Bumbles

Melville explores profound epistemological questions in his book and offers some radical and elliptical answers to the fundamental queries that concern the subject. In "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville reveals the essence of his response to what we can and cannot know and its relation to the world.

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of “light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” (Chapter 42)

Melville reveals that nothing exists on its own, and much of what we perceive in the external macro world does not actually exist in the external quantum world; light at the level of its constituents (quarks, &c.) loses the qualitative descriptive properties we attribute to it (ie. red light, bright light, etc.). At the macro level the broader spectrum of colors spring and split from the same white light (ie. Newton's Prism). Nature deceives us as in every subsequent assessment, colored light can be reduced to white light (or the absence of color) and further to the visible absence of light itself, having when reduced to its own untinged fundamental particles. It is this realization that forms the basis of his response to how to overcome this ambiguity. Melville tasks the reader to adopt the pantheistic perspective when he/she navigates through life. This is not to say that the individual must believe in multiple gods, but rather, in multiple ideas. If a man adheres to monotheism, he maintains a resolute position (ie. one beam of colored light), while the pantheist (ie. the rainbow) yields and considers them all. Therefore, the individual must park himself in the latter not the former: he must not look as the monotheist, who sees the world through a singularly colored and tinted lens, but take all the colors and perspectives and regard them with an equal eye, thereby preventing himself from being blinded by the White Light. For Melville, the white light embodies all possible meaning, which cannot be comprehended since a sufficient regression would yield no meaning (recall that the fundamental qualitative properties of light are not intelligible or indeed relevant when regressed and considered from the quantum level). The myriad colors of the rainbow are the manifest and intelligible fractals of that attainable seeming truth that is incarnate in the visible but blinding White Light. Therefore, to fully appreciate and understand the world, man must regard with an equal eye all philosophies and all cultures and religions, though contradictory between themselves, despite their not being able to offer any one grand metaphysical path to meaning. It is important to highlight that for Melville, it is not that the number of perspectives helps provide a clearer picture of the world - for him, the individual is incapable of using the plethora of perspectives to reach a final philosophy because there is none. All facets diverge, yet all are valid within the Einsteinian relativistic sense.

“For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” (Chapter 85: The Fountain)

To be clear then, Melville's perspective is that the world does not inherently provide any meaning to humanity. However, he posits that individuals can maintain their mental well-being by engaging in pantheistic acknowledgment of every idea and philosophy, encompassing supernatural and scientific praxes. This approach prevents individuals from being blinded in the eye and scarred in the mind with reality, while still retaining some semblance of understanding/quasi-truth, in a reality that is indifferent to them.

“But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” (Chapter 96: The Try Works)

The Tragedy of Ahab

Dr. Dryfus, in his lecture, offers a compelling insight regarding Ahab's encounter with Moby Dick in the novel: Ahab actually never fully confronts the whale, but instead suffers a very strange and arbitrary death from the whale line. In a sense, this represents the worst possible death for Ahab: being subject to random chance and sheer luck, rather than perishing as a martyr in a battle against Moby Dick. From the previous paragraph, the means by which to best regard Ahab’s tragic end in Melville’s philosophy is to view him as an individual who cannot accept the absence of a grand answer or cosmic order in the universe. Ahab attempts to slay not only the physical essence of the whale but the supra-spiritual hand that governs him. Ahab is profoundly disturbed by the lack of a definitive response to suffering and his own insignificance in the vast cosmos. The irony of the loss of his limb is made evident here:

“...Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. ” (Chapter 41: Moby Dick)

Moby Dick indifferently mows off Ahab’s leg, yet with malice. There is a discrepancy here: either Moby Dick is indifferent, or he is malicious, but he cannot be both because if he were indifferent, he would not show malice. It seems then that the malice is an understanding that Ahab has interpreted but did not actually come to pass. For Ahab, it is worse that he is injured for nothing than injured with purpose. Yet somewhere his mind is aware of that glimpse of indifference and he cannot stomach it. He attempts to meet the Whale once more and look for any malice, making out finally the deliberate hand that guides him. It is this hand that is the ultimate object of the hunt.

“Ahab demands the capability to know rather than proclaims his capacity for knowledge:

“Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, a chest modeled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with root to em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all. brass forehead. and about a quarter of an acre of he brams: and let me see-shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky light on the top of his head to illuminate inwards. (p. 390)

Ideally, Ahab rejects his own eyes, which can only gaze upon the "paste-board masks" of the sensory world he wants a window toward the cosmos in order to be illuminated "inwards" concerning an absolute context and a meaning of things. Ultimately, he suffers from his incapacity for know edge.” (Moby Dick: The Reader and the Act of Cognition, Bryce Conrad)

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing “thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. ” (Chapter 119: The Candles)

Here Ahab’s struggle is best conveyed. It is by knowledge and knowing that Ahab holds himself higher than the Fire, that he calls “his fiery father”: it is the Fire who is that a disadvantage as he knows not its father, while Ahab at least knows him to be his. Yet, they both share the same grief of not knowing the first Father, the creator God, &c. Ahab requires Moby Dick’s complete attention, he wants to be razeed again with Moby Dick’s murderous inclinations made stark and visible to him when this happens. To die as he died, by sheer accident, lead on by a whale that made deliberate attempts to leave the ship and its sailors alone, was to kill Ahab not just physically, but Melville burying the very idea that man's existence and this suffering is with some meaning.

At last the only person who has seen “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom”, and thus seen the random construction of the fabric of the world, is Pip. Following his descent into madness, Pip becomes a source of pity for Ahab, and who along with everyone, except Ismeal, drowns.

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.” (Chapter 93: The Castaway)

“The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.” (Chapter 102: The Arsacadies)

Some Papers I liked

1. Moby Dick: The Reader and the Act of Cognition, Bryce Conrad https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61063...

2. AHAB’S ARITHMETIC; OR, THE MATHEMATICS OF MOBY-DICK, Sarah Hart; Birkbeck College, University of London. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.12102.pdf

3. The Cartesian Vortex in Moby-Dick, David Charles Leonard, American Literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2924925

Lecture I liked

1. Hubert Dreyfus - Melville's Moby Dick. https://youtu.be/eq5LDSZDr2E