Spinoza & Melville
Ralph Dumain
Spinoza, without any ensuing resolution or coherent discussion of the
topic. As it happens, I've been reading a lot about Spinoza lately--he
seems to be all the rage these days. I've now plowed through a substantial
portion of Willi Goetschel's Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and
Heine--tough to read, but apparently very important. I rapidly skimmed the
first hundred some pages of Rebecca Goldstein's _Betraying Spinoza_, but
it's premature to comment, as no clear assertions about Spinoza's
Jewishness--the theme of the book--have yet emerged. I've got a lot of
other stuff lined up. But now I'm wondering about the Melville-Spinoza
nexus, which is alleged to be important, but eludes me.
BTW, I've also re-read Heine's THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL and RELIGION AND
PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY, and marvel again at his insight.
I'm totally out of the Melville loop , and can't even remember what I've
read, but I'll adduce a few fragments. Some years ago I read at least one
journal article on the subject, but I can't remember what it was. And I
have this reference at hand:
****************
TI: Melville and Spinoza.
AU: HART,-ALAN
SO: Studia-Spinozana. 1989; 5: 43-58
AB: Herman Melville purchased an edition of Bayle's Dictionary in 1849. It
contains Bayle's version of Spinoza's philosophy. Melville refers to
Spinoza in
Moby Dick and echoes of Bayle's interpretation can be found there and in Billy
Budd.
*******************
Some years ago I brought up Pochmann. Here is a relevant extract:
---------------------------------------------
258. After coming to another impasse in Pierre, Melville shrank within
himself. While he continued, as Hawthorne observed, to wander to and fro in
the "dismal and monotonous" metaphysical regions, and on occasions to
regale his friends and visitors with philosophical monologues in the
Coleridgean manner, his will to believe appears to have effected at least a
partial triumph by the time he wrote Clarel (1876), in which he heaps scorn
upon Jewish Margoth, a shallow scientist, who, in his insensibility to
spiritual values, declares that "All's mere geology," while an ass brays
confirmation (Clarel, I, 350; see also p. 329; Julian Hawthorne, op. cit.,
II, 135; Braswell, op. cit., pp. 108, 110-20; and Weaver, Melville, pp. 16,
351). At all events, when, during the last year of his life, he wrote Billy
Budd, he penned what has been called his "testament of acceptance." See E.
L. G. Watson, "Melville's Testament of Acceptance," New Engl. Quar., VI
(June, 1933), 31927. The daemonic titanism of Ahab has given way before a
sense of resignation to the inscrutable laws of the universe and
acquiescence in the wisdom of God that remains still past man's finding
out, but that is no longer hateful. In what degree this change of heart is
attributable to the growing influence upon him of the Christian tradition,
the mediating and humanizing experiencing of life and old age, a
re-examination of and a pondering upon Kantian ethics, or other influences
is conjectural.
What can be asserted with fair assurance is that his heaping of abuse upon
the "new Apostles . . . muttering Kantian categories through teeth and lips
dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of Graham crackers" (Pierre,
p. 418) proceeds less from any dissatisfaction with Kant than from the
persistence of certain "reconcilers" of the "Optimist" or "Compensation"
school (ibid., p. 385)that is, philosophers who pretend to have found the
talismanic secret. The group includes all those from Plato and Spinoza to
Goethe and Emerson "and many more" who belong to "this guild of
self-impostors," together with "a preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots
and Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more bespeaks the stripedness of
their Greek and German Neoplatonic originals" (ibid., p. 290). It is
noteworthy that Kant is never mentioned in this company. He probably had in
mind men like Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher among the Germans, and
Carlyle and Emerson among Scotch and Yankee disciples. The
transcendentalist philosopher Plotinus Plinlimnon in Pierre, the spineless
Rev. Mr. Falsgrave in the same book, and the chaplain in White-Jacket, who
is genial, well bred, and learned in Plato and in the German philosophers,
but who preaches sermons wholly unsuited to the crew these are not attacks
on Kant but on false disciples and
[Notes to Page 439 759]
traducers of honest divers after the truth like Kant. But even Emerson,
whose optimism Melville could not stomach, and whose reputation for
expounding unintelligible "transcendentalisms, myths and oracular
gibberish" had predisposed Melville to question his sincerity even this
Emerson, granted that he be a humbug, seemed to Melville "no common
humbug". For the sake of argument (he wrote to Evert Duyckinck) let us call
Emerson a fool: "Then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. I love all
men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great
whale to go down stairs five miles or more He does not credit Emerson
precisely with this ability, but he improves the occasion to honor "the
whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again
with blood-shot eyes since the world began." (See Thorp, op. cit., pp.
371-72). For Melville, Kant was one of those thought-divers, and there is
not an instance among the dozens of passages that belittle his disciples of
all kinds which impugns Kant's sincerity or depreciates his philosophic
abilities, The passage in Moby-Dick (II, 59), in which Melville recommends
that Ahab, rather than balance Locke against Kant, throw both overboard if
he wishes the Pequod to "float light and right," is not so much a
condemnation of either Locke or Kant, or both, as an expression of
discontent with all philosophy. It is of the same order as Emerson's
asking, "Who has not looked into a metaphysical book? And what sensible man
ever looked twice?"Works, II, 438.
_______________
.... Following an argument in Clarel (II, 12-13) turning upon the Christian
concept of Heaven as a haven for the oppressed, the theme of love as
presented in the Sermon on the Mount, and evil in human nature, Melville
remarks: "We've touched a theme! From which the club and lyceum swerve, /
Nor Herr von Goethe would esteem." Here is reflected the popular American
conception of Goethe as a worldly, hedonistic pagan, characterized by
Pierre as a "gold-laced virtuoso" and an "inconceivable coxcomb" (Pierre,
pp. 421-22; but see Moby-Dick, II, 119).
Goethe's claim that he found the "Talismanic Secret" but proves Goethe a
pretentious quack who belongs, with Plato and Spinoza, to the "guild of
self-imposters" (Pierre, p. 290).
[p. 760]
Hateful as he found Goethe's "pantheism," he found even more detestable his
optimism: "Goethe's 'Live in the all"' leads him to expostulate, "What
nonesense!" Yet he added this postscript: "This 'all' feeling, though,
there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass
on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the
earth.... This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the
truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary
feeling or opinion."Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 406. Here speaks
Melville the intellectual skeptic who has come to see truth as so partial
or many-sided that he regards the assertion of its pretensions and even the
search for it ridiculous.
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Here are some cites from the ms of a remarkable book by Loren Goldner on
Melville:
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". . . Clarel is a remarkable document of the Western Zeitgeist in the
period between the end of idealism, on both sides of the Atlantic, after
1848, and the beginning of international modernism ca. 1890. Melville's
involvement with anthropology, philosophy and history always made him
something of a writer of ideas, and in Clarel he offers a unique radioscopy
of the Western intellectual and cultural world of the 1870's, published,
perhaps not accidentally, in the same year when even Friedrich Nietzsche
was passing through his most "positivist" period [779] . It is Melville's
discussion, through various characters, of 19th-century Protestant
theology, the Catholic Church, scientific materialism, the tottering
Ottoman empire, Darwin, geology, positivism, socialism, communism and class
war, which makes Clarel a tour d'horizon worthy of illuminating to what
point Melville's earlier problematic had come."
". . . the extreme positivist viewpoint represented by the Jewish geologist
Margoth. Margoth was
"a Jew-- German, I deem--but readvised--an Israelite, say,
Hegelized--Convert to science, for but see the hammer: yes, geology.".
(II.xix. 53-57)
As a "Hegelized" Israelite, Margoth was a figure in the tradition of 19th
century German-Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelsohn, who transformed
Judaism into something much closer to philosophy, much as David Friedrich
Strauss did for Protestantism. But Margoth goes much farther, being in fact
more of a vulgar materialist, (like Turgenev's Bazarov in Fathers and Sons)
or the Moleschottian materialists of the 1850's. Margoth's science has
completely secularized the "sacred geography" through which the pilgrims
are travelling . . . ."
"The appearance of the ultra-positivist figure of Margoth prompts a debate
over secularizing trends in Judaism of real scope. The group wonders if
Margoth's scientism is not a direct expression of his Jewishness, and turns
to Anglican priest Derwent for clarification, but Derwent insists that only
"preconceptions" lie beneath such a connection . . . ."
""More than one bold freethinking Jew" is creating trouble for the rabbis.
Rolfe mentions Uriel Acosta [800] , Heine, and the Alexandrian Jewish
neo-Platonists who
"Sharing some doubts we moderns rue/ Would fain Eclectic comfort fold/ By
grafting slips from Plato's palm/ On Moses' melancholy yew"
(II.xxii.79-83)
and says that "we seek balm by kindred graftings", as did the
aforementioned Moses Mendelsohn. But all these figures do not explain the
vulgar scientific materialism of Margoth, who is hardly a Spinozist:
"...He, poor sheep astray, /The Levitic cipher quite erased,/On what vile
pig-weed hath he grazed./Not his Spinoza's starry brow/(A non-conformer,
ye'll allow),/A lion in brain, in life a lamb,/Sinless recluse of
Amsterdam;/....The erring twain, Spinoza and poor Margoth here,/ Both Jews,
which in dissent do vary:/In these what parted poles appear--/The blind man
and the visionary.""
"But Melville is no more sanguine about Protestantism and Catholicism. To
discuss the Reformation, he lets a French Dominican priest voice an
analysis of the direct line from Luther to communism. The priest presents
himself as a "Catholic Democrat", which provokes an indulgent smile from
Derwent and incredulity from Rolfe. Derwent reminds the Dominican of the
"rot of Rome in Luther's time, the canker spot". But the priest is a
modernist: . . . ."
"Rolfe has the final word, which sounds right out of Dostoevsky's "Grand
Inquisitor": .....
........../Rome and the Atheist have gained/These two shall fight it
out--these two;/Protestantism being retained/For base of operations sly/By
Atheism.""
"This survey of revolution, positivism and the compromises with modernity
of Judaism and various strands of Christianity gives a fair initial
indication of the ideological "desert", highlighted by the desert of the
Wandering Jew, in which Clarel unfolds. The more or less relentless
topography, echoing Melville's journal entries of twenty years before, is
the "external" manifestation of this spiritual geography. Nothing could be
farther from the cosmic imagination of Melville in the South Seas [809] .
The desert is, after all, the birthplace of imageless monotheism. But when
one looks more closely, one sees that in fact Melville is commenting on the
distance he has traveled from his earlier period, in a constant
undercurrent of maritime references in dessicated desert settings, as well
as reference to the "primitive". It is as if he is consciously drawing
attention to the de-cosmized geographical context for the late 19th-century
cultural desert he is crossing. Clarel is not Moby Dick, and does not pose
the "supercession" at least implied in Moby Dick. "
"How far Melville had evolved since the 1845-1851 period of his early sea
novels is underscored in two key characters, the Greek pilot, Agath, and
the Confederate veteran and half-Indian, Ungar. Their stories and their
outlooks make it perfectly clear that anything associated with the
primitive, as one might imagine from the Indian imagery just quoted, has
receded for Melville as any kind of alternative. "
"These thoughts are presented in the context of a broader consideration of
the impact of science which has already been treated. What Melville is
driving at here is the idea that the modern Christianity (with Jesus "the
indulgent God") which no longer insists on radical evil as a force to be
combatted may be handing the world over to evil in the form of "dismission
civil". Although Transcendentalism, having in the interim receded in the
crass materialism of the post-Civil War period, is no longer an issue in
Clarel, Melville is continuing the same polemic against what is left of
institutional religion in the age of Strauss [831] and Renan [832] . "
"But all of these themes are, as it were, prelude, to the remarkable
medievalism and the presence of the Knights Templar in Clarel, a presence
so pervasive that it can hardly be called a leitmotiv, as it was in some of
Melville's earlier works."
"The theme of the pseudo-sacred has been central to the entire analysis of
Melville presented in this study. Its essential meaning is presented in the
"standing of mast-heads" passage of Moby Dick, where neither Washington nor
Napoleon nor Nelson will "answer a single hail from below, however madly
invoked", with the Vendome tower as its concrete embodiment for Melville
and for Marx. This deflation of modern charismatic figures is called the
"pseudo-sacred" because, like the Western religions compromised with
rationality discussed in Clarel, they must necessarily stand in contrast to
the "sacred", cosmic kingship, in societies where cosmos has not yet been
severed from mythos, the necessary presupposition for the "pharoah with the
feet of clay", the Napoleons and the Louis Napoleons. Melville, as was
pointed out in the analyses of Redburn and Pierre ,experienced the
pseudo-sacred first of all in his own estrangement from the American
Revolutionary tradition of his heroic grandfathers, then in his father the
importer of French luxury goods, and thereafter proceeded to analyze it
forwards and backwards with world-historical sweep. The archetype of the
sacred, for the Melville of Moby Dick, was ancient Egypt [842] , and the
prototype for cosmic kingship, in the more directly European tradition, was
Charlemagne, who last appeared, in fragments, in The Confidence Man. All of
these figures, it was argued, were exaggerated father imagos for Melville,
against whom he hoped to form a positive self in rebellion, given the
drastic failure of his real relationship to his own father. Further, it has
been shown that these "fathers", the Charlemagnes, often blended into
buildings, monuments and mountains, such as the pyramids in Moby Dick, the
Mount of the Titans in Pierre, Petra and the New York Tombs in "Bartleby",
and Mt. Greylock in Israel Potter and "The Piazza". But in Clarel,
Napoleon, the paradigm of the pseudo-sacred, is absent, and Charlemagne as
such has receded to a trace, whose coronation is recalled by the outcast
Wandering Jew. So has the estrangement from the revolutionary era of the
18th century, as the latter had also receded. In turning away from the
novel, and the problem of the character, for poetry, Melville had come to
the end of Pierre's Titanism, so to speak; defeated in the public sphere of
literature, he withdrew into 35 years of quiet but by no means second-rate
work, including Clarel . The times had become far more extreme, as Melville
portrays them through his major protagonists; Transcendentalism as an enemy
was nothing compared to the spiritual desert of the 1870's, created (in
Melville's terms) by science, positivism, tepid rationalist theologies and
the revolutionary threat, a dissolution which Melville traced historically
from Luther, Galileo, Voltaire and even further back from Alexandrian
Jewish neo-Platonism. A world view that did not acknowledge radical evil
was, for Melville, bankrupt; when the Transcendentalists faded away,
Melville warred with the even more dangerous (to his view) palliatives that
replaced them. Melville in Clarel is more detached from his protagonists
than he had been in his novels; the distance from Redburn, Ishmael or
Pierre to Clarel also marks the distance Melville had travelled from any
earlier "Titanism". He lets important figures such as Rolfe, Vine, Ungar
and Mortmain articulate parts of his own views, and at other times
expresses himself through his unidentified narrator. Father associations
with buildings, monuments and mountains from earlier works have been
transformed in Clarel into fragments, that is into stones [843] . This does
not mean that Melville has succeeded in the revolt signaled in Pierre; it
merely means he has transposed the terms, and that he does not negate any
more."
"Into the void left by the crumbling of Melville's heroes of negation,
collective or individual, moves the late Melville's initially startling
medievalism. The pseudo-sacred for Pierre was the memory of his famous
grandfather, the general; in Clarel, the pseudo-sacred is a faded tattoo of
a Jerusalem cross on the arm of an old sailor who acquired it in a
distracted moment in the South Seas. The partly-favorable portrait of Roman
Catholicism in Clarel is not that of a potential convert ; Melville's
preoccupation with radical evil left him in the orbit of Calvinism to the
end. One might associate the new consideration for Catholicism (largely
unmentioned in his earlier works [847] ) with a general post-1850 mood
among certain Anglophone intellectuals and artists such as the
pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford movement, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or even the
softening of a Mathew Arnold toward the Church, in which the backlash [848]
against the extreme barren cultural climate described in Clarel made the
Church more respectable than it had been in the era of militant
Enlightenment and the unabashed positivism and utilitarianism [849] that
succeeded it. But the problem goes much deeper than that. Once Melville had
settled his accounts with negation [850] , and his analysis of the pseudo-
sacred, his problematic led him to a post-Enlightenment view of Western
history, if indeed the protagonist of the "antemosaic cosmic man" in Moby
Dick was any closer to the Enlightenment."
"In Clarel, Melville laid to rest every shibboleth of the modern 19th
century world: science, positivism, liberal theology, and revolution. The
book ends with Clarel saying "They wire the world-- Far under sea/They
talk; but never comes to me/A message from beneath the stone." That was in
all likelihood Melville's own attitude, pretty much as Hawthorne had
described him 20 years earlier. The working class had become for him
nothing more than a red spectre on the horizon, in contrast to the vivid
detail on class and labor with which he filled his early books of the sea.
In the deepening pessimism that drew him to Schopenhauer and Buddhism, he
withdrew more and more into his own thought world. The sweep of Clarel,
however, is as vast as that of Moby Dick, in that Melville shows an
awareness of a remarkable array of intellectual, scientific, and religious
currents afoot in the third quarter of the nineteenth century."
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From all of this, and what I remember of Clare's comments, the relevant
ideological factors involved seem to be:
(1) pantheism,
(2) Jewishness,
(3) optimism and pessimism
(4) (scientific) rationality and the knowability of reality
(5) man's place in Nature or the totality of existence
(6) monism vs. dualism.
Some years ago, in reaction to Pochmann, I wrote my impression:
>[there is something] cantankerous in Melville's aversion to German
>metaphysics--not because of any specific objectionable content he
>perceives in it--but because he is averse to its seeming pretensions, in
>conflict with Melville's bitter, pessimistic inclination to maintain that
>reality is unknowable.
I haven't tracked down Melville's references to Spinoza beyond what you see
here in these secondary sources. Perhaps someone else can supply the
missing info. It seems that Melville's 'engagement' with Spinoza was
skin-deep at best. Secondly, I wonder if he really grappled with Spinoza
directly or just filtered him through (German) Romanticism, which was
enamored with Spinoza's alleged pantheism without necessarily embracing his
crypto-materialism or political radicalism. From these commentaries above
Melville comes off as a cranky, disillusioned reactionary, suspicious of
progress, levelling tendencies, the rationalist disenchantment of the
world. Not _all_ such reactionaries are historically
anti-Semites--Nietzsche was not, although he was a reactionary scumbag of
the lowest stripe--but here the Jewish connection arouses suspicion as the
embodiment of hated liberalizing rationalizing desacralizing levelling
modernizing tendencies . Yet in Moby Dick Melville exhibits demystifying
tendencies of a potentially materialist sort, even while vitalistically
skeptical of the positivist direction of modern thought, not to mention an
enquiring spirit and a radical democratic sensibility. Melville certainly
had his antenna up for all of the inner tensions and ideological tendencies
of his age, but as an autodidactic bricoleur, and as an artist rather than
philosopher, he may not have mustered the methodological discipline to
think through the philosophies he ransacked, but reacted according to what
he sensed in them. I could use some clarification, whether it be
Clareification or Somebodyelseification.
tamar cummings
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Ralph Dumain
nothing to do with Melville or anything of an intellectual nature. I
object to being subject to moderation while this garbage is admitted into
this list.
At 05:46 PM 8/19/2006 -0700, tamar cummings wrote:
><http://jewishworldreview.com/david/aaron_insecure.php3>http://jewishworldreview.com/david/aaron_insecure.php3