Moby-Dick ------ Anti-transcendentalist?

Question

Would someone give some example about anti-transcendentalist in Moby-Dick?

Answer 1

In chapter 35, `The Mast-Head', where he describes the experience of being in the crow's nest and feeling one's identity washed gently into the vast blue ocean below, Melville calls on us to imagine a hypothetical `young Platonist', or Romantic, installed in the crow's nest, and surrendering to the urge to drift higher and escape the mortal plane of existence, and finally losing his balance and falling into the ocean to drown. As Dillingham says:

Melville's brand of "superthinking," however, is not to be confused with transcendental moments so prized by Romantic visionaries and mystics in which one's individual identity is lost and where a sense of well-being usually is pervasive. The difference is fundamental. Melville's deep diving is into self with the goal of discovering at the center a hidden but powerful and sublime identity; transcendental or mystical experience takes one without and merges individual identity with the whole.
...The one is a finding; the other is a losing.
Melville's Later Novels, p.14
Dillingham concludes that, although it is clear that Melville recognises the perils inherent in the unrestrained `diving', or pursuit of an inner self, represented in the character of Ahab, such a course is to be favoured over the `mystical' path of losing one's identity, and indeed may be the only path open to the seeker of the self. He believes that it is Ishmael's ability to balance the two sides of himself - the ardent pursuer of inner meaning, and the more `airy' and sensual side - which allow him to survive the destruction of the Pequod.

Answer 2

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville are frequently called “Anti-Transcendentalists.” this does not advise that they hostile the Transcendentalists and believed we ought to continuously all be conformists, persecuting those who were of diverse religions, etc. It means that even as they concept that lots of the Transcendentalist beliefs were good, they considered those certainly as only beliefs, and by no skill sensible, plausible realities. The writings of Melville and Hawthorne lack the optimism of the writings of Emerson and (to an volume) Thoreau. Melville and Hawthorne chosen to concentration on the darkish component to human nature, and how human beings ought to correctly be refrained from or destroyed even as they pay interest to the voice interior them as a replace of conforming to outdoors criteria, how that is futile to ignore exterior authority in genuine societies, etc. for that reason, a more advantageous suited time period for Hawthorne and Melville is Transcendental Pessimists.