Very Like A Whale By Robert Finch Rhetorical Analysis

The human ego has an undeniable knack for inserting itself into the world. Yet, even with this self-insertion, humans want to stay separate from nature, beings sentient yet dependant upon nature, a sort of parasite which feeds on the beauty around them and fuel their massive culture from it. Author Robert Finch in his essay, Very Like a Whale, uses profound ambiguity to illustrate the pull on humans to the somewhat forgotten natural world.

Finch’s ambiguity is due in part to his repetition of rhetorical questions. Asking “what were we looking at?” (8) “What was it we saw?” (10) and “yet we came — why?” (14) all at the surface level are attempting to analyze the pull the beached whale has on observers. But, deeper, it is a question of humanity and that which drives our humanity. His question is why is it that as humans we observe such acts of nature that are so uncommon in the scheme of human existence, but are not uncommon in the complexity of the natural world?

The answer to this question is the “crying need to confront otherness in the universe” (15).

Finch states that humans “need plants, animals, weather, unfettered shores and unbroken woodland… as an antidote to introversion, a preventative against human inbreeding” (17). This inbreeding which we must prevent from occurring is not an incestuous mess which would damage genetics and harm the gene pool, but the combining of human ideas without outside influence, that from outside our culture, which would damage our culture by leaving us without inspiration and ability to expand our consciousness and culture and leave us with nothing but stagnant remnants of old human existence. But there is more to needing nature than expanding the collective mind of

humans.
We require nature because we need to view things unaffected by humanity. Without the whale, the desire to see what humanity cannot cause cannot be fulfilled:
That is why we came to see the whale. Its mute, immobile bulk represented that ultimate, unknowable otherness that we both seek and recoil from, and shouted at us louder than the policeman’s bullhorn that the universe is fraught not merely with response or indifference, but incarnate asserration. (19)
This otherness, the feeling that humans are not alone but part of a grand collective of things working together helps to occasionally quell the culture-wide self-aggrandizement that is the human ego. Seeing things as they are naturally, without the influence of humans helps us to see that we are great and separate beings, even though without these things we could not continue to thrive and diversify.
Knowing otherness allows humans to expand the horizons of being human. It allows us to not only be part of nature, but to be outside of nature, acting upon it and drawing from it, at times parasitic, and others symbiotic. The basis of human culture is making sense of our world with what we experience it to be.