On the Uncertain Duty of a Writer

 

 

Someone told me the other day that, as a writer, I have a duty to always say what I think. 

Aside from the fact that I don't feel under any such obligation, I'm not sure it's possible to speak one's mind and then simply turn spoken words into text; certainly it's a far more difficult task than non-writers imagine. 

 

For as Kafka pointed out, whilst thought, speech, and writing all emerge from (and proceed into) the same darkness, we write differently to how we speak; speak differently to how we think; think differently to how we feel - and, indeed, think differently to how we think we think and how we think we ought to think.     

 

To put this in a Nietzschean nutshell: We knowers are unknown to ourselves - and that's why it's only naive or stupid people who are sure of themselves and their opinions; who pride themselves on their sincerity and believe they can instruct others on their duty. 

 

Writers, like quantum particles, are bound by the principle of uncertainty. 

 

 

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).

 

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.