two decontextualizations

A consideration of what Nietzsche calls "die Tugenden des rechten Lesens."(see his Die froehliche Wissenschaft, Aph. 383) "Beauty is skin deep" is a saying whose very pretense to profundity makes it not beautiful. Seen from a different view, this old saying becomes the prime directive for deciphering meaning out of carefully written books. Beauty has its dilemma, since on the one hand, people tend to identify the beautiful with the good (for example, to call a sage or an emporor "beautiful man" literally in classical Mandarin literature), and on the other hand, when anyone advocates a certain "beauty for its own sake," the beautiful strangely loses substance - this view would only make affairs about art and literature too private to be worthy of scrutiny. Therefore the relative validity of the old saying. Great writers, especially those who don't care about "other people's views" (Cf. DfW, §367) exploit this dilemma in the following way: by letting the skimmed surface seem ugly, it hides what makes it into a whole - but what makes it into a whole is not just some "unifying principle" outside the text, rather the ugly surface itself. "Skin": the very tactility of it makes it so familiar that it is just swallowed, since so hard to digest (Cf. DfW, §365). The old saying really is profound after all.

After reading Moby-Dick. I'm reminded of a saying by Ronald Coase (or quoted by him, I'm not sure):"If you torture enough, nature will reveal herself." A concise statement of simple-minded belief-in-progress positivists. I believe Moby-Dick teaches the same lesson - of course with a peculiar twist. Nature revealed her indifference to Ahab's indignation or his "monomania", but in order to render that revelation knowable to us, we must have a restlessly pursuing Ahab and a survivor who would be able and willing to recollect that event. Melville recognized the human capacity to be "unnatural", to revolt against nature and also recognized it as a prerequisite for understanding nature - but he emphasizes the danger of its failure. Melville shares the positivist view of nature as inimical to and futile for human needs, but he effects a "second sailing" which consists of a healthy empiricism and a narrative ability to make nature lovable again. (I believe I could prove that Ishmael is Melville's depiction of the philosopher, and Moby-Dick, although dressed in many biblical allusions, is in fact an un-Christian wisdom which leads to a noble (in contradistinction to the utilitarian, base) imperialism of democracy.)