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Chasing Moby Dick: eliminating the evil inclination? — 18 Comments

  1. Ahab was successful in destroying evil as he destroyed himself. Self destruction is the result of submitting to evil. This is the message I get from the story. Eliminating evil from one’s own life is the way of the Masters of all legitimate religious
    thought

  2. Beings without free will, that are just programed like computers and animals, cannot committ good or evil actions. A person understands intuitively that it takes a human being or a sapient being to committ evil or good actions. Some people think of animals as humans, but those are the PETA nutheads.

    To even have the concept of good and evil, requires epistemology and epistemology requires free will in the form of the moral agent, a human being. Or any being with free will.

    A person therefore cannot commit only Good actions nor can he committ only Evil actions. Because if he is incapable of doing Evil, then he is not Good. This is the balance principle. The concept of LIght would not exist without the concept of its opposite, Darkness.

    Again, metaphysics. Leading to ethics, good and evil.

    If you remove a person’s ability to committ evil or good actions, or destroy the Good or the Evil, then the only means to do that is to destroy free will.

    A person cannot choose to remove all Evil from himself, just as a person cannot choose to remove only the bad bacterial from his body. Good and Evil make up something greater than the sum of its parts. Remove the parts, and you remove the end result.

    Without free will, a person cannot be said to be a moral agent, responsible for his actions, nor responsible for evil or good.

    If you want to think that a cat that kills a mouse is evil, go ahead. If that is your personal philosophical belief, that a computer that goes on the fritz and disables ATC that then downs a plane full of children, did an evil thing because he just didn’t know any better, then by all means, continue to believe so.

    But that is not the philosophy I hold to.

    Free will isn’t the lack of perception. It is the difference between lower orders of life and higher orders of life, for the religious people that would be after Adam ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Symbolizing the acceptance of free will, free from the dictates of God.

    The idea of responsibility factors into place whether a person knew what his actions would cause and or not. Therefore the difference between manslaughter and murder, a moral as well as a legal difference.

    If it was as you said, that reality worked no different based upon what people knew about their actions, then Good and Evil would not take into intentions. But it does.

    And so you have a conflict in your own personal philosophy, which says that if a person did not realize he was doing evil, he would still be doing the same evil as if he did know.

    That isn’t how justice works nor even how the world works.

    People’s knowledge and intentions, do matter. And the reason they matter is because free will is not about choosing, the is about the ability to choose.

  3. See, I am a bit confused here. about what you write Ymarsakar.
    You say that evil and good a product of free will. Why?

    Free will allows you to choose one or the other, but does choosing make it so? My answer is no. Evil and good are constant things as concrete as any concept can be. So doing evil is always evil. What free will does is make us responsible for the evil we have done. With out free will we would still do evil things but we would not realize what we were doing. Our lack of perception though would not change the true reality.

  4. I wouldn’t get up in the morning for Ahab or Moby Dick. Just not interested, not like you Neo.

    But the greater philosophical points you make concerning the elimination de facto of Evil, and on the particulars of it being either accomplishable nor to the Good, does bring interest.

    I look at it from a philosophical POV, not a theological or literature pov.

    To me, evil and good are manifestions of free will. Therefore one way to eliminate evil is to eliminate free will. If people can’t choose something, then they can’t comitt evil overtly or subtly.

    Creation and Destruction, are another manifestion of the dichotomy. One cannot truly create if one cannot truly destroy. Destroy the function of destruction, and creation will stagnate and grow mutinous. Destroy creation, and you will have ever living death, never renewal or birth.

    If good and evil is in everyone, then a socialist utopian might think that a central controlling body like the government can create Good by subjecting the masses into decisions they have not chosen.

    If evil is served by the existence of Bush, and good is served by the destruction of Bush, then all means are appropriate in getting rid of Bush. And much good would result, de facto according to the logical axiom.

    Bad reasoning eventually catches up to you. Especially with an improper and stupid understanding of Good and Evil by socialists, economics, and businesses. They don’t know what Evil is, so how they can lie that they know how to fight it?

    Ahab doesn’t realize that the evil is in him, his obsession and his vengeance.

    Removing evil or good would eliminate free will. A steam engine needs all its parts, not 1/2 of its parts.

    Attempting to conquer evil is not foolish at all, so long as the moral agent understands the problem and the solution.

    Eliminating free will isn’t a bad thing at all. Not if you ask the Democrats, not if you ask the Socialists, and not if you ask Mister Democracy is against God’s will Zarqawi.

  5. Wonderful post and comments.

    In reading all of it, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” which takes the Moby Dick symbolism in a slightly different direction. It is almost as if he combines the whale and Ahab in his monstrous Judge. One of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.

  6. Hm, No I would have to disagree with the notion that to remove evil would mean the removal of free will. The fact that people choose to do evil things, is true, but we also choose to do good. Removeing free will would eliminate the posability to do either.

    Neo-Necon: An intresting take on Ahab and the White wale. I’ll have to reread the book, and probably read it more closely than I did the first time (in high school). But, it would strike me that if Ahab thought to destroy Moby Dick, and thus destroy evil, he was foolish, not because the world can not ultimately work with out evil, but because man can not destroy something more powerfull then them. Catholicism would say that to win such a battle against evil one needs the Grace of God. By which we are raised to a level of power greater than our own, because it is God’s. To atempt to conquer evil on our own in foolish and vain and thus will fail. Which perhaps can be put on the long list of interpretations of Moby Dick.

  7. Because evil arises from the expression of certain aspects of human nature it can only be eliminated by eliminating free will. That would definitely be a bad thing!

  8. The Talmud is being misquoted.

    The impulse that was captured for three days was the sexual impulse – and that’s why no chicken laid an egg for three days.

    Enigmatically – as is par for Talmudic parables – the sexual urge is released after the sages “line its eyes with kohl”. To enhance its lures? Or so the besotted may see more clearly? Up to the reader… remember, this is the culture that considers the Song of Solomon a holy book, and counsels that marital sex on Sabbath eve is semi-sacred.

    In the same passage, the sages capture and destroy the impulse to idolatry. The force of pagan worship nowadays is therefore assumed to be diminished from what it once was.

    “Evil” is described in Jewish texts as the “yetzer haRa” – the word “yetzer” literally translates as “creator” or “creative urge”.

    So it’s the “Bad Creative Urge”. In this sense the garbled quote is faithful to the original.

    This same impulse is described as “Satan” – a word whose Hebrew root means “one who leads astray” or “deceiver”. In traditional Jewish imagery, Satan (and the Angel of Death) is presented as a drunken fool.

    Evil in Judaism is therefore a misapprehension of truth, or a failure to live up to truth. There is no kingdom or prince of evil whose power/weight equals that of G-d. Instead, choosing falsehood(=injustice) leads to evil. And since G-d is life, it leads also to death.

  9. What a nice post, neo-neo con. I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you!

    That bit of Jewish Philosphy kinda reminds me of the recent movie called Serenity, where the Galactic (or is it Solar System?) Government tries to get rid of the dark side of humanity only to discover that most of the people lose the will to do anything (and a fragment of people become reavers).

    I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that ‘The end of Evil would the the end of History (or Time or Humanity or _insert ones own perspective_)’. It just seems too … contained within abstract or conceptual boundaries for my tastes.

    I’d like to believe that we would somehow… struggle on … without Evil. But that is just my take on things. 🙂

  10. Freud is a direct intellectual/philosophic descendant of the talmudic and hassidic sages. They knew human psychology inside and out.

  11. I like to read Moby Dick in layers. That is, from the most literal to the most symbolic — the text has depth enough to make this approach useful.

    The most literalistic level is that of a straightforward, Conrad-esque seagoing adventure. It works this way, so it is a foolhardy reader who insists that a simple reading cannot also be “correct”.

    Once you start reading Melville’s novel in terms of symbol and metaphor, it tends to take on the character of the reader rather than Melville — that is because the protagonist (Ahab) and the antagonist (the whale) are almost neutral in terms of cultural context: the reader may identify with Ahab, the Whale, Ishmael, Queequeg, or even a secondary character like Stubb or Starbuck.

    One metaphor that Melville certainly intended was the dichotomy between Ahab and the whale he chases. Moby Dick, to Ahab, reprents a vast and chaotic (perhaps even a malignant) universe. And yet Moby Dick is in reality simply an animal, a soulless beast who acts on instinct and not out of any sense of anger or vengeance.

    Ahab is told (by Starbuck, I think) that it is a sin to hate a dumb animal, and there is the central lesson of the book: Ahab’s road to perdition was not lust or drink or gambling; it was the vice of pride, in thinking himself important enough to be the target of God’s wrath (through Moby Dick). To hate the whale in the way Ahab hates him is to hate God. (Ahab makes this clear himself when he says, “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.”

    There is a raft of graduate-level symbolism inherent in the “inscrutable malice” Ahab sees.

  12. I see this is all a plever cloy on the part of Neo to get me to write something about the novel. I may yet be drawn into it since I’ve read the book at least 9 times over the years and am probably due for another pass. Right after the 14 books already on my desk and the seven due from Amazon.

    That said, Moby Dick is the most protean of our novels. Indeed it is among the most protean of all novels. As far as the eternal quest among our contemporaies for the “great American novel” it should be thown over since that book has been written and it is Moby Dick. After its initial publication in 1851 it quickly tanked and vanished from publishers’ lists. In a way, it prefigured Melville’s slide into obscurity. The world was not ready for Moby Dick or Melville. It took about fifty years for the world to catch up and it is still catching up today. Moby Dick and the Pequod are destined to sail forever just beyond our ability to grasp them.

    On the one hand, any book as great as Moby Dick acquires around it a nimbus of meaning other than what was intended by the other or more than was intended. That’s the nature of great works of art. They live and accrue meaning long after their creators are dust. Hence, it is impossible for us to see Moby Dick as it originally appeared. We can only see it through the glass of ourselves and the veil of our times. In a way, that’s good since it “makes it new” by default.

    Rather than get into my own way of framing Moby Dick (I’ll leave that for another time.), I’d just point to the most commentary I’ve read about it and that shaped my own thinking.

    There are two books I’d look at to get, not the nub of Moby Dick, but to at least have the book bracketed.

    The first is that title that is probably the greatest work of American literary criticism and central to a deeper understanding of America itself, F. O. Matthiessen’s American renaissance; art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman.

    This book is, it seems, forever out of print — a condemnation of what passes for literary criticism in academia today — and is a bit hard to condense in a comments section. Briefly it seeks to understand why five of the greatest works of 19th century American literarture [Melville’s Moby-Dick, multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and Thoreau’s Walden.] all came into existence between 1850 and 1855. I also note that this same period saw some of the strongest work of our greatest American poet, Emily Dickenson, created. Matthiessen’s explication of how and why this was so is worthy of an essay in and of itself. I’ll just note that this work is key and let it go at that.

    The second, and much more dated and flawed book, is Studies in Classic American Literature by D.H. Lawrence. Unlike “American renaissance,” the Lawrence rants are available on line.

    Here’s a brief excerpt from this effort,which now reads as a bit hysterical in tone, but is still of value.

    D.H. Lawrence, Classic Studies in American Literature, Chapter 11

    ‘The ship! Great God, where is the ship?’

    Soon they, through dim bewildering mediums, saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of the water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking look- outs on the sea. And now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight –

    The bird of heaven, the eagle, St John’s bird, the Red Indian bird, the American, goes down with the ship, nailed by Tashtego’s hammer, the hammer of the American Indian. The eagle of the spirit. Sunk!

    Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

    So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.

    But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

    The terrible fatality.

    Fatality.

    Doom. Doom! Doom! Doom!

    Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.

    Doom! Doom of what? Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

    Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

    Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed.

    The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

    The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’ That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

    The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

    What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness.

    We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will.

    And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

    The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood- self subjected to our will.

    Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

    Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

    Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk? She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam. Now what next?

    Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

    Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer. The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul.

    She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business- like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them. Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

    To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED. Consummatum est!

    But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?

    Post-mortem effects, presumably.

    Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.
    ========

    No real conclusions to be found in Lawrence at this date, but there are some hints.

  13. Actually, Ahab goes down with the whale. And then the whale takes the ship down. And the ship takes the eagle down. But the coffin bobs up and Ishmael takes a float until the Rachel comes along.

  14. The unanswered, and unasked question is, “… And then what?” If Ahab kills the whale, does he go home and have lunch? Live happily ever after? Enter a retirement home and spend his remaining days retelling the tale to his singular friend? In doing so, he would become a much more pathetic and worthless human being than he was when he was chasing the whale. It’s always the quest itself that’s more valuable than the result of the quest. This is what defines the human condition: an ongoing struggle, not to defeat evil, but in doing so to become something that one is not. By exceeding one’s boundaries and becoming greater than the enemy, one experiences personal evolution. Like the vision in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the man bites the head off of the snake that had crawled into his throat, spat the head of the snake far away, and sprang up, a transfigured, light-surrounded being that laughed.

    I would characterize Ahab as experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrom from having had is leg bitten off by the beast. I see similar emotional scars carried by all too many people, especially military personnel, and there being way too little assistance in helping people heal those scars and integrate their experiences. I hear stories all the time of soldiers who cry for months, years, their whole life after a horrific experience. The slightest thought, song, or sight can set them off. I’ve got my scars that I don’t care to describe. I suspect that most people have their own scars in some way. I think military people are trained not to take up an Ahabian vendetta. But there’s still little understanding or guidance to go from an Ahab consumed with vengeance to that transformed, light-surrounded being that laughs at evil in Zarathustra’s vision.

  15. Neo, your post reminded me of an interview with Cpt. Fick I watched on C-Span. After Baghdad fell he took his men to visit Babylon so they would gain some insight about Iraq and Iraqi’s. When they arrived an older man was waiting and offered them a tour. The first thing the old man said was “Call me Ishmael”.

    -Mike

  16. to vanderleun:

    Perhaps I misunderestimated :-)?

    Yes, indeed all aboard here are one. That’s what I was at least attempting to get at with the last part of the essay–that one can’t separate out the evil impulse and expect it not to affect everything and everybody.

    In my original version of the essay, I’d included the beginnings of a riff on yin and yang (I even found a picure of the yin-yang symbol for a visual), and was trying to tie it all together. But I ran out of steam and hit the delete button. Ah, well.

  17. A reasonable meditation, but you’ve misunderstood (or, say rather, “underestimated”) the more protean nature of the white whale. While this might work if you merely consider the whale as a symbol, but it doesn’t work — or rather falls short — when you see that the whale is drawn larger than a symbol and rises to the level of emblem and avatar.

    To further complicate the matter, you should consider that the whale and the Pequod and all who are aboard here are one.

  18. Excellent! The sin of hubris, the tragic flaw, followed by the fall as events; inevitable, foreshadowed; unwind. Starbuck cannot act; his Quaker pacifism prevents him from killing Ahab. The scribe alone remains to tell the tale.

    It is possible to mine Melville for a lifetime of illumination. My favorite book as a child; not because I understood it, I simply loved the Weyth illustrations in my abridged kid’s copy.

    The first thing that occurred to me as I read the ending of your essay was this post by Dr. Sanity on healthy and unhealthy narcissism and the continuing series by shrinkwrapped on the same theme.

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