By cultural osmosis you know something about Moby Dick, even if you never read the novel (and you probably didn’t). You know he’s a big white sperm whale who ate Captain Ahab’s leg. Very nice. Just like the picture above, which Wikimedia says is an 1892 illustration from an early edition of Melville’s book.
You read the title, you know where I’m going with this. This is all wrong.
I actually read Moby Dick recently. Good novel, would recommend, Melville’s grandiose prose is a relic of another era but certainly fun to immerse yourself in. At the same time he immerses you completely in the world of whaling in such a way that part of you will, like Ishmael, long to go to sea to avoid blowing your brains out. There’s really not much character development or anything like that, English teachers will be sad to hear. It’s not a book about humans, it’s a book about whales.
But, upon reading it, it caught me off guard when the text describes Moby Dick: he’s got a white nose and dorsal fin, alright, but he’s not albino:
For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump… The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale.
“Marbled.” The “White Whale” is white the same way a spotted cow is white—a little more than that, since he’s also covered across his body in white scar tissue from victorious battles against whalers. But he doesn’t look like the picture on the cover (any of the covers).
Nobody reads the book, nobody looks at the source material to know what the whale looks like. The accepted wisdom is sufficient for almost everybody; it’s just wrong.
From Kierkegaard’s The Crowd is Untruth:
There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that “the crowd” received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.
On one hand is the voice saying vox populi, vox Dei. This is the sort-of Hegelian voice in Danish intellectual sphere in which Kierkegaard lives, where moral progress is taken as fact such that what is arrived at by the majority must be the latest revelation of the World-Historical Spirit. On the other is Kierkegaard’s existing individual apart from the crowd.
The crowd is not merely wrong about factual matters like Moby Dick’s skin color—as a crowd they are also ipso facto divorced from truth. Truth may exist on its own ontologically, but it is existentially meaningless unless an individual is in the truth, personally related to the truth. And for Kierkegaard this is eternally an individual condition; God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, relates to humanity not as a mass but singly. When a person ceases for a moment to be an individual and instead becomes merely another member of a group he loses the condition which makes relationship to truth possible. In a crowd “there are only specimens, not individuals.”
In our illustration the only way to have the truth of Moby Dick is to leave the crowd and enter into an individual relationship with the text itself. So it is with existential truth broadly—there is no option besides putting psychological distance between oneself and the world from time to time, to seek out the truth, “if haply [one] might feel after [it], and find [it], though [it] be not far from every one of us.”