Papagiannopoulos Helias, Theatre Exit. An Essay on Ontology under the Navigation of Moby-Dick by H. Melville, Indiktos Publ., Athens, 2000, pages 417.
The present philosophical essay adopts a classical literature piece as its point of reference, Moby-Dick by H. Melville, to broach and analyse major ontological and ideological issues that have diachronically occupied the western philosophical tradition and thought. It constitutes an attempt to recapitulate and comment on the whole of the western philosophical thinking, offering, however, in its process the emergence of a non-western approach, which constitutes the Theatre Exit, as stated in the essay title, in which also lies the importance of Moby Dick, according to the author.
The hunting journey aboard the whaling ship is presented as the life of man, in search of his own ontological autonomy, the lust for life and the transcendence of death, and, at the same time, as course of knowledge towards the fundamental ontological question of life (truth) and death (untruth). The whale symbolises the otherness, the non-Ego, which threatens the ontological autonomy of man. The two central heroes of the narrative, Ahab and Ishmael, are portrayed by the author as “ontological” heroes, incorporating different answers to the ontological problem. If Ahab is a picture of egocentricity that wishes to identify personal identity with ontological truth, Ishmael, starting the same way, escapes disaster, nothingness, which, besides, is the end of the journey, by the gradual on his part and charismatic recognition of the other, of otherness. Melville’s writing is described by the author as eschatological, as the facts are not recorded the time they happen, but are signified in the light of their end.
The transcendence of the will of power and domination on life and death on behalf of the ego-useless and driving nowhere-directs to the kataphasis of the otherness and the emergence of the self as a fact of relation, the existence is perceived as a gift and as a calling in relation. In this way, Ishmael exits the theatrical sociability, when, at the end of the journey, he faces the “other” and recognizes himself in this call from outside, his identity in its catholicity.
At various points of digression in the novel, there are references to issues, such as Augustine’s philosophy and theology, the philosophical presuppositions of the western urban architecture, the coordinates of the institutionalization of society and civilization in the West and others.