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MOBY-DICK AND THE PHILOSOPHER OF PESSIMISM
GREG PRITCHARD
… a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving
after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom
attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed;
he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbour
with masts and rigging gone. And then it is all one whether he
has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything
more than the present moment always vanishing; and now it is
over.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.1
Herman Melville discovered the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer late in
life, and must have been surprised to discover how close this writer's
philosophy was to his own beliefs. Despite this late revelation, the influence
on Melville's work was strong, and there are good arguments to show that
Melville was inspired by his ideas in the creation of 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'
and Billy Budd. Melville may well have been aware of Schopenhauer's
philosophy earlier, however, regardless of his lack of proven or direct
exposure to the work of the German writer at the time of its composition,
Moby-Dick exhibits many affinities with Schopenhauer's thought and it is
possible to examine the book through such a reading.
The two writers shared an individual pessimism, misogyny, and
withdrawnness (due to their genius). They also shared a respect for Indian
religious thought. Moby-Dick aligns itself to Schopenhauer's thought in its
discussion of 'Will' versus representation (though Melville doesn't use those
terms), in its opposition of light to heat, and in the novel's suggestion of the
interconnectedness of all reality. Melville's ideas further resemble those of
Schopenhauer in the novel's depiction of the madness of Ahab, and in the
recurrent questioning of God. Melville's idea of redemption through
'government' of 'sharkishness' alludes to Schopenhauer's ideal of the 'Will'less person. Under the influence of the German writer, Melville would
develop this idea in his later works.
Unfortunately, the difference in their ages, distance separating them, and the
fickleness of fame, all conspired against them being aware of each other's
writing. Though Schopenhauer's main work, The World as Will and
Representation, was published in 1818, the year before Melville's birth,
Schopenhauer was not to achieve the fame he desperately craved until the
1850s, and he died in 1860. The 'first light of his reputation,' to quote Brian
Magee, did not break in England until 1853, and came as a result of the
publication of an article by John Oxenford entitled 'Iconoclasm in German
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35
Philosophy,' in the George Eliot edited Westminster Review (one of only ten
Eliot edited).2 Melville's magnum opus Moby-Dick was published in 1851,
and although he had already achieved some fame with the publication of
Typee in 1847, it is unlikely either book ever came to Schopenhauer's
attention.
On his trip to England in 1849 aboard the Independence, Melville was
introduced to George J. Adler by his friends the Duyckincks. He wrote in
his journal that Adler was chief amongst some 'very pleasant passengers,'
and the author of 'a formidable lexicon' in German and English, the
compilation of which had 'almost ruined his health.'3 In fact, Adler was
committed to New York's Bloomingdale Asylum four years later (though
subsequently released). On the voyage he was Melville's 'principal
companion.' Melville noted that Adler was 'full of the German metaphysics,
and discourses of Kant, Swedenborg &c.' He relates how he, Adler and
another (James Taylor) had drunk whiskey punches until two a.m., talking
'metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schegel, Kant &c.' Another entry
describes drinking mulled wine while Adler 'got – all of us – riding on the
German horse again.' On another evening he strolled the decks with Adler,
talking of 'Fixed Fate, Free-will, fore-knowledge absolute.'4
It is not known if Adler knew of Schopenhauer's work or discussed him
with Melville, however, if he did, the German philosopher's work appears
not to have kindled the latter's interest. It is not until two decades later
(1871) that Melville scores mention of Schopenhauer in The Solitudes of
Nature and of Man or, The Loneliness of Human Life by William
Rounseville Alger: 'Schopenhauer says: For the most part we have only a
choice between solitude and vulgarity. The most social men are the least
intellectual. "He is very unsocial," is almost equivalent to saying, "He is a
man of great qualities".'5 It would be another two decades before Melville
borrowed Schopenhauer's Counsels and Maxims from the New York
Society Library on February 5th, 1891. The book had a profound effect on
Melville and eleven days later he purchased his own copy of this book, as
well as other books by the German writer, including a three volume
translation of The World as Will and Idea (better known now as Will and
Representation), Religion: A Dialogue, Studies in Pessimism, and T h e
Wisdom of Life.6 As Arthur Stedman notes in his introduction to an 1892
edition of Typee, Melville was reading Schopenhauer during his last illness
the same year.
Amongst Melville's library there are recorded fifteen books by Honor de
Balzac. John Haydock has pointed out the influence of Schopenhauer on
Balzac and suggested the latter influenced Melville while he was writing
Billy Budd. He notes that an essay, in the F. Barron Freeman edited
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Melville's Billy Budd by R. K. Gupta, suggests the influence of
Schopenhauer on Billy Budd.7 Olive Fite has also argued for this
interpretation.8 Haydock notes that Melville's copy of Balzac's Séraphita
was published in 1889, and that Melville could have been directed to
Schopenhauer by the writing of George Frederic Parsons, who penned the
introduction. Haydock notes that Parsons strongly connects the concept of
will in Séraphita with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, including the belief
in reincarnation and the absolute necessity for volition to subdue the
instinctive 'will-to-live.' Alexander Eliot in Furioso, and Daniel Stempel and
Bruce M. Stillians in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, have argued that
Melville's Bartleby is also a character largely inspired by Schopenhauerean
philosophy, and Deleuze notes the similarity as well.9 Stempel and Stillians
argue that there is a good possibility that Melville would have read
Oxenford's article on Schopenhauer, either in New York, Boston or
Pittsfield, especially since the Review had printed a favourable reference to
Melville's work in 1852. They claim 'the evidence is so strong as to rule out
the possibility that he might have simply ignored the article,' if he had
picked up the April issue. They imagine 'the strong impression which
Oxenford's article must have made as Melville found his own intimations of
a malignity inherent in the fabric of creation supported by Schopenhauer's
metaphysics of evil will as Kant's thing-in-itself.'10 The connection between
Melville and Oxenford's article, however, must remain at the level of
conjecture, and regardless, succeeded the writing and publication of MobyDick.
Melville and Schopenhauer were both thinkers who were convinced, and
you could argue rightly, that the profundity and worth of their writing were
not appreciated by the bulk of contemporary readers. Like Melville,
Schopenhauer found the book of Ecclesiastes to be a source of insight,
quoting 'Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem,' [He that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow].11 Both have quoted the same book's
statement that 'All Is Vanity.' They were both convinced of their own genius
and believed that this aspect of their personality meant that they must lead
solitary lives, even in the company of others. When Melville finally
purchased Schopenhauer's books, it was these aspects of the German's
philosophy that he underscored, as he had in Alger's book. For example, on
page 120 of the introduction to Wisdom of Life Melville scored '…the more
a man leaves to posterity, in other words to humanity in general, the more of
an alien he is to his contemporaries; since his work is not meant for them as
such.'12 Interestingly, both Schopenhauer and Melville left almost unmarked
graves. On Melville's grave in the Woodlawn cemetery in New York there
is only his name and a blank scroll ('full of meaning') and Schopenhauer's
gravesite in the Friedhof Cemetery in Frankfurt has only the philosopher's
name, no date, nor epitaph. 'They will find me,' he is quoted as saying.13
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37
Another major similarity between the two writers is the respect they had for
Eastern beliefs such as Hinduism and Buddhism. At a time when the
Upanishads were hardly heard of in Europe, Schopenhauer read every night
from a Latin translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads (he called
the Oupnekhat). Magee writes: 'To this day Schopenhauer remains the only
great Western philosopher to have been genuinely well versed in Eastern
thought and to have related it to his own work.'14 As writers such as Mani
and Kulkhani have argued, Melville too investigated Eastern thought, and
Moby-Dick demonstrated this legacy.15 In Mani's word's, 'Melville fuses
symbols from East and West and creates new archetypes to portray
pessimism.'16
Schopenhauer's major legacy to philosophy was his metaphysics of a world
divided into 'Will' and 'Representation', as per Kant into noumenal and
phenomenal realms – the division into what is and what is rationally
knowable. However, unlike Kant who believed the noumenal world to be
completely unknowable, Schopenhauer believed that humans had a very
limited access to knowledge of the 'Will' through their body, which was
'Will' objectified. He believed that the world we inhabit is only subjective,
as we perceive it, and thus is only 'representation' of the 'Will', the
appearance of this one 'Will' to itself.17 The 'Will' is 'the thing-in-itself' – and
has the form of a dynamic striving. In The World as Will and
Representation, he describes it thus: 'We have long since recognized this
striving, that constitutes the kernel and in-itself of everything, as the same
thing that in us, where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of fullest
consciousness, is called will.'18 Magee describes the 'Will' as 'a universal,
aimless, unindividualized, non-alive force.'19 Much of the resistance to
Schopenhauer, however, has been on account of his choice of terminology,
particularly the use of the word 'Will', which has engendered confusion with
other more common senses of the word.20
For Schopenhauer, the 'Will', this 'ceaseless striving,' explains the base level
of reality where the meaning behind the phenomena of perception resides.
Melville intuitively posits a similar transcendental 'layer' and his metaphor
for this is 'whiteness', most evident in (but not existent in) the white whale.
After cataloguing white things Ishmael notes, 'for all these accumulated
associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet
lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes
more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood'
(p.192).21 The chapter 'The Whiteness of the Whale, 'contains many
statements that reflect Schopenhauer's belief in the noumenal underlying the
phenomenal. For example, Ishmael contrasts the 'phenomenon of whiteness'
with 'the prime agent,' and notes that 'though in many of its aspects this
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visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in
fright.' Ishmael also questions:
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 color as the visible absence of color,
and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in
a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism
from which we shrink? (p.199)
He writes of the myriad and colourful phenomena that populate the world of
perception, its 'subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances,' yet notes
that even though 'all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot [her]
allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within' (p.200).
Melville's charnel house allusion allies him further with Schopenhauer – not
only do they both posit a 'lower layer,' a noumenal realm separate to the
phenomenal, but they both conceive of it as 'evil', to use Schopenhauer's
terminology. For Schopenhauer, 'there remains an unending conflict
between [these] phenomena as individuals. It is visible at all grades of
individuals, and makes the world a permanent battlefield of all those
phenomena of one and the same will.'22 He asserts:
… every animal can maintain its own existence only by the
incessant elimination of another's. Thus the will-to-live
generally feasts upon itself, and in different forms is its own
nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all
the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use. Yet
… this same human race reveals in itself with terrible clearness
that conflict, that variance of the will with itself, and we get
homo himini lupus [quoting Plautus' 'Man is wolf to man].23
Schopenhauer concludes that satisfaction is never lasting, and that as
therefore, there 'is no end to striving … there is no measure or end to
suffering.'24 The combination of his belief that 'essentially all life is
suffering,' and his generally cantankerous disposition, led to him being
considered the arch pessimist of philosophy.25 In reply, he stated:
For the rest, I cannot here withhold the statement that
optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those
who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads,
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39
seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really
wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable
sufferings of mankind.26
Although Moby-Dick is often cited in books on whales, it is also probably
the greatest literary work concerning sharks. In Ishmael's elaborate
classification system of whales, he notes 'we are all killers, on land and on
sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included' (p.144). Melville used the shark as a
base symbol from which to build his conception of nature and human
society. For Ishmael, there is nothing lower in terms of morality than the
shark, and yet one of the underlying beliefs of Moby-Dick is the 'sharkish'
nature of both humanity and nature – an intertwined combination of
vulnerability and cannibalism. It is hard to overestimate the importance of
the shark to Melville's novel, and not surprisingly, Henry Nash Smith
considers the shark Melville's principal symbol.27 The inability to transcend
one's sharkishness is an important aspect of Moby-Dick, and one can infer
much about various characters by the way they are referred to relative to the
shark. Examples can be found in Fleece's admonition of Stubb (p.307), and
in the many references to Queequeg as shark (or more accurately, as wellgoverned shark, in Zoellner's terms). Quite a few characters and objects in
Moby-dick are described in shark-like terms, including Stubb and
Queequeg. The list also includes a whaleboat (p.294), harpooners ('no
harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish' –p. 93), Tashtego ('his
shark-white teeth' –p. 513), Perth ('in a bristling shark-skin apron' –p. 496),
Ahab's hand ('here's velvet shark-skin' –p. 529) and even Moby Dick ('in the
manner of a biting shark' –p. 556). In his sermon to the sharks, Fleece says:
Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much
for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked
natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de
shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing
more dan de shark well goberned (p.303).
Instead of Spinoza's pantheism, which suggests humans can do as they wish
because they are sovereign to their own nature, the text echoes
Schopenhauer's belief that the world is all one 'Will', but that the 'Will' is
evil, and the only recourse is through resistance (or in Melville's terms,
'government').28 Many times Melville stresses this belief in a base level of
the world. 'The Gilder' contains a warning about indulging in a too Goethelike reverie: 'when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not
willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang'
(500). Similarly, in 'The Funeral,' Ishmael exclaims: 'Oh, horrible
vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free' (p.317). The
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idea of the world's inherent evilness was not first proposed by Schopenhauer
or Melville. Hsòn Tzu, writing in the fourth century B.C., noted: 'Man's
nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity.' A thought that
resembles Melville's 'well-governed shark.'29
Schopenhauer suggests that as man is simultaneously the dark impulse of
willing (focused on the genitals) and the serene subject of pure knowing
(focused through the brain), so too heat is the first condition of life, and
light the condition of 'the most perfect kind of knowledge.' Thus, he sees in
the sun the source of a polarity between heat for the will, and light for
knowledge. In this he is again echoed by Melville in the 'Try-works'
chapter, not surprisingly as both writers obviously set great store in the
work of Plato (with both making use of the Platonic conception of reality
illustrated by the 'Simile of the Cave').30 Melville posits a similar polarity
between the warmth of the try-works and the light of the sun:
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream
with thy hand on the helm! … believe not the artificial fire,
when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in
the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like
devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at
least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true
lamp --all others but liars! (p. 435)
On the nature of madness, the two are again remarkably similar. In MobyDick it says: 'There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is
madness'(p.436). Schopenhauer suggests that suffering resides in the
memory, and claims 'if such a sorrow, such painful knowledge or reflection,
is so harrowing that it becomes positively unbearable, and the individual
would succumb to it, then nature, alarmed in this way, seizes on madness as
the last means of saving life.' In a perfect anticipation of Ahab he writes:
'The mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of its
memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness
from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength, just as a limb affected by
mortification is cut off and replaced by a wooden one.'31 Schopenhauer
considered the ravings of Ajax, King Lear and Ophelia to be examples of
this, and no doubt, he would have considered Ahab an equally good
exemplar.
Both writers discuss the idea of will, in it non-specific sense. In his first
work, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
Schopenhauer writes that causality takes three forms, 'cause' in the
narrowest sense, 'stimulus' and 'motive'. The first of the three applies to the
inorganic kingdom, stimulus applies to vegetative life and the unconscious
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41
parts of animal life, and motives, through the medium of knowledge, define
animals and humans.32 He believed 'motive is a cause, and it operates with
the necessity entailed by all causes.' In the case of humans, he thought, 'the
more powerful motive … decides him, and his action ensues with precisely
the same necessity.' For him, freedom of will meant ('not the twaddle of
professors of philosophy but') 'that two different actions are possible to a
given person in a given situation.'
Now, although animal and man are determined by motives with
equal necessity, man nevertheless has the advantage over the
animal of complete elective decision (Whalentscheidung). This
has often been regarded as a freedom of will in individual
actions, although it is nothing but the possibility of a conflict,
thoroughly fought out, between several motives, the strongest of
which then determines the will with necessity.33
To return to Moby-Dick, Ishmael, while weaving a mat with Queequeg,
relates that:
There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single,
ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely
enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads
with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I,
with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
destiny into these unalterable threads.
For him, chance, free will, and necessity were not incompatible but
interweavingly working together. Echoing Schopenhauer, he continues:
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
ultimate course – its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between
given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within
the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed
by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns
rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events. (pp.21920)
Earlier, in the 'Sunset' chapter, Ahab exclaims: 'The path to my fixed
purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over
unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents'
beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron
way!' (p.172). Ahab is conscious of the strongest of 'motives' that cause him
to act as he does.34
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Melville and Schopenhauer both intuitively believed that all of reality was
interconnected, with the latter supplying a metaphysics to account for this
belief : all phenomena are interconnected because they are all merely
representations of the one underlying 'Will'. Both writers found support for
such beliefs in Hindu scriptures, and respected (yet rejected) the pantheistic
beliefs of Baruch Spinoza. Schopenhauer thought that using the word 'God'
for the world invented an unnecessary synonym for 'world'.35 His
metaphysics demonstrated a unity similar to Spinoza's, but without the need
for a mystical explanation. Melville too rejects Spinoza's conception, which
he only read second hand, in Pierre Bayle's dictionary.36 There is a sense in
Moby-Dick that Melville could not accept Spinoza's benign substance and
atheistic monism, that, like Schopenhauer, he saw something inherently
'evil' in the world. The great difference between Schopenhauer and Melville,
inheres in the reason for this 'evilness'. For the former, it followed from his
non-anthropocentric metaphysics; however, Melville's exposure to the
Calvinist God, made him suspect that such a God could only be malicious.
The metaphor Melville uses for the pantheistic world is the 'loom'. Equally
significant and symbolic of this conception of ecological structure, of
dialogic relationships and interconnectedness, are the metaphors of mats and
weaving. For example, Father Mapple's 'two stranded lesson' from Jonah
(p.42) and the Monkey-Rope that binds Ishmael inextricably to Queequeg
(p.327). The chapter entitled 'The Mat-Maker' is the most blatant and
contrived. To Ishmael it 'seemed as if this were the Loom of Time' (p.219).37
Melville no doubt understands that whether it is in nature, culture or
literature, all meanings co-relate and intermingle. His conception of the
world is holistic, fluid and interdependent, represented in the ocean. In his
description of the monkey-rope that attaches Ishmael to Queequeg during a
delicate operation, Ishmael says he saw 'that this situation … was the
precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases he, one
way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals'
(pp.327-30). Earlier in the bedroom scene with Queequeg, Ishmael had
declared his need for human companionship with the statement: 'Nothing
exists in itself' (p.55).38
In the 'A Bower in the Arsacides' chapter, Ishmael, by way of explaining the
sperm whale skeleton, describes how he entered a 'grand temple of lordly
palms' to find such a skeleton and found it like a giant green factory full of
busy looms. Again, we find the loom imagery:
Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! – pause! – one word! –
whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore
all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! – stay thy hand! –
but one single word with thee! Nay – the shuttle flies –the
figures float from forth the loom; the freshet- rushing carpet for
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43
ever slides away. 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. For even so it is in all material factories.
(p.460)
Ishmael reflects on the 'weaver god' that controls the 'great world's loom,'
and notes that despite the desperate entreaties of believers, the god is
silent.39 There are two possible conclusions: either a god chooses to remain
quiet, or there is no god. Ishmael's questioning resembles that of
Schopenhauer:
But must nature then, from sheer obduracy, for ever remain
dumb to our questioning? Is nature not, as everything great is,
open, communicative and even naïve. Can her failure to reply
ever be for any other reason than that we have asked the wrong
question, that our question has been based on false
presuppositions, that it has even harboured a contradiction?
For can it be imagined that a connexion between causes and
consequences could exist in nature which is essentially and for
ever undiscoverable?40
Schopenhauer's answer is the same as Ishmael's: 'Nature is unfathomable
because we seek after causes and consequences in a realm where this form
is not to be found…. merely the form under which our intellect
comprehends appearance, i.e. the surface of things.'41
In the famous typographically altered chapter 'The Gilder,' the narrator says,
'the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms
crossed by storms, a storm for every calm' (p.500).42 In this pastoral chapter,
the narrator describes the oceanic state of epistemological and ontological
blending: 'fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one
seamless whole' (p.500). In keeping with the nineteenth-century fascination
in phrenology, and entrenched beliefs that the mind is housed in the skull,
Ishmael's exposition on the sperm whale's skull is, as would be expected,
full of symbolism and diverse possible interpretations, and again questions
the ontological status of gods. Ahab addresses the whale's skull:
'Speak, thou vast and venerable head,' muttered Ahab, 'which,
though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest
hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret
thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest….
Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming
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ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to
each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the
murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck;
for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw;
and his murderers still sailed on unharmed – while swift
lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne
a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.' (p.320)
This speech is a remarkable questioning of fate and God, and the nature of
evil, and it echoes Ishmael's 'A Bower in the Arsacides' speech. The 'true'
lovers are still punished and the murderers escape, and Ahab, like so many
before him, commits the heresy of questioning how a god can allow such
things. It is a direct contradiction of standard Calvinist doctrine, which
claims that nothing happens except by God's decree. And yet, Ahab's
answer is that it does no good to ask questions of gods, for they never
answer: 'O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an
infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!' (p.320). Ahab comes to
the same conclusion as Ishmael and consigns the dead whale to the bulk of
unfeeling, unknowing, unanswering nature. Like many, Ahab feels the
ability to speak is the sign of intelligence. Conversation with the dead whale
is just another example of the continual stress on the inability of
questioning. In correspondence, Melville discussed the problem of
questioning god, and of overly contemplating the ramifications of totality:
We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets,
and that He would like a little information upon certain points
Himself. We mortals astonish him as much as He us. But it is
this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke
ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you
jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.43
The ineffable is also evident in Melville's allusion to the 'Sphynx,' the
mystical creature that is both the Egyptian statue and the riddling monster.
Ahab's parting comment returns to the metaphors of interconnectedness that
I have been discussing: 'O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all
utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on
matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind' (p.320).
Schopenhauer did not believe that a morality could not be based on his
metaphysics. He believed that there are three actions that the individual
person can take, the obviously 'Will' induced egoism, malice, and
compassion. He wrote that 'no genuine virtue can be brought about through
morality and abstract knowledge in general, but that such virtue must spring
from the intuitive knowledge that recognises in another's individuality the
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45
same inner nature as one's own.'44 Again turning to Eastern thought for
support, he believed this agreed with the Vedic principle tat tvasm asii (this
art thou).45 Deep Ecologist Warwick Fox posits that there are three ways in
which we can identify with the world, to aid our realisation of a larger-thanself reality: personal, ontological, and cosmological.46 Moby-Dick examines
these carefully, and the narrative leads towards Ishmael's self-realisation.
Ishmael's descriptions of whales, sharks, and other characters (covered
below) are an example of 'personal' identification, and his careful dissection
and consideration of the body of the whale contributes to his conception of
existence, of dasein – an 'ontological' identification. Lastly, it is through his
metaphors of interconnectedness that Ishmael suggests an understanding of
commonality that resembles Fox's 'cosmological' identification.
For Schopenhauer, '[n]o animal ever torments another for the sake of
tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical
nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.' It was through his
observations on the way humanity treated both others and animals that he
was convinced of the 'misery of human existence,' that the 'Will' was evil
and the only redemption for humanity lay in resistance.47 He believed the
only recourse is the denial of the 'Will'. In this, he also found inspiration in
the spiritual beliefs of Eastern religions. Likewise, Moby-Dick suggests the
way to salvation is to govern the sharkishness within us all, to deny the
impulses of the 'Will'. Schopenhauer believed that it was possible for a
person to reach a state of 'Will' denial:
Such a man, who after bitter struggles with his own nature, has
at last completely conquered, is then left only as pure knowing
being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can
distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move
him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which
hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy,
and anger drag us here and there in constant pain.48
Whilst this is a good description of Bartleby and Billy Budd, it is also a
description of the state reached by Ishmael in the 'Epilogue' of Moby-Dick:
… floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight
of it … I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing
vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.
Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the
button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
circle, like another ixion I did revolve.… Buoyed up by [the]
coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft
and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if
46
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with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed
with sheathed beaks. (p.583)
There are strong similarities between Melville's idea of redemption through
'government' of 'sharkishness', a state Ishmael reaches at the end of the
novel, and Schopenhauer's ideal of the 'Will'-less person. Thus, we can see
that, even if Melville was unaware of Schopenhauerean thought at the time
of the composition of Moby-Dick, the book can be read as having affinities
with Schopenhauerean thought.
ENDNOTES
1
A. Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, Trans. T. B. Saunders. George Allen and Unwin,
London, 1923, p. 35.
2
B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 26. Stempel
and Stillians write that this article not only introduced Schopenhauer's philosophy to the
English speaking world, but also 'catapulted the hitherto obscure philosopher into fame in his
own country.' They note that the article was listed in the 1850 catalogue of the New York
Society Library, which was often visited by Melville. D. Stempel and B.M Stillians,
'Bartleby the Scrivener: A Parable of Pessimism', Nineteenth Century Fiction, (1972), 27, pp.
268-82.
3
J. Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, Gordian
Press, New York, 1951, pp. 319-23.
4
Wenke shows that in this quotation Melville 'evokes the sedate demons' from Paradise
Lost, demonstrating his knowledge of Milton. J. Wenke, Melville's Muse: Literary Creation
& the Forms of Philosophical fiction, The Kent State University Press, Kent Ohio, and
London, England, 1975, p. 96.
5
Leyda, Melville Log, p. 720.
6
Ibid.,p. 832. M.M.J. Sealts, Melville's Reading, University of South Carolina Press,
Columbia, 1988, p.130.
7
See essays in F. Barron Freeman, (ed.), Melville's Billy Budd, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA., 1948; R.K. Gupta, 'Billy Budd and Schopenhauer,' Schopenhauer-Jarbuch,
(1992) 73, pp. 91-97; J. Haydock, 'Melville's Seraphita: Billy Budd, Sailor', Melville Society
Extracts, March, 1972, pp. 104,: 2-13.
8
O.L. Fite, 'Billy Budd, Claggart and Schopenhauer,' Nineteenth Century Fiction, (1968) 23,
pp. 336-43.
9
Stempel and Stillians, p. 269. G. Deleuze, Essays, Critical and Clinical, Trans. Daniel W.
Smith and Michael A. Greco. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 192, n13.
10
Stempel and Stillians, p. 271.
11
A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols.
Dover Publications, New York, 1969, p. 310.
12
Leyda, Melville Log, p. 832.
13
R.S. Levine, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK, 1998, p. 10. V.J. McGill, Schopenhauer Pessimist and Pagan,
Haskell House Publishers Ltd, New York, 1971, p. 1.
14
Magee, Philosophy, p. 15.
15
H.B. Kulkarni, Moby-Dick: A Hindu Avatar, Monograph Series Volume XVIII - Number 2
Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah, 1970; L. Mani, The Apocalyptic Vision in
Nineteenth Century American Fiction, University Press of America Inc, Washington, 1981.
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
16
47
Ibid., p. xi. Mani notes that 'Walter Sutton surmises that Melville's interest in Buddhism
must have begun during his journey to the Mediterranean countries and the Near East in
1857-1858, and developed later when he read Schopenhauer. See 'Melville and the Great
God Budd,' Prairie Schooner, XXXIV (1960), pp 128-133, 315.
17
A. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Pengiun, London, 1970,
pp. 20-1. T. Honderich, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 803.
18
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, p. 309.
19
Magee, Philosophy, p. 144.
20
Magee writes: 'by a disastrous choice as regards the key term in his vocabulary he has
ensured that all but the closest students of his work are bound to take him to be saying
something else.' He suggests that 'energy' or 'force' would have been better terms. Magee
believes Schopenhauer complicates this fact because he 'proceeds to use it ['Will'] side by
side in all three of his stipulated senses. Quite often he uses it in two of them in the same
sentence.' Magee, Philosophy, pp. 144-5.
21
All page numbers in parentheses are from H. Melville, Moby Dick, first published 1851 ed,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1988.
22
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, p. 265.
23
Ibid., p. 147.
24
Ibid., p. 309.
25
Ibid., p. 310.
26
Ibid., p. 327.
27
Henry Nash Smith, 'The Image of Society in Moby-Dick,' in M. T. Gilmore, (ed.),
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moby Dick, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey, 1977, p. 33.
28
B. de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence,
Trans. R. H. M. Elwes, Dover Publications, New York, 1955, pp. 213, 238-41. See also
Schopenhauer, 1970, op. cit.
29
B. Watson, (ed.), Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu and Hon Fei Tzu, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1967, p. 157.
30
Plato, The Republic, Trans. H. D. P. Lee, Penguin Classics Penguin, Ringwood, Australia,
1963, p. 278.
31
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, p.193.
32
A. Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Open Court, La
Salle, Illinois, 1974, pp. 69-72. The principle of sufficient reason has four forms, i) essendi
(time and space), ii) fiendi (cause), iii) agendi (motive) and iv) cognoscendi (abstract reason),
and in all four forms necessity rules, so that we have i) mathematical necessity, ii) physical
necessity, iii) moral necessity and iv) logical necessity. F.S.J. Copelston, Arthur
Schopenhauer - Philosopher of Pessimism, Search Press, London, 1946, p. 24.
33
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, p. 297.
34
It should be stated, however, that such a conception of free will is not uniquely
Schopenhauer's. Walton Patrick has suggested that the idea of necessity, as used by Melville
in Bartleby, is derived from Jonathan Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will and
Joseph Priestly's The Philosophical Doctrine of Necessity, whereby 'the will has a degree of
freedom, but is freedom to operate only within the strict limits of necessity.' What
Schopenhauer brings to this discussion is a metaphysical explanation of free will. W.R.
Patrick, 'Melville's Bartleby and the Doctrine of Necessity,' American Literature 41, March,
1969, pp. 39-54.
35
Copelston, Philosopher of Pessimism, pp 92, 145.
36
See H.A. Hauser, 'Spinozan Philosophy in Pierre,' American Literature 49, March,1977.
37
Wenke, Melville's Muse, p. 108. Wenke shows several sources where Melville may have
derived the idea of a loom as metaphor, including Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Plato's Myth
of Er in the Republic (103). He notes Carlyle's character Teufelsdrockh's use of the Loom of
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Time metaphor adapted from Goethe, and the allusion to this in Pip's vision in 'The
Castaway' when he see 'god's foot upon the treadle of the loom' (109-10).
38
Some critics have taken this out of context as an exposition of the existence of nothing,
placing the stress on 'exists', but when Ishmael expresses this sentiment the word 'in' has the
meaning of 'by'. Nothing exists by itself. Everything has interconnections to everything else.
39
Zoellner writes that Ishmael's line ('I saw no living thing within; naught was there but
bones' p. 461) was, in Melville's nineteenth century America, 'as close as Ishmael dare come
to an overt denial of the existence of an intelligent and personal God, and consequentially to
a direct controversion of Captain Ahab's agentistic thesis.' R. The Salt-Sea Mastodon,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973, p. 210.
40
Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, p. 57.
41
Ibid.
42
See Wenke, Melville's Muse, p. 145, and J. Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, in Levine,
Cambridge Companion, pp. 87-8, for a discussion on the implications of different
punctuation (between English and American published versions) on this chapter.
43
Melville, from correspondence, quoted by Wenke, Melville's Muse, p. 113.
44
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, pp. 367-8.
45
Ibid., p. 374.
46
W. Fox, Towards a Transpersonal Ecology, Green Books Ltd, Totnes, Devon, UK, 1995,
pp. 249-58.
47
Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, pp. 22-3, 139-40.
48
Schopenhauer, The World as Will, p. 391.