Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd

Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd THOMAS HOVE University of Wisconsin,Madison ne of the most important cultural debates of the late nineteenth century was the status of morality in the wake of Darwinism and other 0naturalist accounts of human development. If Darwin’stheories were correct, many Victorian moralists worried, there might be no strong foundation for traditional Christian values like altruism and benevolence.’ According to traditional Christianity’sdualist view of human nature as a mix of pure spirit and corrupt matter, these values were justified by their location in the higher realm of the spirit. Instances of human error and evil could be blamed on the limitations our bodily existence puts on our spiritual aims. Melville explored the ethical problems of this dualist view most thoroughly in Piewe (1852): “Pierre, though charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing was made of clay”2 Even though his other fictions of the 1850s foreground various cognitive and ethical impasses of dualism, it would take several decades for him to entertain a naturalist outlook disassociated from cynical and pessimistic characters like the Fidele passengers in The Confidence-Man (1857) and Margoth in Clarel (1876). In Billy Budd, Melville explores a naturalist view of action more thoroughly and sympathetically than in any of his previous works.3In doing so, he challenges the traditional dualist metaphysics of the person and the absolutist normative framework it supports. Billy Budd manifests a post-Darwinian philosophical tendency to rank passions not according to a dualist hierarchy of pure spirit and corrupt matter but according to a pragmatic sense of what actions are appropriate for achieving a goal within a specific situation. According to this naturalist ethics, deeming what’sappropriate depends not on some accurate perception of truth but rather on interpretations of situations that can guide human energies toward desired ends. Although the narrator of Silly Budd suggests that we can never directly perceive these energies, and although he characterizes thought as a latecomer on the scene of action, he ’For a broad philosophical discussion of this crisis of Victorian ethics, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 393-418. 2 Herman Melville, Pierre; oc The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 19711, 107. 3 For a different account of Melville’s turn to naturalism, see Milton R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (1957; Urhana: University of Illinois Press, 1968). L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 5 1 T H O M A S H O V E nevertheless affirms intelligence’sefforts to understand action’slaws and mechanisms . Such efforts are most apparent in his speculations on the origins and mechanisms of Claggart’s antipathy toward Billy. Analyzing Billy Budd from a naturalist standpoint offers several theoretical and interpretive advantages over readings that either insist upon a correspondence theory of knowledge or reaffirm traditional dualist ethics. Readings that try to resolve the novel’s cognitive and ethical problems tend to assume that accurate assessment of a character’s motivations will allow us to attribute determinate moral or political positions to the text. This obsession with both epistemological and ethical certainty appears even in deconstructive readings, which emphasize how the novel’s historical and normative claims fail to live up to standards of absolute certainty But if we reject these standards as inappropriate remnants of a dualist metaphysics, we can begin to place the novel in the intellectual context of late nineteenth-century efforts to reconceive morality from a materialist standpoint. In addition, to get around the impasses that have plagued ethical and political interpretations of Billy Budd, we can reject the assumption that the text itself strives for certainty, and we can avoid measuring the text’s ethical and political content up against external normative frameworks like Christian altruism or Marxist anti-authoritarianism.4 To list other advantages of an epistemologically modest and ethically neutral reading strategy: it enables us to take fuller account of...