The purpose of my dissertation is to illuminate the depth of Herman Melville’s philosophical and aesthetical inquiries into the fundamental questions about human existence and possibilities in his novel Moby-Dick. I investigate the ways in which the novel interrogates the basic tenets of Platonism and Christianity and explores a positive alternative to the limitations of the existing system of knowledge by reading the novel in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s revision of the traditional understanding of human will, epistemology, and religion of the West. In his views of human life and the world, Melville’s remarkable affinities with Schopenhauer have drawn much critical attention, but not many critics have paid attention to the import of the similarities between Melville and Nietzsche. My analysis of Melville’s intellectual relationship with these two German philosophers contributes to current scholarship not only by bringing to light Melville’s position in the larger intellectual tradition beyond his immediate cultural milieu, but also by exploring how Moby-Dick provides an answer to whether literature has a positive power especially when literature seems to undermine its own credibility and authority by questioning the validity of narrative and truth.
I contend that Schopenhauer’s differentiation between the veil of appearance and an inner reality of every natural phenomenon can elucidate Ahab’s investigation of the incongruities between seems and is, while the concept of will as “merely a blind, irresistible impulse” can throw light on Ahab’s “will determinate” and “madness maddened” in his pursuit of Moby Dick. Regarding Ahab’s rejection of conventional religious doctrines in his attempt to give meaning to his life, I argue that Ahab’s self-overcoming does not extend to examining the implications of his mad pursuit of Moby Dick, ultimately differentiating him from the Nietzschean Overman despite their similarities. My analysis of Ishmael’s philosophical journey in the novel draws on Schopenhauer’s negation of will to life, or egoism, through which Schopenhauer challenges the epistemological frame of the Western tradition. Through my comparison between Ishmael and the Schopenhauerian genius, I contend that Ishmael as a philosopher fails to grasp and represent the whiteness of the whale because of his refusal to lose his consciousness as a perceiving subject. Although Ishmael as a philosopher is led on “in barren mazes,” Ishmael as a tragic dramatist eventually grasps “the ungraspable phantom of life.” Drawing on Nietzsche’s notion of “becoming what one is,” which suggests that understanding and participating in the unending process of “becoming” is the only way to grasp any truth without falsifying life, I argue that Ishmael’s purposefully indeterminate rendering of the elusive thoughts which are “continually flitting through” our life is Melville’s attempt to present and contain through the manipulation of the dissimulatory power of language that which cannot be otherwise represented in any fixed or stabilized words.