I've been reading Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick" recently. It's filled with biblical and philosophical references beginning with the protagonist saying "Call me Ismael" at the opening of the book. Melville is able to both praise and condemn the hunting of whales through the subtleties of his writing. He describes the beauty and the horror, the courage and cruelty, the irrationality and the wonder of being a 19th century sailor on a whaling ship.
The novel describes Captain Ahab's obsession with hunting Moby Dick the great white whale. Moby Dick represents much more than a white Sperm Whale. Moby is something unknown perhaps unknowable, therefore something to be feared. He is without color representing something beyond what our senses are capable of perceiving. A Platonic form-like entity. Sperm whales had to be killed so we could light our lamps. Before we can be cruel, we first have to hate and fear...then we can be as cruel as necessary.
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Consider three things -
Why do we hunt the whale?
Why does Sisyphus push the rock to the top of the mountain?
Why do we have so much faith in Euclidean geometry - aka reason?
In chapter 98 Melville writes about the repeating nature of whale hunting; the chase, the kill, the extraction of oil and the cleanup. Repeated over and over, no sooner have things been cleaned up than the call "there she blows" rings out and the chase is on even though as Melville writes,
"Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when- There she blows!- the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again."
The end of chapter 98 of the novel has this,
"Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage- and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope."
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Why does Ishmael tell us he taught Pythagoras how to tie a rope on Melville's whaling ship 2000 years after Pythagoras died?
Melville is telling us to let go of our unwarranted faith in reason/science/math/expertise. Live in the world, learn from the world and the people in it - make your own world. On the other hand, don't let your reason go to sleep lest the monsters come.
I will propose humans hunt "the whale" for the same reason Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Because that's what we do. There is no geometric rational explanation for why humans do human-things no matter what the enlightenment might have led us to believe.
There is no utopia, there is no perfect world there is only the world you construct. Listen to Voltaire and tend your own garden. We are human because we are able to make choices. You can make a world as beautiful or as ugly as you prefer. The choice of how I react to any external stimulus is always my choice.
Where was I - or who am I and why am I here, as the philosopher fighter pilot James Stockton said.
The world is plural - it is a strange place, a beautiful place and a terrible place. We too are plural we contain multitudes; good, bad or indifferent. To be a fully formed human requires keeping various competing, sometimes incoherent, at times incommensurable values in tension.
Speaking of a terrible place the 18th century fascist precursor Joseph De Maistre has a chilling vision -
"The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death."
Maybe.
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The end of suffering will not occur in this world because we are human and to be human means to be born, to suffer and to die. Our attempts to deny this truth only leads to more suffering as well as a myriad of other pathologies.
There is hope though - give up your overreliance on Pythagorean, Euclidian, Geometrical ideas of how the world works. Why? Because they are inaccurate and incomplete. Euclidian geometry fails to describe things as simple as imaginary (or real) triangles on a soccer ball. Einstein added the 4th dimension of time to our 3 dimensions of space. This made the clockwork mechanistic Newtonian view of the universe - useful but incomplete. Our Euclidian brains are much to puny to understand ultimate things - who we are, why we are here, where is "here", the nature of time, infinities, space, celestial bodies, birth and rebirth.
You, if you have a feel for infinity, know you are the center of the universe. You live at the center of a circle. A circle with a center that is everywhere, and a circumference that is nowhere. When you look up at the stars you know you are looking backwards in time to a point where things began and will begin again. You understand your origin (not birth) somehow traces back beyond anything our puny brains could fathom to the very birth, death and rebirth of all that is.
It should be quite humbling to have an inkling of just how much we don't know. It could be quite freeing to not have to know everything, even though admitting one's ignorance is frowned upon in social media, popular politics and various opinions people propose about medicine, child raising, sexuality, etc. it still could be quite liberating to just say "I don't know". and leave it at that. For those things we don't know we occasionally have to take a leap of faith and simply believe, such as when we get married, have a child, follow a religion.
I will wrap this with a note about synchronicity. I won't bore you with the strange coincidences that led me to think about Euclidean geometry, reason, and a white whale. I had a feeling that something I didn't understand was pointing at something I didn't understand. Which is why this essay is so confusing, and I wish I was a poet.
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Some background information.
Metempsychosis is another word for reincarnation - the idea that the soul of a human or animal transmigrates to a different human or animal at the time of death of the body.
"Synchronicity is the idea that events that seem to be meaningfully related but have no obvious causal connection are actually coincidences. The term was introduced by Carl Jung, an analytical psychiatrist, who believed it was a healthy function of the mind.
Some examples of synchronicity include: Having similar thoughts with someone who is far away. Having a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens. Meeting someone on the other side of the world who happens to be your neighbor.
While some people believe that synchronistic events have spiritual meaning, most scientists think that they are just coincidences that seem meaningful because of human thinking." *source for this definition of synchronicity is Google search AI.
Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who lived from 570 to 495 BC He, (along with Euclid several centuries later) was one of the progenitors of Geometry.
Herman Melville is an American writer who lived in the mid-19th century and is best known for writing the book "Moby Dick or The Whale" in 1851.
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