Faith or doubt: Melville, judgement, and ideology

Throughout his most celebrated prose fiction, Herman Melville consistently displays an especially intense interest in the constituent elements of a metaphysical "Truth" that lies at the center of a "very axis of reality" and gives meaning to the many ambiguities of human experience. The attempt to pursue and articulate this primarily religious concept using the purely "objective," rationalist means of the individual intellect makes Melville an especially intense religious essentialist during the very same century that saw the collapse of this essentialism and the rise of more intuitive and historical ways of thinking about religion. Melville's inability, finally, to establish such "Truth" through purely "objective," intellectual means leads to a gradual foregrounding in Typee, Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd of his own subjective method of aesthetic and intellectual judgment. Melville carries out the Enlightenment emphasis on independent intellectual investigation to its rigorous extreme and discovers the need to move beyond it, and into an alternative mode of judgment that is sufficiently self-critical.;The consequence of judgment's displacement of "Truth" is not only increased religious doubt for Melville, but an increasingly self-reflexive interrogation of his own aesthetic methods and intellectual premises. By engaging the Enlightenment, Transcendentalist, and Christian theories of human judgment in his pursuit of "Truth," Melville comes independently to appreciate the inherent subjectivity of this pursuit and, as a necessary corollary, to postulate a potential split in human perception between a world of material appearances and a world of ideal Truths that parallels the critical philosophy of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Melville's increasingly self-reflexive, critical orientation leads him eventually to an awareness of the aesthetic and intellectual consequences of such subjectivity that is unique for his time and much more characteristic of modern ideological theorists. That the Christian theory of judgment and "Truth" purports already to account for this inherent subjectivity and its moral consequences gives Melville reason to pause and conclude in Billy Budd with an exquisite aesthetics of the aporia rather than any uncritical dogma.