Moby-Dick and Schopenhauer (Critical Essay)

Most human suffering, Schopenhauer says, is inflicted by men themselves: "homo homini lupus," man is a wolf for man. "In general," Schopenhauer adds, "the conduct of men towards each other is characterised as a rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness, nay, cruelty: an opposite course of conduct appears only as an exception" (3: 388). Although Melville sometimes traced human suffering to a Hardy-like malicious supernatural force, in the last analysis he held human beings themselves responsible for human suffering, as Schopenhauer had done. In this "wolfish world" (7: 62), Ishmael remarks, "we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included" (7: 176). Moby-Dick presents man as a sordid, mercenary creature. "The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man," thinks Ahab, "is sordidness" (7: 266-67). Believing that "man is a money-making animal" (8: 168), Stubb speculates that Pip would be of less value to the crew than the whale. "Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?" asks Ishmael, and brings out human rapacity involved, for example, in the entire colonial enterprise: "What is India to England" but a kind of "Loose-Fish" (8: 147). "There is no folly of the beasts of the earth," he sums up, "which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men" (8: 130).

In Schopenhauer's scheme, while pain is one major fact of life, the other is ennui, which sets in as soon as there is respite from want or struggle. Thus "life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui ... after man had transferred all pain and torments to hell, there then remained nothing over for heaven but ennui" (1: 402). Perhaps Melville's most classic portrayal of ennui occurs in Pierre, in which the extravagant bliss of Pierre's early life inevitably invites ennui. In Moby-Dick, ennui could be one of the reasons, perhaps the most salient, why Ishmael goes to sea. To be sure, his motives are mixed, and he has "little or no money" in his purse. But, more importantly, having "nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world" (7: 1).

Schopenhauer believed the way to salvation to lie not in the destruction of the self, but in the denial of the will and in remaining unseduced by its importunities. In such a state, the "will ... turns away from life; it now shudders at the pleasures in which it recognises the assertion of life." Man "now attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true indifference, and perfect will-lessness" (1: 489-90). The denial of the will is "the only radical cure of the disease of which all other means are only palliations or anodynes" (1: 468).

Critics have shown the presence of Schopenhauerian resignation in characters such as Bartleby and Billy Budd. In Moby-Dick, the dominant mood is struggle and defiance, but the spirit of resignation is not altogether absent. In the celebrated Hindu scripture The Bhagavad Gita, the ideal man is said to be a sthitpragna, a "steadfast" person, who remains indifferent to pain and pleasure and retains his equilibrium in all circumstances: "He who feels neither excitement nor repulsion ... who is beyond good and evil ... whose soul is the same in honour or disgrace, who is beyond heat or cold or pleasure or pain, who is free from the chain of attachments" is on his way to attain salvation. (9) Buddhism, which Schopenhauer greatly admired, locates happiness in detachment from the things of the world.

The ability to retain equipoise and remain unmoved in all situations--a prelude to, as well as a product of, the spirit of renunciation advocated by Schopenhauer--is best seen in Ishmael. When being hired as a whaling hand on the Pequod, he does not seem to care what wages he is offered. Later, standing in the masthead to look out for passing whales, he often falls into a meditative reverie and loses track of such mundane concerns as spotting whales. He is painfully conscious of "the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort" (7: 73) and "the vanity of glory ... the insanity of life" (7: 187). He holds that "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" (8: 117). Describing the whale's blubber, Ishmael turns the commonplace subject into occasion for high speculation and spiritual admonition: "Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own" (8: 33).

Queequeg also shows this equipoise. Ishmael's initial distrust gives way to increasing admiration for Queequeg's lofty indifference to external events. Ishmael marvels that thrown "some twenty thousand miles from home ... thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter," Queequeg "yet seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that" (7: 61).

Subconsciously aware of the suicidal nature of his enterprise, Ahab yet pursues Moby-Dick with determination, undeterred by the prospect of failure. In so doing he epitomizes Gita's ideal that one must act without undue concern as to the outcome. In "The Symphony," Ahab comes close to showing, briefly, a spirit of resignation, soon, however, to fall back into defiance.

It is perhaps Starbuck who comes closest to being the ideal detached and steadfast person. Although only thirty years old, he has the wisdom commonly associated with long experience of life: "Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds" (7: 141). Fittingly it is when analyzing Starbuck that Ishmael remarks that "man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes" (7: 143), and justifies his ascribing "high qualities, though dark" to, and "weaving ... tragic graces" around, "meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways" (7: 144).

Schopenhauer presents a bleak view of human sexuality as an ignoble slavery to nature. It is the reproductive hunger of the individual, he suggests, that keeps mankind chained to the wheel of life. In "The Tartarus of Maids," Melville allegorically presents sexuality as vulnerability, and seems with Schopenhauer to hold procreation as a prison house and an enslavement to nature.

Both Schopenhauer and Melville were struck by the illusive nature of female beauty. Schopenhauer argues that nature endows women with a fleeting beauty to further its agenda of perpetuating the species. (10) In Moby-Dick, Ishmael concludes his reflections on "The Whiteness of the Whale" with a theory of the "natural philosophers" that all "earthly hues" other than white, including "the butterfly cheeks of young girls," are "but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only lain on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within" (7: 244). Melville, of course, does not share Schopenhauer's pejorative view of women. Yet Ishmael speaks disparagingly of "the mere negative, feminine" quality of "submission and endurance" (8: 119). In the "largely masculine world of Melville's writings," (11) women play only a peripheral role.

Like Freud, Schopenhauer considered excessive repression damaging to personality. If a person repressed his instincts too much, he believed, they tended to become fixed ideas which could lead in the end to the madhouse. Thus Ahab's frenzied vengeance could be partly due to repression. Marrying a young girl when he was past fifty, he sailed for Cape Horn the very next day, "leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife? wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive!" In his forty years of continual whaling, "forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time," he has not spent three ashore. With "the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow," he has been "more a demon than a man" (8: 327-28). Schopenhauer saw madness as an escape from "violent mental suffering or unexpected and terrible calamities." If the sorrow or painful knowledge "becomes altogether unbearable ... then, terrified Nature seizes upon madness as the last resource of life" (1: 250; emphasis Schopenhauer's). Ahab clearsightedly points out to the blacksmith the relation between excruciating misery and madness (cf. 8: 258). Schopenhauer had also been struck by the similarity between madness and genius (1: 251). Pip's near drowning turns him mad in the eyes of his shipmates, but "man's insanity," says Ishmael, is "heaven's sense" (8: 170). Far from being an affliction, madness can thus become a strategy of survival and a means of enhanced insight.

Melville shared Schopenhauer's adverse view of church, dogma, and orthodoxy. Schopenhauer had an interest in, and considerable knowledge of, several religions. He praised Buddhism and Hinduism for their insight and found in them much that was congenial. "The ancient wisdom of the human race," he says, "will not be displaced by what happened in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian philosophy streams back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought" (1: 460-61). Bryan Magee rightly remarks that "of the major figures in Western philosophy Schopenhauer is the one who has most in common with Eastern thought." (12)

Melville, too, was not at all parochial in his approach to the religions of the world, frequently using ideas, symbols, legends, and myths from many of them in his writings, as critics such as James Baird, Dorothee Finkelstein, and H. Bruce Franklin have shown. (13) In Moby-Dick, Melville reaches out to the religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition and uses them for thematic and structural purposes. He refers to the reincarnation of Vishnu as Leviathan to illustrate pictorial representation of the whale (7: 332) and to enhance "the honor and glory of whaling," and points out that Vishnu himself was "a whaleman" (8: 104). Ishmael, at first suspicious of Queequeg's pagan ways, becomes more liberal when he comes in close contact with him: "a man can be honest in any sort of skin," he thinks (7: 26), adding that Queequeg is a "human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him" (7: 30). Interestingly, Ishmael's recognition of Queequeg's humanity is followed by a traumatic recollection of the harsh and inhuman behavior of his own stepmother (7: 31-32). Ishmael not only sheds religious bigotry, but (after, to be sure, an internal debate comparable to Huck's who decides to risk going to hell to save Jim) joins Queequeg in pagan worship. "How elastic our stiff prejudices grow," he sums up, "when love once comes to bend them" (7: 66).

Like Aristotle before and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) after him, Schopenhauer was primarily a philosopher who yet showed unusual insight into aesthetic problems as well as an abiding interest in literature and art. According to Schopenhauer, art probes beneath surface reality to get at universal truth. Melville, too, came to regard sensuously perceived objects as "pasteboard masks" behind which lurk deeper meanings that are truth, which it is the artist's prime responsibility to discover and convey. Brodhead rightly says that "Melville increasingly identified literature as a vehicle of revelation." (14) Both Schopenhauer and Melville regard the essential truth about human life and the world to be tragic, and hence give pride of place among literary forms to tragedy, which expresses the truth most forcefully. Schopenhauer reserves highest praise for tragedy, calling it "the summit of poetical art" (1: 326), because it portrays "the wail of humanity, the reign of chance and error, the fall of the just, the triumph of the wicked" (3: 212). In "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Melville praises Hawthorne for his "great power of blackness" (13: 129), for powerfully embodying in his works the tragic experience of mankind. Melville's major novels not only express the tragic spirit but also emulate the form of tragedy, so that Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Billy Budd have all been studied as tragedies. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael refers to "the black tragedy of the melancholy ship" (8: 262), and, since "all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me" (7: 183), justifies weaving "tragic graces" round "meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways" (7: 144). Ahab is elevated to the stature of a tragic hero through an array of devices, most saliently through grandiose imagery.

Schopenhauer believed that Nature was solicitous of the species but negligent of the individual: "For it is not the individual, but only the species that Nature cares for, and for the preservation of which she so earnestly strives" (1: 356). Nature "cares only for the preservation of the species," the individual being "nothing to it" (1: 425). In a similar vein, Ishmael finds "the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water ... if ever the world is to be again flooded ... then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies" (8: 228).

Behind the broad agreement between Schopenhauer and Melville on a range of issues, what serves as a fundamental unifying force is their similar attitude toward life. Schopenhauer looks upon life as "a business which does not cover its expenses," and upon man as "a being whose existence is a punishment and an expiation" (3: 383; 391). In Moby-Dick, Melville brings out the tragic nature of human destiny. His dark vision of man at the mercy of instinctual drives and irrational forces he can neither understand nor control is entirely in consonance with Schopenhauer's thinking.

Moby-Dick, to be sure, also contains elements quite unlike Schopenhauer's mode of expression, such as humor and wit. Moreover, Ishmael distinguishes between "high abstracted man alone" and "mankind in mass" (8: 232), finding that "man, in the ideal is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature" (7: 143). Schopenhauer's inflexibly negative view of human nature can accommodate no such distinction. Finally, quite unlike Schopenhauer, Moby-Dick holds out the possibility of joy in human life, even though a slender one. "While ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me," Ishmael remarks, "deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy" (8: 136). Starbuck murmurs to himself: "if we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half-way, to cheer." But he feels constrained to add: "Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!" (8: 190-91). Ishmael holds that "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" (8: 182). Even Ahab admits: "So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me" (8: 310; my emphasis). The "bright" side remains merely "theoretic" and pales into insignificance beside the pressing reality of the "dark side."

Schopenhauer and Melville, understandably, also differ in approach and emphasis. A systematic philosopher, Schopenhauer presents a reasoned, comprehensive, and sweeping image of man and the world within a schematic framework. Melville, notwithstanding his passion for metaphysical speculation, retains the vision, perspective, and method of the literary artist, seeking to convey his vision through indirection--through symbols, images, and myths rather than through statement and explication, through intuition rather than through reasoning.

Within these limits, however, the two writers show a remarkable similarity of views on a host of important issues. Since Schopenhauer's direct influence on Melville could have occurred only after the writing and publication of Moby-Dick, what we confront is the phenomenon of two profound and original thinkers, working in different languages and cultures, yet arriving at similar conclusions on fundamental issues of human existence. Schopenhauer, too, had reached philosophical positions that he acknowledged as being very close to those of Buddhism before becoming acquainted with Eastern thought in late 1813 through the orientalist Friedrich Maier.

It is only in terms of their remarkable congeniality of views that one can explain Melville's fascination with Schopenhauer's works when these finally became accessible in the last years of Melville's life, to the extent that in his final illness, what he read "when able to study" was a set of Schopenhauer's writings. (15) As Shurr remarks, in Schopenhauer Melville "seems to have found a kindred spirit and confirmation for some of his own most deeply held opinions." While Schopenhauer remains perhaps the most literary among philosophers, Melville, to use Shurr's words, is "the most intellectual and philosophical of our canonical writers." (16) As a result, in Moby-Dick "the pressure of passionate philosophical surmise" keeps disrupting the line of narration. (17) Like his own Captain Vere in his chosen "fine of reading," Melville found in Schopenhauer "confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts--confirmation which he had vainly sought in social converse" (13: 29). A study of similarities between Schopenhauer and Moby-Dick on matters philosophical and aesthetic, and of the frequent occurrence in the novel of Schopenhauerian ideas and motifs, throws light on important aspects of Melville's thought and art, and helps explore an exciting chapter in crosscultural encounter and the history of ideas.


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"We find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which - a voice speaks."
- Arthur Schopenhauer