Chapter 2 Ambiental Cogito

Ahab with Whales

Branka Arsić

Questions concerning relations among the completeness of the body, the integrity of personhood, and the continuity of life are Moby-Dick’s organizing obsession. Two ontologies will be formulated here, each approaching the questions in opposing ways. Ahab will be nominated to represent radical idealism. For Ahab, life is immaterial, evacuated from the body into the spiritual; it is imagined as a concentrated soul whose integrity is never afflicted because its livingness is independent of what befalls the body. As I reconstruct in the first part of this essay, many aspects of Ahab’s ontology that render bodies irrelevant for the experience of personhood verge on the deranged. Yet regardless of its extremism, his ontology is in its essence only a version of the Western mind’s mainstream narrative, told by many, from Plato via Christianity to Descartes, as a story of the purity, eternity, and self-sufficiency of the soul. For Melville, the ethical consequences of such a story for how the body comes to be treated are disconcerting: why would we think that inflicting pain or violating a body’s integrity is ethically unacceptable if bodies are nothing to persons, if they are merely inert, insensitive, nonpsychic, and therefore disposable matter, something like waste? The second part of my essay will reconstruct the ontology that counters Ahab’s; it will be represented by whales. For cetaceans confuse the dichotomy between inside and outside; their bodies don’t quite end where their epidermal “blanket,” to use Melville’s term, ends. Instead, out of their epidermis sensuous villi grow, through which whales feel what is outside them as if it were inside them. They thus partially overlap with their bodies’ ambience, turning them into what I call ambient beings, beings that exceed their form and whose surrounds are their own feeling bodies. And while their bodies, which continue to experience themselves outside their figure, prove for Melville that life can be thought of as a continuum of sensuous matter, the way that cetaceans push out of their own envelope will nevertheless not mean that whales are not individuated, even though it will revise what individuation is. For whales teach Ishmael that beings needn’t be locked into or even settled into a particular formation in order to be considered as individuated. Whales thus encourage an ontology of permeable bodies confused about their borders and lacking a clear sense of their figuration without, for all that, canceling gatheredness. The lesson provided by cetacean life will finally lead Ishmael, as I analyze in the last part of the essay, to risk a general theory of life as the continuity of what is heterogeneous. It will make him think a great deal about tactility and closeness, about fragility and pain, and it will force him to abandon Ahab’s Cartesian tale about the mind cleansed of all matter, replacing it instead with what I call the ambiental cogito.

Anthropocene Ontology: Ahab, Notching, and Molding

Everybody in the novel constantly thinks about Ahab’s completeness, whether mental or embodied. Everybody is concerned with the relation of a part of the body to its whole and to the mind and with the status of a severed limb. Is Ahab—his person or his soul—still complete, or is he merely a ragged remnant of himself? Does the disfiguration of his body affect the discreteness of his personhood, as Peleg’s crude metaphysics suggests, claiming that “it was the sharp shooting pains in [Ahab’s] bleeding stump” upon losing his leg that made him “dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need[ing] mending.”1

The most explicit answer to those questions will be articulated by Ahab himself during his conversation, late in the journey, with the ship’s carpenter, who is tasked with making him a new leg. Discussing the ontological status of the new ivory leg he is about to try on, Ahab will reveal that even though the new leg “looks like a real live leg” (472), he won’t be able to integrate it into the wholeness of his body and feel it as his own, because he still senses his long-lost leg of flesh. Thus, even though there are two material legs (his old fleshy one and the carpenter’s new ivory one), neither of them vital, both of them detached from his body, one of them present and the other decayed, he nevertheless senses the latter as still attached to him and living while not denying that it is also amputated, and such sensing affords him the feel of somatic completeness: “Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean” (471). His ability to have a sensation of “flesh and blood” when the flesh is lost to rotting will then serve as an experiential ground corroborating the distance between sensation and matter, which is what Ahab will go on to claim in a wicked literal proposal he makes to the carpenter.

For Ahab will ask the carpenter to place his own leg so that it might function as the continuation of Ahab’s amputated one and allow the carpenter a moment to consider whether the spatial continuity thus formed is a real integration of matter into a vital limb or whether, to the contrary, it is a mere adjacency of separate pieces of matter: “Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life, there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I” (471). What Ahab is saying to the carpenter is that the perception of what is outside the mind (the apparent fusion of his and the carpenter’s legs into one) fallaciously opposes the experience of what is in the mind (the discontinuity of their bodies, discreteness of persons). The blending of two legs is merely apparent—their relation being in fact one of contiguity, serialization, or segmentation—because the life force that would animate matter within such merging is not found in it. Making one leg out of two remains illusory, incapable of defying the numerical difference of persons because the “tingling life” that allows one to sense a body as one’s own is not itself of the body. Embodiment is, in fact, so inconsequential to the feeling of having a body and to a sense of personal identity that Ahab can argue in support of the logic that would allow him and the carpenter to feel their respective legs at the spot occupied by the leg of only one of them (“here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul”). And if, by virtue of their immateriality, two persons can feel their body where there is only one body, then nothing prevents the possibility that one material body simultaneously hosts multiple persons. Hence, Ahab’s final question to the carpenter:

How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing thee in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? . . . And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? (471)

Not only, then, do bodies have nothing to do with persons, but the immaterial persons are so clear-cut that regardless of their ideality they are never porous, susceptible to what surrounds them, remaining instead utterly resistant to penetration and mixing; disembodied they are defined as thinking things, while thinking things are identified as “entire” and “living.”2 Life is thus rendered spiritual, and what is spiritual is imagined as able to exist so distinctly and firmly formed that two thinking things remain adjacent to one another at best, impervious and inaccessible.

Behind Ahab’s reference to thinking things are years of Melville’s reflecting on Descartes’s res cogitans (reasoning thing). While writing Mardi he has already attentively read, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, how Cartesian idealism removes sensation, perception, and affection from the body, and he continues to consult the same source throughout the process of composing Moby-Dick.3 Chapter 5 of Coleridge’s book, “On the Law of Association,” declares Descartes’s idealism to be Western philosophy’s final victory against the vulgarity of materialism best epitomized by Thomas Hobbes. On Coleridge’s interpretation, Hobbes had invented a world in which everything from sensation to thought, from body to personhood, is both material and sensuous, in which sensations result not just from perceptions understood as impressions that objects make on the senses but also—and that is what makes this materialism vulgar to the point of ringing with erotic undertones—from the actual mixing of different bodies.4 The profanity of such an “exclusively material” world was successfully refuted only by Descartes’s Dissertatio de Methodo, for it experientially proved sensations to be independent not just from external bodies but from senses as well (Coleridge, 208).5 On the basis of the case he witnessed, where parts of a human body were amputated, Descartes concluded that a person’s feeling of their body has nothing to do with that body. Here, then, is the passage in which Coleridge summarizes Descartes and whose argument Melville makes Ahab ventriloquize during the conversation with the carpenter:

But in his interesting work ‘De Methodo,’ Descartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject. . . . A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in that of the very fingers which had been cut off. (Coleridge, 208)

As Coleridge reconstructs, the fact of the child’s feeling pain in his amputated fingers led Descartes to argue, as did Ahab after experiencing sensations in his severed leg, that pain—and by extension any other sensation or feeling—must be purely “inward” or mental, independent from the situation of the body: “Descartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law” (Coleridge, 208). The general law Coleridge has in mind here is formulated in Descartes’s Sixth Meditation, which declares the contingent connection between a limb—amputated or not—and the feeling of pain in it. As Descartes puts it, “when the nerves in the foot are set in motion in a violent and unusual manner, this motion . . . gives . . . the sensation of a pain as occurring in the foot.” But even if the brain registers sensation as dependent on the condition of a limb, there is in fact no intrinsic relation between the two, for “God could have made the nature of man such that this particular motion in the brain indicated something else to the mind.”6 That God could have made all kinds of arrangements between sensation and the body—the motion felt as pain generated by the condition of the foot could easily be relocated as if arriving from a different limb; it could be made to indicate a feeling opposite to pain; and moreover, it needn’t be perceived as somatic at all but could result instead from sheer consciousness of itself and still be the same pain—proves that feelings don’t inhere in matter but are of the mind, which can therefore sense, feel, and think without requiring a body at all. Thus, as Descartes puts it, “although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind” (Descartes, 59). Persons are substantially unhinged from matter, completely ideal and integral. Descartes’s “I” remains untouched even as he is losing his feet and arms to amputation, as does Ahab’s, categorically asserting that nothing is taken away from it even if all its bones are crushed. For “even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being” (Moby-Dick, 560). Dead bone in an amputated limb, broken bone in a limb still attached to the body, healthy bone in an unaffected part of the body, or an ivory peg instead of bone are all the same to Ahab insofar as they are uniformly not his, because what is Ahab “proper”—his “entire, living” personhood—remains immune from matter and “uninterpenetrat[ed]” by events befalling his body. That is why even if his body is mutilated to the point of becoming a mere stump, the wholeness of his personhood remains an “inaccessible being,” allowing him to declare that “Ahab is for ever Ahab,” because at the same time as “ye see an old man cut down to the stump[,] leaning on a shivered lance . . . Ahab’s soul . . . moves” (561). Because Ahab’s being is not his life, his life does not have the form of his body; his life is an animated soul (“Ahab’s soul . . . moves”) that, on the grounds of its ideality, can claim immortality. Persons—with all their sensations, feelings, and thoughts—are made “for ever” and are utterly indestructible, whereas their bodies, as Melville puts it, again having recourse to Descartes’s concepts, are the “mere machine of an automaton” (468).7

As Melville finds in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary, automatons, which include bodies of humans and “brutes,” are inherently dead, incapable of either instinct or sensation, moved and organized by life “found only in incorporeal substances,” which arrives in them contingently.8 Thus, when Ahab observes the world from his ship, he sees that world’s beings in the same way that Descartes saw them from his Amsterdam window: he sees whales, albatrosses, and people as inherently dead matter that never changes or suffers of its own accord, in the matter of its own body. And in that world’s mobility he sees the force of sensuous and thinking, but ideal, life slowly carving its way through matter to the visible surface where it will animate it and give it form.

There are three salient instances in Moby-Dick that offer remarkable insight into the process of an immaterial living force shaping matter into form; they are snapshots of how others see Ahab’s body molded by such a force, how Ahab sees others molded by it, and how Ahab experiences himself finally released into its pure, ideal form, emancipated from the embodied.

Others Seeing Ahab

As Ishmael perceives it, Ahab is correct in believing that his body is fashioned and animated, its motions decided by the ideality of his mind, for he is “so full of his thought” that “you could almost see that thought turn in him when he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement” (160). “Inward mould” is Buffon’s concept. He uses the term in several senses to help him answer different questions, from the origin and nature of life to how matter is organized into discrete bodies and how those bodies grow and change. But regardless of the variety of its senses, the term always refers to an invisible template of the animal or vegetal body, a frame hidden in the interiority of the body that “constrain[s]” “accessory matter” to a “constant form.”9 The constraint provided by the mold is necessary because, in Buffon’s combination of Cartesian idealism and atomism, particles of matter are not in a continuous flow and lack any intrinsic relation; they drift through space with no logic or bond. In the absence of something to bind them into a form, they would not exist as bodies at all. If “their union . . . is accomplished” it is, as Buffon puts it, “by the intervention of an internal mould [moule intérieur], which is the efficient cause of the figure of the animal or vegetable, and in which the essence, the unity, and the continuation of the species consists” (215). That the mold is an efficient cause of the body’s figure means, in accord with the history of Western metaphysics, that it isn’t itself of the body but, rather, something ideal that comes to inert and unorganized matter as its shaping force. In Buffon’s words, it is a “penetrating power,” moving into matter to figure it from the inside. Deposited in the depth of everything embodied, the mold thus acts as a “matrix that . . . penetrates the whole” of opaque and formless materiality with a shape that will then individuate it by slowly coming to its surface, thereby cutting off what it encloses from what remains outside it (40). Figuration and life—to the extent that they coincide with organized matter—are thus ideal, leading Thomas Steele Hall to argue that Buffon often gives moule intérieur a “metaphysical status,” understanding it as an ideal “form of animal and plant.”10

The metaphysics of the interior mold works differently for beings of different complexity. “Inferior” forms of life such as “worms, polypuses, elms, willows . . . and insects” are “collection[s] of particles every way similar,” each particle enwrapped in its own little mold, all of them contiguously “assembled” into a larger form that drapes them all. But because such inferior bodies are a “compound” of identical particle-figures, where each can be easily separated from the others, and “in certain circumstances . . . expanded” into a full blown individual, a section of a worm’s body that is severed from it is able to grow into a new whole worm (Hall, 17). The interior mold of complex life also encompasses smaller forms that figure organs and bones. Like the particles composing worms, organs are also contiguous—for they have clear-cut borders—their organization and order worked out by a larger mold whose force traverses and connects them into a complex individual. But because these organ-figures are dissimilar from one another, and because each has a different function, they don’t contain the whole individual in nuce, as is the case with worm particle-forms; they therefore can’t be severed from the body without that body changing its shape or functions, and they will never allow regeneration of the initial embodied wholeness. Yet even if a severed limb doesn’t expand into a whole new man and even if a man doesn’t grow a new material limb in place of an amputated one, the individual—its life, its psyche, and the form of its body—nevertheless remains entire and itself, for its essence is not made of matter but is a formal template emanating a perceptible figure through that matter. To violate the body, its perceptible form, and material concreteness is thus to damage what for Buffon is merely “accessory,” but it is not to impair the immaterial mold in which the body’s true reality resides. Imperceptible to the outside observer, the ideated figure of the entire body is preserved by the force of ideal molding that still works through it, which elucidates why Ahab feels whole even if he lacks a limb. Thus, however complexly or confusedly Ishmael understood the concept—the metaphysics of which is irreconcilable with biology, for what can biology do with the idea of ideal form?—when he sees Ahab as “turned” and “paced” by the “inward mould” of his thought in such a way that his whole body “seemed” that mold, what he is in fact witnessing is the way the disembodied force of figuration carves its way into the superficial matter that hides it. Identifying this force of figuration with Cartesian thinking—an equation that Ishmael doesn’t find explicitly in Buffon but that is nevertheless logical since it isn’t clear what kind of nature this immaterial force could be if not a spiritual one—he sees it “penetrat[ing] the whole” of Ahab’s body, acting as a “matrix” that will “so completely” possess and shape him that his body and its “every . . . movement” will be reduced to it. In this extraordinary moment Ishmael in fact sees Ahab’s body assuming the form of his thought, witnessing an incredible transubstantiation of matter into ideality.

Ahab Seeing Others

How Ishmael sees Ahab is how Ahab sees everything. In what is perhaps the most famous passage of the novel, at which point Ahab himself relies on Buffon, he describes his ontology precisely as one of an internal, immaterial mold forming and moving the mattered world behind whose surface it hides: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each . . . living act . . . there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” (164). Generalizing Buffon’s metaphysical biology, Ahab regards everything as made by the ideal power of a single molding force, which in his rendering becomes a superior res cogitans that generates specific interior molds, which then permeate inert and amorphous matter so as to shape it into singular existences. The universe is thus seen after the model of a complex interior mold—similar to that which Buffon detects in “superior” animals and humans—made of many heterogeneous smaller ones, animating matter while figuring it in visible creatures and carving its way toward the surface while nevertheless remaining hidden behind its screen. All beings are thus mere automatons vitalized by the “living act” of thinking force. Thus, when Ahab dreams of piercing the matter covering this force, he is also dreaming about emancipating himself from the opacity of bodies that are merely auxiliary in order to reach life itself in its ideal and intelligible truth. But because, according to his ontology, bodies are merely supplemental and extraneous to their life and sensuousness, piercing them affects neither their vitality nor their form, both of which are purely ideal. Bodies can be violated or chopped up, yet they remain “untouched,” just as Ahab said he did despite the disfigurations his own body had undergone. Ahab can do without his leg, just as other captains he meets do without arms; on his ship and the ships they encounter, human bodies can be tortured, captured, or enslaved; whales can be sliced, skinned, cut, and beheaded because, according to this ontology, fragmentation, amputation, or mutilation don’t violate the integrity and dignity of either persons or the selfless living.

But in presuming that he can crack bodies open without affecting their life, Ahab’s Cartesian-style idealism, which is also the mainstream narrative arc of the modern Western mind, entails disconcerting ethical questions. For what would motivate any ethical treatment of bodies if what is embodied were indeed insensitive, and if the ways in which bodies are affected never causes their suffering? What would be the reason, really, not to exterminate animals, cut up whales, or torture humans if, despite whether their bones are broken or unbroken, they still remain “untouched” and “eternal,” unable to experience pain? If Melville turns Ahab into a Cartesian subject, it is not only in order to familiarize us with his ontology but to depict, as Colin Dayan puts it, the modern “thinking mind’s destructive . . . proclivities.”11 Neither the modern subject, emblematized by Ahab and whose date of birth coincides with the arrival of the Western colonial project, nor those it subjects, need the body to stay alive and be whole. Such is the tale that philosophy tells only so that bodies can be better used and abused. Stubb’s steak prepared from the flesh of a newly killed whale, his “spermaceti supper” of destruction, is—like all the massacres, exterminations, and extinctions that accompany Western modernity—revealed, in Dayan’s terms, as a “nasty belch that follows a meal of pure thought” (Moby-Dick, 293; Dayan, 204).

Ahab’s Pure Form

Even though Descartes and Ahab are endowed with completely ideal sensations and feelings (famously, in the Second Meditation, Descartes defines res cogitans as what not only understands and wills but also feels), they nevertheless sense and feel. They experience the ideated passion of a thought that thinks itself. To think itself a thought must split into a thinking thought and its passive object, thus being subjected to itself as a subject. A thinking thing suffers itself, just as Ahab does, his idea of piercing through the “mask” that bodies are being “his ruling passion,” one he can’t escape (211). He is subjugated by his sovereignty, which splits him in two and turns his hunt after an animal body into an impossible quest to overcome his fractured personhood. His personhood might be untouched by his broken body, as he keeps insisting, but what counts as an untouched and whole person in modern philosophy’s account is, in fact, constitutionally cracked, necessarily haunted by itself. The logic of modern subjectivity is such that it doesn’t only use bodies as machines and dead tools (“of all tools used . . . men are most apt to get out of order” [Melville, 211]); it also crushes and divides itself. As Descartes demonstrated, there is no subjectivity that is not turned into its own evil demon, which then decides, controls, and possesses it, making it feel itself as restless, uneasy, and fearful even when, like Ahab, it is at its most powerful. In spite of his strength, Ahab is helpless when it comes to giving up on a hunt that haunts him yet is failing. That is why he can diagnose that our “poor brains beat too much,” making human thinking heated, or why Ishmael can say that Ahab’s mind “feels, feels, feels” (563).

Neither Descartes nor Ahab is happy about this fracture immanent to subjectivity, and so they both go on to fantasize how to suture it by emancipating themselves from their “inward” affectivity. Descartes considers not only that he has “no senses” but also that “my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports ever happened” (16)—no impressions and thus no imagination, no memory, no dreams, no concepts (because no world at all). He is reduced to the emptiness of a thought. Similarly Ahab. As he reveals to the carpenter, to mend the cracked nature of persons a new Prometheus is needed, one who would restyle humans until they are so ideated that they coincide with a pure mind. In a little speech that he gives to the carpenter about how such a Prometheus to come should refashion men, and which accurately summarizes Descartes’s Second Meditation, Ahab describes his ideal man as completely shut off not just from everything external to his mind but also from everything internal to it that is not pure, unaffected thought:

Hold: while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern . . . no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. (470)

Ahab’s most desirable man is heartless and decidedly not ambiental (his eyes are closed to his exterior); he is reduced to pure thought that, like Descartes’s lumen naturale (natural light), inwardly illuminates itself. This new mind imagined as pure thought is thus a formed, voided, peaceful transparency. It is formed because in focusing its light to illuminate itself, it receives a form; it is void because there is nothing else to it other than itself, all candidates for content—images, memories, affects—being disqualified; it is in perfect coincidence with itself because such is the nature of light; and it is peaceful because there are no differences in it to disturb it. And since this bounded calm in perfect conformity with itself is all there is for it, it thus is and exhausts its world.

Yet even if Ahab recognizes that to be all there is and to coincide with it in pure thought is the “right and privilege” of “god only,” he nevertheless insists that he has occasionally been elevated to such a level of experience. This is his account of what it looked like: “To think . . . God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turn to ice, and shiver it” (563). In these exquisite moments, when Ahab is on a threshold of becoming God, his thought is focused, its standstill making it incapable of affecting itself—for self-affection requires motion—and closing it to reception. When the reception that would generate content is blocked, thought reposes in self-coincidence. At that moment, when thought realizes itself as pure ideality elevated to a form voided of content, it finally releases itself from matter, cracking open Ahab’s skull. Ahab’s image for what happens is that of water solidifying into ice and breaking its glass container: it finds itself out there, a formed, because frozen, transparency. But the strangeness of this image is not only in finding that cracking one’s skull is exhilarating; it is also in finding the most desired life—the one that, finally released from matter, becomes truly ideal—in what is frozen and inanimate. Its oddity, then, is that it imagines life as death.

Cetacean Ontology: Ambient Beings and the Logic of Continuous Bodies

Is the whale an insect—is its body notched and all surface—or is it rather a body stirred by an ideal force of life seated in one spot, similar to a soul and more in accord with the way Ahab imagines bodies to be? D. Graham Burnett considers that whalers thought both. For practical reasons, they were looking for the single seat of a whale’s life that, if pierced by the harpoon, would bring about an instantaneous death and reduce the length of the hunt. As Burnett puts it, “In this sense, the ‘life’ of a whale was a point on its body; a point—the point—of greatest relevance to the whaler. Touching the ‘life’ of the whale was the whaler’s culminating aim.”12 Close in their thinking to Ahab’s ontology, therefore, seamen thought of the whale as a mass of dead matter enlivened by vital forces dispersing through it from a single site. Yet, as Burnett also argues, this inquiry into the location of cetacean life didn’t generate an authentic understanding of a whale’s body. To the contrary, as suggested by many diagrams designed to assist in the dissection of whales, the sense of their anatomy remained “superficial,” amounting to what Burnett paradoxically calls a “profound knowledge of the superficies of the animal. The ‘blanket’ was what mattered to whalers, and their cetological nomenclature reflected their preoccupation with the three- to fifteen-inch-thick blubber envelope” (123). Reducing the whale to a blanket that had to be cut into—as shown by the diagram provided by Thomas Beale and studied by Ishmael—indeed makes it look like a serially notched tableau or like the segmented body of a long insect.

Ishmael’s cetology will resist the simplistic allure of that “superficial natural history” and follow the path of Ahab’s desire to pierce deep beyond the surface “mask” of the cetacean body, cracking it open, chopping it into pieces, cleaving its skin, and bisecting its brain, driven by the wish to know the nature of its matter and whether it is inherently alive (Burnett, 125). But that cetology does not in the end confirm Ahab’s ideated world, in which persons are purely mental stuff firmly fixed by a form, in which nothing is so open that it could continue into what it is not, in which bodies are dead and ordered according to dichotomies of front and back, high and low, surface and depth. For in its world, the cetacean will encounter heterogeneous elements that are rendered continuous, bodies whose depths are inarticulate and invested with surfaces, in which interiors disperse into the exterior they involve, in which matter is affective, form hard to sustain, and shapes—never determined by a mold—difficult to locate.

It is precisely the absence of something that could be identified as a “mold” of the cetacean body that systematically frustrates Ishmael’s efforts to determine what a whale is. Whether cetology investigates the whale’s bones, muscles, skin, face, or brain, identification of the animal’s shape remains tenuous. Its bones don’t give it away, rendering it impossible to “derive even a tolerable idea of [the whale’s] living contour” on the basis of a skeleton (Moby-Dick, 264). This phenomenon comes to obsess Ishmael more than any other element of the cetacean anatomy, making him repeat “again and again in this book” “the fact . . . that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body” (457). The oddity is uniformly reiterated by all the naturalists of cetacean life whom Ishmael reads, from Thomas Beale and John Hunter (extensively quoted by Beale) to Frederick Cuvier. For instance, in a passage circled by Melville, John Hunter discloses in cetaceans what appears to be a bizarre lack of a molded body:

The bones alone in many animals, when properly articulated into what is called the skeleton give the general shape and the character of the animal . . . [which] only require[es] a skin to be thrown over the skeleton to make the species known; but this is not so decidedly the case with this order of animals, for the skeleton in them does not give us the true shape.13

A properly articulated skeleton—its bones firmly joined, positioned close to the body’s surface—is what gives formless matter a shape and functions as its frame. According to the scientific accounts that Ishmael consults, then, the skeleton is a version of Buffon’s and Ahab’s internal mold that individuates by forming. None of that is so in the case of the whale; its bones are not only distant from its skin but also lack proper articulation. As Hunter additionally specifies, the “vertebrae, ribs and bones of the anterior extremities” do not have “their . . . articulation in all of them” (quoted in Beale, 74).

The realization that the whale’s life is thus not “properly” articulated, being instead made of what is inarticulate, leads Ishmael to suspect—in a radical reversal of Ahab’s ontology and Buffon’s science—that it has no “interior mold” in the depths of its body that carves its way through it, and that consequently, life needn’t be formed. This is how Ishmael describes the emergence of this disorienting insight:

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance . . . that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs . . . only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part. . . . Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank! . . . But the spine . . . There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire. (454)

In the places where Ishmael searches for articulation, he finds only “utter blank[s]” of disarticulation, bones out of joint that “mostly lie” in shapeless heaps, large spaces of soft tissue that unlock skeletal pieces into “disordered” distances as if to release the whale’s body from figuration. Against his better taxonomical judgment he is then led to identify the whale as a “boneless toughness” (337).

If the whale’s body can be called “boneless,” it is because Hunter finds in the cetacean bones ingredients so foreign to their composition that, on the page Melville marked, he confesses that their origin and whether they can be called bones at all remains arcane:

The bones . . . are composed of an animal substance and an earth which is not animal. These seem to be only . . . the earth thrown into the interstices of the animal part. In the bones of fishes this does not seem to be the case, the earth in many fish being so united with the animal part as to render them transparent. . . . The bones are less compact than those of quadrupeds that are similar to them. (quoted in Beale, 73–74)

What is supposed to be the firmest thing about a being—its bone—is revealed as evanescent. For what are whale bones? Are they earth or animal substance? Are they pebbles or tissue, is each of them one or many, are they homegrown from the ground of the animal’s body, or are they somehow heaved onto it from the surrounding aquatic landscapes? And what do such equivocal bones turn the whales into? Not into fish, for a fish fuses divergent elements of the ossified and terrestrial into a translucent unity, whereas with whales what is outside their “interstices”—dust, earth, clay, dirt—has somehow reached into it to be enveloped there by a life strangely conjured as a continuity of the disparate and opaque. Nor into quadrupeds, for although whale bones are structurally similar to the bones of quadrupeds, they differ substantially in being porous as opposed to impermeable. It is their bones, then, that reveal whales as elusive, neither-nor beings.

In addition, their skin, which Beale calls a “covering” and Ishmael a “blanket,” also confirms them as beings whose borders are so vague that it is hard to determine what is extraneous to them. It is plied in two interwoven folds. The layer of cuticles is “similar to . . . the sole of the foot of human species,” which becomes an “infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only [being] almost as flexible and soft as satin” when it is scraped off “from the unmarred . . . body of the whale” after its death (Moby-Dick, 305). Woven into the cuticles is the skin’s other layer of cutis, which, in Hunter’s words, forms “small ridges, similar to those on the human fingers” across the skin’s surface, and ends in “soft,” hairlike, “extremely vascular” and sensitive outgrowths called “villi” that “float in the water” (quoted in Beale, 91). The villi thus extend neural ridge-fingers into the animal’s ambience while simultaneously constituting the epidermis that continues into the muscles, which, for their part, not only continue into but sometimes grow into the porous bones.14 And conversely: according to the same logic of continuity, bones end in villi that transcend the body by extending into its ambience, thus disturbing the divide between interior and exterior.

“Exterior” is a word that can be used only conditionally here, since by continuing into the water the whale’s villi are not content to fold their ambience over their ridges and so announce the becoming inside of the whale’s own outside; in addition, sensing “ahead” of the body, as it were, they sense in the now what the rest of the whale’s skin is only about to sense. Swimming in the oceanic ambience, the whale’s body thus follows itself into an exteriority whose interior part it already is, inasmuch as the villi are already sensing it. It thus lives simultaneously ahead and behind, inside and outside itself, in a strange spatial and temporal continuity of being, making us understand why Ishmael argues that it is impossible to determine “what and where is the skin of the whale” (305). “Interior” is similarly imprecise. For when Ishmael argues that the “same . . . thin . . . substance” of a twofold skin “invests the entire body of the whale” (306), he means that its villi really go all the way into the interior of its bones, that every little sensation registered by the neural skin submerged in the water goes to the core of the whale’s body, and that therefore to touch the whale is to touch it right down to the bone. Contradicting the epistemological reasons that motivate Ahab’s desire to pierce the screen of matter in order to reach what is buried “behind” it, the whale’s body thus reveals that surfaces traverse depths and that depths emerge on surfaces. And in so doing, it also upsets the divide between interior and exterior, for what can count as exterior if what is external to the body touches its core? But if, as a result of these unsettled divisions, to touch the whale’s vascular skin is in effect to touch the whale all the way to its depth, then shouldn’t it be concluded that the cetacean body is sensitive to the bone, embodying a thoroughly affective material life?

It is the whale’s brain that finally convinces Ishmael that the animal is just such a sensuous superfluous existence. As with all of the whale’s other organs, Ishmael is unable to determine what and where the whale’s brain is. It could be many things. It could be any of the soft substances filling the cavities of its head, “lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions” resembling an “immense honeycomb . . . formed by the crossing and re-crossing . . . of tough elastic white fibres” (348, 339). But such a brain wouldn’t be fully formed and therefore, as Ishmael puts it, could be considered only a “semblance” of the brain, nothing but a network of malleable straps of fiber woven in all directions without explicit edges, their plasticity continuously refiguring the actual size and shape of what is woven (348). It could also be the “upper part” of the whale’s head, full of liquid oil, occupying “the entire length of the entire top of the head,” but then again, how can an unformed liquid flow be called a brain (340)? And finally, the whale’s brain could be “a mere handful” of fibrous tissue “secreted” “under the long floor” of the cranial crater, but the fact of its being pressed by surrounding liquids prevents it from giving any sign of itself, and how can a “true brain” be something that doesn’t “indicate” itself (348)?

Because it becomes clear to Ishmael that “phrenologically” speaking the brain of the whale doesn’t exist because it isn’t anything gathered, Ishmael’s search takes a physiological turn, proposing not a “cranial” but a “spinal theory” of the brain, which suggests the whale’s backbone as the brain’s locale (350). For “if you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls” (349).15 The German theory Ishmael has in mind here is that of Lorenz Oken, as Douglas Robillard demonstrated in 1995, later confirmed by the careful textual analysis of Jill Barnum.16

In the outlandish world that Oken summons in his Elements of Physiophilosophy (1847) all life is “free blossom,” and not only cetaceans but everything lives thanks to blooming flower-brains. A flower is composed of three organs (corolla, pistil, and seed), each of which, according to Oken, concretizes an element constitutive of life (air, fire, earth).17 The flower enacts a fusion of that elemental heterogeneity into a new seed that grows another plant (Oken, 228, par. 1161). The flower is thus something that can itself be identified as individuated (contracted through an alloy of diverse elements), but it is also only a moment in the vital continuum, a stage in the plant’s development, which renders its individuation porous. Nonflower parts of the plant, such as the stem, also constitute flower-life to the extent that without them a flower will die; furthermore, this vaguely discrete flower is “the synthesis of the entire plant,” embodied in “the seed it carries,” which will then “repeat the whole plant,” thus enabling the flower to survive and again confirming life’s continuum (Oken, 230, par. 1170; 231, par. 1177). And because this threefold nature of the flower enables Oken to discern that individuation can occur without interrupting, but instead confirming the material continuum of all life, because it thus allows him to see that discreteness—even if as fragile as a flower’s—needn’t cancel the flow of life into congruous fully formed entities, the flower eventually transcends the realm of the vegetal and comes to represent a logic of life as a whole.

Animals thus come to be flowers also: “an animal is a floral vesicle freely separated from the earth” (Oken, 230, par. 1774). Animals flower by blossoming brains that fuse interiors with exteriors and surfaces with depths. Thus “the first animal sign . . . which the plant gives off in the blossom from itself” is the “mouth” that fuses the “anterior flesh” of the face with “posterior bones”; out of this oral fusion of the face and bones blossoms an “oral nervous mass” that, made of nerves, is the first emergence of the cerebral (362, par. 2049; 363, par. 2050). This cerebral mass also fuses two heterogeneous elements—the “medullary substance” that is accommodated to the bones and the cortex that is “accommodated to the flesh”—into a flower of purely nervous tissue that can be called the brain (363, par. 2059). The brain is thus nothing but, as Oken puts it, “the nervous trunk,” which continues to form the spinal cord: “[The brain] is . . . a spinal cord that has been bent from above forwards” (363, par. 2057; 362, par. 2052). This brain-spine flowers further into the vertebrae mentioned by Ishmael, each one being a little “nervous” brain which in turn blossoms into other organs, all of which are sensuous; Oken identifies intestinal, pulmonic, osseous, vascular, and muscular senses, thus making muscles and bones capable of sensuous experiences. And these sense organs finally flower into the five common senses. Touch, because it is diffused throughout the whole epidermal surface of the body, is the most neural and thus most cerebral sense of all. Organized by the logic that Ishmael will find concretized in cetacean life, which allows surfaces to cut across depths and interiors to externalize—from the mouth that opens the body into its ambience, into the head, down the backbone, into all the organs and back on the surface through the skin—the body in its totality becomes for Oken the brain, or a global “nervous sense” whose primary function is never thinking but feeling: “the most general function of the brain is, however, feeling” (269–70, par. 1438). From this perspective, there is no thinking other than feeling, and what is called a thought is a feeling also. Hence, when Ishmael proposes a spinal theory of the cetacean brain because he sees the whale’s spinal canal “filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance . . . as the brain” (349) and continuing into vertebrae that further bloom into little fibrous “skulls” that, in turn, accede into the bones and muscles and resurface on the skin, ending as villi in the water, he is, following Oken, turning the whole body of the whale into an affective brained network.

But to say that the whale’s brain coincides with its body, rather than being a formally delineated organ processing sensations into unified information, is also to say that heterogeneous sensations simultaneously affecting the whale remain nonsynthesized. Thus the whale may be more intensely tactile than other creatures, as Beale confirms, suggesting that in addition to the “common sensation of touching,” derived from their sensory contact with water, whales experience “acute touching” when their body directly encounters another (Beale, 114). Yet no cerebral power mediates that tactility to produce the coherent feeling of an integrated body. When the whale feels pain, it feels many pains simultaneously. Similarly, the visual perceptions impressed on the whale’s eyes, which are positioned on the sides of its head, don’t cohere into a single picture; as a result, the whale always sees “one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side” of its head—for example, something pleasing and something horrifying simultaneously (Moby-Dick, 330). Because its affection is thus in fact heteroaffection, the whale is a creature of immediacy without intimacy, an affective tremor that persistently feels heterologically. And because this heteroaffective life continues into its surrounds, which in turn permeate it, the whale can be called a milieu-being. But since this milieu-being is thoroughly cerebral, because it is nothing but a large “feeling brain,” the whale should be understood as a properly ambiental cogito. Its ambiental nature—the porousness of its individuation—is, moreover, such that for a whale, form and centralization coincide with death. We learn that from Ishmael, who witnesses how the precious liquid substance that occupies the upper part of whale’s “boneless” cranium, which “in life remains perfectly fluid,” is transformed “upon exposure to the air, after death [and] begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water” (269). In complete contrast to Ahab’s ontology, where life coincides with the pure form of thought emblematized as ice breaking free from the glass-cranium, here death is depicted as crystallization, and formation is incarnated as ice breaking free from the watery cranium. Thus, as Dan Beachy-Quick puts it, here “form is evidence and proof of its own mortality,” such that the whale’s death is equal to Ahab’s life. In death the whale crosses over into Ahab’s world of icy figurations.18

The Haptic: Kneading, Weaving, and the Ambiental Cogito

Whales change Ishmael. He begins the journey as a firm idealist, his ontology close to Ahab’s dismissal of the material. He offers us a glimpse into that ontology while reminiscing about his visit to the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel, whose marble tablets on the walls prompt him to wonder about whether those who died at sea, “placelessly perished without a grave,” are less fortunate than those who “lie buried under the green grass” with a proper grave (36). But on the basis of an idealism he identifies as truly his own, he soon dismisses the quandary as irrelevant. His idealism is a paraphrase of Ahab’s, for it rejects the body as utterly inconsequential to personal identity: “Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. . . . Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me” (37). For Ishmael as for Ahab, we are mistaken in “this matter of Life” because we experience it as being as material and concretized as our bodies, whereas in fact bodies are extraneous to the life of the self and the fate of a body doesn’t affect personal identity; hence, “take my body . . . it is not me.”

But Ishmael will forsake this Ahab-like ontology not only because he understands the suggestions made by the ambiental bodies of whales—that life is embodied, that matter is affective, and that bodies can continue into their environment, that they are not constrained by any internal mold. Ishmael also deserts his idealism because he himself experiences for an instant what it is like to be such an ambient being and is thus convinced of its possibility. We see him transported to an ambient existence at the precise moment when the whale’s spermaceti begins to harden into an ice-like form. When that happens, when the fluid content of the cetacean cranium is “cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that . . . it strangely concrete[s] into lumps,” it is the task of whalemen to squeeze those lumps back into fluid in order to preserve the liquidity of the oily substance (415). And just at that moment, as he kneads the whale’s dead brain to deconcretize it, Ishmael is so mollified by what he is working to soften that he himself tips over into his ambience and into a feeling of continuity with cetacean matter:

This sperm . . . Such a delicious mollifier! And having my hands in it for only a few minutes my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. . . . As I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues . . . as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence . . . I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger. . . . I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. (415)

That passage has commonly been read as expressing Ishmael’s homoeroticism. But such a reading is problematic, inasmuch as it affords human relationships a privilege that is not acknowledged by Ishmael. What Ishmael explicitly describes is a passage to a different mode of being. The reference to Paracelsus indexes precisely that susceptibility for all bodies. Melville will have found it in Thomas Browne’s discussion of the sperm whale, which approvingly refers to Paracelsus’s claim that whale spermaceti is an excellent example of the capacity of all matter for real morphological alterations. For in proving that “from the most feted [sic] substances may be drawn the most odiferous essences,” alchemical change presumes that no condition is stable.19 And what Ishmael recounts here is exactly such an instability in his own condition, one that comes about through a transformation that goes two ways: as he breaks the form of the dead cetacean tissue, its now-liquefied globules change him in return, permeating his pores to formally amend him. The softness of ambient matter pervades him, his envelope is torn, his form breached—for, as he reports, his self “melted”—and his fingers are transformed into eels that “serpentine and spiralize,” becoming eel-fingers that we might logically understand as large feelers not at all unlike the whale’s villi: sensitive tactile films, which, by extending into the liquid cetacean environment, allow Ishmael to experience it as the continuation of his own epidermis rather than as substantially different matter. Fusing with whale tissues, Ishmael’s eel-villi—each with its “mouth” opening into the matter they touch—thus mollify the hardness of his body, making him undergo, just like the spermaceti, a metamorphosis from a solid to a supple state: melted into the matter he kneads, he is no longer able to differentiate among his fingers, the whale globules, and the globule-becoming “co-laborers’ hands.” Tipping over the borderlines of his body, feeling his material surrounds in continuity with himself, he becomes the sort of ambiental cogito he first encountered when studying whales.

This ambiental cogitation of Ishmael’s “open” fingers, which weave him into a malleable continuum of bodies and elements, is what Gaston Bachelard, discussing the same “squeeze of the eels” passage, calls the “cogito of earthen matter,” or alternatively, “a cogito of kneading.”20 He calls it a cogito in order to argue that a type of immersed affective knowing occurs through such “delicious mollification”; he calls it “earthen” to distance it from the proceedings of an ideated cogito advocated by Descartes and Ahab, which insists on the inconsequentiality of the terrestrial; and he calls it “kneading” to indicate that it proceeds by squeezing, alloying, intertwining, and merging as opposed to standing against in discreteness (Bachelard, 61). Such a cogito, then, is neither a “neutral cogito of mere self-knowing” nor “the more active kind of self-recognition which arises in . . . the sense of straining or striving against things.”21 Instead of self-recognition, and following his own account of what happened in that exquisite instant, Ishmael experiences the coincidence of his mind and his sensations, and this coincidence results in a selflessness that releases him into an “insanity” that renders him unable to differentiate. What actually occurs, then, is, in Bachelard’s words, “a dynamic and profound participation . . . in the material sense,” Ishmael’s becoming feeling but nonreflexive matter (Bachelard, 61). And this concomitance of body and the mind in a sensation enacted by an “opening” touch is what Bachelard identifies as a new way of cogitating. According to Bachelard’s idea of the kneading cogito, when Ishmael’s fingers “stretch in the softness of this perfect matter . . . they become fingers–consciousness of fingers,” which eventually immerses “his whole being . . . in the good stuff” (Bachelard, 62). This embodied villi-consciousness that is fingers rather than being about fingers thus changes Ishmael’s whole being into an affective trunk permeated by what it is not, much like the whale’s affective brain-body. Both Ishmael and the whale constitute, by virtue of their nondiscreteness, the porousness and total sensitivity that I call the ambiental cogito.

Negatively speaking, this cogito doesn’t know any of the things that a cogito was traditionally supposed to know: the spiritual, the ideal, the discrete, and the formal. But by unlearning its discreteness, this cogito that proceeds by squeezing and kneading rather than meditating learns something opposite. In Bachelard’s words, “Kneading is in some sense the antithesis of modeling [or molding]. It tends to destroy form. For Plato, in the Timaeus, through kneading one ruins inner form in order to create softened matter. . . . ‘All who essay to mold figures in any soft material utterly refuse to allow any previous figure to remain visible therein, and begin by marking it as even and as smooth as possible’” (Bachelard, 71). Positively speaking, then, the “knowing”—here in quotation marks because it isn’t obtained self-referentially—acquired by this cogito is that life “refuses” “previous figures,” and advances by instability and becomings that invalidate interior molds. This tactile and nonreflective cogito thus ratifies an ontology of the continuity of living matter that is intimated by cetacean bodies and simultaneously rescinds that shared by Enlightenment science, Descartes, and Ahab. The certainty it provides is the nullity of “inner form.”

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 78, 79. Further citations in the text.

2. Thus, in contrast to Sharon Cameron, whose remarkable analysis of the nature of human corporeality in Moby-Dick concludes that because personal identities are immaterial “bodies can be fused” (Cameron, The Corporeal Self, Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 60), Ahab insists that they in fact always remain unfused. Ahab’s limb precisely never grows into the carpenter’s calf since any fermentation of their bodies’ segments into a vital flow would require the influx of immaterial life and would have to be conditioned by a preceding fusion of ideated personhoods. But that is what Ahab clearly denies: it is precisely because persons remain one and entire—hence irreducibly solitary—that he can propose his strange arithmetic of life, bodies, and minds, according to which many persons can inhabit the same body.

3. For Melville’s reading of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, see Robert Milder, “A Brief Biography,” in A Historical Guide to Herman Melville, ed. Giles Gunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 26.

4. Thus, on Coleridge’s interpretation of Hobbes, when one body rubs another, a sensation is produced that is a fusion of two material particles and is itself material. For when a body is “impinged on by external objects,” “rays of light” reflected from those objects, or “effluxes of their finer particles,” move into that body and enact in it “a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs,” such as the brain, rendering the outcome of this embodied stirring, or thinking, material. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 209. Further citations in the text.

5. Descartes “follows” Hobbes only in Coleridge’s private chronology. As Coleridge himself recognizes, “Descartes . . . work ‘De Methodo’ preceded Hobbes’s ‘De Natura Humana,’ by more than a year.” Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 208.

6. René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 60. Further citations in the text.

7. For Melville, Coleridge’s discussion of Descartes will arrive at the same conclusion. Because the distance between our minds and our bodies is for Descartes so ample, as Coleridge reconstructs it, it will also be that the order, succession, and association of our sensations have nothing to do with the actual state of our bodies. All sensations being “inward,” one sensation is able to recall another—previously experienced entirely independently of the body—in a contingent way, and can thus launch a series of associations or memories that reconstruct completely immaterial pasts or entertain futures destined to be merely mental. And it is precisely thanks to this law of associating ideated sensations that feeling a severed limb is possible: a child or Ahab feels a limb he doesn’t have because an inward sensation triggers an associative chain of sensations that were, in their first occurrence, already sensing far away from the body (otherwise, the limb would have to be actually present, and sensation would have to be harbored by matter). It is thanks to the same law of ideated association that a sensation will be named or thought; the word identifying it as pain or the thought thinking it as pain are understood to be disembodied abstractions and therefore equally purely spiritual. Thus, on Coleridge’s very mistaken interpretation of Descartes, which is what Melville reads, the mind builds language, logical and grammatical categories, thoughts, memories, and volitions by moving from an already abstracted reality toward an ever more abstracted reality, rendering each person an isolated world: “On this principle . . . [Descartes] built up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of association. He showed, in what sense not only general terms, but generic images . . . actually existed.” Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 208.

8. Pierre Bayle, An Historical and Critical Dictionary, Selected and Abridged from the Great Work of Peter Bayle. With a Life of Bayle. In Four Vols., vol. 1 (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826), 214. Melville bought Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary in 1849 and famously wrote to Edward Duyckinck that he intended “to lay [its] great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro’ the summer.” Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1993), 128.

9. Georges Louis Leclerq, Comte de Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History. Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, vol. 2 (London: H. D. Symonds, 1797), 299, 300. Further citations in the text.

10. Thomas Steele Hall, History of General Physiology, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1900, vol. 1, From Pre-Socratic Times to the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 12. Further citations in the text.

11. Colin Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 204. Further citations in the text.

12. D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 119. Further citations in the text. Burnett also mentions that New Bedford’s Captain Francis Post—who in Burnett’s argument emblematizes the whaler searching for the seat of a whale’s life—“hoisted a cub sperm whale on board his vessel so that he . . . might make an anatomical investigation ‘to observe the position of the seat of life’ in order that the harpooner might ‘point his lance with a more deadly aim’” (119).

13. Hunter is quoted in Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London: John van Voorst, 1839), 72. Further citations in the text.

14. Hunter relates that “[whale] muscles, a very short time after death lose their fibrous substance, becom[ing] as uniform in texture as clay.” Quoted in Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 89. Additionally, the jaw is an example of a bone mixed with muscles, for “the articulation of the . . . jaw is not by simple contact . . . as in a quadruped, but by a very thick intermediate substance of the ligamentous kind, so interwoven that its parts move on each other.”

15. Hunter also registers the difficulty in determining where and what the whale’s brain is, detailing how the substance commonly presumed to be the brain is “more visibly fibrous” than in any other animal, its nerved muscular fibers passing from a “center to the circumference” that continues out of the cortex into “medulla spinalis,” itself composed of a cortex-like substance “terminating about the twenty-fifth vertebra.” Quoted in Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 112.

16. As Jill Barnum puts it: “Melville owed a debt to German Romantic thought in general, and to Oken in particular. He was reading Oken’s Elements of Physiophilosophy while composing Moby-Dick. In 1854 he presented a copy of The Whale to John C. Hoadley inscribed with these lines from Oken’s Elements: ‘All life is from the sea; none from the continent. Man also is a child of the worm and shallow parts of the sea in the neighborhood of the land.’” Barnum, “Melville, Lorenz Oken, and Biology: Engaging the ‘Long Now,’” Leviathan 7, no. 2 (October 2005): 41–46, 44. See also Douglas Robillard, “Lorenz Oken and Moby-Dick,” Melville Society Extracts, no. 100 (March 1995): 8–9.

17. Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), 231, par. 1777. Further citations in the text.

18. Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2008), 19.

19. Browne is quoted in Beale: “But notwithstanding the above statement, Dr. Thomas Brown [sic], in his work published a few years afterwards (1686), in his description of a sperm whale which was thrown on the coast of Norfolk, states that ‘. . . if, as Paracelsus encourageth, ordure makes the best musk, and from the most feted [sic] substances may be drawn the most odoriferous essences, all that had not Vespasian’s nose might boldly swear here was a substance for such extractions.’” Quoted in Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 131.

20. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002), 63. Further citations in the text.

21. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 223.