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.
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