自柏拉圖以來，西方哲學傳統長久為視覺所宰制；咸以為視學霸權與笛卡爾主義沆瀣一氣，堅實了傳統認識論的基礎，在此二元思維模式中，人類心靈、理性以及意識皆大受讚揚，反之，舉凡活的存有所依附的身體感官以及物質性則遭到貶抑。當代文化研究者試圖以二十世紀歐陸哲思彌補此鴻溝，如：海德格、梅洛龐蒂、列維納斯、依希佳黑等人之思想，其中梅氏理論在回復身體重要性及重思主/客之非二元關係上極具潛力。本文將試圖說明，梅洛龐蒂及梅爾維爾雖處於完全不同的歷史脈絡中，但兩者均強調視覺與觸覺之跨侵，進而對視覺霸權提出挑戰的策略卻不謀而合。兩者對觀視的重塑相應了十九世紀在光學上的典範轉移--牛頓的粒子說被波動說所取代。在《莫比．迪克》中，梅爾維爾以新的光學理論顛覆了傳統認識論的內/外二元模式，因而豐富了當代與身體相關的討論。此一真知灼見亦說明了他和梅洛龐蒂現象學可對話之處。

Western philosophical tradition ever since Plato has, as many culture critics show, been dominated by vision. It is widely accepted that this hegemony of vision has conspired with Cartesianism to forge the foundation of dualism for traditional epistemology which celebrates the human mind, reason, and consciousness at the cost of bodily senses and the materiality in which every living being is embedded. Scholars of contemporary cultural studies try to bridge this gap by resorting to twentieth century continental philosophers, such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Irigaray, to name but a few. Among them, Merleau-Ponty has offered a promising model for reviving the body and rethinking a non-dualistic relation between subject and object. In this study, I would like to show that, although situated in historical contexts quite different from each other, Merleau-Ponty and Melville challenge the hegemony of vision in a very similar way—emphasizing the encroachment of touch and vision. Their recasting of seeing corresponds with the paradigm shift in optics at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the traditional Newtonian corpuscular theory was replaced by the new wave theory of light. With the new paradigm in mind, Melville in Moby-Dick has subverted the inside/outside dichotomy posed by traditional epistemology and made a significant contribution to contemporary discussion of the body, a revolutionary insight which marks his affinity with Merleau-Pontian phenomenology.