D. H. Lawrence's Philosophy of Mind

The Thinker - Rodin Stylized Pop Art Poster 

By Kim Wang

fineartamerica.com 

On Human Destiny is an interesting short piece written by D. H. Lawrence in which he addresses the question of mind. Lawrence argues that whilst most people don't have original thoughts, we all of us nevertheless have minds that are constantly active, even in sleep, grinding ideas over and over until they turn to dust. 

Whatever else he may be, man is first and foremost a thinking animal and even though we moderns like to assert our spontaneity of feeling and action, our very spontaneity is just another idea, born in the mind having been "gestated in self-consciousness".

Rather surprisingly, Lawrence also claims that this has always been the case: that man has never been a wild, instinctive creature; "even the most prognathous cave-man was an ideal beast ... no more like the wild deer or jaguar among the mountains, than we are". No matter how wild or primitive a man may appear to be, "you may be sure he is grinding upon his own fixed, peculiar ideas, and he's no more spontaneous than a London bus-conductor: probably not as much". 

Thus, it's unfair to claim, as some critics do, that Lawrence subscribes to the Romantic fantasy of a noble savage, beautiful and innocent in his mindlessness and free animality. And it's therefore also mistaken to suggest that Lawrence simply advocates some kind of return to Nature. He knows our becoming-animal is a question of culture and futurity, not regression, and that it certainly doesn't involve the surrendering of human intelligence: "You may, like Yeats, admire the simpleton, and call him God's Fool. But for me the village idiot is outside the pale."

Essentially, then, for Lawrence, mind is what characterizes man as a species and determines human destiny and it's "just puerile to sigh for innocence and naive spontaneity". But, the mind can become a sterile thing without some form of emotional inspiration. That's the key: our adventure further and further into consciousness mustn't become a journey into pure abstraction; we have to think, but we also need to feel and ensure our ideas remain fresh with creative vitality, not fixed and fatal and turned into dogma.

As Lawrence puts it in a poem: "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness ... a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas".


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Human Destiny', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 203-04. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Volume 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81.

The Culture Cult

Westview Press (2001) 

The fact that this is a badly written and bad tempered book with a strangely dated frame of reference, lacking both philosophical rigour and insight, certainly detracts from but doesn't entirely negate the fact that it's an interesting study on what has once more become a vital question - namely, that of culture and civilization. Or, rather, culture contra civilization.

Roger Sandall - a former lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney - is not a man who likes to leave anyone in any doubt where he stands. In The Culture Cult he offers an unambiguous critique of romantic primitivism and an unapologetic defence of modernity and Western civilization. He also analyses how designer tribalism is used to undermine the values and achievements of the latter by people who, for one reason or another, choose to reject civil society, science, and secularism.

For those who often violently oppose corrupt (i.e. complex) modernity in favour of pre-modern ways of life - such as radical Islamists, for example - human rights, healthcare, and education are besides the point. They insist on the moral superiority of their traditions and beliefs and offer a fictionalized account of the past to justify this insistence. Depressingly - and disastrously - as members of religious and/or ethnic minorities who have migrated to the West, they are encouraged (often by those who mean well) to effectively lead separate lives based on practices and views that are at irreconcilably at odds with the world around them and which thus keep them trapped in poverty, superstition, and ignorance. This often leads to resentment, criminal behaviour and, ultimately, opens a pathway to extremism. 

Sandall regards everything associated with noble savagery and the culture cult as bad news. And he is at pains to remind us that most traditional cultures "feature domestic oppression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints", concluding that if you want to live a free and full life then it might be worth your while defending civilization - not stone age stupidity or a sentimental ideal of Otherness.

Remember: the life of the Maasai warrior who drinks fresh blood from the neck of a cow, is no more noble, authentic, or spiritually enriched, than the life of an American tourist sipping a can of Coke.