The Bloody Cargo of Kant and Locke
Melville and Poe sailed alone as Romantic Realists and had the last word
In chapter 73 of Moby Dick, Stubb and Flask kill a right whale. Flask predicts the head will be hoisted aboard port side, opposite a sperm whale’s head on the starboard, to fulfill a prophecy from the satanic crewman, Fedallah:
As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.
The two heads, according to Flask’s telling of Fedallah’s prophecy, will ensure the Pequod can never capsize.
The great battle between the Empiricists and the Rationalists had cooled some by the time Melville wrote Moby Dick. The Romantics, particularly the extreme American adherents, the Transcendentalists, had largely spent themselves in their over-reaction to Enlightenment positivism, but they did not yet know it. The un-moored trust in the goodness and rationalism of man was never accepted by Herman Melville or Edgar Allan Poe, who are often called the Dark Romantics but really deserve to be called Romantic Realists. The Transcendentalists seemed victorious in American culture by the time Moby Dick was published and with Walt Whitman’s arrival, their place seemed assured. But, like Woodstock and Altamont, their zenith and their fall were closer than the Transcendentalists knew, but, by then, Melville had quit writing commercially and Poe was long dead. Yet, the Romantic Realists would have their posthumous say.
I began this article as a reaction to Mr. Jacob Yusufov’s two columns, Imperfection of Man: Against Romanticism and Romantics of Conservatism: Politics of the Present. I, being steeped in the logical positivism of science by profession, bristle when the Enlightenment is over-praised and Romanticism’s reaction to it under-appreciated. But, after careful reading and thought, Mr. Yusufov is right in both his essays. Except this: logical positivism AND utopian liberalism are equally responsible for sinking us deeper in the water and upsetting our trim.
I have neither the time nor the philosophic chops to go toe-to-toe with Mr. Yusufov except to say that Romanticism was mainly a reaction against the sterility of the Enlightenment and was never a monolithic movement, anastomozing from the very beginning. The European versions took on various forms from benign to murderous while the American romantics started with local color stories and historical fiction. Things got weird when Ralph Waldo Emerson and his protege Henry Thoreau began their Transcendental journeys. It from the Emerson-Thoreau crunchy granola bowl that modern gnostic individualism and utopianism was pushed in front of Mikey. It’s sposta be good for ya, Mikey.
Mr. Yusufov mentions Kant’s belief that nature was either an enemy or neutral. The American Transcendentalists did not believe this. They should have. Thoreau failed at Walden because he thought he, (man) could live in unity with nature, somehow bending it to his will by sheer belief and compel her to reveal truth; Thus Spake Thoreau. Modern examples of this religion are everywhere. One is the sad story of Chris McCandless whose death was directly inspired by Thoreau. McCandless starved to death, but the cause was his arrogance before nature generated by the modern folding of scientism and utopianism. A guidebook and some canoe trips does not a frontiersman make. McCandless was lionized in book and movie by the modern transcendentals as a great American individualist. Hugh Glass’s survival tale is inspiring, but not because Glass WANTED to be alone, for goodness sake! Glass planned to avenge his solitude.
But even an expert like Captain Ahab can fall victim to deranging gnostic self-reliance. Melville, walking among the living memory of the French Revolution and the American frontier, understood that overturning all to invent anew is a kind of suicide, a diabolical suicide. I find this ironic: gnostic romantics believed one COULD know things innately (truth without experience) and yet they did all they could to untether themselves from truth bequeathed to them by their forebears and then try to find truth in experience (at Walden, in Alaska, etc).
Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance, is not about the virtues of sewing, hunting, working and changing one’s own oil. The tract is about reliance on one’s own idiom, own thoughts, own passions and putting them first, above all rest of humanity and, by extrapolation, before God:
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested: "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied: "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he.
One must wonder how Emerson squared this relativist sentiment with Kant’s categorical imperatives. Did Emerson really want such individualism to be universal?
Melville again uses the whales heads metaphorically in chapter 74:
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
The Right whale is a baleen whale, a filter feeder, that takes in that of value and keep out that which has none; the Stoic. The Sperm whale, which sounds deeply into the darkest of places, yet can still see in the “cave” as well out, is the ultimate Platonist. Throughout the book, Melville assigns whales antediluvian wisdom and a deep knowledge of a world that we can never know. Anthropomorphic as the quote above is, one can guess that Melville greatly respected these animals. His description of the sperm whale mothers and calves in Chapter 87 touches the heart and shocks our humanity as the cruel chapter ends. Possibly the saddest chapter in the book.
Edgar Alan Poe was a more vocal critic of Transcendentalism and wrote a snarky story called, Never Bet the Devil Your Head. Another Diabolical suicide. Poe believed man was a fallen creature, prone to corruption and moral weakness. In his way, Poe was fundamentally conservative. He also disliked the Transcendental writers addiction to allegory; their cloying need for a moral in every story and poem. So what does Poe do? He writes an allegory to make fun of the Frogpondians, as he called Emerson’s bunch. You could say he wrote a gory, Tory, allegory story (sorry…couldn’t stop myself).
Poe names names in this story about his libertine friend, Mr. Toby Dammit. Worried about his friend’s habitual use of the phrase, “I’ll bet the devil my head,” Poe warns the phrase is “queer” and:
…but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical. I began not to like it at all. Mr. Dammits soul was in a perilous state. I resolved to bring all my eloquence into play to save it.
Note Poe assigned Emerson the most ridiculous of the “isticals.”
Neither Melville nor Poe spared the Empiricists of science (they did not live to see positivism consume all). Poe was early to the scrap and in 1829 wrote his sonnet, To Science, 36 years before Whitman wrote his beautiful, When I heard the learned Astronomer:
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Poe’s anti-transcendentalism was equaled by his overt anti-empiricism, which he lays out to dry in the sun in his prose poem, Eureka written a year after his wife’s death and a year before his own. Poe said he did not use Baconian induction to reach his conclusions, but instead intuited them with his ratiocination (his reason). This visionary poem was widely despised and Poe lost respect and friends, just as Melville did after Moby Dick. Poe thought the poem to be his greatest work and that he would remembered for it. Indeed, much of the poem’s “science” is hooey, but much is also profound and mind-blowing. The work has inspired astronomers and cosmologists since.
Melville was keen to show man’s helplessness against nature. Read the quote below very, very carefully:
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
So heavy laden is Melville’s prose one can skim past those last lines. When we survive scientific voyages, contain monsters and defy death, it is only because nature has not revealed her full might at the moment of our peak hubris.
So Melville and Poe got in the last word. No one makes a movie based on Kant, Locke or Emerson. Thoreau is still read by a few masochistic crunchies. But how many will read, and read again, Moby Dick or the Raven? Bartleby the Scriver or the Tell Tale Heart?
Avast, Mr. Yusufov! There still be God-fearing men who toss the thunderheads overboard and sail lightly into a sun-bronzed sea with but a cargo of hope and canvas filled by His providence.
Poe’s preface to Eureka:
To the few who love me and whom I love—to those who feel rather than to those who think—to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.
What I here propound is true:—therefore it cannot die:—or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will “rise again to the Life Everlasting.”
Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.
E. A. P.
Vale!
As I finished this, I again acknowledged just how difficult it is to try to compartmentalize positivism and romantic attitudes (as though it's possible to even conquer human categories of thought that say something about the world and our place in it). On the one hand, romantics, like Kant, might believe that we are freest when we have taken hold over nature—and then what truly separates him from being a victim of the enlightenment? On the other hand, as you wrote, Melville knows that nature is not at her peak if we can dominate her. We can't dominate her and, to address Thoreau, we cannot be unified with her either. High school me was actually inclined to believe Thoreau over Joyce Carol Oates...and the "romantic" in me still wants to.
But that irony, I think, is the true core of the argument about romanticism. It seems to me to be this untrammeled principle that one chooses to live by, regardless of what the belief system is. Whether it's Keats' devotion to love to the point of leaving his lover Fanny because he cannot write about love without feeling the pain of her absence, or Poe's satirical jab against the transcendentalists and the naive view that we can champion our individualism while enabling "science" to drag "Diana from her car" or being able to seek treasure in the cosmos as though this was novel without being afraid...romanticism has captured something more "real" in the human experience, making the individual a modest participant in his life.
However...not all romantics are "realists" as you'd call Poe and Melville. Romantics might also be individualists and relativists—I'd argue they are. And what happens when the romantic, contrary to the transcendentalist and positivist, seeks to validate his individuality? He just might impose it on others. So while the enlightenment created positivists, it also created romantics, both of whom have sought to dominate.
Of course, romanticism isn't completely bad. I believe it contains the seeds of a modest, prudent political philosophy. But what isn't used for tyranny?