Three basic principles underlie the post-modernistic critique of literary interpretation (and, by extension, other social sciences).

First Principle

The first is that one should have no compunctions about taking a philosophical approach.  There is no point simply in juxtaposing one text against another.  This does not however invalidate the need for, or the utility of, an attempt at deep analysis beyond the text’s workable surface.  “[T]he most powerful and apposite readings of literary works may be those that treat them as philosophical gestures by teasing out the implications of their dealings with the philosophical oppositions that support them” (Culler, 1982, p. 149).

Second Principle

The second is that the structuralist tradition gives short shrift to other alternative accounts, which simply are different, or potentially even more explanatory.  An unequivocal interpretation of a text is a “privileged reading” that simply “suits our purposes” whereas “to be authentic in (our) postmodern condition” is “to admit the indistinguishable fictionality of all interpretive models” (Waugh, 2001, p. 304).

Paul Ricoeur (1970) originated this critique of structural discourse.  Any attempt to discern the meaning of a text hypothesizes a gap between its “real” meaning and its “apparent” meaning.  Consequently one believes the text “presents us with a challenge to believe that [its] true meaning … emerges only through interpretation” (Stewart, 1989, p. 296).  We become “suspicious” of the text.  What is required in order to alleviate this “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a radical critique of the very possibility of understanding and interpreting the text, to begin with (Gadamer, 1984, p. 73).

Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Heidegger all engaged in this style of analysis.  It leads, however, to another problem, which is that each of them perpetuated singular world-views, inconsistent with the others.  This argument now primarily is associated with Jacques Derrida (1967) and deconstructionism.  For example, Homer schematized persons into “heroes” and everybody else.  Dante’s paradigm was sinners versus saints.  Western philosophy is based on the concept that individuals are “rational,” which entails its opposite; and the Judeo-Christian tradition’s views of all of us as creatures of God.  “All these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle” (Waugh, 2001, p. 354).  None is transferable or for that matter even intelligible to any of the others.  Rather than “adding up” to a composite whole, they “cancel each other out.”  Derrida characterizes this as a “demand for narrative.”  However, “No one inflection enjoys any absolute privilege, no meaning can be fixed or decided upon.  No border is guaranteed, inside or out,” (1979, p. 87, p. 78). (1)

Derrida’s theme has been echoed in the works of philosophers in the British-American academic community such as Richard Rorty (1981).  Says Rorty, both contemporary analytic (e.g., Wittgenstein) and continental philosophy (e.g., Heidegger) offer “parallel deconstructions of philosophy’s traditional claim to privilege, to be the discipline that adjudicates the claims to knowledge advanced by the others.”  There is “no such foundation to knowledge.  Each discipline offers its own way of knowing, and philosophy should not place itself in a position of privilege vis-à-vis these ways of knowing” (Dasenbrock, 1989, p. 9).

In the social sciences, Max Weber averred that nature is blank – a tabula rosa, with universal and unconditionally valid laws. (2)  We then in turn impose culture onto it and culture recursively makes us the types of beings we are.  To continue with the above example, there really were heroes for Homer and there really were sinners for Dante.  The Greeks had heroes (instead of saints) with their respective attributes because that’s what challenged them as they existed in their spatio-temporal environment.  Someone like Odysseus is both a cultural precipitate and a cultural catalyst.  Homer’s template has no inherent or atemporal meaning.  It pertained, to the extent it did, only to the culture he described.  Different cultural perspectives best are regarded as typological categorizations or ways of parsing nature.

As expressed by the Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus:

The Greeks … lived in a moral space that gave direction and meaning to their lives.  In the same way, the Medieval cathedral made it possible to be sinner or a saint and showed Christians the dimensions of salvation and damnation.  In either case, one knew where one stood and what one had to do. … For the Greeks, what showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians, saints and sinners, rewards and temptations.  There could not have been saints in Ancient Greece.  At best there could only have been weak people who let everybody walk all over them.  Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages.  Such people would have been regarded as pagans – prideful sinners who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God.

(Dreyfus, 2008).

Structuralist interpretations, on the other hand, strive to an inherent meaning from the text.  The resulting synchronic paradigm comes at the expense of any plurality of interpretations.  There always is something contradictory about mapping the open and unfolding processes of narrative on to static or circulating structures.  Structuralist analysis of narrative are “like trying to account for a game of solitaire by demonstrating that the pack was organized into four suits of thirteen different values”  (Connor, 2004, p. 64).  Most structuralists prefer their own interpretations, but even as they do, their bias must be based on the prospect that many other interpretations are possible – a possibility they dismiss.

Third Principle

A third problem is that of the author’s “intent,” to the extent it is possible even to hypothesize such a state of mind.  Most structuralist readings depend on extra-textual evidence and biographical facts about the author’s life.  They frequently however do not support the proffered interpretation, or beleaguers it even further because they are inconsistent with the text itself.  Under Derrida’s view the author cannot control the meaning of the text, since it functions autonomously from authorial intention.  A text can have multiple meanings, one of which might be intended, but none of which uniquely are compelled.

Dreyfus’ colleague at Berkeley, John Searle, addressed this issue in the context of his theory of intention.  In his influential debate with Derrida, Searle (1994) says there are two ways to interpret a text: one based on “literal sentence meaning” and another based on “speaker meaning.”  Under the former, “the meaning of the text consists in the meanings of the words and sentences of which it consists.”  The latter is “what the writer intends to mean” (within the confines of the language and background assumptions of which the text is a narrative).  In this second sense one must “insist on understanding the author’s intentions in understanding the text” (p. 652).

Searle invites us to consider a hypothetical case where one comes across a series of marks on a beach somehow comprising the words to a verse of Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”  “[T]hese marks certainly look as if they constituted a sentence composed of English words,” but it isn’t necessary for them to have been produced intentionally (p. 649), unless they were.  “[D]ifferent tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions” (p. 658), some of which might be opaque (as with this particular example).  These different approaches are not necessarily incompatible.  They are not “competing answers to the same question, but noncompeting answers to quite different questions” (p. 655).

Searle can be read as supporting a structuralist program.  If the meaning of a text can be derived from its words and sentences then it may cohere into a single, intra-textual perspective (subject to Derrida’s critique).  One also can appeal to the author’s overt statements and background for evidence as to what he or she meant.  Even on this second definition, though, most structuralist readings fall short simply because the lives of authors have numerous internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

An Example – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

To illustrate these principles further I will consider Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  One way to read Moby Dick is as a critique of monotheism or onto-theology (that is, the idea that the being of specific entities can be explained in terms of other specific entities, such as a god).  “Theology” (θεολογία) is discourse about god or gods – religion, conventionally understood.  Onto-theology defines a god as the originator of being.  In the Judeo-Christian Tradition the God of Abraham and Moses produced or caused everything that is.  Taking a post-modernist view, however, referring to God simply is “telling a story” – tracing one form of entity (us) back to its origin with some other entity (God).

From the post-modern standpoint this conceptual misunderstanding has pervasively infiltrated the Judeo-Christian literary and narrative tradition and its metaphysics (Heidegger, 1955).  Classically, metaphysics (also a Greek word) is the study of “being as such,” the “first causes of things” or “things that do not change” (Ingwagen, 2007).  It “establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is” (Thomson, 2000, p. 297).  Each culture has its own metaphysics.  By “codifying and disseminating an understanding of what entities are, metaphysics provides each historical ‘epoch’ of intelligibility with its ontological bedrock.  And by furnishing an account of the ultimate source from which entities issue, metaphysics supplies intelligibility with a kind of foundational justification that … Heidegger characterizes as ‘theological.’”  Theology “reflects a series of historical transformations in our metaphysical understanding of entities are” (Thomson, 2005, p. 8).

The development and progression of Western metaphysics (since the ancient Greeks and the archaic Israelites) has resulted in a proliferation of distinctions such as “reality versus appearance” and “the rational versus the irrational,” all of which Heidegger rejects.  It is a short step from Heidegger’s definition of onto-theology to include monotheism in the sense of Abrahamic religions (primarily Judaism and Christianity, but also – never mentioned by Heidegger – Islam) (Westphal, 2001, p. 9 – 16; Crowe, 2007, p. 187). (3)

Under this polytheistic interpretation, Melville is against onto-theology.  The primary evidence of this tendency is Ahab’s folly of attributing cognition to an insensate beast.  To set forth several more: there is no single “right” perspective to describe the whale – its image can’t be depicted while it is in its natural habitat (the ocean) and it loses its shape on land (Chapter 55, Chapter 56).  Science doesn’t understand it and is unable to explain its migratory patterns, social behavior or even physiology (Chapter 79).  It moves its tail unpredictably in myriad different directions (Chapter 86).  It is covered with hieroglyphic scars (so for that matter is Queequeg).  It is white – the absence of color (Chapter 42).  Its spout can’t be distinguished against the backdrop of sea and sky (Chapter 85).  The sound it makes when spouting is a kind of white noise.  The whale skeleton of the Bower in the Arsacides (Chapter 102) is both a cathedral and a prison.  The trees surrounding it rustle like a weaver’s loom, the sound of which also is white noise.  We are immersed in it and deafened by it as it obscures the meaning of individual discourse, just like we are blinded by the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42).

Contrasted with the whale’s relentless monochromaticity are various other phenomena suggesting the plentitude of nature.  To cite several examples: Pip hopefully spots a swarm of “multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.  He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (Chapter 93).  When Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast (Chapter 99), each of the sailors has a different perception of its nature as a talisman.  Even the whale’s spout acts as a prism, breaking white light into the colors of the spectrum.  The colors of this rainbow invite a plethora of different explanations.  The Bower of the Arsacides is a colorful carpet, woven by God.  A “weaver God” who “reveals the rainbow” facilitates this polyglot understanding.  By focusing intently on one objective – Moby Dick – Ahab loses visibility of everything else.  The whale is white only for those who want for it to have a settled meaning, which it doesn’t have.  These reference points are evidence of Melville’s endorsement of an essentially polytheistic perspective. (4)

We know as a matter of his biography however that Melville was “nurtured in orthodox Calvinism by his Dutch Reformed mother and minister; yet by the time he wrote Moby Dick, he had not only lived among cannibals and whalemen but had ‘swam through libraries’” (McIntosh, 1986, p. 23).  His interest was not so much to “attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas,” such as polytheism.  Rather, “his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life” (Herbert, 1986, p. 113). (5)  His “revolutionary impact upon the novel form does not derive from Christianity’s absence – a formal experimentalism released from the grip of conventions that have their roots in a defeated Protestant orthodoxy – but precisely from its continued presence” (Franchot, 1998, p. 157) (emphasis added).

Such a program hardly can be interpreted as anti-onto-theological.  “Melville’s quarrel with authority was a complex affair, and to strip his profoundly symbolic writings down to theological allegories … is reductive” (Bezanson, 1953, p. 268).  He rejects the “simplifications, reductions and isolations” of dualisms such as monotheism versus polytheism.  In its place he substitutes a “language of wonder” that preserves a “fascination with the particulars of the natural world” while simultaneously embracing and critiquing our assumptions about it (Luck, 2007, p. 5).  This enables us to see outside of our “traditional ways of thinking about religion and spirituality” (Coffler, 2006, p. 112).  In addition to encountering the “realm of the transcendent,” Melville also wanted to “dramatize [both the] parallel failures of human striving (Ahab) and knowing (Ishamel)” (Buell, 1986, p. 61) (emphasis added).

The ideal culture Melville envisions is one that permits these different perspectives to cohabitate, or in which they become entirely irrelevant.  Melville is not an “individualist” or “personality driven.”  Nor is he some kind of a latter-day ecologist, concerned only with man’s depredations against nature. (6)  He is far more concerned with achieving a balance between purposeful human action and the world that constrains it – including not only nature, but also human culture, history and conventions.

Culture is produced by human social interactions such as the squeezing of the hands (Chapter 94).  On such occasions we attune ourselves to social practices and become sensitized to the corresponding intuitions they evoke.  They are created, manifest themselves, and we are aware of them (to the extent we are) only within the space of this “clearing.”  They are a precipitate of dwelling, standing against the homelessness of wandering and an individualistic stance towards the world. (7)

Although not referring to Melville, two modern social theorists have expressed this idea with particular clarity: Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor.  In his essay “Civil Religion in America” (1967, p. 175), Bellah elaborated on Rousseau’s definition of “civil religion,” redefining it as “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity.”  It is “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.”

According to Taylor (1989, p. 512), “We are now in an age in which a publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings is an impossibility.” (8)  As a result, we have “tended to displace in importance the sense of belonging to large scale collective agencies” (Taylor, 2007, p. 484).  This is contrary to our nature, because “to make the demand for meaning is not an optional stance.  It is central to our humanity” (p. 584), and cultural institutions are an “indispensable matrix of civilizational order” (p. 491).  Any contemporary definition of self “requires answers totally dependent on cultural or moral contexts, frameworks, or orientation – human categories of personal and social action, of value” (Tauber, 2006).  This is appropriate because (man) is “a self-interpreting animal.  He is necessarily so, for there is no such thing as the structure of meanings for him independently of his interpretation of them; one is woven into the other” (Taylor, 1987, p. 46). (9)

The outcomes envisioned by Bellah and Taylor do not imply an anti-onto-theological critique.  They do not iterate a rigid monotheism or an anti-onto-theological opposition to it.  As if anticipating Bellah and Taylor, Melville does not fault monotheism per se.  All religions “employ a controlling hierarchy; with narrow doctrines that restrain and control people’s choices and lives.”  But Moby Dick should not be read as depicting a “battle between good and evil with Ahab as the human hero trying to destroy the symbol of evil in the whale.”  Ahab may be a “madman who is convinced that he has the right and the power to pursue his personal goal as symbolized in Moby Dick, a mere creature in nature that has little or no interest in humans.”  But this isn’t Melville’s point.  What is wrong is any form of religion that structures the world “in such ways as to be available to empower an Ahab, who believes that he has the knowledge of good and evil and may act for the rest of his society, nation, or the world” (Elliott, 2005, pp. 190 – 191).  In juxtaposing Ahab against Moby Dick, Melville “forces the reader to contemplate the Absolute suddenly placed in what appears to be the ordinary contingencies of life, and then to consider the consequences” (Obenzinger, 2006, p. 181).  All of which illustrates Melville’s conception of a dynamic clearing situated beyond the categories of faith. (10)

Melville also suggests a resolution of the apparent impasse between monotheism (as embedded in the Judeo-Christian Tradition) and the more “authentic” understanding of being.  In this respect, while it is (trivially) true that “no single artist … can ever represent an entire culture,” there is a profound sense in which Melville is “truly representative of the kind of humanity that gives meaning to culture (Bryant, p. 4).  Moby Dick “conceives one last and greatest quest for a whole vision of a whole world” (Grenberg, 1989, p. 93).

Endnotes

(1) In fairness to Heidegger some commentators disagree with Derrida that Heidegger should be lumped into the same category as Marx and Freud.  Heidegger does more than simply “attempt to relinquish philosophical ties to the past.”  He calls for a “fundamental reinterpretation of them” thereby allowing for “reinterpretation at a revivified ontological level constantly in view of the question of being” (Mei, 2007).  Dreyfus (1991, p. 36) recognizes this dynamic in the structure of Being and Time (MacAvoy, 2001, p. 463; Russell, 2008, p. 97).

(2) Seen in this light a better interpretation of the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42) is not the absence of color or the embodiment of malevolence.  Our inability to classify it is symptomatic of our own ontological confusion (Werge, 1969, p. 96).  We are confused because of the ambiguity of the interface between man and nature.  “Melville’s careful disorderly reading of antiquity’s inscription of the whale attests to myth’s ambiguities.  His use of the whale in classical myths confirms the persistent permeability of myth’s borders and Melville’s celebration of that permeability.  The mythical whale-man and the recorder of tales remind us that myth grants us complexity and, in its variations, compounds the complexity of narrative’s desire.  The cumulated variations, the diversity of competing accounts of any myth, preserve and safeguard contradictions.  For Melville, myth-maker, selective reader, and purposeful natural historian, these variations extend a chase on ancient waters beyond a three-day pursuit of Moby Dick toward the ever-receding horizon and the morphing shape of the whale” (Djelal, 2006, p. 53).

(3) It would have been truer to the phenomena Heidegger described if he had not disapproved of monotheism per se.  He should be more interested in opposing the initial juxtaposition of experience into categories such as monotheism versus polytheism, to begin with.

(4) Although he does not mention him, Dreyfus’ account is a more sophisticated version of (and may have been inspired by) Thompson (1952).

(5) In this respect Melville may come close to realizing Derrida’s objective of “going beyond” philosophical interpretation.  Whenever one does so, one establishes a dichotomy, if only to distinguish between one’s own perspective and other less-preferable ones, and to explain why yours is better.  Derrida wanted to establish a vocabulary that is “intrinsically and self-evidently final, not merely the most comprehensive and fruitful vocabulary we have come up with so far.”

In doing so, of course, Derrida himself offered a theory.  Setting this criticism aside as more-or-less trivial (which it is), the move one has to make to get behind the bivalency of interpretation – to  “write about philosophy unphilosophically, get at it from the outside, be a postphilosophical thinker” – is far from clear.  It can’t be “pretending to say the same old thing while subversively putting a new spin on the old words.”

Derrida’s advice is to use “noninferential associations” (such as those suggested by literature) instead of “inferential connections” (such as those demanded by formal reasoning), a process he calls différance, which somehow avoids inter-explicable oppositional concepts.  It is not at all clear it is possible to make such a maneuver to effect such an outcome.  To the extent it is, Melville is within shouting distance of it, because he is not juxtaposing monotheism with polytheism.  Melville’s “quarrel” is not so much with God as with the conceptions of God in the two religious traditions (Herbert, 1977; Sherrill, 1978, p. 325).  Melville can be seen as creating a new discourse that attempts to overreach these distinctions.  Quotes are from Rorty, 1984, p. 5, p. 10, p. 13.

(6) “The interfusion of self and non-self, of metaphysics and earthly domains, resists eighteenth-century rationalism and positivism, which required that nature be objectified and placed at a distance so that it could by systematically studied. … The comprehension of nature as a mechanical system – although at first buttressing eighteenth-century deistic theology – ultimately removed God from the world” (Harvey, 2006, p. 72).

(7) This is not some kind of private mental universe.  Melville “discovered that the universe is an infinite sum of concepts, a universal conceptual brotherhood.”  He realized “that the actual and anonymous universe remains shielded and impervious to man exactly because this opaque net of concepts or masks, like an impenetrable wall, intervenes. … In its anguished effort to perceive the world, [our mind] constantly creates more and more names, weaving thus more and more ‘eyelets’ into that net, and making, thus, its prison even more stifling. … Every new concept the mind invents in order to create itself or to define its identity is also a new disguise of itself, a replacement or substitution of its own self, a new mask” (Christodoulou, 2001, p. 162).

(8) Taylor specifically invokes Odysseus: his homecoming “from the realm of the monstrous, the threatening, of the limit situation, to the joys of ordinary life with its rhythmed flow of time” is “one of the constitutive experiences of modernity” (p. 627).

(9) Dostoyevsky actually accomplished this synthesis in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).  “His religion is Orthodoxy because it is the religion of the Russian people” (Mirsky, 1949, p. 283) (emphasis in original).

(10) Heidegger’s concept of “clearing” also is a better way to understand the Bower of the Arsacides.  Its weaver god is does not suggest polytheism.  It is the integration of nature and human purpose.  Penelope also weaves the shroud of Laertes; her name incorporates the Greek word for “web” or “wool” (πήνη).  She cunningly unravels it each night to avoid remarriage to one of the suitors, just as she interprets the plot of Odysseus’ return.  Weaving is her counterpart to Odysseus’ wandering (though she is more successful in controlling the course of events) (Felson-Rubin, 1996, p. 166).

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Werge, T. (1969).  Moby-Dick and the Calvinist Tradition.  Studies in the Novel, 1(4), 484 – 506. Reprinted in Davey, M. (2004) (Ed.)  A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (pp. 96 – 98).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Westphal, M. (2001).  Overcoming Onto-Theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Wordsworth, W. (1798).  A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.  In Hayden, J. (1981) (Ed.), William Wordsworth: The Poems, v. 1.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

In an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times former presidential candidate Mitt Romney weighed in with his views regarding Detroit’s request for loan guarantees. While I think Mr. Romney basically is an idiot, I have to say his views on this point are well-considered. Detroit has no more entitlement to a bailout than any other American industry.

That being so Mr. Romney succumbed to what I will call the “expertise fallacy.” He stated: “management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.”

I have been through this issue a dozen times in the entertainment industry. For example, Chrysalis Records recruited Joe Kiener, a tennis shoe executive. Angel Records recruited Steve Murphy, a book publishing executive. EMI Music recruited Terri Santisi, who for all I know now is preparing tax returns at H. & R. Block. As adept as they may have been in their respective fields, none of these executives had the slightest idea of what they were doing in the record business.

I’ll never forget a record company convention I was at in Palm Springs, California.  At the time Chrysalis Records had a big hit with Sinead O’Connor’s cover of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U.”  Kiener and I were talking and he says, “I’m busy planning her 4th single” (i.e., the one that was to be the fourth one after “Nothing Compares 2 U”).  I said, “Joe, shouldn’t you be worrying about her next single first?”  I liked Kiener and thought he was a nice guy, but he didn’t understand a word of what I was saying.  Shortly afterwords O’Connor shaved her head and started insulting Pope John Paul II, which was the end of her major label career.  God knows how much marketing money Kiener spent on this quixotic notion.

The premise underlying the expertise fallacy is that there are two separate knowledge bases. One pertains to the “industry” and the other pertains to a substantive field of endeavor, for example, “finance” or “marketing.” Companies delude themselves into believing the latter trumps the former and that people from other unrelated enterprises must know something they don’t.

This isn’t how the phenomenology of expertise works. As analyzed by experts such as Hubert Dreyfus, it is a series of steps to acclimatize oneself to the nuances and dynamics of a particular firm, how it is situated in the marketplace, and the product handling characteristics of what it has for sale. Every industry has its own specialized and non-fungible set of customs, conventions and protocols. Strategies that may work for consumer products companies such as Procter & Gamble have little in common with the nuances required to originate, market, promote and distribute records or movies. It only is coincidental these terms even are used interchangeably when in fact they have completely different meanings.

I make this observation ecumenically. While I am not aware of specific examples, I am sure record or film industry executives would not be very good at selling underarm deodorant.

One of the main differences between consumer entertainment software (CDs, DVDs, video games, etc.) and other types of consumer products (laundry detergent, groceries, etc.) is the economics of replication. Consumer entertainment software is inexpensive to duplicate (and has become even less so with the increasing obsolescence of physical goods). The only investment required is to originate it (e.g. recording costs for a record, the negative cost for a film). This cost in turn is amortizable over the number of units sold. As it is recouped, its per-unit cost becomes increasingly small (and one of the key measures of a project’s success is the rate of this recoupment).

Consumer product companies, on the other hand, incur very little in the way of fixed cost. And, their marginal per-unit cost always will be higher because they are selling a physical thing. This leads to completely different product life cycles, handling strategies and marketing campaigns. The ways in which these are structured will depend more on the particular industry than on some set of general theoretical principles.

Automobile companies have plenty of reasons to be insecure right now. There is no reason to suspect, however, that executives from some outside industry will be any smarter than the present incumbents. In fact they most likely will be less successful because they don’t know a thing about making or selling cars. In appealing to the alleged “expertise” of industry outsiders, Mr. Romney is making a significant conceptual error.

In this essay I will advance an interpretation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick based on the work of the Weimar-era philosopher Martin Heidegger. I have no compunctions about taking such an approach. It is unlikely one can say anything completely new about Moby Dick, much less some of the other texts I examine herein (such as the Odyssey and the Book of Exodus), and there is no point simply in juxtaposing one text against another. This does not preclude the need for, or invalidate the utility of, all attempts at deep analysis beyond the text’s workable surface. The “most powerful and apposite readings of literary works may be those that treat them as philosophical gestures by teasing out the implications of their dealings with the philosophical oppositions that support them.” (1) If Heidegger’s analysis of what he calls “the question of the meaning of Being” is as pervasive as he wants for it to be, then it should be a foundational template for analyzing all fictional texts (at least in the Western literary canon) – if only for the reason that the characters in those texts necessarily must express the meaning of their own being, just as their authors do in writing the text.

I will start by summarizing Heidegger’s basic concerns. The themes he develops suggest two ways of looking at Moby Dick, which are the related concepts of existential space and homelessness. I will examine and then apply each in turn.

Being. Heidegger primarily was interested in “ontology” – the Greek word for “being” (οντο-) combined with -λογία, which means science, study or theory. (2) The purpose of ontology is to describe what it is for anything to exist, all the way from rocks, art, icons, what Heidegger called “equipment” (things we deploy to accomplish outcomes, like using a hammer to drive in a nail, although his definition is much broader than “tools” conventionally understood), and people (including oneself).

Human beings are unique in that they are the only class of beings who attempt to discern the “meaning of their own Being” – not in a “conscious” way, but through what they do.  For example, one might discern the meaning of his/her being as a scientist or teacher at a university, a construction worker, an executive for a corporation, an artist, a parent, etc. It’s not a goal or an outcome like getting a degree, finishing a building, completing a deal or winning a race. It’s an ongoing process throughout the duration of one’s entire life, as one “pushes into the possibilities” the future temporally presents.  While of course there are times when one has reflected on this activity, more basically one “acts it out.” Conscious reflection comprises only one aspect (and a small one) of what one does and how one constantly “is in the world.”

A “world” has three essential characteristics: It is a totality of interrelated pieces of equipment, each used to carry out a specific task such as hammering in a nail. These tasks are undertaken so as to achieve certain purposes, such as building a house. Finally, this activity enables those performing it to have identities, such as being a carpenter. These identities are the meaning or point of engaging in these activities.” (3)  In Heidegger jargon, these might be called one’s “for-the-sake-of-which,” a series of concentric circles of increasingly-expanding concerns that structures one’s life and gives it meaning. (4) They comprise the way the world becomes meaningful.

Spatiality

An important aspect of being-in-the-world is how we orient ourselves spatially. It will take me several steps to outline Heidegger’s account of this phenomenon, and then apply it to Moby Dick. I will start by explaining Heidegger’s distinction between Cartesian space and existential space. I briefly will discuss the two strategies (which Melville contrasts) that one can use to orient oneself within in them, which I will characterize as “technological navigation” versus “positional navigation.” Heidegger actually has a concept of what it must be like to be an animal (such as a whale), which I will briefly set forth. As it swims throughout the ocean, the whale instinctively deploys a form of positional navigation. Finally, I will examine Ahab’s abrupt transition from technological navigation in Cartesian space, to positional navigation in existential space, and show how this is an important element in the novel’s dénouement.

Cartesian space and existential space. One of Heidegger’s concepts in Being and Time is the difference between Cartesian (5) space and existential space. “Cartesian space” is res extensa – objective space. One assesses it using terms like “inch,” “meter” or “light year.” “Existential space” is the realm of our practical environmental concerns. One does not position oneself as “a physical body located at a certain point in objective space.” Rather, things in the world “show up as having a certain accessibility – that is, a certain nearness or farness – according to my ability to ‘grasp’ or ‘procure’ them.” They are “near” or “far,” or to the “left” or “right,” and one situates oneself by using these directions. Physical, geometric space is derivative from our “interested dealings in the world” whereby we “disclose pragmatic spatiality” (Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World 133).

Ahab’s Concept of Cartesian Space. Here’s how this applies to Moby Dick. There could be no space vaster than the ocean Ahab contends with as he pursues the whale. He begins the Pequod’s voyage engaged with the ocean as Cartesian space. Melville describes Ahab’s navigational technique as follows (Chapter 44): ”[Y]ou would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. … Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.”

Technological Navigation. The way one locates oneself within the Cartesian space of the ocean is by using instruments of technological navigation, such as Ahab’s “roll of yellowish sea charts” and “piles of old log-books.” He also deployed other technologies of his time, such as a quadrant (Chapter 118) and a compass (Chapter 124) to fix his location (a quadrant measures latitude by showing the angle of a star, such as the North Star, to a flat plane, which is the surface of the ocean). “When the navigator takes a compass bearing on a landmark from the bridge of a boat he has a real point of view on a real space.” (6) Those technologies were culturally-specific. An outcome of eighteenth-century rationalism and positivism, they “required that nature be objectified and placed at a distance so that it could by systematically studied” and comprehended “nature as a mechanical system.” (7)

Heidegger was famously dubious about technology (here, the charts, log-books, the quadrant and the compass) and the role it plays in a society’s relationship to nature. (8) He criticized “consumption for the sake of consumption” and even castigated the peasants of Germany’s dark forest for having radios and televisions. Setting aside these specific outcomes, his more serious issue with technology is the belief it will solve all of our problems. Technology lulls us into thinking we can understand natural phenomena (such as the ocean and Cartesian space), and master them. It restricts our “way of thinking” (impairs our understanding of the meaning of Being). We can overcome this effect only by stepping outside of it and its associated analytical/calculative methodologies. Having done so, we can see technology for what it is – a precipitate of our current cultural practices, our “latest understanding of being.” (9) As I will show, Ahab later undertook just this exercise.

Positional Navigation. The way one gets through existential space is positional navigation, using variations of the directional indicators Heidegger postulates. It is how one finds one’s way when one is bereft of the instruments of technological navigation.

Although they phrase it differently, this precise distinction has intrigued anthropologists who have studied seafaring cultures, such as those of Micronesia. The example of the South Pacific is pertinent because it is a vast area of ocean through which Ahab navigated (Chapter 111). Melville sailed there and wrote about it in Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Mardi, A Voyage Thither (1849). In addition to topics such as cannibalism, other aspects of its culture must have permeated his thinking. (10)

Micronesian navigators use positional navigation to travel in a way that is completely different from Western navigators. They “routinely sail hundreds of miles out of sight of land without the use of charts, tables, or any of the other instruments.” From the standpoint of cognitive science, they may “use an elegant system of superimposed mental images.” (11) These mental images comprise a “global representation of the locations of the various pieces of land relative to each other.” They create an “abstract representation of a space” and then enable one to assume an “imaginary point of view relative to the abstract representation” (Hutchins, “Understanding Micronesian navigation,” 206).

It might be possible to regard this as a kind of “mental map,” because all the navigator has to do is imagine it. There is “little room or need for innovation. Navigation requires the solution of no unprecedented problems. The navigator must be judicious and perceptive, but he is never called upon to have new ideas, to relate things together in new ways.” (12)

These different types of “mental navigational maps” are culturally-specific: “Western researchers have questioned the rationality of the Micronesian navigators, saying that their techniques are logically incongruous, or that the Micronesian navigator does not let logical consistency or inconsistency, insofar as he is aware of them, interfere with practical utility. However, it can be shown that the models used by Micronesians operate in a different frame of reference and on the basis of different fundamental representational assumptions from those that are common in the Western world.” (Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” 1568).

Even without the notion of a “mental map,” positional navigation is fundamentally different from technological navigation. It relies on intuitive strategies for discerning location within existential space, instead of explicit knowledge about how to utilize instruments to establish coordinates in Cartesian space. It might be characterized as an “egocentric representation of an environment;” the latter, a “sociocentric ‘god’s eye view’.” (13) As a Westernized mariner, Ahab had no alternative other than to begin the Pequod’s voyage using the tools and techniques of technological navigation through the ocean, conceived as Cartesian space.

Whales-eye navigation. Whales are unable to use such tools and techniques, or imagine any strategy of technological navigation. They are creatures of nature with inexpressible ascriptive predicates (Chapter 42), and the ocean is their natural ecology. They situate themselves in it, and survive and function within its environmental constraints, on animal instinct. They (clearly) do not use technological instruments (because they aren’t humans). They (probably) do not use “mental maps” (for the same reason) (assuming we do). Their navigational strategy more closely resembles a form of positional navigation within their environmental space. They are much more like Micronesian navigators (and vice versa), then Ahab when he left Nantucket.

Heidegger had quite a bit to say about animals, consistent with this approach. (14) Animals exist somewhere on a spectrum between inanimate objects and people. The animal “is poor in world on its own terms, poor in the sense of being deprived.” Being an animal is better than being a rock, because the rock has no “access” to its surroundings. It lacks the possibility of even having a world to be deprived of, but animals do. A lizard, for example, warms itself in the sun by “basking on a warm stone.” It is more than simply “there,” in the sense of being physically present. “It actively seeks out the stone upon which it lies. And if the lizard is removed from the stone and placed in another, cooler area, it will not stay put as the stone does, but will in all likelihood try once again to seek out a warm stone or another place to bask in the sun.” It “has a responsive and interactive relation with the environment that surrounds it.” (15) If the whale were human, Heidegger would say it was absorbed in coping with its environment and transparent to its surroundings (coral, seaweed, plankton, other fishes, etc.).

Whales may be smarter than Heidegger thinks they are. “Despite a deep evolutionary divergence, adaptation to physically dissimilar environments, and very different neuroanatomical organization,” cetaceans “show striking convergence in social behavior, artificial ‘language’ comprehension, and self-recognition ability.” (16) Nonetheless, it seems safe to conclude that whales cannot circumspectively consider their environment or comport themselves towards it, as can a human. “When we lie out in the sun … the sun is accessible to us as sun, and rocks are accessible to us as rocks in a way that is simply not possible for the animal.” In principle, an animal can never “gain access to the other entities it encounters in its environment as entities” (emphasis in original). If by world one “means accessibility to other beings, we can say that the animal has world; but if ‘world’ is in some way related to having access to the being of beings, to beings as such, then the animal does not have world.” For these reasons, animals (such as whales) “have a radically different mode of being-in-the-world than do humans” (Calarco 23). Let us call it being-in-the-ocean – a way of existing that is wholly determined by environmental constraints, and the necessity of positionally navigating within the aquatic world.

Ahab’s Transition from Cartesian Space to Existential Space. Ahab dramatically illustrates the difference between Cartesian space and existential space. As the Pequod’s voyage progresses, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable and fidgety within the realm of Cartesian space. Melville describes this conflict as follows (Chapter 44): “Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the un-hooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.” [Emphasis added.]

Ahab was adrift in the “maze of currents and eddies” of Cartesian space. Instead of using its objective reference points, discerned by technological navigation, his existential space became contoured by the project of locating the whale (Chapter 36). His task was “absurdly hopeless” in the realm of Cartesian space, but made perfect sense to him within the framework of his own existential space. In this respect, Ahab came to function in the same milieu as Moby Dick. He stopped thinking like a person, and started acting like a whale.

There came a time when Ahab explicitly made the transition from Cartesian space to existential space and became a positional navigator, as opposed to a technological one. He abruptly began to “schematize an alternative mental model” – a “dynamic, graded and egocentric map,” using bearings that “radiated out” from his own point of view. Having crossed this bridge, it was “literally inconceivable that the bearings might intersect” at a point anywhere but his own immediate location (Shorr 279).

Ahab completed his estrangement with Cartesian space by actually destroying the Pequod’s instruments of technological navigation. He declaims (Chapter 118): “Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”

Later (Chapter 134) he even attempts to persuade the crew they’re going east, instead of west: “Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West. But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses — that’s all. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck. “Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.” [Emphasis added.]

This is the single most important passage in the entire book. By destroying the quadrant and magically thinking he can change the direction of the compass, Ahab completes his disconnect with Cartesian space. He literally overthrew the technology (the quadrant and the compass) that enabled him to position himself in it. He might as well also have thrown overboard the yellowish sea charts and piles of old log-books, and perhaps he did.

In doing so, Ahab dramatically evidenced the dichotomy between Cartesian space and existential space. Estranged from the former, he completed the arc Melville anticipated at the onset of the voyage. Ahab persists in attributing malevolent intention to the whale, when it simply is an animal. Whereas most whalers simply were “bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint,” Ahab “was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (Chapter 41). The pursuit of this objective required him unhesitatingly to follow the whale, wherever that might lead. It was the meaning of his being. His concern was not the Pequod’s objective location, but how near or far it was from Moby Dick. He no longer wanted or needed to situate himself positionally in Cartesian space. (17)

This leads to the sequence of events on the third day of the chase (Chapter 135). Ahab abandoned any effort to understand the ocean, or Moby Dick, on a scientific or even rational basis. The ocean is deep, dark and inscrutable. It is the whale’s natural ecology as a marine mammal. An inveterate mariner, Ahab envied the whale’s facility, relying on instinct, responding to the intuitions it suggests. Unlike Moby Dick, Ahab is constrained by the conventions of Cartesian space (among other issues, he can’t breathe underwater). He finally becomes part of the whale’s world. He gives up the spear and responds to the whale’s imprecations to join him, only to perish. (18) In doing so he resolves the juxtaposition between himself as a sentient being and the whale as a non-conscious, insensate beast.

Homelessness

To this point I have argued (and, I hope, demonstrated) that one of the distinctive attributes of existential space is positional navigation of the sort instinctively deployed by Moby Dick, and (eventually) by Ahab. Both caromed through the ocean like billiard balls or bumper-cars at a county fair, configured by their respective orientations and objectives. I now would like to extend this line of reasoning to another concept, which is the phenomenon of “not-being-at-homeness.” Heidegger called this Unheimlichkeit, which is German for the experience of “eeriness” or “uncanniness” (Heidegger, Being and Time). For him, there could not be a more important concept. It is an “inescapable feature of the human condition … a shadow over our being.”

Wandering through the world – being homeless – in turn is one of Moby Dick’s explicit themes. (19) All of the key personalities experience it – Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, and Moby Dick himself. It is the single most shocking (and frightening) aspect of the book. It is the place (or rather, lack of place) where any Heideggerian analysis of Moby Dick must resolve.

To demonstrate this, I first will establish what Heidegger means by Unheimlichkeit and why it is a fundamental modality of being-in-the-world. I will explain the alternative Heidegger opposes against it, which he calls “dwelling.” The motif of Unheimlichkeit is pervasive in the epic narrative tradition preceding Melville, and of which he is a part. I will look at two of its foundational strands, which are Homer’s Odyssey and the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Each of the important characters of Moby Dick encounters Unheimlichkeit differently, and iterates important aspects of the phenotypes of Odysseus and Moses. I also will account for the ways each resolves the problem of dwelling, to the extent they do.

Unheimlichkeit. Unheimlichkeit’s source is “thrown-ness,” the anxiety we experience in the face of the inevitable prospect of dying and the essentially arbitrary nature of human culture and institutions. It is a sense of estrangement. (20) It is disruptive because it “entails a displacement or disruption” of one’s “smooth unreflective functioning in the world.” (21) One “feels fundamentally unsettled, that is, senses that human beings can never be at home in the world” (Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World 37) (emphasis in original): “The things that once evoked commitment – gods, heroes, the God-man, the acts of great statesmen, the words of great thinkers – have lost their authority. As a result, individuals feel isolated and alienated. They feel that their lives have no meaning because the public world contains no guidelines. … The only way to have a meaningful life in the present age, then, is to let your involvement become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is not something that is in any way provisional – although it certainly is vulnerable.” (22)

Dwelling. The radical insecurity of Unheimlichkeit is balanced by Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” which means “safety,” “to be at peace,” “to be protected from harm and threat,” “safeguarded” and “cared for and protected.” (23) Dwelling is where one ends up when one stops wandering. It facilitates the development of conventions and traditions. (24) It is “where the articulation of the nature of things” (such as material culture) occur. (25) It results in what the sociologist Albert Borgmann calls “focal practices” or “joint commodities” – ways in which human activity becomes concentrated through use of objects, attribution of meaning, and the development of a sense of community. (26)

It does so by “attuning” our sensibilities – putting them into an appropriate mood for making sense of things and people. Attuning brings “things and people into their own” by grounding situations and making them matter to us. (27) It “gives us access to certain everyday phenomena that we would not want to live without.” (28) It is our everyday, common-sense understanding that enables things to show up the way they do, and for us to be the way we are. “The shared practices into which we are socialized … provide a background understanding of what matters and what it makes sense to do, on the basis of which we can direct our actions. This understanding of being creates what Heidegger calls a clearing in which things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful for us. We do not produce the clearing. It produces us as the kind of human beings that we are.” (Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics”). Heidegger’s word for clearing is Lichtung, literally, a place where there is light. Culture is such a clearing – the background of explanations and narratives within which we all reside, and that makes different meanings possible.

The Judeo-Christian Tradition. Heidegger identifies Unheimlichkeit as a malaise of contemporary culture. Properly considered, though, it is one of the widespread themes of the entire Judeo-Christian Tradition (as it has temporally unfolded). What we call the Judeo-Christian Tradition initially was developed by the ancient Greeks (Heidegger was fascinated by them) (29) and the archaic Israelites. Heidegger came to characterize it as “onto-theology,” which is the idea that the being of specific entities can be explained in terms of other specific entities, such as a god.” (30)

Melville consistently incorporated myths, mythologies, comparative mythology, and mythological theories derived from the Judeo-Christian Tradition, in his major works. They determine and define large parts of Moby Dick’s structure and meaning. (31)

Melville was well versed (in epic poetry forms) and appropriated them to his own highly original purposes, indeed, that in this novel he set out to fuse the heroic qualities of the ancient Homeric epic with the spiritual qualities of the early modern form found in Dante and Milton, all in an unprecedented poetic prose – the first such prose epic of its kind. … Moby Dick is a ‘spiritual epic.’ … Moreover, given Melville’s symbolic technique, which in an epic work is designed to infuse the quotidian world with significance and elevate mundane matters to the supernatural plane, the theme of the quest for the soul takes on an overriding importance. … As an epic of the universal story of mankind therefore, Moby-Dick is … comparable for its time and place to the Odyssey of ancient Greece or the Aeneid of early Rome. (32)

In composing Moby Dick, Melville “undertook a doubly ambitious plan, bringing together the two main traditions in the form, the ancient national epic of combat, as exemplified by the Iliad or Beowulf, and the modern epic of spiritual quest, as exemplified by the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost.” It is “an epic of the universal story of mankind.” (33)

Seen in this light, Odysseus and Moses are particularly appropriate examples. They shaped our present concerns and even our sense of what counts as human perfection; they are our “Judeo-Christian inheritance.” (34) They still are “alive to us, are contemporary with us, in a way that no earlier figures are. Our cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us, all originate” with them. (35)

Within their respective traditions, each was a catalyst or “world discloser,” in that they facilitated the attunement of their respective cultures to the paradigms they established. World-disclosers take over “whatever perceptual material is available in order to express the power of the feeling of a particular situation,” thereby controlling the “affective aspect of common meanings.” By doing so they can “transform states of affairs.” They direct our attention to “the way things gather us to them, the way they draw us to regard them with a certain attunement” (Spinosa, Heidegger on Living Gods, 224, 216). They supply an “understanding of what matters and what it makes sense to do, on the basis of which we can direct our actions,” a space in which “things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful for us.” (36) They “make history possible by giving everything that shows up a certain tone which thought then seeks to articulate.” (37)

They also are prototypes for the main characters in Moby Dick, who are composites of several of their most important ascriptive predicates, as I will describe.

Odysseus. The motif of Odysseus is pervasive and it is “difficult to overstate” its influence. (38) He is a “model and a mirror of both individual and cultural self-definition” (Schein, “Introduction,” Reading the Odyssey 3). The aspect of Odysseus that most captured Melville’s imagination “was not his strength, his resoluteness, or his cunning, but his eternal wanderlust.” (39) As Odysseus traveled through strange worlds, confronting barely human creatures, he became the prototype for “every subsequent explorer of sea, land or indeed outer space.” (40) Even as he inhabited them, he was alien to them; they offered him “no social function” he could “recognize and accept.” (41) Nonetheless, he managed to survive, just like Ishmael survived his confrontation with Moby Dick. (42)

Odysseus’ voyage illustrates the futility of using a map, or even having a sense of direction. He wandered. He had no instruments of technological navigation. Where he landed next entirely was up to the gods (or, at least, out of his hands); Poseidon determined his navigational strategy. He was not homeless (he dwelt in Ithaca). His purpose was to return to his home, and he realized it.

Moses. Around the same time as Odysseus (43), Moses and the chosen people peregrinated about the Sinai. Moses was as important to the archaic Israelites as Odysseus was to the ancient Greeks. (44) Like Odysseus, Moses wandered and had no instruments of technological navigation. Yahweh determined his navigational strategy through the desert (his ocean). A cloud led him by day, and a pillar of fire by night. Unlike Odysseus, he remained within a single world with only one god who led them through it. (45) Also unlike Odysseus, Moses was homeless; he had no dwelling. His purpose was to lead his people to the Promised Land. He realized it (though he dies on the eastern shore of the Jordan River and did not cross over into it, Bible, Numbers 20:12).

Wandering, Homelessness, Dwelling, Navigation, Purpose.

The characters who populate Moby Dick instantiate different aspects of Odysseus and Moses, their world-disclosing predecessors. They exemplify different facets of the argument I have developed to this point. Wandering is a basic feature of Unheimlichkeit, and the characters of Moby Dick are every bit as much wanderers as Odysseus and Moses. They have odd adventures and encounter disconcerting phenomena. (46) They become forgetful of their purpose. (47) They pursue the meaning of their being. More broadly, Melville’s point is that we all are cast out, just like the Biblical Ishmael. All of us are “guests” on the earth. (48) One is fortunate if one is able to find, and come to inhabit, a dwelling that is suitable and congenial to one’s purposes – like Odysseus, Moses, and the characters of Moby Dick. I will devote the remainder of this essay to discussing these topics.

1. Moby Dick. Moby Dick wanders. He is not homeless. He dwells in the ocean. He positionally navigates it as he follows the “driftings” of his food. There are “ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes.” One can “arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey” (Chapter 44). He does not, however, have any kind of non-instinctual objective. He’s a whale, and whales don’t have “purposes.”

2. Ahab. Ahab wanders. He is not homeless. He dwells in Nantucket (Chapter 16). He starts off navigating technologically through Cartesian space. He loses directionality when he segues to positional navigation through existential space. At that moment his dwelling changes from the terrestrial to the oceanic, which is the same as Moby Dick’s. He remains intent to the end on his objective, which is to exact revenge on Moby Dick for biting off his leg. Viewed as a goal or an outcome, he does not realize it. Moby Dick destroys the Pequod, Ahab drowns, and Moby Dick swims off (Chapter 135).

3. Ishmael. Ishmael wanders. He is homeless. He has no dwelling. (49) As a sailor on the Pequod, he is captive to Moby Dick’s and Ahab’s navigational strategies. He has no purpose other than to “sail about a little and see the watery portion of the world” (Chapter 1). He achieves it and survives the catastrophe (Epilogue).

4. Queequeg. Queequeg wanders. He is not homeless. He dwells in Kokovoko. He too is captive to Moby Dick’s and Ahab’s navigational strategies. He has no purpose other than to “see something more of Christendom”) (Chapter 12). He achieves it, but perishes in the process. (50)

The following table summarizes these findings:

Culture. Melville envisions a culture that permits these different perspectives to cohabitate. He imagines a world in which purposeful human activity is balanced with the factors that constrain it, both natural and social. Culture is produced by interactions between people, such as the squeezing of the hands (Chapter 94). On such occasions, we attune ourselves to communal practices and become sensitized to the corresponding intuitions they evoke. They are created, manifest themselves, and we become aware of them (to the extent we are) only within the space of this “clearing.” They are a precipitate of dwelling, standing against the Unheimlichkeit of wandering.

Although not referring to Melville, two modern social theorists have expressed this idea with particular clarity: Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. In his essay “Civil Religion in America,” (51) Bellah elaborated on Rousseau’s definition of “civil religion,” redefining it as “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity.” It is “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.”

According to Taylor, “We are now in an age in which a publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings is an impossibility.” (52) As a result, we have “tended to displace in importance the sense of belonging to large scale collective agencies.” (53) This is contrary to our nature, because “to make the demand for meaning is not an optional stance. It is central to our humanity” (Taylor, A Secular Age 584) and cultural institutions are an “indispensable matrix of civilizational order” (Taylor, A Secular Age 491). Any contemporary definition of self “requires answers totally dependent on cultural or moral contexts, frameworks, or orientation – human categories of personal and social action, of value.” (54) This is appropriate because (man) is “a self-interpreting animal. He is necessarily so, for there is no such thing as the structure of meanings for him independently of his interpretation of them; one is woven into the other.” (55)

Taylor’s use of the verb “weave” is particularly suggestive of Melville’s “weaver god.” In The Bower of the Arsacides (Chapter 102), Melville imagines a disclosive space much like a Heidegger-type clearing: “It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.”

The same God fractures the light of the whale’s spout into a multi-colored rainbow (Chapter 85). Melville then encounters a gigantic whale skeleton. While it is a remnant of nature, human initiative has transformed it into what could be a church, or a museum, or a prison – all human architectural structures. It integrates both into a harmonious whole.

Our inability to classify the whale’s skeleton is symptomatic of our own ontological confusion. (56) We are confused because of the ambiguity of the interface it presents between man and nature: “Melville’s careful disorderly reading of antiquity’s inscription of the whale attests to myth’s ambiguities. His use of the whale in classical myths confirms the persistent permeability of myth’s borders and Melville’s celebration of that permeability. The mythical whale-man and the recorder of tales remind us that myth grants us complexity and, in its variations, compounds the complexity of narrative’s desire. The cumulated variations, the diversity of competing accounts of any myth, preserve and safeguard contradictions. For Melville, myth-maker, selective reader, and purposeful natural historian, these variations extend a chase on ancient waters beyond a three-day pursuit of Moby Dick toward the ever-receding horizon and the morphing shape of the whale.” (57)

Several critics read Moby Dick as a critique of monotheism, (58) or as a psychological study of Ahab. (59) The outcomes envisioned by Bellah and Taylor suggest neither of these interpretations have it quite right.

We know as a matter of his biography that Melville was “nurtured in orthodox Calvinism by his Dutch Reformed mother and minister; yet by the time he wrote Moby Dick, he had not only lived among cannibals and whalemen but had ‘swam through libraries’.” (60) His interest was not so much to “attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas,” such as polytheism. Rather, “his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life.” (61) His “revolutionary impact upon the novel form does not derive from Christianity’s absence – a formal experimentalism released from the grip of conventions that have their roots in a defeated Protestant orthodoxy – but precisely from its continued presence” (Franchot 157) (emphasis added).

All religions “employ a controlling hierarchy; with narrow doctrines that restrain and control people’s choices and lives.” But Moby Dick should not be read as depicting a “battle between good and evil with Ahab as the human hero trying to destroy the symbol of evil in the whale.” What is wrong is any form of religion that structures the world “in such ways as to be available to empower an Ahab, who believes that he has the knowledge of good and evil and may act for the rest of his society, nation, or the world.” (62)

To strip Melville’s “profoundly symbolic writings down to theological allegories … is reductive.” (63) He rejects the “simplifications, reductions and isolations” of dualisms such as monotheism versus polytheism. His “quarrel” is not so much with God as with these opposed conceptions of God. (64) Melville can be seen as creating a new discourse that attempts to overreach these distinctions. In place of them he substitutes a “language of wonder” that preserves a “fascination with the particulars of the natural world” while simultaneously embracing and critiquing our assumptions about it. (65) This enables us to see outside of our “traditional ways of thinking about religion and spirituality.” (66)

Nor is the world Melville envisions some kind of private mental universe. He “discovered that the universe is an infinite sum of concepts, a universal conceptual brotherhood.” The “actual and anonymous universe remains shielded and impervious to man exactly because this opaque net of concepts or masks, like an impenetrable wall, intervenes.” (67) This dramatizes both the “parallel failures of human striving (Ahab) and knowing (Ishamel).” (68) In juxtaposing Ahab against Moby Dick, Melville “forces the reader to contemplate the Absolute suddenly placed in what appears to be the ordinary contingencies of life, and then to consider the consequences.” (69) All of which illustrates Melville’s conception of a dynamic clearing situated beyond the categories of faith (such as the Bower of the Arsacides).

Conclusion

Obviously Melville did not think in explicitly Heidegger-like terms, and there is no evidence that Heidegger even had heard of Melville. It is not that far off the mark, though, for me to contend that Melville was deeply concerned with the same problems of being-in-the-world that Heidegger later would address. In this respect, while it is (trivially) true that “no single artist … can ever represent an entire culture,” there is a profound sense in which Melville is “truly representative of the kind of humanity that gives meaning to culture. (70) Moby Dick “conceives one last and greatest quest for a whole vision of a whole world” (Grenberg 93). It invites and demands constant reinterpretation, as do the Odyssey (Slatkin 229) and Exodus. I am confident Melville would embrace the ecumenical spirit of this endeavor.

Endnotes

(1) Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1982) 149.

(2) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962).

(3) Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds – Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge: MIT, 1997) 17.

(4) Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Boston: MIT, 1991) 95; with the important exception that “for-the-sake-of-which” is a process of disclosing, not a “final goal.” As much as Ahab may have enjoyed his quest for the whale, there can be no question but that it was focused on an objective, that is, the whale’s physical demise.

(5) The term “Cartesian” comes from the French Enlightenment philosopher who was the modern originator of these theories, René Descartes.

(6) Edwin Hutchins, “Understanding Micronesian navigation,” Mental Models, eds. Dedre Genter and Albert Stevens (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1983) 206.

(7) Bruce Harvey, “Science and the Earth,” A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Malden: Blackwell, 2007) 71 – 82.

(8) Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 1954, trans. William Lovitt, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper, 1977) 307 – 342.

(9) Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology, Technology and Values, eds. Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Laura Westra (Lanham: Bowman and Littlefield, 1997) 41 – 54.

(10) Michel Despland, “Two Ways of Articulating Outsider’s Knowledge of Polynesian Culture and Religion: Melville’s Typee and Mardi,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2004: 16, 105 – 121.

(11) Edwin Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” Journal of Pragmatics, 2005: 37(10), 1555 – 1577: 1567.

(12) Gladwin Thomas, East is a big bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll (Cambridge: Harvard, 1970) 220.

(13) Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind – Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford, 1996) 278.

(14) Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 1929, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana, 1995).

(15) Matthew Calarco, “Heidegger’s Zoontology,” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, eds. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (New York: Continuum, 2004) 18 – 30: 23.

(16) Lori Marino, “Convergence of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Cetaceans and Primates, Brain Behavior and Evolution, 2005: 59, 21 – 32: 21.

(17) Another example of the contrast between Cartesian space and existential space is Kokovoko, which is not drawn on any map. Its lack of coordinates in Cartesian space has an “underlying ontological dimension.” Even before he destroyed his instruments of technological navigation, Ahab would not have been able to find it, because the “existence of maps is no proof of the existence of a reality.” The map is a: “catalyst of the protagonist’s perception. … Trying to negate the topographical tendency towards disorder by the building up of shapes, organizing divergent disorderly factors, by orderly delineation of some marks and erasure of what is thought to form irrelevancies, Ahab tends to believe in implied necessary existence. The systematic inscription of the supposedly uninscribed ocean is the exemplification of a structuralist wish to guarantee presence although stability cannot be guaranteed.” Zbigniew Bialas, “Pondering Over the Chart of Kokovoko – Herman Melville and the Critique of Cartological Inscription, Melville “Among the Nations”, eds. Sanford Marovitz and Athanasios Christodoulou (Kent: Kent State, 2005) 345 – 354: 347 – 349.

(18) As foretold by Mapple in his sermon on Jonah, who “cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea” (Chapter 9). Contrary to first impression, Mapple does not so much fall into the “formulaic tradition of Protestant homiletics.” Rather, his concern is to juxtapose the futility of individual purpose in contrast to the overwhelming force of nature. As Ishmael glosses it, “clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter” (Chapter 76). Truth that “lives in the deep can be confronted only in the deep.” Ahab and his crew “dramatize the heroism and tragedy of our unsuccessful yet unyielding efforts to confront that alien world. … In the end, we can neither control nor understand our world, can neither control nor understand ourselves.” Bruce Grenberg, Some Other World to Find – Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman Melville (Chicago: Chicago, 1989) 98, 101 – 102.

(19) Jenny Franchot, “Melville’s Traveling God,” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Cambridge, 1998) 157 – 185: 158.

(20) Pio Colonnello, “Homelessness as Heimatlosigkeit?,” The Ethics of Homelessness – Philosophical Perspectives, ed. G. Abbarno (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) 41 – 54: 41.

(21) Leslie MacAvoy, “Overturning Cartesianism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Rethinking Dreyfus on Heidegger,” Inquiry, 2001: 44, 455 – 480: 461.

(22) Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics,” 15 Oct. 2008.

(23) Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking, ” 1951, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 1971). Quotes are from Julian Young, “What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World,” Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity – Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT, 2000) 187 – 204.

(24) Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, “Highway bridges and feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm technology,” Man and World, 1997: 30, 159 – 177: 166.

(25) Håkan Karlsson, “Why Is There Material Culture Rather than Nothing? Heideggerian thoughts and archaeology,” Philosophy and Archaeological Practice – Perspectives for the 21^st Century, eds. Cornelius Holtorf and Håkan Karlsson (Lindome: Bricoleur, 2000) 69 – 86: 72.

(26) Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: Chicago) 88.

(27) Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, “Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 2003: 23(5), 339 – 349: 344.

(28) Charles Spinosa, “Heidegger on Living Gods,” Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science – Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT, 2000) 209 – 228: 210.

(29) He thought they were the last philosophical thinkers correctly oriented towards pursing the meaning of Being. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, 1942, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana, 1992). They were the first to experience the “astonishment, the fundamental mood of the first beginning.” It “struck and dazzled them,” Michel Haar, “Attunement and Thinking,” Heidegger Reexamined – Volume 3 – Art, Poetry and Technology, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (New York: Routledge, 2002) 149 – 162: 158. The historical commentator who came closest to realizing a Heideggerian interpretation of the Odyssey may have been the neo-Platonist Porphyry (ca. 234 – 305 CE). In The Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey, he “sees Odysseus as a symbol of the soul journeying through the material realm of becoming to its final restoration in pure being.” Seth Schein, “Introduction,” Reading the Odyssey – Selected Interpretive Essays, ed. Seth Schein (Princeton: Princeton, 1996) 3 – 32: 15.

(30) “Theology” (θεολογία), of course, is discourse about god or gods – religion, conventionally understood. Onto-theology defines a god as the originator of being. In the Judeo-Christian Tradition, the God of Abraham and Moses produced or caused everything that is. For Heidegger, referring to God is “telling a story” – tracing one form of entity (us) back to its origin with some other entity (God). Heidegger is critical of onto-theology because has obscured the quest for the meaning of Being. “Being” is what produces and causes entities, not other entities. William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Continuum, 2007) 17.

This conceptual misunderstanding has pervasively infiltrated the Judeo-Christian literary and narrative tradition. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 1955, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1969) 42 – 74. It has done so by proliferating distinctions such as “reality versus appearance” and “the rational versus the irrational,” all of which Heidegger rejects. It is a short step from Heidegger’s definition of onto-theology to include monotheism in the sense of Abrahamic religions. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith, New York: Fordham, 2001) 9 – 16; Benjamin Crowe, “On the Track of the Fugitive Gods: Heidegger, Luther, Hölderlin, The Journal of Religion, 2007: 183 – 205: 187. By “codifying and disseminating an understanding of what entities are, metaphysics provides each historical ‘epoch’ of intelligibility with its ontological bedrock. And by furnishing an account of the ultimate source from which entities issue, metaphysics supplies intelligibility with a kind of foundational justification that … Heidegger characterizes as ‘theological.’” Theology “reflects a series of historical transformations in our metaphysical understanding of entities are.” Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005) 8.

(31) H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (Stanford: Stanford, 1963).

(32) Christopher Sten, Sounding the Whale – Moby Dick as Epic Novel (Kent: Kent State, 1996) x, 2.

(33) Christopher Sten, “Threading the Labyrinth: Moby-Dick as Hybrid Epic,” A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Kelley, 408 – 422: 408.

(34) Hubert Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 137 – 161: 138. World-disclosers such as Odysseus and Moses also played significant roles in establishing our sense of “self,” understood as a cultural precipitate. They developed a system of “creedal hedges … raised around impulses of independence or autonomy from communal purpose.” By doing so they established a “corporate identity within which the individual” must “organize the range of his[/her] experience.” Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago: Chicago, 1966) 15, 17.

(35) Robert Bellah, “What is Axial about the Axial Age?”, Archives of European Sociology, 2005: XLVI(1), 69 – 87: 73.

(36) Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics,” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2^nd ed., ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge, 2006) 345 – 372: 351.

(37) Hubert Dreyfus, “Introduction,” Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Boston: Blackwell, 1992), 1 – 12: 12.

(38) Claudia Johnson and Vernon Johnson, Understanding the Odyssey (Westport: Greenwood, 2003) xiii.

(39) Milton Reigelman, “Looking at Melville’s First Hero through a Homeric Lens: Tommo and Odysseus,” Melville “Among the Nations”, eds. Morovitz and Christodoulou, 201 – 209: 202.

(40) Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses – A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2008) 75.

(41) Hélène Foley, “‘Reverse Similies’ and Sex Roles in the Odyssey,” Arethusa, 1978: 11, 7 – 26, reprinted in Modern Critical Interpretations – Homer’s The Odyssey, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 87 – 102: 100.

(42) The Greek word for Odysseus’ return home is νόστος or nostos (from which our word “nostalgia” is derived). Nostos is a genre of epic literary form. Karl Reinhardt, “The Adventures in the Odyssey,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 63 – 132: 87. Odysseus had to make it through numerous literal and symbolic encounters in fantastical lands in order to return back to normalcy. These confrontations defined the meaning of his being and his identity as a member of the human species. The most important aspect of his adventure is the contrast between these worlds, 82. Seen in this light, “Odysseus’ homecoming is his most exotic adventure” of all. Michael Nagler, “Dread Goddess Revisited,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Shein, 141 – 162: 161. As is Ishmael’s rescue by The Rachel (Epilogue). Moby Dick flips between first- and third- person narrative, emphasizing this juxtaposition, as does the Odyssey. Laura Slatkin, “Composition by Theme and the Mētis of the Odyssey,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 223 – 238: 231.

(43) Bellah refers to it as the “Axial Age.” Bellah, “What is Axial about the Axial Age.”

(44) Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997) 3.

(45) As did Virgil for Dante in the Divine Comedy. Although layered, that world nonetheless remained a phenomenologically-consistent whole, with a single god (i.e., God). Dante and Virgil encountered Odysseus in the only place where Dante thought to stick him, which was in the eighth circle (Inferno, Canto 26). In Dante’s cosmology that was the one reserved for false counselors, Odysseus having betrayed his sailors by inducing them to travel beyond the edge of the known world, on the promise of virtue and knowledge.

(46) I am thinking in particular of the Pequod’s improbable and hallucinogenic encounters with other ships: The Albatross (Chapter 52), The Virgin (Chapter 81), The Rose-Bud (Chapter 91), The Samuel Enderby (Chapter 100), The Bachelor (Chapter 115), The Rachel (Chapter 128) and The Delight (Chapter 131).

(47) Chapter 61: “It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn. Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.”

Odysseus frequently avoids similar opportunities to become forgetful of his objective (the meaning of his being, to return home to Ithaca): with Circe, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters, upon hearing the song of the Sirens, and with Calypso. The “human way” prevailed over all that is “nonhuman.” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and Mythical Meanings,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 33 – 54: 45. By “wresting the names of its heroes from oblivion” in this manner, “the social memory is really attempting to root a whole system of values in the absolute, in order to preserve it from precariousness, instability, and destruction: in short, to shelter it from time and from death.” Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Death with Two Faces,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 55 – 62: 57. It establishes their κλέος (kleos) or historical celebrity – something they cannot do of their own accord. Charles Segal, “Kleos and Its Ironies in the Odyssey, Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 201 – 222: 203.

Illustrating this, Odysseus returns to Ithaca as a simple beggar, much as Ishmael would have been following his rescue by The Rachel (Epilogue). Odysseus’ identity progressively changes from being a wanderer to being at home in his dwelling, as he is “recognized” by Telemachus, Argus, Euryclea and Penelope. Ishmael survives to narrate Moby Dick. Melville establishes Ishmael’s kleos for all time, just as Homer did for Odysseus.

(48) There is a long tradition in Greek poetry involving the concepts of “being a host” and “being a guest” (ξενία, xenia). Reinhardt, “The Adventures in the Odyssey,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Schein, 63 – 132: 88, 122; Nagler, “Dread Goddess Revisited,” Reading the Odyssey, ed. Shein, 141 – 162: 157. Some hosts are less congenial than others (Polyphemus eats his guests), just as some guests are less than congenial (the Suitors are gluttons).

(49) It might be possible to regard Ishmael’s dwelling as the Pequod (Chapter 21 – Chapter 135). However, it only is a provisional or temporary place. It lacks the culture-revealing facility that a true dwelling has. Ishmael is as acculturated as he is going to get during the course of the story, when he signs up to sail on the Pequod. He eschews the easy bonhomie of the crew (Chapter 40), and never does acquire much facility as a sailor. “Even when Ishmael seems intimately involved in the activities of the Pequod, he stands truly apart from the rest of the crew, his separateness revealed in his inability to engage in any activity and take his identity from it.” A better interpretation of Ishmael emphasizes this estrangement. “An unwanted child in an alien world, clinging to his fragile mortality, just as at the end of the voyage he will cling to Queequeg’s life-buoy coffin, Ishmael not too surprisingly sees himself at the mercy of ‘the invisible police officer of the Fates’.” Grenberg 111, 96.

(50) Queequeg is considerably more alert to cultural signifiers than is Ishmael. He embodies the practices of his Kokovokian culture. He is devoted to a religious totem, Yojo (Chapter 16), and spends considerable time constructing a coffin in accordance with Kokovoko tradition (Chapter 110). He guides Ishmael, just like Virgil guides Dante.

(51) Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967: 96(1), 1 – 21. Reprinted in Beyond Belief (Berkeley: California, 1970), 168 – 189: 175.

(52) Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard, 1989) 512. Taylor specifically invokes Odysseus: his homecoming “from the realm of the monstrous, the threatening, of the limit situation, to the joys of ordinary life with its rhythmed flow of time” is “one of the constitutive experiences of modernity,” 627.

(53) Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard, 2007) 484.

(54) Alfred Tauber, “The Biological Notion of Self and Non-Self,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 19 Mar. 2006, 15 Oct. 2008.

(55) Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Interpretive Social Science – A Second Look, eds. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan (Berkeley: California, 1988) 33 – 81: 46. Dostoyevsky actually accomplished this synthesis in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). “His religion is Orthodoxy because it is the religion of the Russian people” (emphasis in original). Dmitry Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis Whitfield (New York: Vintage, 1949) 283.

(56) Thomas Werge, “Moby-Dick and the Calvinist Tradition,” Studies in the Novel, 1969: 1(4), 484 – 506. Reprinted in A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, ed. Michael Davey (New York: Routledge, 2004) 96 – 98: 96.

(57) Juana Djelal, “The Shape of the Whale: Flukes and Other Tales,” Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 2006: 7(2), 47 – 53: 53.

(58) E.g. Shawn Thomson, The Romantic Architecture of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2001).

(59) E.g. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford, 1941); Nick Selby, Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Columbia, 1999) 62; Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton, 1952); Clifford Hallam, “Ishmael’s Tale: Confessions of an Outsider,” reviewed in John Samson, ed., “Melville,” American Literary Scholarship, ed. David Nordloh (Durham: Duke, 2002) 46.

(60) James McIntosh, “The Mariner’s Multiple Quest,” New Essays on Moby Dick, ed. Richard Brodhead (New York: Cambridge, 1986) 23 – 52: 23.

(61) T. Walter Herbert, “Calvinist Earthquake: Moby Dick and Religious Tradition,” New Essays, ed. Brodhead, 109 – 140; T. Walter Herbert, Moby Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (Piscataway: Rutgers, 1977).

(62) Emory Elliott, “Wandering To-and-Fro – Melville and Religion,” A Historical Guide to Herman Melville, ed. Giles Gunn (Oxford: Oxford, 2005) 167 – 224: 190 – 191.

(63) Walter Bezanson, “Review of Thompson, 1952, Melville’s Quarrel with God,” Modern Language Notes, 1953: 68(4), 266 – 268: 268.

(64) Herbert, Moby Dick and Calvinism; Rowland Sherrill, “Review of Herbert, 1977, Moby Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled,” The Journal of Religion, 1978: 58(3), 324 – 325: 325.

(65) Chad Luck, “The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby Dick, and the Marvelous,” Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 2007: 9(1), 3 – 23: 5.

(66) Gail Coffler, “Melville’s Allusions to Religion,” Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 2006: 8(1), 107 – 119: 112. It also shows that Melville may have had a better understanding of the problem of onto-theology than did Heidegger. Heidegger would have been truer to the phenomena he described if he had not disapproved of monotheism per se. He should be more interested in opposing the initial juxtaposition of experience into categories such as monotheism versus polytheism, to begin with.

(67) Athanasios Christodoulou, “The ‘Tragicalness of Human Thought’ – an Introduction to Melville’s Theory of Knowledge, Melville “Among the Nations”, ed. Marovitz and Athanasios, 159 – 174: 162.

(68) Lawrence Buell, “Moby Dick as Sacred Text,” New Essays on Moby Dick, ed. Brodhead, 53 – 72: 61.

(69) Hilton Obenzinger, “Wicked Books: Melville and Religion,” A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Kelley, 181 – 196: 181.

(70) John Bryant, “The Persistence of Melville: Representative Writer for a Multicultural Age,” Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant (Kent: Kent State, 1997) 3 – 30: 4.

The way signs work is complex enough as it is.  Not only is there the sign, but also: that which is signified; the person responding to it; and the social conventions that give it meaning.  A “stop sign” at an intersection, for example, has no inherent or intrinsic properties.  It commands us to brake the car, and we do so, because it’s a traffic law.  Among other effects, this has social utility, because it tends to minimize the likelihood of collisions, with their attendant personal and economic cost.  So strong is this pull that most of us still come to a halt, even at 2:AM, when there are no other cars for as far as the eye can see, because we are acculturated to obey the rule. 

In principle, though, the stop sign could be almost anything else.  It could be square instead of hexagonal; green instead of red; and be inscribed with the word “go,” instead of the word “stop.”  What’s important is the semiotic relationship between these elements, their mode of signification, the behavior triggered by the sign, and the web of meaning surrounding these elements.

The power of the stop sign depends on human agreement.  As characterized by John Searle, it is an “institutional fact,” as opposed to a “brute fact,” such as the height of Mount Everest, The Construction of Social Reality 2 (1985).  It is an invisible feature of our “socially constructed reality.”  It is not functional, like a screwdriver, which needs to be a certain shape in order to accomplish its purpose.  Nor is it world-constrained, like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge.  Hoover Dam had to be built at the narrowest gorge in the Grand Canyon in order to effectively block the flow of the Colorado River.  The Golden Gate Bridge was built as a straight line between to promontories defining the entrance to San Francisco Bay.  It does not meander in, say, a semi-circular pattern.

Screwdrivers, dams and bridges are not signs, thought they may be incorporated into them and later acquire a signifying role, e.g., a scenic picture of the Golden Gate Bridge may come to mean, “Visit San Francisco on Holiday.” 

Signs per se, on the other hand, are arbitrary.  Their combination of symbols just as easily could mean something else.  Their meaning, as Searle says at 12, is “observer relative.”  Observer-relativity in turn depends on (1) the agreement (or imposition) of function; (2) cooperative behavior; and constitutive rules, which exist only because of the human institutions that adopt them.  These in turn comprise a set of “background capacities,” enabling us to function in the world, 129.

Unfortunately, Searle misleading calls element (2) “collective intentionality,” 23, which assumes a kind of teleology.  As economists such as Fredrich A. Hayek have observed, teleology “occurs only on the level of the individual, who has purposes planned only for the short-term future.  The entire system has a teleological structure only in so far as those individual teleologies interact to govern the dynamical behavior of the entire system.”  The long-term evolution of a biological or economic system, however, is “unpredictable and any trends which may be visible at a given time could be reversed in the future,” Barrow, J. & Tipler, F., The Anthropic Principle 140 (1986).

Whatever its provenance, the schematic of signs breaks down in the case of strange signs.  By “strange signs,” I mean signs that, because they are (or can become) ambiguous, end up not doing their job.  They either are ignored; communicate no meaning; or actually communicate a meaning that is not at all what was intended by the creator of the sign.  Three examples I will consider are: (1) the pedestrian no-crossing sign at the border checkpoint in San Onofre, California; (2) the Carl Sagan space probe plaque; and (3) the (proposed) sign at the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

 1.            The San Onofre Check-Point Sign

This sign is intended to communicate a warning to immigrants not to run across Interstate 5, which is the high-speed freeway the border check-point intercepts.  The reason why immigrants should not attempt to cross the freeway at this point is because a fast-moving automobile may strike them.  This risk is exacerbated at night.  Night-time crossings are probable because they supply a cover of darkness, which in turn minimizes the likelihood of interdiction by Border Patrol agents.  Darkness, however, considerably reduces visibility on the freeway. 

The problem with this sign is that, as a matter of historical fact, it actually has encouraged immigrants (primarily, persons of Hispanic origin) to cross at this point.  They think the sign means to run across the freeway at the spot where the sign is posted, in order to get to the other side.  This is an example of the sign potentially meaning – and having actually meant – the exact opposite of what was intended.

 2.            The Carl Sagan Space-Probe Plaque 

Carl Sagan notoriously designed a plaque that was attached to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft.  It signifies essential aspects of life on Earth.  Supposedly, any extra-terrestrial being with sufficient intelligence to decode it thereupon would become apprised of human existence and some of its characteristics.

The decipherability of the plaque blatantly depends on an application of the anthropic principle.  As characterized by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle 1: “[O]ur location in the Universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.  The basic features of the Universe, including such properties as its shape, size, age and laws of change, must be observed to be of a type that allows the evolution of observers, for if intelligent life did not evolve in an otherwise possible universe, it is obvious that no one would be asking the reason for the observed shape, size, age and so forth of the Universe” (emphasis in original).  This mild version of the anthropic principle almost certainly is true, albeit vapid.

A stronger version, though, goes on to claim that “the Universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage,” Barrow & Tipler 6 (emphasis in original).  In other words, the Universe has to be the way it is, and we have to be in it here on the planet earth, if for no reason other than we perceive it and are capable of making the observation that we do so.  Anthropicists cite recent hypotheses from string theory in modern physics suggesting that, even though in principle there could be any number of possible multi-worlds or alternative universes, in fact very few of them have the unique combination of physical and mathematical properties necessary in order to support life. 

In fact, this hypothesis is absurd, since there are an infinite number of possible galaxies and worlds, and infinity divided by infinity, no matter how small, still is infinity.  “[T]here are other miracles which could occur and lead to anthropically acceptable worlds with a vastly larger probability than our world,” Susskind, L., “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory,” (2003).

In principle, evidence cited in support of the anthropic principle could be entirely coincidental, Carr, B.J. & Rees, M.J., “The anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world, 278 Nature 605 (Apr. 1979).  To demonstrate its validity, one would have to “multiply reality” “to such an extent that very special events like emergence of Life become quite possible.”  This number, however, would have “to be fairly huge in order to accommodate all the unlikely events leading to modern picture of Life,” Kamenshchik, A. & Teryaev, O., “Many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory and mesoscopic anthropic principle,” (2007). 

A further problem arises from the potential number of observers resident in the many possible alternative worlds.  “The anthropic principle claims that what we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.  So it is natural that the probability should not be proportional to the number of observers, rather, it is just the probability for the existence of observers.”  The “anthropic selectional effect does not become stronger just because there can be more observers … there should be an infinite number of observers. … This is more than the finite number of observers like us.  So the question is, why we are human observers, not freak observers. … But if freak observers are infinite, we can not be typical. … [I]f there are both a finite number of humans and a finite number of freak observers (or without freak observers) in our universe, then the anthropic probability for our universe should be infinitely small compared with some other universe with infinite number of freak observers, which can be self-consistently realized,” Li, M. & Wang, Y., “Typicality, Freak Observers and the Anthropic Principle of Existence,” (2007).

Sagan’s space-probe plaque assumes that extra-terrestrial life will be able to understand and decode its inscriptions.  It depicts artifacts of our world, which may not pertain, or in fact be completely different from, those found in any potential other world.  That possible world, if it exists, will be as unintelligible to us, as ours is to them.

3.            The Yucca Mountain Sign

Yucca Mountain is designed as a repository for spent uranium, fuel rods and other waste generated by nuclear power plants.  Its premise is that, rather than carefully storing this detritus at the site of the nuclear power plant where it is generated, it should be tidily packaged and then safely transported to a central location.  Yucca Mountain is located in Nevada, conveniently upwind from Las Vegas.  Las Vegas residents previously have been subjected to large doses of nuclear radiation from early above-ground atomic test experiments.  Evidently some more radiation from spent nuclear fuel rods won’t hurt them, and actually might contribute to their social and environmental well-being.

Yucca Mountain is designed as a repository for spent uranium, fuel rods and other waste generated by nuclear power plants.  Its premise is that, rather than carefully storing this detritus at the site of the nuclear power plant where it is generated, it should be tidily packaged and then safely transported to a central location.  Yucca Mountain is located in Nevada, conveniently upwind from Las Vegas.  Las Vegas residents previously have been subjected to large doses of nuclear radiation from early above-ground atomic test experiments.  Evidently some more radiation from spent nuclear fuel rods won’t hurt them, and actually might contribute to their social and environmental well-being.

The spent nuclear fuel rods will continue to be radioactive for, say, 10,000 years.  It therefore has been thought to be desirable to install some kind of a “universal warning sign” or “permanent marker” in order to designate their location.  Only with such a marker will our distant progeny be able to avoid intrusion into, or interference with, the site. 

The problem is that any sign assumes our descendants will be able to understand its semiotics and signification.  It is highly dubious whether this is so. We cannot, for example, interpret Stonehenge, or the pyramids in Egypt.  They are relics of previous cultures, and our successors surely will face the same difficulty.  This is so even if they might be able to redeploy the nuclear waste for beneficial purposes, e.g., they have devised more efficient extraction or utilization techniques.  Assuming either good or bad, the sign remains incomprehensible.

For that matter, there is no reason to believe they will have language, to begin with.  They might not have any form of communication at all.  They might not even exist as life-forms analogous to us.  And, as with the San Onofre border check-point, there is significant risk that any form of sign actually might encourage the very behavior it was designed to deter.  This could be a disastrous consequence if, as life-forms, they are vulnerable to the same proclivities, as are we.

In conclusion, the concept of the Yucca Mountain sign is futile in principle.  At best, we can rely only on the dangerous nature of the site being transmitted through the evanescent media of pop culture, such as the internet.  When these media (or their successors) expire, then so will knowledge of the site.  Any other alternative is a waste of time.  While this in and of itself is a trivial objection, the sign also is faulty in principle.  The danger of future misinterpretation of it far outweighs any plausible beneficial effect.

I am sick and tired of hearing George Bush (most notably) refer to people as “folk.”  Mr. Bush is not the only one with a predeliction for frequent misuse of this term, although he is the most notable example.  I now cringe whenever it is uttered by anybody, even if the context is benign. 

From an etymological standpoint “folk” means indigenous culture.  It typically is spatially localized to a particular community.  It frequently (though not necessarily) comprises a “tradition” or set of historical practices shared by members of a discrete social group.  It has a number of precipitates such as “folk psychology,” which is a common-sense set of beliefs and assumptions underlying everyday knowledge and practices.  From an anthropological perspective, local “folk” thought (Völksgedanke) can be contrasted with the common mental “endowment” we all share (Elementargedanke).

Bush uses the term negligently to mean “everybody.”  The reason why he does this is because he is striving to seem ordinary and unassuming even though he is President.  His motive is to attempt to ingratiate himself with the populace.  Instead of doing so he just seems stupid or condescending.  His public opinion polls are at a record low.

Like Porky Pig said, “that’s all, folks!”

There was a widely-reported news announcement today that Nancy Reagan had endorsed John McCain for President of the United States.  I certainly don’t have anything against Ms. Reagan, who strikes me has having conducted herself with dignity and comportment during a long and illustrious career.  Neither do I have anything against Mr. McCain, though I do wish he wouldn’t mumble quite so much, and I think he’s too old and generationally-embedded to be President.

What was irritating were Ms. Reagan’s remarks.  “Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed,” she said. 

This strikes me as being an extreme mis-use of language.  Few things could be as meaningless as a post-facto endorsement.  The whole point of an endorsement is that the endorser lends weight and prestige to the endorsee, thereby assisting the endorsee to achieve traction with whomever it is to whom the endorsee is attempting to appeal.  Conceptually, endorsing somebody after “everything was decided” is like deciding to place a bet on a race-horse after the race has ended. 

If this is Ms. Reagan’s, or Mr. McCain’s, concept of an “endorsement,” then something is seriously amiss.

1. “Napoleon ordered his troops to advance” is a performative. “To order” entails there is somebody doing the ordering, that is, Napoleon. The syntax of this sentence is straightforward. There are two participants: Napoleon, and the troops. Napoleon is the subject, the originator of the action described by the verb (“ordering”). The troops are the object, the target of the action originated by the subject (Napoleon).

2. “The troops were ordered by Napoleon to advance” (or, “The troops were ordered to advance by Napoleon”) is (1), reformatted in passive voice. Passive voice shifts focus from verb subject (Napoleon) to verb object (the troops). Although the troops now are the ostensible subject, however, they still are the ones whom Napoleon ordered to advance. There is no ambiguity as to who gave the order. The troops would not have advanced on their own accord, had it not been for the order. Napoleon therefore remains the “real” subject, and the troops remain the “real” object. Their respective roles as participants in the scenario of advancement have not changed. Neither has the relationship between the parties within the verb’s argument. Napoleon still is the originator of the action (the utterer of the performative), and the troops still are its target. The sentence still describes the same events in the world.

3. What were the circumstances under which Napoleon ordered his troops to advance? Surely Napoleon had not simply conceived an abstract desire to do so. Rather, he was responding to conditions on the ground. Such as: a breach in the enemy lines; an opportunity to encircle his foe; good prospects for a frontal assault; or any other military maneuver. He was a great general, because he could do this with ease and facility. We might say, “Assessing (evaluating) conditions on the ground, Napoleon ordered his troops to advance. This, however, only tells us something about Napoleon. It does not illumine the conditions on the ground, which prompted Napoleon to issue the order. We still do not know anything about the troops, other than they advanced. They did not advance on their own accord. They advanced because Napoleon ordered them to do so.

4. “Responding to (in response to) conditions on the ground, Napoleon ordered his troops to advance,” is a modest improvement. It eliminates some of the psychological features of “analyzing,” “considering,” and similar activities. So does “Conditions on the ground solicited Napoleon (afforded to Napoleon the opportunity) to order his troops to advance.” However, with both, we still have the imperious Napoleon.

5. “Napoleon was solicited (afforded) by conditions on the ground, to order his troops to advice. (5) is the passive reformat of (4). We already know Napoleon is the verb’s subject (the issuer of the order). (5) improves on (4), though, because it de-emphasizes his role. It eliminates redundancy, by refocusing the sentence on those aspects of the situation identified at (3). Although grammatically less correct, passive voice reduces the prominence of the subject, and promotes verb clause intelligibility.

(5) remains, however, just a verbose rendering of (1). We hypothesized performatives always imply a strongly-asserted self. We have not been able to devise a counter-example. Nor, in principle, will we ever be able to do so, no matter how exfoliated (and impractical) the expression.

Because of this, performatives are dissimilar to other world-changing verbs. “Napoleon’s troops advanced in response to conditions on the ground” is active voice. The troops might be lizards seeking out the heat, and we still could use this sentence to describe their activity, without fear of embarrassment or contradiction. It doesn’t commit us to a theory of mind – either as to Napoleon, or the troops. Rather than doing the ordering, “Napoleon’s” becomes an ascriptive predicate of the troops (an adjective). For that matter, they also wore blue jackets, fired muskets, and wore mustachios.

But enough with Napoleon, let’s consider a different example. What we are looking for is a series of words (an expression) highlighting the agent-actor characteristic of performatives, by juxtaposing it against a non-performative phrase. So, when asked, “why did you rob banks,” the depression-era outlaw Willie Sutton apocryphally replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Mr. Sutton did not say, “because I wanted to,” or use any other intention-importing verb. Properly understood, Mr. Sutton was responding to his milieu, i.e., financial institutions with currency. The bank made him do it, or predisposed him to do it, or made him feel like doing it, or activated his instinct to do it.

1. “I robbed the bank” leaves little doubt as to who did what. Mr. Sutton originated the action of robbing, and it was the bank that was robbed. Mr. Sutton, however, was not asked to make a first-person avowal. He was answering a question. His response yields improved action-to-world fit.

2. The passive voice formulation is, “The bank was robbed by me.” As we observed earlier, passive voice is less preferable grammatically, than active. Mr. Sutton’s response, though, better accommodates the relationship between the parties, as Mr. Sutton’s answer explains. This is not so with performatives. Implied verb intentionality can’t be eliminated, regardless of voice.

Austin certainly was aware of the world-changing nature of performatives. He does not, however, dwell on the issue of the agent uttering the performative; the conditions in the world prompting its utterance, or, for that matter, conditions in the world thereafter. Like his fellow British Empiricists, he tacitly assumes a “self in opposition to “world.” The former incants a verb formulation, and a new iteration of the latter magically appears.

How to Do Things with Words was infelicitously titled. Possible reformulations such as How Things Are Done with Words, or How to Accomplish the Doing of Things with Words, or How Words Are Used to Accomplish the Doing of Things, only exacerbate the problem. Regardless of what else may be going on, no “things” are being “done.” The existing title emphasizes the existence of these “things,” whatever they may be. This results in the needless proliferation of unwanted objects, and is ontologically superfluous. A more accurate title might be, How to Accomplish Results with Words, or How You Can Change World-States with Words.

How to Do Things with Words implies there is someone doing whatever it is that is being done. It emphasizes the existence of counterpart “selves” using words – not changed world-states. In this respect, it is like the performatives it describes and evaluates.

Austin’s use of the verb “do” also is annoying. It shares this with the Hollywood locution, “let’s do lunch,” or, “I’ll do the meatloaf” (instead of the performative, “I order the meatloaf”). In German, the verb “machten” means either “do” or “make,” depending on context. The improper speakers of “do” certainly don’t mean they intend to cook lunch (or fabricate the meatloaf).  If Austin was German, but retained a British sensibility, he might have entitled his book, How to Make Things with Words.  If he had “gone native,” he might have evolved this to, How the World Makes You Use Words to Say Things.

Best might be a title such as, How a State of Affairs in the World Solicits a Language User to Deploy a Certain Style of Verb in Order to Modify that State of Affairs. I concur it is unlikely Austin ever would adopt this formulation. Its tongue-twisting absurdity shows how the syntax of performatives can lead to a potentially counter-intuitive result. Austin’s Theory of Performatives accounts for a self; words; and an altered world. It does not account, however, for the pre-altered world, which is integral to understanding the performative’s context and meaning.

§243 – §315 of the Philosophical Investigations suggest a large quantity of imprecise notions, which is typical of Wittgenstein. I don’t want to call them “concepts” or “ideas,” and certainly not “propositions.” The definitions of each of these words is different, and they imply other contexts. “Proposals” might work, but that makes it sound as though Wittgenstein had deposited certain meanings into them, whatever those are. This well might be the case, but probably isn’t. I don’t want to prejudge the issue, because it’s easy with Wittgenstein to over-interpret the text – a peculiar form of granular analysis. The biggest problem might be “calling” or “naming” “them” at all, because doing so implies they are “things” or “entities,” susceptible to being “referred to” or “designated as” such, which Wittgenstein most certainly would eschew. In fact, I am hesitant even to say they suggest some-“thing” or any-“thing” to begin with, again because of that pesky word “thing,” which implies they can be pointed out, or defined ostensively.

By the same token, they (whatever they are, or might be) certainly suggest more than merely no-“thing,” understood as the absence of some-“thing,” or any-“thing.” Taking a stand as to what “they” actually are, or might be, may make it impossible to discern exactly what (if anything) Wittgenstein is saying, or trying to stay. Wittgenstein certainly is engaging in some form of activity, otherwise he wouldn’t have written down any words, to begin with, much less the specific words he used. Rather, he would have sat there with his hands neatly folded, or embarked upon some other form of activity. In doing so, he would not necessarily have to be thinking about §243 – §315, or writing anything down, or wondering what words he was going to use, or anything at all. He could have been listening to music, or eating a sandwich, or whatever else he was doing.

The eventual outcome of this problem (understood in the sense of what happens at the conclusion of a process, not as a specific result, which might be a “thing”) well may be we have do away with certain nouns and articles altogether, if only because of the false ideations they import. The nouns we probably can keep are those that unambiguously refer to objects, items or things that actually exist in the world, or that might exist – items like rocks and trees, and unicorns. We can point to them, or hypothetical rearrangements of them, and possibly even devise a word for them. The nouns with which we must dispense will be those implicating mental representations of the foregoing, including perceptions, thoughts, ideas, memories, and all other forms of activity allegedly occurring in the “mind,” whatever that is (if it is any-“thing” at all). In a way, this may be what Bertrand Russell was trying to get to, when he defined a class of two or three nouns that could refer unambiguously, such as “this,” “that” and “I.”

The reason why Wittgenstein’s notions are imprecise is because they are not tightly compacted, or proprietary. Anybody can grab onto them, and define them pretty much however they want. Wittgenstein well might subscribe to some of these deployments, others he would reject entirely as ill-conceived, or an inappropriate extrapolation from whatever it is (or might be) that he meant. And, as per above, we know he meant some-“thing,” otherwise, he wouldn’t have written down the words he wrote, to begin with. Or, better phrased: we might approximate what Wittgenstein meant, if he would assent to some formulation of it, if it was presented to him for approval or rejection – if it was sufficiently determinate, and within the penumbra of what counts as “close enough.” In order to elude any problem of reference, perhaps he would evidence his agreement (or lack of it) only by nodding his head up, or down, as the case might be.

They are, then, a congeries of notions, partaking of varying degrees of definiteness or precision, situated at various distances from the core of whatever it is that Wittgenstein is attempting to express. Like planets, orbiting the center, in concentric circles.

Going back to the start, I also hesitate to use a verb stronger than the text “suggests” the notions. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say these sections of the Philosophical Investigations “state” or even “imply” (insert appropriate word for whatever “it” “is,” or might be). Because that indicates, or tends to indicate, intentional, meaning-conferring activity on Wittgenstein’s part. Wittgenstein well might deny ever having engaged in same, because it would be a form of “mental noun,” like having an “intention,” which he probably would want to avoid.

Even the process is dubious, because it implies Wittgenstein deliberately “selected” certain words that somehow “matched” whatever it was in his head, that he was attempting to express. In much the same way one might pick out produce at the grocery store, carefully inspecting each potato, in order to determine its fitness and suitability for the purpose of including it as a menu item in one’s dinner.

This simple exegesis casts some doubt on Wittgenstein’s enterprise, if his objective is to eliminate all things mental. For surely he would not have written down the words he in fact used, unless he discerned some relationship, however abstract, between them and what he wanted to express. We might even call it the “idea” he wanted to express, without committing ourselves to the existence of some-“thing” tangible that lived inside of his head. His words might be vague, and they may not completely envelop the topography of the idea.

This potential difficulty is exacerbated by the German language, which specializes in attempting to match words with ideas, simply by adding on more syllables to the words – sometimes expanding their potential applicability, sometimes restricting it. It fundamentally is unlike its parent language, Latin, which has a clear structure of subject – verb – object. It is easy to diagram Latin sentences. Latin invites this form of analysis, because it is particularly serial. Its syntactical structure also implies a robust notion of self. If Latin has an excess of “subject” nouns, then German is partakes of an excess of compound “object” nouns, together with their exfoliated adjectival appendages.

Despite this, somehow, the words Wittgenstein uses are “close enough” to express his thoughts, in the context of discourse in which he is engaged – that is, philosophical analysis. Which, for Wittgenstein, paradoxically might result in an outcome where the words “mean” no-“thing” at all, either to him, or for us, bewildered as we are in our attempts to extract meaning from them.

Let us consider two more examples of, or analogies to, this type of activity. A camera with a zoom lens situates the image to be photographed in a certain perspective. It also enables the photographer to focus on that image; and select a focal length (the “f”-stop), which is the depth of field of the focus. And, a notch filter for the sound engineer performs a similar function. The engineer selects a particular frequency to be boosted or cut; and then the “q” factor, which is the shape of the envelope surrounding the frequency – the range of frequencies surrounding the center, which also will be affected. That zone can be narrow or wider, either in fixed increments (like an f-stop), or on a variable basis, depending upon the type of control.

Both of these are analog processes, in that they involve interaction between light or sound, on the one hand, and perspicuous activity on the part of the person performing the task. The person performing the task must deploy tools of sensory perception in order to discern which looks, or sounds, “best” (or, at least, “better than” some other iteration of same). In the same manner, Wittgenstein must select the words to express his ideas.

There is no particular reason why this is, or must be, a “conscious” process. Most of the time, we write down words, or natter on in conversation, without the slightest “idea” of what we are trying to say (or, only a “general” idea, or a heading in a “vague direction”). We just open our mouth, and out come the words. It certainly would be wrong to say (again, for most of the time) that we “pick out” individual words to use.

Nor does the photographer necessarily have a “mental representation” of the photograph-to-be (how it should “look”), or compare one “mental representation” of it to another, say, when changing zoom-perspective or focal length. Fashion photographers, for example, attempt to induce their models to assume a number of different poses, attitudes and expressions, and are content blithely to snap away, hoping that one of the pictures felicitously captures or depicts what transpired during the session.

And, the sound engineer may spend hours fiddling with the equalization of different frequencies, all with a view towards making the sound recording sound as “good” as possible, with reference to some standard. Even less so than the photographer, that paradigm is not a “mental representation.” Rather, it depends on the engineer’s background, experience, and skill at differentiating (and then selecting from) any number of possible outcomes.

Still, we deploy certain words, instead of others. A musician writes down certain notes, instead of others. An artist chooses certain colors from a palette, instead of others. Even the chef selects particular vegetables from those on offer at the market. This process cannot be random, or chaotic. If it was, then, any old word, or any old note, or any old color, or any old vegetable, would do – which simply isn’t the case.

In order to be explanatory, or to explore his own assumptions, Wittgenstein ought to clarify exactly what’s involved in this process. But he doesn’t. Rather, if anything, he suggests we ought to do it, on his behalf. His words are elusive. This might mean he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about. Or, he cannot express himself articulately. Giving Wittgenstein more credit, he may be eschewing mere exposition. He invites us to participate in the process of understanding. We are not simply readers, rather, collaborators. To cooperate with Wittgenstein effectively, we in turn must import our own concepts, structure, meaning, framework, assumptions, and uses of language.

Many things Wittgenstein says are absurd. In many instances, he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about. He fails to address the issue properly, or parse it in a manner that makes sense. There are few things more amusing than contemporary philosophers who slavishly worship at the altar of Wittgenstein.

One of my personal grievances is that he has an annoying habit of using an imaginary interlocutor to express matters of importance, or at least they seem as though they are, or might be. This rather gives the impression that he’s a little child, wanting his mother to see something clever he’s just done. The imaginary interlocutor might just be a cover Wittgenstein uses, when he reaches impasse. Like a salmon about to spawn, he swims up a stream, to a tiny, closely-confined pond. The pond is so far removed from the mainstream of the river, that he no longer has the ability to navigate his way back. Where he would confront the rush of culture, and society – the main stream, or commonly accepted version, of what he’s trying to observe and articulate.

None of this particularly would matter, except for Wittgenstein’s stated objective, of doing just that – to expose the backgrounds, the contexts, and the applications, of words. How they are used, and how they intersect with “mind,” if they do, or if that’s possible, to begin with.

On the other hand, many of Wittgenstein’s insights are brilliant. But it’s hard to tell which is which.

For Wittgenstein, the best outcome might be a “brain transplant” between him and you, or me, or us. In this way, his thoughts could be transferred to us seamlessly, without loss of nuance, and without the intervention of words, each participating in some degree of indeterminacy. This particularly is so for nouns attempting to name, or characterize, or describe mental events or activity. And, verbs describing mental processes, as to which there is some kind of an outcome or result.

This, of course, isn’t possible. Words, properly understood, are the troublesome intermediaries. Even if we break through the penumbra of vagueness, we still are left with the problem of “why those words, instead of others.” Why did Dostoyevsky, or Melville, or any other great novelist, use the words they did, instead of others? Why did Mozart pick the certain notes he did? Surely, they weren’t just random – otherwise, anybody could do it. Part of what makes them great artists is their skill at instinctively selecting the “best” word (note) to use. [I hesitate to say “intuitively,” because that implies a level of cognition that well might be absent.]

But, “best” with reference to what? Even if we don’t attribute to them any “conscious” objective, we haven’t avoided the issue. Because if it comes down to sheer skill, like a championship tennis player, or a grand master at chess, there still has to be some standard, or criteria, for what counts as “good.” In a game, it is winning – there is a way of scoring one performance, as “better than” another. It is implausible, though, this would be sufficient for Wittgenstein’s purpose. Because some people can’t stand Dostoyevsky. Some people find Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, to be unlistenable. On the other hand, I think they’re so amazing, that I no longer can listen to Bach, or Brahms, or Beethoven, or other crusty old German composers. There is a reason for these different outcomes, and I think I know what it is. For now, though, Wittgenstein has enough trouble enough explaining the fact they’re different, to begin with.

In the absence of suitable technology, then, we have no choice but to parse the text as delicately as possible, and with as much deference and discretion as we are capable of mustering. Keeping in mind that it is possible to read the same section of the Philosophical Investigations for several hours, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, as different issues keep revealing themselves with each methodology. It’s not possible to establish a protocol, or a procedure, for reading the text, that will result in the maximum extraction of whatever is, or might be, there to be extracted.

The simples way to proceed might be to construct a table. Column A sets forth the notion suggested by the text. Column B would ask, “does Wittgenstein agree?” In some cases he might rebuke the notion; in others, accept it; in others, not have the slightest idea of what we are talking about. Column C would evaluate whether the notion actually is so, or, at least, if we “think” it is (itself a conundrum unavoidably suggested by the very nature of this activity). You can pose the following as questions, or aspects of a phenomenological inquiry. Examples:

1. We experience brain activity in response to irradiations on the retina, vibrations in the auditory canal. If these are pleasurable or painful, we well might react behaviorally, with words or gestures. There is a functional, and perhaps even predictable, relationship between the two.

2. We interpolate, or somehow translate, that brain activity, into sensations and experiences, such as pleasure or pain.

3. We use words to identify or characterize these states (though not in the sense of “naming” an “object,” a “mental state,” that resides in the brain). One of the ways in which we do so is by using first-person psychological sentences (“avowals”). Not all uses of words, though, involve this reflexiveness. We are capable of engaging in fluid conversation and discourse, with other people. We communicate with them, and they with us. As we do so, we may not have the slightest “idea” of what we’re talking about.

4. Our brains are confined to our skulls. We do not have television screens on our foreheads, enabling somebody else to peer inside of our brain. The most advanced forms of electroencephalography, MRI, cat scan, and brain surgery cannot begin to account for the wealth of human experience and common sense. In principle, they never will be able to.

5. Because of this, it is impossible for us to experience other people’s sensations. Nonetheless, we understand their descriptions of their sensations, and even their characterizations of ours. This is what happens when you go to a doctor, for example, and describe, or try to describe, an ailment. The reciprocal occurs when the doctor offers a diagnosis. Most of the time, the patient and the doctor achieve mutual understanding. Sometimes, we have “empathy” with another person’s problems or issues. This only is possible because we recognize their experience, characterized by their words, as something uncannily similar to something we also have experienced. We are able to communicate that sense, back to our conversational counterpart.

6. It is impossible for any one of us to have a “private language,” that is, one understood only by its speaker. If this was so, it would preclude any reciprocal, interactive, or communicative effect.

7. We engage in “functional behavior,” that is, the ability to use language, follow rules, manipulate equipment, and the like. In some cases, we have no “sensation” of doing so. We do so with ease, facility, and non-consciously. Any sensations we might have might collapse, or incorporate into, sensation-experiencing behavior (the type of behavior exhibited by someone experiencing that sensation, or one somehow similar to it). Certainly this is all somebody else can perceive, or respond to, if at all.

8. There is, however, no “one way” (much less a “right way,” or even a “comprehensive way”) to describe human activity or endeavor.

9. We deploy cognitive mechanisms and processes, such as doing arithmetic, writing poems, and conceiving of the theory of relativity. We use what J. L. Austin characterized as “performative” verbs, to achieve a result in the world. The world changes when we use them; it is different than it was, before the speaker’s utterance. The use of performatives in turn implies an “intention” to cause, or bring about, a certain state of affairs. If I didn’t want to achieve a certain effect, then I would have used different words, or no words at all. Again, this activity doesn’t necessarily have to be “conscious,” in the sense that it’s subject to more-or-less simultaneous awareness or introspection. However, sometimes, it is.

10. We also have ideas, reflections, memories, and other forms of “mental representations.” We associate ideas quickly and fluently, hop-scotching between one suggestive thought to another. These somehow are triggered, or activated. Sometimes they’re from the distant past, sometimes quite recent. There is, however, a reason why one has Memory A, which leads to Memory B, which leads to Memory C. If this process was random or chaotic, however, then there would be no reason why anybody is able to associate anything with anything. The explanation may be entirely neurochemical, or depend on relative electrical charges of neurons or synapses, or their size, or their flexibility. As with most of our day-to-day activity, it is entirely non-conscious.

11. From time to time, we have “self-knowledge,” that is, we know what we are thinking about, and why we are thinking about that, instead of something else. We “know” what is in the “mind.”

12. Wittgenstein believes philosophy is nothing more than “grammar,” that is, parsing language and how words are used. Because of this, he also is committed to the notion there is no such thing as a “creative” use of language, such as that found in novels, or poetry. It’s a mystery how he was able to write Philosophical Investigations, to begin with. Is this right? It seems dubious, because philosophy deals with “issues,” comprising more than merely the means by which they are expressed.

Put slightly differently, language presents a “procedural” issue. Because it deals with “fit,” in the ways we’ve discussed, it isn’t disinteresting. However, particularly in philosophical or creative discourse, it always is deployed for some purpose or reason. We can be as clear as crystal about words and language, yet the “substantive” problem remains.

The Solution to Wittgenstein’s Dilemma

“Product.”  This term frequently was used in the consumer entertainment software business, back when there was one.  It refers to “things” such as books, records (CDs, cassettes), videos (DVDs, VHS), etc.  My objection to it is two-fold.  First, it is misused to refer to the work embodied in the tangible medium, as opposed to the physical or mechanical instantiation of it.  Second, even when correctly used (in the second sense), it is implicitly derisory to the creator’s effort.  It suggests it isn’t artistic or unique, rather, it’s fungible and replaceable.  Even if the latter is so – and it may be true more often than you think – it still is derogatory.

“Content.”  Which is a convenient lead-in to the successor to “product,” particularly as aesthetic works migrate to the Internet.  “Content” is every bit (get it, bit) as dismissive as “product.”  It demeans the creator’s effort.  It suggests the work’s sole function is to take up space, attract page-views, stimulate advertising dollars, improve search-engine rankings, or the like.  When in fact it should be the primary driver of these activities, not the subordinate one.  By analogy, “articles” in many newspapers, magazines and other print media frequently are regarded merely as “devices” or “carriers” for advertising, and “content” carries the same connotation.

“Folk.”  If I hear our President George Bush refer to “folk” one more time, I think I’ll barf.  Same with the current crop of presidential candidates, together with their “analysts” (oops, I mean “operatives” or “spin doctors”).  “Folk” is a specialized term referring to a narrow affinity-based group, such as an ethnic tribe, a clog-dancing club, people who play “folk music,” and what not.  It cannot and should not be used to refer to “people in general,” or an amorphous group of individuals to which one is attempting to appeal.  Its mis-use in this context reveals the faux-humanization of political discourse, that is, trying to make yourself sound sincere, when in fact you’re not. 

So apologies in advance if we encounter each other and I am mildly remonstrative on the above points.

Mr. Ulin’s criticism completely misses the point. It’s not so much that Bukowski “was” or “wasn’t” unique. Rather, he spoke in a voice that was tremendously evocative of LA as a place, not as an abstract concept, or even an abstract concept of place. More so than any of these other writers, he was responsible for the “De-Disney-ification” of Los Angeles experience. He substituted a real, gritty world for the fantasy world spoon-fed to us by pop culture and the mass media. It’s the antithesis of the American ideal, because it rejects any kind of juxtaposition between alternatives (i.e., this is good, that is bad). Rather, for Bukowski, the whole menu of alternatives is screwed up to begin with. Instead of choosing between unpalatable options, he simply opts out.

There is no evidence Bukowski ever read Derrida, or for that matter even heard of him, Bukowski, however, took deconstructionism to its lowest-to-the-ground, most-fully-parsed, most atomic level. In an effort to eliminate pretense and artifice from his writing, he arrived at a style that disassembled the world into its simplest, most granular elements. The key to his success was that he had no agenda, no theory to advocate, no aesthetic or point of view. He simply didn’t care. As a result, he was open to experience, and open to whatever happened, in its most unstructured, disaggregated, decompiled form.

In this respect, he was way beyond the beats, with whom he sometimes is compared. The beats stood in antithesis to 1940’s literary formalism. Whereas, Bukowski stands for nothing, not even in opposition to something, or anything. His work simply hits the pavement hard, flopping this way and that, like how a fisherman hits a salmon on its head to facilitate its already-suffocating death.Culturally, he gravitated to the lowest common denominator.

As with Derrida, it is highly unlikely Bukowski ever read the philosopher John Rawls, or for that matter even heard of him. Similarly, though, one of Bukowski’s over-arching themes was that a society – our society – should be judged not by what is the greatest good for the greatest number; but rather, how it treats its most downtrodden, its most unfortunate.

There are two ways to psychoanalyze Bukowski. Both are suggestive, because there is so much evidence in support of each. The first is Freudian – obviously he was deeply conflicted, particularly as a result of his pathological relationship with his father, who beat him constantly. The second is Phenomenologically – he writes as if he had no consciousness, that he fully was at one with his world. In order to participate in that world with him, and to partake of it, we need to understand his loathsome self-image, his mid-career of scrabbling hardship, his alcoholism, and his ability to put all of this into words.Here is why, particularly living in Los Angeles, Bukowski will continue to remain relevant.

1. Once I had lunch with a friend at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As we were walking out, a woman jostled him, and then remonstrated him for not making way for her, as she exited the room. He replied, “In the country where I come from, the only question we ask a woman like you, is how much.”

2. Incidents of road-rage are common. I saw a blue corvette cut off another sports car on Sunset Boulevard. They raced around several hair-pin turns. At a stop light, the guy in the blue corvette stopped his car, opened his door, and pulled out what looked like a small-caliber weapon. I quickly turned up a side street, anxious not to get caught in the melee.

3. I was behind a driver, who happened to be a woman, who was behind a gentleman in a sports car, who in turn was behind a large truck. We all were driving up Laurel Canyon. She honked at the guy in the sports car, evidently because he wasn’t moving fast enough, or (sensibly) didn’t want to attempt to pass the truck on the winding road. He got out of his car, and went to the driver’s side of her car. By this time, another car had come up behind me, so I was stuck. Rather than having an altercation, though, she said to him: “Hey, do you want to fuck?” Not as in, have an altercation, but rather as in, have sex.

4. I saw a driver hit another car in a grocery-store parking lot, then simply drove off as if nothing had happened. The lot was crowded, and I was right behind him. Fortunately, it didn’t even look like a fender-bender; neither vehicle seemed to have suffered any damage. A woman, who seemed to be of foreign extraction, hopped out of the bumped car, and started yelling at the guy, who was in the bumping car. She ran around the entire lot, appealing to other drivers to assist her. I’m not sure in what respect they might have been of aid, as she clearly was not injured. The only thing I could think of is that she saw her big chance at a Southern California-style lawsuit simply driving away.

5. Grocery store check-out lines also seem to be common sites of frustration. I saw a gentleman arguing with the clerk, evidently on the premise the automatic scanner had not correctly calculated the correct discount to which he was entitled as a result of his membership in the store’s club. There was a long line behind him, and somebody started grumbling. He turned around, put up his dukes, and said, “You all better get out of here, ‘cause this is gonna take some time! All of you’d better leave!” He actually approached the person immediately behind him in what looked to me to be a threatening and belligerent manner. At least, I’m sure the guy was happy there was a shopping cart between them. As I left, I saw the clerk taking all of his groceries out of their bags, and rescanning them.

6. I went to a seminar at UCLA that took place in Dodd Hall, home of UCLA’s illustrious Philosophy Department. At some point, I went to the men’s room to relieve myself. The gentleman standing several urinals down commented, “Think of all the great philosophers who have pissed here.” There was a job opening for a new Assistant Professor in the Department, and somebody told me they had over 400 applicants. Ironically, the State of California probably lacks sufficient funding to fill the position.

7. Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills in particular, is known for its many cases of horrifically bad plastic surgery. Although it’s hard to decide, I think what annoys me the most, is the women with the big lips. They flubber, babble and drool, like ducks in a pond. While I don’t know for sure what it must feel like to possess such a physical attribute, I imagine it’s something like the Novocain wearing off after a trip to the dentist. Where in God’s name did they get the idea this was attractive?

These are just samples of the daily indignities, of which Bukowski wrote. He occasionally spoke of how he used to survive on PayDay candy bars, and how much he looked forward to consuming their peanuty goodness. I eat one in remembrance of, and solidarity, with him.