The White Whale and the Problem of Grasping

"I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man."
Moby-Dick, Chapter 108

"...though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped."
Philippians 2:6

What if the cognitive mechanisms through which we encounter reality itself have become corrupted? In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist presents a well-documented theory about hemispheric differences in the brain and how they affect our perception of and engagement with reality itself. McGilchrist draws from a number of scientific and medical studies to argue that the left and right hemispheres of the human brain have evolved to perceive, process, and interact with the world in two fundamentally different yet complementary ways. To simplify an incredibly nuanced and complex book, the right hemisphere of the brain is primarily responsible for attending to wholes. It enables us to attend to and eventually synthesize holistic systems. In contrast, the left hemisphere is largely responsible for attending to parts. It allows us to dissect those larger systems into fragments for analysis, deeper understanding, and manipulation. Both processes are crucial for a full engagement with the world around us.

McGilchrist’s most interesting and provocative theory is that the post-Enlightenment world favors the left hemisphere’s mode of engagement, pushing us toward compartmentalization and abstraction and away from what might be called the holistic, the poetic, or perhaps the sacramental. The book’s title—drawn from a Nietzschean fable—reflects McGilchrist’s view that the right hemisphere, which should be primary, has been supplanted by the left hemisphere through a kind of unwitting conspiracy of the modern world. Increasingly, it seems that the modern world is trapped in an epistemological hall of mirrors without an obvious resolution.

Here’s McGilchrist on what we might expect from a world that privileges left hemisphere modes of engagement to the exclusion of the right:

We would expect there to be a resentment of, and a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder: Weber’s ‘disenchanted’ world. Religion would seem to be mere fantasy. The right hemisphere is drawn forward by exemplars of qualities it values, where the left hemisphere is driven forward by a desire for power and control. One would expect, therefore, that there would develop an intolerance of and a constant undercutting, ironising, or deconstructing of such exemplars, in both life and art. Perhaps, the characteristic mode of the right hemisphere would become impossible, perhaps shameful. It would become hard to discern value or meaning in life at all; a sense of nausea and boredom before life would be likely to lead to a craving for novelty and stimulation. 

It’s not hard to see, in these words, a portrait of the secular West that has become increasingly exhausted by its own project of domination.

After finishing McGilchrist’s massive tome, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick. I suspected that Herman Melville, especially in the character of Ahab, might offer insights that resonate with The Master and His Emissary. Melville was writing at a time when captains of industry in Britain and America were learning how to manipulate and dominate Nature. In other words, he was writing Moby-Dick at a time when the world that we live in today was coming into being. If McGilchrist is correct in his diagnosis, then Melville’s world was one where the left-hemisphere was beginning to exert its dominance over the right. It’s difficult to imagine a more brutally reductive left-hemisphere activity—with the left-hemisphere’s drive toward manipulation and domination—than Nantucket whalers pursuing the majestic sperm whale to near extinction for its valuable spermaceti oil, essential for burning the lamps of the early industrial world.

In Chapter 74 of Moby-Dick, “The Sperm Whale’s Head,” Melville himself explores two different ways of seeing, with a number of similarities to McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain:

[A]ny one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things–however large or however small–at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness.

The two modes of perception described by Melville concern wholes and parts, each necessarily excluding the other in complementary ways, together forming a complete vision of reality. A mode of attention that can only grasp wholes or parts but not both is an impoverished one. Melville’s language about seeing closely parallels McGilchrist’s view of the left hemisphere, which “yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, dismebodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.” In contrast, the right hemisphere offers a world of “individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known.” The commonalities between Melville and McGilchrist here are telling.

In Chapter 100—“Ahab and the Carpenter”—Melville puts the following words into the mouth of the monomaniacal captain of the ill-fated Pequod: “I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.” While Ahab is purportedly talking about the vise that was used to create his new leg that the ship’s carpenter has just fashioned out of the jawbone of a sperm whale, it is hard to imagine a statement that more perfectly captures the essential features of the left-hemisphere run amok: the firm grip is what enables us to manipulate and, eventually, dominate Nature to the ends ordained by an unencumbered human will. In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist talks at length about how words like manipulate and comprehend are etymologically rooted in this motion of grasping, which is a fundamentally left-hemisphere activity, precisely because the left-hemisphere is what gives us the clarity and power to manipulate.

The vise that is used to manipulate the jawbone of the sperm whale into something functional for Ahab is an apt metaphor for the idea of grasping something, which is really just seizing it, removing it from its larger context, finding new ways to manipulate it so that it becomes useful. To grasp something—to get a good grip on it—requires isolating the object from its larger network of relationships. Think of a butterfly pinned down under glass against a black background at a museum. An exhibit like that provides a certain kind of knowledge of butterflies, and it enables us to see things that we might otherwise miss if we were observing butterflies in their natural setting. But while the act of grasping the butterfly helps us to understand it in a limited sense, it also obscures just as much as it reveals. To grasp a butterfly as it exists in a museum means to separate it from the manner in which it actually exists: as part of a larger system of living creatures. Someone who truly wants to understand butterflies needs to learn how to see it both ways. This is the origin of Ahab’s monomania: he sees only the white whale. Everything else—and everyone else—is a means to the end of his quest for domination.

Throughout the novel, Melville is critical of the post-Enlightenment, left-hemisphere inclination to reduce knowledge to a collection of propositional facts—those most helpful to the act of manipulation. This emphasis on the propositional is to the exclusion of a more experiential, poetic, and sacramental encounter with the truth. This critique is exemplified by comparing Ishmael with his friend and shipmate Queequeg. As a veteran harpooner, Queequeg knows little of the propositional facts and taxonomy that Ishmael regales us with in chapters like “Cetology,” but it’s also true that Queequeg knows more about whales than any book-studied expert because he has direct experience with the beast itself. Queequeg has what the Tradition calls poetic knowledge of whaling. As left hemisphere modes of seeing continue to exert their dominance over our encounter with reality in the modern world, we acknowledge Queequeg’s kind of “expertise” less and less. Moby-Dick offers a caricature of propositional knowledge so that we might be more sympathetic to the experiential and poetic ways of knowing. In fact, much of Ishmael’s growth on the ill-fated voyage of the Pequod is a movement of expansion of his knowledge to include the poetic.

How justifiable is my reading of Moby-Dick as a cautionary tale about the predominance of the left-hemisphere modes of attention over those of the right? The very structure of Moby-Dick appears to recommend such a reading. Melville uses extended digressions, a narrative that develops at a glacial pace, unexpected humor scattered throughout the novel, random stylistic variations, “facts” about whales that may or may not be true, a shifting narrative perspective, and an almost obsessive use of allusion and metaphor, all of which seem deliberately designed to force the reader into a right-hemisphere mode of engaging with the text. Perhaps one of the reasons why so few modern readers finish Moby-Dick is because the modes of attention required to read it are even more foreign to us now than they were in Melville’s time.

In the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians, St. Paul gives us the famous “Christ Hymn.” In it, he tells us that Christ “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (2:6). This is a reversal of the lie that the serpent tells our primordial parents in Genesis 3. Eve, just before she grasps at the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, is promised by the fork-tongued liar that “you will be like God.” This attempt to grasp at divinity must fail because human beings are not gods and cannot be made into gods by any human effort. We may become gods, as St. Athanasius says in On the Incarnation, only because the second person of the Holy Trinity humbled himself to become man so that we might receive adoption as His beloved sons and daughters. To grasp at divinity is to misunderstand, at a fundamental level, the basic nature of the cosmos. It is, in a word, to misapprehend reality itself.

Perhaps that’s the lesson at the heart of both The Master and His Emissary and Moby-Dick: when we adopt a utilitarian posture of domination over the world, we misapprehend it. The consequence is that we end up consigned to an increasingly narrow hall of epistemological mirrors. In an attempt to isolate the objects of our conquest, we ourselves become isolated from the complex network of relationships that enable us to see reality more clearly.

Moby-Dick is a tragic novel. At the end of the book, Ahab and the Pequod are destroyed by the object of their conquest. Ahab sees the elusive eponymous white whale as a thing to be grasped and ends up humbled and destroyed. Iain McGilchrist and Herman Melville both understand that the path back to sanity in our world begins with unlearning our tendency to grasp at the world so that we can begin, once again, to see it as it is: a cosmos replete with meaning and occasions for wonder, a gift to be received rather than a beast to be conquered and eventually destroyed.

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