To sweetly perish in Plato’s honey head


6 April 2020 Day 14

Yesterday was my sister’s birthday. I wanted to go to her house, get the family together, and celebrate but we cannot risk it. She has four little girls and all of them are still healthy. Plus my mother is 75 and a lifetime smoker who refuses to shelter in place. For her birthday, I will build her a 4×4 raised bed. Which I will have to find a way to transport to her house! Maybe I will have to construct it there. It won’t be too difficult and I can make it in her back yard with cordless tools.

Melville’s whale has come to a head, literally. The Pequod has captured two whales, a sperm whale one day and a right whale the next. Both bodies are hauled to the ship, skinned, and then the heads are cut open for various purposes. The Sperm whale’s head is tunneled into and the spermacetti (a wax) is removed while the right whale’s only precious cargo is the baleen. But Melville uses these two whales as metaphors or allegory about why he hates certain philosophers.

“So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds forever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.” – Chapter 73, Stubb and Flask kill a Right whale; and then have a talk over him

My reading of this passage has changed the further I get into the book. With each subsequent chapter, Melville makes clear that he is in fact the one with both whale-heads weighing him down.

On the one side is Locke, the empiricist, the rationalist, who says that we can only know the world and ideas of the world through our senses. On the other is Kant and the idea of the sublime. Melville half-quotes Kant at the end of chapter 76, “But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais?”

Lifting the veil of Sais is a reference to the goddess Isis who, in 18th century romanticism, represented nature. Lifting the veil of Isis was a claim that science attempted to make in the 18th century, that science could reveal nature’s mysteries. But Kant rejected that, suggesting that the sublime will always remain unknowable: “Perhaps no one has said anything more sublime, or expressed a thought more sublimely, than in that inscription on the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is, all that was, and all that shall be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.”

Melville continues with this dualism in chapter 75 “this Right whale I take to have been a stoic; the Sperm whale a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.” This might seem difficult to parse because Plato’s ethics informed the Stoics and Platonian ideals and Stoic ethics get mashed together in some minds. But the Stoics were utilitarians, and they would later inform the works of Locke. What’s difficult here is that Stoics were the ones who made the gods corporeal entities. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy:

“The governing metaphor for Stoic cosmology is biological, in contrast to the fundamentally mechanical conception of the Epicureans. The entire cosmos is a living thing and God stands to the cosmos as an animal’s life force stands to the animal’s body, enlivening, moving and directing it by its presence throughout. The Stoics insistence that only bodies are capable of causing anything, however, guarantees that this cosmic life force must be conceived of as somehow corporeal.”

Spinoza’s position on god is similar but radically different. God isn’t a single being, as the Stoics would have you believe, but rather god is every element of being. Again the Stanford Encyclopedia illuminates:

“This proof that God—an infinite, necessary and uncaused, indivisible being—is the only substance of the universe proceeds in three simple steps. First, establish that no two substances can share an attribute or essence (Ip5). Then, prove that there is a substance with infinite attributes (i.e., God) (Ip11). It follows, in conclusion, that the existence of that infinite substance precludes the existence of any other substance. For if there were to be a second substance, it would have to have some attribute or essence. But since God has all possible attributes, then the attribute to be possessed by this second substance would be one of the attributes already possessed by God. But it has already been established that no two substances can have the same attribute. Therefore, there can be, besides God, no such second substance.”

In calling the Right whale the Stoic, and the Sperm whale Spinozian Melville explicitly rejects my main reading of the text, that Moby Dick is the living embodiment of (the Christian) god. My first read through of the book 20+ years ago, I came to the conclusion that Moby Dick is god, a vengeful god, and that Ahab is punished for his hubris.

Instead, I think Melville is saying that Moby Dick is god but everything is god. And when man tries to put himself above god (nature) and lift the veil of Isis, he will be punished.

In chapter 78, Tashtego falls into the Sperm whale’s head and the head falls into the ocean. Queequeg dives overboard and “delivers” Tash from the head via underwater cesarean – slicing open the bottom of the case and birthing Tashtego out into the world again. Melville ends the chapter thus:

“Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragment spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled- the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?”

Once again, we seem to be served up a metaphor which confuses. Plato’s honey head? Sweet death? I suspect we will learn more as Melville finishes these chapters on the biology of the whale. But for now I feel confident saying the death is a sweet one, because you are nestled in the case of Truth.

Oddly, these are the chapters most people say to skip. But they are the ones which most thoroughly explain Melville’s philosophy and reason for the book.

Qq

3 comments

  1. This is an unusually philosophical reading of Melville. As an admirer of Spinoza and his non-anthropomorphic god. I read your post with interest.

    “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.” The sum total of all the laws of universe.

  2. Thanks for the update Tim. Melville was obviously a great writer and philosopher. I have incredible admiration for anyone who has the patience and energy and intelligence to delve into the depths of Melville and Moby Dick. To each his own but it’s not for me.

  3. Interesting blog. I read Moby Dick many, many years ago and don’t recall much detail. Further, I am no philosopher, though I do think Seneca’s letters suggest a sensible approach to life and I deeply regret not having read them when I was a young man at the beginning of my career. I certainly couldn’t distinguish a Spinoza idea from a Kant thought. So I thought this was simply a tale about a somewhat twisted fella who went fishing.

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