming) to conscious focus on the process itself and the quality of incarnated presence. Leonardo studies vortices not to control them for some instrumental end, but to understand their phenomenological essence and hidden laws; aquawareness emphasizes the conscious quality of experience rather than technical efficiency or agonistic speed.
Both Leonardo and Aquawareness adopt an integrated holistic approach that synthesizes apparently separate and autonomous dimensions of human experience. Leonardo unites rigorous scientific observation, deep philosophical reflection, and refined aesthetic sensitivity in his studies on water — his masterful drawings of vortices are simultaneously precise scientific documents and works of visual art of extraordinary beauty. Contemporary aquawareness combines technical skills in conscious swimming, biomechanical insights (understanding of buoyancy laws, hydrodynamics, efficient movement), integrated psychosomatic awareness (attention to bodily tensions, emotional states, consciousness flows), and contemplative philosophical vision oriented toward increased bodily awareness.
This integration concretely realizes the Leonardian principle according to which authentic and transformative experience cannot be fragmented into isolated disciplinary compartments, but must be lived and understood in its dynamic and processual totality. As Leonardo never rigidly separated the artist from the scientist, the contemplative from the engineer, aquawareness does not artificially separate the swimmer from the meditator, the body from the mind, technique from contemplative awareness.
### The Transformation of Ordinary Experience into Profound Knowledge
### The Integration of Multiple Dimensions of Experience
A fundamental and qualitative epistemological difference distinguishes the Leonardian approach from contemporary aquawareness, despite their profound substantial methodological convergence: Leonardo observes water mainly from the outside, predominantly through direct observation and controlled experiments (although with intense mental immersion and probably also occasional physical), while aquawareness experiences it from the inside through total and conscious bodily immersion.
This is not a superficial distinction of method, but represents a qualitative epistemological leap in the mode of knowledge and awareness. As emerges from contemporary ethnographic and phenomenological research on wild swimming (conscious wild swimming in open natural waters), the experience of deep and conscious bodily immersion produces forms of embodied knowledge and awareness irreducible to external observation, however attentive, systematic, and scientifically rigorous.
Expert wild swimmers consistently describe how “when bodily movements consciously synchronize with the movement of water, this leads to a unique, profound, and transformative connection with nature, to a temporary dissolution of perceptual boundaries between the bodily self and the environment.”
Phenomenological research clearly identifies two distinct experiential modalities: haptic experiences — from ancient Greek haptein (to touch) — felt by the immersed body through direct and immediate epidermal contact with water (variable temperature, hydrostatic pressure, fluid resistance, aquatic movement texture) — and somatic experiences — felt inside the body as visceral, proprioceptive, emotional, and conscious states — that together produce what researchers call very effectively the “feel for the water” — an embodied, incarnated understanding of aquatic dynamics that completely transcends and precedes verbal, conceptual, and rational knowledge.
### From External Observation to Bodily Participation: A Crucial Epistemological Difference
As much for Leonardo as for contemporary aquawareness, water constitutes a privileged epistemological and ontological paradigm. The liquid element, due to its fundamentally fluid, dynamic, and processual nature, requires a cognitive approach that knows how to consciously adapt to processes in continuous becoming rather than attempt to crystallize static realities according to fixed categories. This intrinsic characteristic makes water an optimal medium for developing innovative empirical methodologies and new scientific paradigms.
Leonardo deeply intuits that water, being the “vehicle of nature” — the dynamic principle that mediates and connects all natural phenomena — constitutes a privileged key to access for understanding fundamental and universal natural processes. Contemporary aquawareness develops and extends this Leonardian intuition by transforming the aquatic environment into a living experiential laboratory for the conscious exploration of complex psychosomatic dynamics, sophisticated biomechanical processes, and profound contemplative phenomena.
Both approaches deliberately overcome the rigid disciplinary fragmentations that characterize specialized academic knowledge, using the mediating element of water as a unifying theme. Leonardo organically integrates precise anatomy, rigorous physics, practical engineering, refined aesthetic sensitivity, and deep philosophical reflection through systematic observation of aquatic phenomena. Contemporary aquawareness combines scientific biomechanics, psychology of awareness, neurosciences of embodiment, contemplative philosophy, and aquatic pedagogy in a coherent transdisciplinary synthesis.
This methodological convergence reveals the existence of universal epistemological principles that transcend historical, cultural, and technological specificities: the ontological priority of direct experience as the foundation of authentic knowledge; the holistic integration of cognitive dimensions (sensory, emotional, rational, intuitive, contemplative); the transformation of passive observation into active and participated contemplation; the recognition of the incarnated body as a cognitive tool not inferior or subordinate to the rational mind; the conscious opening to becoming rather than the crystallization of static realities according to fixed categories.
### The Methodological Convergence: Toward a Contemplative Science of Water
#### Water as a Privileged Epistemological Paradigm
#### The Transdisciplinary Approach
Aquawareness is positioned at the significant intersection between the Renaissance methodological heritage of Leonardo and an emerging contemporary scientific paradigm that is gaining increasing academic recognition: contemplative science.
Contemplative science is defined as “an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates rigorous scientific methodologies with meditative contemplative practices to investigate the human mind, consciousness, and holistic human well-being.” This dynamic field, which has seen explosive development in the last two decades thanks also to the constructive dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western neuroscientists and the foundation of the Mind & Life Institute, deliberately seeks to overcome the traditional epistemological dichotomy between first-person subjective perspective (vivid subjective experience) and third-person objective perspective (external scientific observation).
As the Mind & Life Institute, international pioneer of this innovative approach, notes, “contemplative research employs methods based on first-person experience, inviting researchers to use meditative contemplative practices to investigate the mind from within, thus complementing and enriching conventional external and observational approaches.” This represents exactly the epistemological synthesis that aquawareness concretely realizes: living incarnated experience in first person (somatic sensations, emotions, states of consciousness during conscious immersion) informed and integrated with rigorous scientific understanding in third person of the underlying physical dynamics, physiological processes, and neurological mechanisms.
Neuroscientific studies on mindfulness and meditative practices have demonstrated that regular contemplative practices structurally modify the human brain through neuroplasticity — lasting physical changes in neural connections and gray matter density — particularly increasing gray matter density in brain areas associated with conscious interoception (insula), focused attention (prefrontal cortex), and emotional regulation (anterior cingulate cortex). The neuroplasticity induced by sincere meditative practices suggests that aquawareness, as a form of “meditation in movement” situated in a natural aquatic environment that facilitates specific states of awareness, could produce particularly specific and lasting neural adaptations linked to increased aquatic bodily awareness.
Aquawareness therefore represents a truly human science in the sense deeply hoped for both by Leonardo and by contemporary contemplative science: an integrated approach that synthesizes methodical empirical rigor (systematic observation, intersubjective verification, replicability), direct encarnated experience (conscious bodily immersion, first-person attention, personal transformation), without sacrificing or subordinating any of these crucial dimensions to the others.
### Aquawareness and Contemplative Science: Toward a Truly Human Science
## Conclusions: The Legacy of an Epistemological Revolution
Leonardo’s phrase “Remember, when commenting on waters, to attach first the experience and then the reason” constitutes much more than an isolated technical methodological principle: it represents a true and profound epistemological revolution that crosses the centuries maintaining intact its ability to inspire ever innovative approaches to authentic knowledge. The significant convergence with De Leo’s contemporary aquawareness demonstrates the existence of a universal and trans-temporal empirical wisdom that manifests every time the human being authentically and consciously opens to the direct experience of the primordial aquatic element.
The Leonardian legacy in aquawareness does not constitute a simple uncritical repetition of ancient principles, but a creative and sophisticated re-actualization that adapts the fundamental intuition — the absolute priority of direct experience — to contemporary contexts and specific human needs of the twenty-first century. Both approaches demonstrate that true cognitive innovation does not derive from the abandonment of the experiential dimension in favor of abstract theoretical abstraction, but from the human ability to transform ordinary experience into an occasion for extraordinary knowledge and personal transformation.
The profound continuity between the Renaissance Leonardian method and contemporary aquawareness reveals that certain fundamental epistemological truths are trans-temporal and trans-cultural, manifesting authentically whenever the human being approaches with authenticity, honesty, and conscious presence the direct experience of the aquatic element that represents the primordial matrix of life itself. In this profound sense, Leonardo’s phrase continues to resonate as a permanent and perennial invitation to rediscover in living experience the most authentic, fertile, and transformative source of every significant and lasting knowledge.
## BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WEBOGRAPHY
### Primary Sources of Leonardo da Vinci
– Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Leicester (Codex Hammer), facsimile edition, The British Library, London, 1996
– Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, Royal Academy of Lincei, Rome
– Leonardo da Vinci, Anatomy Notebooks, critical edition by K. D. Keele, Academic Press, London, 1983
– Leonardo da Vinci, Books of Sciences, anthology by Luigi Arabasino, Mondadori, Milan, 2006
– Vinciana. Studies and research on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, collection of manuscripts available in digital edition at the Galileo Museum in Florence
### Fundamental Studies on Leonardo
– Pedretti, Carlo, Leonardo. Architect of Water, Electa, Milan, 1982 (fundamental work on Leonardian studies related to water)
– Pedretti, Carlo, The Royal Collection. A Catalogue of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (three volumes – indispensable reference)
– Pedretti, Carlo, Leonardo da Vinci. The Codex Leicester, Giunti, Florence, 1998
– Capra, Fritjof, The Science of Leonardo, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2006 (Italian edition of The Science of Leonardo, Doubleday, New York, 2007)
– Kemp, Martin, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006
– Vecce, Carlo, Leonardo, Salerno Editrice, Rome, 1998
– Laurenza, Domenico, Leonardo. The hydraulic engineer, in Leonardo and the waters, edited by Carlo Pedretti, Giunti, Florence, 2001
– Clayton, Martin & Ron Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: The Anatomy of Man, Fine Art Presentations/Getty Museum Publications, Los Angeles, 2010
– Hibbert, Christopher, Leonardo. A life, Mondadori, Milan, 2005
### Specific Studies on Leonardo and Water
– Taglialagamba, Sara, Water in Leonardo da Vinci’s Culture, academic publications in specialized journals (consult Academia.edu – direct pupil of Carlo Pedretti)
– Taglialagamba, Sara, articles in the proceedings of international Leonardian conferences
– Fehrenbach, Frank, Leonardo and Antiquity. Studies on Natural Philosophy and Natural Aesthetics around 1500, Fink Verlag, Munich, 2015
– Laurenza, Domenico, The Search for Truth. Images and Scientific Method in Leonardo, Giunti Editore, Florence, 1999
– Leonardo and the waters, exhibition catalog edited by Carlo Pedretti, Giunti, Florence, 2001
– The Science of Water in Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks of the Galileo Museum, Florence, 2003
### Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition
– Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, Bompiani, Milan, 2003 (Italian edition of the 1945 classic)
– Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968
– Neimanis, Astrida, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Bloomsbury Academic, London/New York, 2017
– Varela, Francisco, Thompson, Evan & Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1991
– Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987
– Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, New York, 1999
– Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2007
– Di Paolo, Ezequiel A., Cuffari, Elena C. & De Jaegher, Hanne, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2018
### Studies on Wild Swimming and Embodied Aquatic Experience
– Springett, Jane & Loyd, Claire (eds.), Aquatic Adventures. Explorations in Phenomenology and Embodied Water Practices, Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 2015
– Brownlee, Lynne, Wild Swimming: Freedom, Fitness, Nature, Penned in the Margins, London, 2012
– Throsby, Karen, “Immersion”: Embodiment and Authenticity in Recreational Swimming, Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 202-220, 2013
– Swimming in the Deep End: Embodied Practices, Injury and Sociability in Open Water Swimming, Phenomenology of aquatic sport, Brighton, 2019
### Neurosciences and Interoception
– Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Adelphi, Milan, 1995
– Craig, Arthur D., “Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 3, pp. 655-666, 2002
– Critchley, Hugo D. & Harrison, Neil A., “Visceral Influences on Brain and Behavior”, Neuron, Vol. 77, No. 4, pp. 624-638, 2013
– Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2017
– Barrett, Lisa Feldman & Simmons, W. Kyle, “Interoceptive Predictions in the Brain”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 419-429, 2015
– Khalsa, Sahib S., Adolphs, Ralph, Cameron, Olivia C., et al., “Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap”, Biological Psychiatry: CNNI, Vol. 3, No. 6, pp. 501-513, 2018
– Tsakiris, Manos & Critchley, Hugo D., “Interoception Beyond Homeostasis: Affect, Agency, and Experience”, Current Opinion in Psychology, Vol. 34, pp. 29-34, 2020
### Contemplative Science and Mindfulness Research
– Goleman, Daniel & Davidson, Richard J., Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind and Body, Bantam Press, London, 2017
– Siegel, Daniel J., The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2012
– Williams, J. Mark G., Teasdale, John D., Segal, Zindel V. & Kabat-Zinn, Jon, The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, Guilford Press, New York, 2007
– Tang, Yi-Yuan, Hölzel, Britta K. & Posner, Michael I., “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 213-225, 2015
– Dorjee, Dusana, Defining Contemplative Science: The Significance of Subjective Processes and the Application of Rigorous Thinking in Science, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 7, Article 1788, 2016
### Studies on Floating and the Effects of Relative Microgravity
– Feinstein, Justin S., Khalsa, Sahib S., Sinha, Priyamvada, et al., “The Relaxation and Immersion Tank as Mindfulness Training Tool: A Qualitative Needs Assessment”, PLOS ONE, Vol. 13, No. 6, e0191381, 2018
– Woodworth, Jason C., Erickson, Brian, Erickson, Whitney, et al., “Floating Versus Control Conditions: A Preliminary Controlled Trial for Fibromyalgia”, Industrial Psychiatry Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 118-126, 2012
### On Aquawareness (selection of primary sources)
– De Leo, Giancarlo, articles published on www.aquawareness.net
– De Leo, Giancarlo, publications on FuoriMag.it dedicated to aquawareness
– De Leo, Giancarlo, Aquawareness: Philosophical Foundations and Modern Applications, 2025
– De Leo, Giancarlo, Back to Basic Swimming, www.aquawareness.net, 2024
– Academic documentation published on Academia.edu: “Aquawareness – An Analysis of Academic Resources”
### Digital Resources and Online Archives
– Galileo Museum, Florence — Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, complete virtual exhibition: https://mostre.museogalileo.it/codiceleicester/it/
– The British Library, London — Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, complete digital collection: https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/leonardo-da-vinci
– Institute and Museum of History of Science, Florence — Resources on Leonardo scientist: https://www.museogalileo.it/
– Google Arts & Culture — Leonardo da Vinci: The Mind of Renaissance, interactive exhibition
– Mind & Life Institute — Publications on contemplative science: https://www.mindandlife.org/
– Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison — Research on meditation: https://centerhealthyminds.org/
Note: The bibliography is structured to facilitate further in-depth academic research. For specific questions regarding Sara Taglialagamba’s writings on Leonardo and water, direct contact with the author via Academia.edu or the research institutions that affiliate her is recommended.
