stakes the veil for the "reasoning thing" behind it, the phenomenon for the noumen. The harpoon must be turned inward. Emerson said "I become a transparent eyeball." Thoreau restates the idea: "It was no longer beans I hoes, nor I that hoed beans." "We are laid asleep in body and become a living soul," says Wordsworth. And Whitman later will say, "I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. / I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." Ahab seems rather to unleash his almost superhuman vengeance against the very fact of the inscrutability of the universe. In part, Ahab resembles Kant, who while accepting the limitations of human knowledge and experience, being limited by the a priori categories of human experiencing of the world, still insisted upon "the thing in itself," which lies beyond our capacities of perception and of which we ultimately can know nothing. Fitche and Schiller, however, dispensed with the concept of "the thing in itself" and saw human experience and action partaking of the divine intelligence, and through which the universe manifests itself. Ahab's desire to pierce through the phenomenal world seems like the Kantian believing in "the thing in itself" the "truth" or real presence outside of appearances. Emerson, too, in a less radical approach speaks of Letter to Hawthorne, April 16, 1851: at 555: As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you have Him in the street." W O R K S C I T E DCarlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, Book III, Chapt 8 Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Norton, 1967.Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy. Berkeley: U Ca P, 1979....
