Descartes, Melville, and the Nihilism of Modernity

That’s quite a weighty title for a small thought. Melville’s Ahab says that the world is nothing but a pasteboard mask, and all the colors of the world, its variety of shapes and its beauties, are nothing but a harlot’s painting on a more essential blankness, a whiteness like the blank forehead of an albino sperm whale.

And so does Descartes. As summarized by EJ Diksterhuis, Descartes assumes that the material world is essentially extension in space, and in the strict sense is nothing more: “It seems to be more indeed: the material bodies we perceive also have physical qualities such as colour, odour, and taste, hardness, softness, brittleness, &x., but all these words merely designate states of consciousness with which we react to the presence of or the contact with particular parts of space, they are subjective reactions which the latter generate in us, and which cannot therefore be subject of scientific knowledge. Apart from the geometric characteristics of bodies, namely geometric form and size, only the kinematic magnitures determining their relative state of motion can be known in the scientific sense. Physics is the science of moving forms of space, and as such – just like geometry, which is concerned with resting forms of space – it can be deduced from axioms established a priori. The human mind brings forth not only mathematics but physics as well.”