If It Be Not True To Me ... Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Phallic Epistemology

Portrait of D. H. Lawrence by the brilliant American 

scratchboard illustrator Bri Hermanson

bhermanson.com 

One of Lawrence's major philosophical concerns was with the question of knowledge. If he didn't produce a fully developed epistemology as such, he nevertheless mused frequently on this topic and the closely related theory of consciousness.

Indeed, he even wrote a poem in which he professed his love of thinking and set out five conditions that constitute legitimate thought:

(i) the welling up of unknown life into consciousness

(ii) the validating of statements according to conscious criteria

(iii) the observation and interpretation of natural phenomena

(iv) the careful examination of direct experience

(v) the ontological receptiveness of Dasein, or, as Lawrence puts it, man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

What thought is not, says Lawrence, is a trick or an exercise that involves playing with already existent ideas. He hates this and regards it not only as a form of mental conceit, but mechanical in operation; something which offends him as a vitalist.

Preferably, for Lawrence, thinking should take place in the body and not the mind; for whilst we can easily go wrong in the latter, what the former tells us is always true. Thus Lawrence posits some kind of instinctive and pristine form of blood-knowledge, untainted by idealism with all its abstractions and logical absurdities.

This libidinal irrationalism (and anti-rationalism) underlies Lawrence's hostility towards modern science and ultimately renders his theory of knowledge deeply suspect and philosophically untenable; unless of course one is an ardent devotee of Nietzsche, who also wrote in blood and advanced similar ideas.

Critics and commentators sympathetic to Lawrence who argue that his reputation as an enemy of intellect is an unjust (if pervasive) cliché are, alas, fooling no one; certainly not those of us who are intimately familiar with his writing. Nor does it really work to suggest that if Lawrence's theory of knowledge fails to convince, then this reveals inadequacies in our own thinking.

The fact is, Lawrence - as a novelist, as a poet, and even as an essayist - is not concerned with objective truth; he's concerned, rather, with his own feelings and experiences of the world (i.e., of the world not as it is, but as it is for him). And so he gaily dismisses evidence for evolution or the expansion of the universe, for example, simply on the basis that it doesn't accord with his own instinctive-intuitive (i.e. fanciful) understanding of life's development and cosmology.

This is summed up in the first two lines of the little song that Lawrence gives us to sing in Fantasia; a four-line ditty which he obviously finds amusing in its chirpy insouciance, but which I find anything but: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ...?                  

Such art-speech hardly demonstrates a powerful and lifelong commitment to furthering knowledge and exploring inhuman reality. Rather, it reveals that Lawrence is not only sceptical but indifferent about the possibility of such. What's more, he's betraying a surprisingly solipsistic side to his nature; the universe may not be mind-dependent in Lawrence's Weltanschauung, but it's permanently correlated with his precious solar plexus (the great dynamic centre of what he calls primary consciousness and which houses the wisdom of the soul).

Either that, or it's dependent in some manner upon the phallic principle that he promotes in his later work, contrasting cerebral consciousness with phallic consciousness; the former a way of knowing the world scientically in terms of apartness and the latter a way of knowing it mytho-poetically in terms of togetherness.

And this, rather strangely, is where Lawrence concludes his epistemology; with one hand pressed firmly on his abdomen and the other gripped tightly round his cock so as to know the categorical difference between a rubber-ball and a pomegranate ...                

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
 
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Readers interested in Lawrence's haemo-epistemology might also like to see the related posts Haemostasis (18 Dec 2012) and On Haematolagnia, Feelings and Freethinkers (7 Jan 2016).

 

On Haematolagnia, Feelings and Freethinkers

According to Lawrence, who posits some kind of instinctive and pristine form of blood-knowledge, the intellect is always suspect and we can easily go wrong in our minds. Thus, we should always trust our feelings, rather than our ideas. What the blood tells us, writes Lawrence in a letter to Ernest Collins, is always true. This libidinal irrationalism underlies Lawrence’s hostility towards modern science and forms the basis of his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis.

However, according to Nietzsche - at least during his mid-period, before he too started to develop something of a blood fetish - our feelings are no more original or authentic than our ideas. For behind even our deepest feelings stand inherited values, inclinations, and judgements. Thus to trust one’s feelings - to listen to one’s blood as Lawrence would have it - means no more than paying respectful obedience to our ancestors, rather than to “the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience”.

Ultimately, freethinkers are individuals who break from the morality of custom and traditional ways of behaving, evaluating, and feeling; men and women determined to rely upon their own intellectual resources, rather than sink down into the blood, into the past and into impersonal stupidity.

It’s a sad fact, says Nietzsche, but we must constantly be on guard against the feelings; particularly those higher feelings, “so greatly are they nourished by delusion and nonsense”.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), Letter number 539, (17 January, 1913).

Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Book I, Sections 35 and 33.

Haemostasis

For Lawrence, who subscribes to a libidinal materialism in which 'touch' is of crucial importance, the physical handling of an object brings us much closer to a true understanding of it than any abstract theory of the thing. Via frequent contact and usage, we gain what he terms 'blood-knowledge' and by which he means an intuitive, sensual, and pre-cognitive way of relating to the material world.

Although he often claims that he is not an opponent of mind and doesn't advocate an acephalic humanity, Lawrence clearly privileges some form of primal consciousness that he locates in the lower-body and which delights in doing the washing-up. One of the reasons he dislikes Kant is because the latter only thought coldly and critically with his head and never darkly and desirously with his blood: and he never did the dishes!

Real thought, says Lawrence, is an experience and requires the establishment of a 'peculiar alien sympathy' with the otherness of things that lie external to our selves and exist mind-independently. Idealism marks the death of all this: it is a negation of the real and of the great affective centres within the body wherein the pristine unconscious is located. If we are to be happy and vital creatures, then we must, says Lawrence, get back into vivid relationship with the cosmos; i.e. get back into touch and know once more not in terms of apartness (which is rational and scientific), but in terms of togetherness (which is religious and poetic).

What are we to make of all this? At one time, I would have subscribed to this vision and affirmed Lawrence's libidinal materialism without hesitation. And, in fact, I still think there is much to be said for the latter and believe it may hold a fundamental key to the development of an object-oriented ontology. Ultimately, Lawrence plays for me much the same role that Heidegger plays for Graham Harman and he remains a major influence on my thinking.

However, I now have some reservations and find much of what Lawrence writes here, as elsewhere, problematic. Thus, the idea that the physical handling of a mundane object such as a tea-pot, or the frequent use of a tool such as a hammer, somehow brings us closer to it than we might ever be to those things of which we have only a theoretical understanding - such as molecules, black holes, or electromagnetic waves - seems dubious.

In fact, it seems to be based on an entirely false (although common) distinction made between theoretical and non-theoretical forms of knowledge, in which the former are presented as artificial, speculative, and parasitic upon the latter which is the warm-blooded body of true human  understanding. As Paul Churchland points out: "That these specious contrasts are wholesale nonsense has not prevented them finding expression and approval" in the writings not only of artists and poets like Lawrence, but also in the work of many philosophers. Churchland continues:

"Upon close inspection the various contrasts thought to fund the distinction are seen to disappear. If viewed warily, the network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our common-sense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial  as any overtly theoretical system. ... Comprehensive theories, on the other hand, prove not to be essentially parasitic, but to be potentially autonomous frameworks in their own right. In short, it appears that all knowledge ... is theoretical; that there is no such thing as non-theoretical understanding. Our common-sense conceptual framework stands unmasked as being itself a theory, or a battery of theories. And where before we saw a dichotomy between the theoretical and non-theoretical, we are left with little more than a distinction between freshly minted theory and thoroughly thumb-worn theory whose cultural assimilation is complete."

- Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (CUP, 1979), pp. 1-2.

In other words, Lawrence's blood-knowledge is simply another term for doxa - or that which can be passed off as true without question simply because it has already been widely accepted as such in advance. Thus Lawrence, the arch-opponent of the cliche and stereotype, is here exposed as trading in such; just as he panders to prejudice and reinforces reactionary ignorance with his lazy and disappointing dismissal of modern science.