Melville and those German Metaphysicians

[David Morris]

--- lorentzen-nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
>.... what i would really like to know: did melville actually read german
philosophers? i know (better: so i hear) that melville learned a lot during his
ship-travel to london in oktober 1849 from the talks he had with george adler
(1821-1868), a jewish guy with german roots who translated goethe's "iphigenie
auf tauris" (terrible play, btw) into american english. 

This came up on the "Ishmail" list:

Looking over Pochmann again, I can see what must have happened.  Pochmann
adduces a few quotes out of context from Melville's works and interweaves them
into his own commentary.  I'll give you the most extreme examples, from
Pochmann's footnotes: 

--------------- 
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. 

--------------- 



__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com