“Moby-Dick”: Concluding Thoughts

This is the fourteenth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The “Young America” movement aimed at speaking and acting for a new generation of Americans, as President John Kennedy would attempt to do, a century later, and as the ‘New Left’ would claim to do, only a few years after Kennedy. The passing of the torch of political authority from the older to the younger raises perennial questions: Will the fire light the way? Or will it burn the holder? Will it go out, causing the new bearer to stumble? Should it be snuffed out, and another torch lit? Should it be used to follow the same path, or should a new path be chosen?

In Melville’s generation, Abraham Lincoln considered these questions in a lecture at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” was delvered and published thirteen years before the publication of Moby-Dick; its author wasalmost exactly the same age as Melville when he published his great novel. Like Melville, the young Lincoln has been said to have had his doubts about religion, although unlike Melville he could later claim to  have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general.”

Lincoln invited his listeners to admire the American “system of political institutions,” which “conduc[es] more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” This “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” stands as “a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” He understood the duty of his generation of Americans to be the transmission of this legacy, “unprofaned by the foot of an invader,” to the next generation. He found the prospect of foreign conquest remote. But the danger of self-ruin was real, as seen in recent instances of “mob law”: lynchings in Mississippi; extrajudicial execution by burning of a murderer in Missouri. When “the lawless in spirit” become “lawless in practice,” law-abiding citizens will lose their trust in the government intended to secure their liberty and equal rights. If such citizens lose their attachment to the ruling institutions of a republican regime, then “the capability of a people to govern themselves” must come into question. This will give an opportunity to the supremely ambitious men who arise in every generation, men who “belong to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,” men who “disdain the beaten path” of ancestors to seek glory on any ground other than that taken by men who have gone before them. Only if citizens trust one another, and trust the government they have constituted and perpetuated, can such potential tyrants by defeated.

To reestablish or strengthen that trust, only reason can furnish new pillars for “the temple of liberty.” Those materials can then “be molded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and the laws”—for what Lincoln does not hesitate to call a “political religion.” The old pillars of the temple were the Founders; the new pillars can only be men and women who emulate them, whose ambition finds its model not in an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon but in George Washington, that supremely self-governing statesman who has earned his status as first in war and first in peace among a people who intend to govern themselves, first of all by ruling their own passions.

When Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, Americans ruled the middle section of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. If that rule could be consolidated by settlement, if disunion could be prevented, the United States would then amount very nearly to a vast island, with oceans along its eastern and western borders, seas bordering it on much of the North and South. Melville set out to caution Young America, to show his countrymen that the Pacific wasn’t entirely pacific, that ocean waters surround all land on earth with chaos. [1] America’s destiny may not be so manifest as Young America supposes. Is it as bright as they believe, given the real nature of ‘the Pacific’ Americans have arrived at? With Mexico and its ambitions to seize New Orleans defeated, and if the remaining Amerindian nations and tribes are subdued, will Americans enjoy the prosperous peace they have sought in their wars? Lincoln worried that they might not, and those worries crested like a wave in the decade to follow. He saw the possibility of chaos on land, political chaos within the United States, in an intensifying regime conflict between the commercial-republican North and the slaveholding-oligarchic South, worsened by the moral and political conflict between political parties in the North.

For Lincoln saw in Young America—above all in his great Illinois rival, Senator Stephen Douglas—a threat to American self-government as dangerous as that posed by the slaveholding plantation oligarchs of the South. Douglas, Lincoln averred, was “blowing out the moral lights around us” by refusing to navigate the popular sovereignty of the republican regime in America by the constellation of natural rights, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, which had justified the Founders’ assertion of that sovereignty against the sovereignty of the British tyrant. To argue that the legal status of slaves in the newly-settled territories of the United States may be settled by popular votes in those territories, instead of by appeal to the natural rights to equality and liberty enunciated by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, overrode the rule of reason, valorized the rule of passion. Law should secure natural rights; citizens should not suppose themselves entitled to vote the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God up or down.

Ahab represents nothing if not the family of the lion or the tribe of the (sea)-eagle. Aboard the Pequod, no one effectively opposes him, as Starbuck dithers, the crew alternately trembles and cheers, and Bulkington stays below deck. With Moby-Dick, however, Melville opposes him, readying his readers to recognize and oppose him, too. To the mighty man, the might-makes-right man, Melville opposes the mighty book. A mighty book needs a mighty theme, Ishmael tells us. But mere might against might will not suffice. Don’t merely ‘enlarge’ your mind, Ishmael advises. “Subtilize it.” Make it more discerning, more reasonable. The way to reasonableness isn’t some ‘system’ of thought, philosophic or religious, but moderation of the soul’s passions. Tempering the passions gives the mind a chance to think instead of only feeling. Ahab suggests that he who feels most intensely, whose feelings overwhelm other less coruscant souls, rightly rules them with a minimum of ‘back-talk.’ Melville writes to make citizens more thoughtful, more likely (among other things) to recognize an Ahab as a tyrant, as a person who may “have his humanities” but will not permit himself to be ruled by them, will not rule others by them, and thereby compromises the humanity of those he rules.

To subtilize the minds of Americans, Melville takes them to sea, where the chaotic dimension of nature must be faced. At sea one meets foreigners, men reared in regimes different from the American regime. Ishmael recalls “gams” or meetings with whaling ships from several countries. The Germans prove inexperienced, therefore lacking in practical judgment or prudence. They haven’t ruled themselves long enough; the ‘nation of philosophers’ and of Kultur may mean well but it cannot do well, as it navigates often unstable seas. The French, too—landsmen, sometime upholders of the Rights of Man, accustomed to life under the centralized modern state—lack experience in self-government. The English do have such experience; what is more, their commercial way of life keeps them sane, but sometimes obscures from them the depths of the oceans upon which they sail so adeptly. As for the American ships the crew of the Pequod meet, they range from the self-indulgent to the compassionate. Which way will Americans take, in their regime?

They will need a modern state of some sort. With a decent regime, that state does provide protection for women and children against human predators; it sends out expeditions, usually for commerce or, as with the America of Melville’s time, expansion of its empire of liberty. Like all manifestations of the “weaver-god,” it needs a framework for production. Given the chaotic dimension of the cosmos, it makes oligarchy difficult unless oligarchy embeds itself into the state’s institutional framework in the form of bureaucracy—a move that wouldn’t happen for nearly a century. Otherwise, as in the novel, the modern state’s regime wavers between monarchy and democracy; under the well-designed framework of the American institutions, that had meant wavering between a strong Congress and a strong presidency. Democracy proves vulnerable to demagoguery and deception, whether religious or political. Founded as a tensile combination between ‘Abraham’ and ‘Ismael,’ the American regime of 1851 saw threats from both Southern oligarchs and restive democrats, neither of which much heeded the moral limitations of natural right. While democrats lauded America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the continent, Melville makes “destiny” manifest as a danger, not an inevitable happy ending. A better Young America would understand nature or the chaos-cosmos of the weaver god in a more careful way, soberly interweaving policy, including the policy of expansion, within the work of that ‘god,’ recognizing and avoiding demagogue-tyrants as they arise, encouraging commerce and industry without succumbing to venality. No aristocracy exists to guide Young America, but maybe Melville could. If, as one scholar puts it, Melville set himself the task of “reshap[ing] tragedy for a democratic (and American) audience” [2], as a lesson in much-needed moderation, his hero’s tragic flaw is dominant, his “humanities” recessive to the end. [3] Ahab rules his subjects by demagoguery, self-interest, and force, weapons lying around, as it were, in the commercial and democratic republican regime. Young America must learn to recognize such a man. It will fail to do so if immoderate and also if uncourageous—too timid, like Starbuck, or too rash and given to infect others with rashness, like Ahab. Ahab pits his personality against the impersonal weaver-god, but as John Alvis sees, “Personality is modernity’s substitute for soul” [4]. Melville doesn’t think the soul immortal, in the Christian sense, but he does want Young America to remember the soul, and to take care of it. In this, he wants what Lincoln wanted.

The weaver-god hears no mortal voice as it intertwines life and death. The ancients called this cosmic interweaving force Fate, supposing they saw it behind all the personal gods of their pantheon. Trellised by a lifeless framework, like the God of the Bible the weaver-god respects no persons but only because it is impersonal, not because it is impartial or just. American Transcendentalists were wrong to suppose it benign. American Progressives would make the same mistake. Marx was wrong to expect it to issue in a happy outcome. Nietzsche would be wrong to love it, although his pessimism of strength echoes some of Melville’s thoughts, even as it amplifies them too much. Transcendentalists had chosen the wrong symbolism to depict it; Melville deploys symbolism, too, but makes it compatible with his stern realism. Fate leaves room for chance or fortune, for randomness, also for human custom; despite these severe limitations, human beings can still ply the shuttle, exercise a modest freedom for good or evil. In politics, therefore, revolution or regime change and modest reform remain possible, although they require virtue and good fortune for success. The philosophic founders of modern science supposed that human beings can use their freedom to conquer nature and fortune; Melville thinks not. The ocean is too big. If he could see the technologies of later centuries, he would continue to say that the ocean is too big, pointing to the near-limitless cosmos beyond earth, with its imploding and exploding stars, its snake-spiraling nebulae (with their microcosmic counterparts, snake-stranding DNA), and its overall entropic careening, as an even more decisive refutation of human pretension. If the chaos-cosmos could speak, it too could ask the devastating rhetorical question, “Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?” Melville provides nature a sort of voice, derived from his experience of the ocean.

Rightly so humbled, human beings may still have self-knowledge and a measure of self-protection if they exercise genuine moderation, not Starbuck’s false moderation. “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” If you don’t, you won’t understand the underlying foundation of the chaos-cosmos, as in your thinking you will finally face the blank wall that tormented Ahab. It need not torment you, as it does him, leading him to ruin. You may never understand how or why human freedom can arise in the chaos-cosmos of fate. The blank wall Ahab finds at the end of his speculative thought defeats doctrines and systems religious or philosophic, but a mind alert to practical matters—how a ship works, how a political regime and a modern state work, and how such things might be made to work better—will find its “inner Tahiti.” Two deformations of Melville’s thought might come from this: pragmatism, which in American thought would put itself in the service of nature-conquest; and Epicureanism, an apolitical withdrawal from one’s country. Regarding the latter, Melville’s Ishmael may be an outsider, but he spins his yarn anyway, and Melville never set out for the territories to live as a hermit. He continued to intervene in American politics, in his subsequent writings.

What will guide practical reason? The chaos-cosmos, nature, may not lend itself to a doctrine of natural right, as the American founding generation maintained, but nature isn’t evil if decently treated. At its generative, original, ‘sperm’ level of being nature is pure, cleansing, offering human beings a natural baptism if not a foundation for a systematic natural religion. Nature affords a place for friendship and fraternity, so long as one doesn’t stare too long in the face of its fire, and so long as one accepts its carpenter-Christ as impersonal, the Christ of the Bible as human, as a man of sorrows.

Leviathan, the king of the proud, combines the bulk of the land with the movement of water; Leviathan’s spout mixes water with air. The `H’ of the word ‘whale’ denotes beholding, beholding the haishim, the fiery `souls’ of atoms postulated by Lucretius. Earth, water, air, fire: nature unites and balances opposites, as does its political equivalent, the modern state, as Mr. Madison saw. Nature is cannibalistic, self-devouring, a matter of life and death. The right way to understand it is with a pantheism of pessimism, a pessimism of strength. Expect little from it; do not be so foolish as to love it; reserve the agapic love Christianity teaches and the friendship-love of citizens for those fellow-humans who need and deserve it. The (perhaps) self-generating chaos-cosmos will kill you, but in so doing it self-regenerates, self-repairs. Cold comfort that is, but warmer comforts, material and soulful, remain to you in the meantime.

Ahab understands some of this, but not nearly enough. To the modern tyrant’s soul, ‘Being’ is alogos, a thing rightly worshiped only in defiance. In the plays of Shakespeare Melville so admired, he would rank with Richard III, not Lear or Prospero. Unlike Richard, however, he has not only political ambitions; unlike subsequent tyrants, he has no ‘ideological’ ambitions. Ahab’s ambitions are metaphysical. He rejects all that is ‘above’ him, navigating only by the ‘horizontal,’ what is around him. In this he partakes of democracy even as he tyrannizes, a practice Tocqueville would have expected, having studied Napoleon. Ahab contradicts himself, repeatedly, having taken the fluid sea as his solid rock. No human being can stand on that rock, much less walk on water and survive. Ahab would have needed to do one or the other, but he doesn’t want to be a man and he cannot be a god. After the fact, Ishmael rightly interprets the typhoon lightning strikes in Biblical terms—specifically, in terms of the Book of Daniel. Ishmael finds in Biblical prophecy cogent explanations of what has happened; he never ‘prophesies’ or predicts, claiming no access to the thoughts of a personal god. Charles Olson rightly understands Ishmael as the chorus for a tragedy in the form of a novel, not as would-be prophet. [5]

Ahab’s days were numbered; he had been weighed, found wanting; his state would split, sundered by the nature it sought to defeat. His regime, too, must split because its sole, a-logical ruler is ‘split’ among his many self-contradictions. Fire-worshipers crave freedom, but in gazing at the fire too long they become only greater slaves to fate, thinking not wisely but too wishfully in obedience to the false prophets they follow. Ahab would ‘save’ himself and even triumph by “pil[ing] on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Yet there is no reason to suppose that killing the Whale would cure Ahab’s soul; the chaos-cosmos will remain, whatever becomes of its symbol. Ishmael, who shares Ahab’s estimate of the whiteness of the Whale— “the palsied universe…lies before us a leper” —wisely avoids Ahab’s rage at it. Caught up in the general enthusiasm of the crew at crucial moments, and therefore no fit ruler, his soul reclaims its balance for the most part and in the end. Unlike his tyrant-captain, he does not weep over “The Symphony” of the elements, having so much less to regret. He sees that even at its most pacific, the sea-birds who skim the ocean’s surface are as white as the whale. Whiteness dominates the ocean tyrannically only when something or someone roils it. He seldom does.

If our souls are like orphans of unwed mothers, their fathers unknown, then philosophy must take the Socratic turn. That is, if orthodoxy, tradition, can mislead and if credulity can be foolish, so can incredulity. We don’t know enough for either. Ishmael scoffs at religious doctrines, but equally at the pretenses of modern science. Socratic inquiry through examination of orthodoxies and observations of the many human ‘types’ and political regimes is what philosophers can do. As for religious men, Solomon is the one Ishmael esteems, for his practical wisdom in speech and action. And if Socrates and Solomon are the Catskill eagles among men, the average citizen may need to think as the old Manxman does, with common sense. [6] Morally, his exemplar may well be the natural man, Queequeg—natural even to the point of cannibalism, in emulation of all nature—but also courageous, resourceful, adaptable to all regimes, a loyal friend, a wanderer and wonderer, like Ishmael. Ishmael doesn’t follow his friend into cannibalism of the literal kind, but he does argue that in a pantheistic universe we are all cannibals by necessity, himself included—all part of self-devouring, self-regenerating nature in one way or another. The ‘marriage’ or friendship of Queequeg and Ishmael serves as the equivalent of real marriage in Aristotle: the foundation of political life, in this case a pairing of a potential philosopher or (at least) an ‘intellectual’ and a man of courage, the alliance of reason and spiritedness commended by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. 

Wanderers won’t make citizens, but neither will philosophers, entirely. They will always hold fast in their inner core, observing and reasoning about their observations. Like citizens, and like wanderers Ishmael and Queequeg, philosophers will form friendships. They can become political philosophers, not mere isolatoes. If friendly, un-philosophic citizens also learn to recognize the kinds of men who endanger friendship, the tyrants, they can govern themselves. They need to see the virtues of Queequeg and Ishmael, as described by a political-philosophic poet, to strengthen themselves, and to smarten themselves up, for such civic friendship. Most will never be a Queequeg or an Ishmael, but most can learn things from them.

A decade after Melville published Moby-Dick, he and his fellow-Americans saw their own national tragedy, in which Ishmaels and Queequegs, Ahabs, Starbucks, Stubbs, and Flasks, along with many of the other characters in the novel, and some not there, came forward to enact a regime conflict ‘for real.’ Melville acted as the chorus in that tragedy, writing his poems, Battle-Pieces, as the events of the war coursed from beginning to end.

 

Notes

1. In this I depart from Charles Olson’s account (op. cit., 116-119) which takes the Pacific Ocean to be genuinely pacific. Nothing that harbors Moby-Dick can be genuinely pacific. And then there are the typhoons.
2.  George Schulman: “Chasing the Whale: Moby-Dick as Political Theory.” In Jason Frank, ed.: A Political Companion to Herman Melville.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 71.
3.  Olson makes much of Ahab’s ‘softening’ under the effect of Pip’s spirit (op. cit., 60-63). Ishmael makes it clear that he esteems the compassion Pip evokes—Ahab’s one tear being worth more than all the water in the ocean—but he also observes how Ahab overcomes that compassion with an act of will, as if this were the last temptation of the anti-Christ.
4.  John Alvis: “Moby-Dick and Melville’s Quarrel with America.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, No. 2, winter 1996, 239.
5.  Olson, op. cit., 58. Ishmael is, however, a one-man chorus; he does not represent the opinions of any political community.
6.  Olson sees the Catskill eagle in Ishmael (op. cit., 15) misses the common sense in the Manxman. He must, because he takes the American people to be represented by Ishmael, whereas Melville knows that an Ishmael must always be the exception, not the rule.