The Path To Salvation

Moby-Dick, a classic work by Herman Melville, a mid-nineteenth-century American writer, characteristics of its mighty content in thought, epic scale in composing, and a writing style of gorgeously heroic, has been rooted in American literature as the greatest symbolic novel displaying the bitter struggle between man and nature on a macrocosmic scene with far-reaching implications. Since the novel was first published in 1851, the critical comment had been half praise and half blame, for its deep worry about human civilization and gloomy atmosphere of pessimism was above the comprehension ability of a rising optimistic America. Not until 1920s, after the westerners awoke from the nightmare of the First World War, did this prophetic work re-acclaim and was given its due position of importance in American literature. This novel relates a story about madness and revenge. The monomaniac behavior of its tragic protagonist Captain Ahab to pursue and kill the white whale evolves unduly into a malicious challenge to the infinite Cosmos and natural laws. In consequence he loses his own life and buries the hope of salvation for others, too.This work is enriched with Melville's profound speculations about man's future destiny and his relationship with the God and nature. This thesis, inspired from that, aims to explore its thematic content from a newly philosophical perspective according to the eighteenth-century German classic philosopher Immanuel Kant and his theory about the critique of Reason. Kant, after a thorough analysis of three kinds of faculty in human mind, namely cognition ability, aesthetic feeling, and moral will, together with three corresponding objects, respectively the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, made a comprehensive discussion centering around the major topic "what is human being?" and brought out finally his three famous critique works. To apply this construction system in philosophy consisting of ontology, epistemology, and moral to literary criticism forms the basic frame of this thesis.Therefore, the first chapter begins with a general survey of Kantian philosophy and illustrates the analysis mode on which this thesis is generally based, and then triesto give proof of Melville's philosophic flavour thus displayed in his works.The second chapter can be divided into three parts. Firstly, it starts to explain Moby-Dick in this aspect of Ahab's ontological quest, i.e. his desperate pursuit of the white whale, and demonstrate that this pursuit reveals a vain attempt of human understanding to overstep its innate limitedness and seek desperately the infinite ideals, but only to bring out a doomed outcome of failure like the self-contradictory antinomy exposed by Kant. This is a typical manifestation of excessive inflation of rationality and gradual desertion of faith that has taken place in the western ideology since the Enlightenment. Then, this chapter proceeds to analyze Moby-Dick from another angle of Ishmael's epistemological meditation mainly concerning the method how to comprehend the world. Instead of treating Moby Dick as a scientific object of dismemberment as what Ahab does, Ishmael looks upon it as a kind of spiritual symbol with a view to grasp the wholeness of universe and develops from the subjectivity of Kantian time and space a worldview of relativity. Finally this chapter ends with an analysis of the discussion about causality reflected in Moby-Dick, another primary category in Kantian epistemology as well.The third chapter is primarily concerned with the ambiguous attitude in Moby-Dick towards some moral issues regarding man's freewill and religion, in order to point out that this work has displayed a different life style and advocated a novel mental principle for us human beings. As a free moral subject, human being needs some transcendental ideals which can function as a perception norm in order to conduct him to make an incessant quest for the unitary and mental perfection in humanity. This kind of positive aspiration relies solely on man's inborn freewill and is necessarily carried out in his routine moral behaviors through an intermediate of aesthetic imagination, which is of great help to generate feeling of sublimity in his heart and thus builds a spiritual bridge to communicate with the noumenal reality so as to guarantee a balanced development of human nature.The last chapter, suggested by the disastrous ending in Moby-Dick, hopes to offer a reply to the title of thesis—The Path to Salvation—corresponding to Melville'smajor concern—Who Am I? In an age that emphasizes radical individualism, summarized from a keen observation on people's changing attitude towards the world and himself, the expectations for human salvation in Moby-Dick lie in the brotherly love among mankind, a personal heart of balance with head, and transcendental aspiration originated from the sacred intuition and moral conviction deeply imbedded in the true humanity.Neither Melville nor Kant could shake off the bondage of dichotomy in the western ideology due to the confinement of their age. These two serious thinkers display in their works, respectively in terms of mental imagery and pure conception, the westerners' uncertain state in life when they cling to the irresolvable antinomy between body and soul, matter and mind, appearance and thing-in-itself, and so on. However, their works, by means of a negative lesson, offer a way out of the predicament for modern men who are experiencing mental alienation and deeply engulfed in a vicious cycle of material production and consumption. That is, when facing our realistic life with an honest attitude, we should always look up to some spiritual ideals with a free mind and preserve in the very bottom of our heart a transcendental yearning. In such way there will remain forever a bright and wonderful prospect in store for us while enjoying our mortal life.