Moby-dick As Philosophy : Plato - Melville - Nietzsche (9780996772518) by Anderson Mark

Author:Anderson, Mark [Anderson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996772518
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 76:

The Battering-Ram

This chapter of Moby-Dick, in which Ishmael continues his commentary on the Sperm Whale’s massive head, concludes with an allusion to the inarticulable horror that “befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais.” Plutarch preserves the ancient account of a cloaked statue of Isis that once stood in the Egyptian city of Sais, but Melville relies more immediately on Schiller’s poem “The Veiled Statue at Sais.” According to the narrative therein related, hidden behind the statue’s veil is nothing less than Truth itself. When a young Egyptian seeker of knowledge learns of this from a priest, he immediately longs to expose the truth so as to learn it, to possess it; but the priest warns him off by appealing to the deity’s own prohibition against lifting her veil. Nevertheless, the brash young man will not be dissuaded. He returns to the temple at midnight, and sneaking over the walls he approaches the goddess. Standing then before the Truth incarnate, he removes the veil and gazes excitedly on it. What does he see? No one knows, for when he was found the following morning passed out before the statue, an expression of dread distorting his pallid mask of a face, he refused to speak it. Nor did he ever after disclose the secret. His remaining days he passed in sorrow, and he died the premature death of a wrecked man.

Nietzsche alludes to this story in the first section of the second book of The Gay Science. Headed “To the realists,” the passage expresses Nietzsche’s rejection of realism, realism in this instance being the idea that “the world really is the way it appears to you.” Nietzsche mocks the realists’ naive belief that reality stands unveiled before them, their refusal to acknowledge the “human contribution” to our experience of reality. This human contribution, according to Nietzsche, includes the most fundamental elements of our experience of reality: the “erroneous articles of faith” that “there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be,” also that there are “lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces,” and “cause and effect.” Now just consider for a moment your conception of the world, then subtract from it all things and even the very notion of thinghood. What is left of a world from which enduring things have been withdrawn, not to mention the atoms of which things—and even the lines and planes of which three-dimensionality itself—are composed? A world without any “arbitrary division and dismemberment” into individual things causally related one to another would be an undifferentiated blur, a field of indistinguishable distortion, a world, in short, without Being, and therefore a radically Heraclitean “continuum and … flux.” If the human contribution is indeed so extensive, then, Nietzsche concludes, “There is no ‘reality’” independent of it, no more for the realist than for the anti-realist. And notice the scare-quotes in which he encloses the word reality: the letters spell out the mere ghost of an idea, an empty concept.

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