Member-only story
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a White Whale
1 — The Skeptical Problem
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is not a novel. Or, more precisely, it is not just a novel. In it, Melville tried to explode the characteristic form of the novel by importing the styles of many different genres (drama, glossaries, aphorism, natural history, philosophy, theology) into a novelistic shell, which in turn also explodes their characteristic forms. Like Queequeg’s tattooed body, it contains a panoply of signs — some decipherable, some not, all various and multiform — that together make up a world, one that can be known, but not completely, not exhaustively. Which raises the philosophical and human problem of skepticism.
In the history of Western Philosophy, skepticism generally divides into two broad categories: “veil-of-ideas” skepticism, epitomized by Descartes in the Discourse on Method and Meditations, and “Pyrrhonism”, which originated in the Greek Skeptics who took over Plato’s Academy, and which was resurrected, in different ways, by Hume in the Treatise on Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and by Montaigne in his Essais.
2 — A Livable Skepticism
Cartesian skepticism sets up a metaphysical screen between our ideas and the features in the external world that these ideas are said to represent. This kind of skepticism was dubbed…
