Throw All These Thunder-Heads Overboard

In Chapter 73, the Pequod kills a Right Whale and hangs its head from the larboard side. The ship had been listing toward the Sperm Whale's head, which was already hanging from the starboard. Now, with both heads aboard, she rights herself — though, Melville tells us, "sorely strained."

Then comes the passage that stops you:

"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."

He names them. Locke. Kant. Empiricism and idealism, hung at different heights from either side of the ship. The standard philosophical project — balance one against the other, find the synthesis, maintain your equilibrium — is what Melville calls "very poor plight." The balanced ship is still strained. The balanced mind is still enslaved to its counterweights.

His verdict is not synthesis. It's dissolution. Throw them overboard.

What makes this more than aphorism is the chapter that follows.

Chapter 74 describes the Sperm Whale's eye. It sits far back and low on the side of the head, and from its position — each eye facing a completely different direction — the whale perceives two entirely separate pictures: one on the port side of the world, one on starboard, with "profound darkness and nothingness" between. Two fronts. Two backs. The whale can never see an object directly ahead of it. Whatever is coming straight at it: invisible.

Melville lingers on this: "How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and another in an exactly opposite direction?"

He thinks the divided vision explains the whale's tactical vulnerability — why whales beset by multiple boats from different angles behave with "timidity and liability to queer frights," "helpless perplexity of volition." The whale can't integrate what it sees. Two complete pictures and no synthesis between them. The thing that would kill it approaches from directly ahead, and there's no eye there to receive it.

The two heads are the ship's version of the whale's divided eyes. Locke and Kant, one on each side. Two complete pictures. Profound darkness and nothingness between — and whatever is actually coming at you from straight ahead, unseen.

Then, buried in the anatomy of the whale's ear, Melville delivers what reads like the book's hidden instruction:

"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it."

Not enlarge. Subtilize. Make finer distinctions within what you already see. Don't multiply your perceptual apparatus — deepen it. The problem with the whale is not the size of its eyes but where they're pointed. The problem with the trimming mind is not a shortage of philosophical systems but the conviction that adding another one to the other side will stabilize the ship.

This is Melville's epistemology, given in one word: Subtilize.

The chapter ends with Fedallah.

While the crew works, Fedallah stands apart, "calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand." Reading the dead head against the lines of his own palm. The Parsee as oracle, comparing two kinds of inscription — the wrinkles written by the sea on the dead whale's brow, and the lines written by fate in the living man's hand.

And Ahab stands near him, positioned so that "the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's."

The Sperm Whale head is Locke. The Right Whale head is Kant. The ship strains between them, technically upright, in poor plight. And at the center of it, barely distinct from his shadow, stands Ahab — the man who hoisted both heads and called it balance.

The wrinkles in the dead whale's head and the lines in Fedallah's hand correspond. The ship is reading itself. Ahab can't see what's coming because he's surrounded himself with heads — one on each side, facing outward — and believes the counterweight is the point.

The instruction in Chapter 74 is addressed to the reader, not to Ahab. Ahab is too far in. He has his heads, he has his balance, he has Fedallah's prophecy that the ship cannot capsize. What he doesn't have is the ability to see straight ahead.

Subtilize it. Not more systems. Finer sight.

Chapter 75 closes the triptych with the Right Whale's death face: "enormous practical resolution in facing death." The Stoic's lower lip pressed against the ship's side. And the Sperm Whale's death face: "a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death." The Platonist.

The Stoic meets death with resolution. The Platonist meets it with equanimity. Both are dead. Both their heads are hanging from the ship, their philosophical styles preserved in the expression they died with, while the ship sails on in "very poor plight," strained but technically level.

The instruction Melville gives is not choose the right philosophy and not balance them properly. It's the third thing, the thing neither Locke nor Kant nor Ahab does: throw them overboard, subtilize your sight, and look straight ahead at whatever is coming.

The whale couldn't. Ahab won't.

The reader can.