Drop #6: "Remember, when commenting on waters, to attach first the experience and then the reason" — Leonardo da Vinci's Aquawareness

This article explores how Leonardo da Vinci’s empirical approach to water prefigures and inspires the contemporary philosophy and practice of Aquawareness. Starting from Leonardo’s injunction to “attach first the experience and then the reason” when commenting on waters, it reconstructs his inversion of the scholastic method, showing how direct, bodily and sensory engagement with the aquatic element becomes the primary source of knowledge, while rational explanation is a secondary, reflective act. The essay then argues that Aquawareness radicalizes and updates this Leonardian intuition by transforming aquatic practice into a living experiential laboratory in which pure, present-moment attention allows experience and reason to co-emerge in real time through a dual awareness of one’s own body in water and of water’s dynamic behaviour. In Aquawareness, thanks to this dual awareness, the temporal gap between “first” (experience) and “then” (reason) tends to shrink toward zero, as sensing and understanding take shape simultaneously within the same embodied aquatic act. In this perspective, Aquawareness is presented as an embodied, phenomenological and psychosomatic development of Leonardo’s science of water, in which fluid dynamics, somatic learning and contemplative presence converge to generate a new form of situated aquatic intelligence.