Posted By BillHeise on May 8, 2010

Most Americans believe that equal distribution of resources is the natural state of affairs. When resources are placed in the hands of the few, then we want to redistribute them in a more equitable manner. In this case, nature and human nature have a common source. Nature distributes resources equally and man, though his corrupt nature, tries to get more than his or her share. The solution is the get our ‘unequal’ distribution back in line with the ‘natural’ distribution of resources.

My regular readers will recall that the Pareto Principle is the principle that 80% of the resources go to 20% of the people (read more about this in Tales Told Out of School). I maintain, following the practices that I mastered after I got out of school, that this is the natural distribution of resources. That makes a huge difference in how we human beings evaluate our relation with nature. It means that politicians in this country are acting against nature when they attempt to correct the unequal distribution of resources by smoothing out the curve of the distribution of resources.

Now I want to be clear at the outset. My argument does not have to be right, although I think it is. And there is a lot of traditional evidence that we human beings believe that the foundation of our lives is grounded in the natural world. This brings up the question whether I can offer proof that my idea is compelling enough that you should agree with me, or whether my idea is one of an infinite series of discrete atoms in a universe which can exist side by side without bumping into one another. If that’s the case, then I have my idea, and you have yours, and never the twain shall meet.

So before we get going I want to make a distinction between the actual state of affairs and the human perception of the state of affairs. The fact is that Pareto was right about the state of affairs he observed in Italy. 80% of the land was in fact in the hands of a mere 20%. There is no arguing the facts of nature. But the interpretation of those same facts is another matter altogether. The state of affairs in which some have more than others led many 20th century thinkers to don their progressive thinking caps and go to war with what I contend is the natural state of affairs. Herbert Hoover thought that if he let the market do its work that the market would correct itself and return to the ‘natural’ equity. argument is no substitute for facts. When the markets didn’t work like Hoover thought they should, the engineer President applied his burgeoning field to the problems of mankind. That didn’t work, either, and he got thrown out of office. The people elected FDR, who thought that he could regulate a just society against the injustices of man.

Progressive thinkers have at their heart the same impulses to go to war with nature. But they rectify the injustices practiced by men in a hierarchical society by leveling that society back to our natural human state (American, if you are uncomfortable with the notion of a general human nature) to the state of the golden age where men and nature existed as one (See my entry on Ovid and read him if you haven’t yet done so).

Nature in History

This is a belief that extends very far back in Western history. Early on in the philosophical tradition, Protagoras had equated the limits of the mind with the limits of the universe, saying stuff like “Man is the measure of the universe.” Plato, the most comprehensive thinker in the ancient world, had some trouble squaring the universe of the mind with the circle of the universe in general. His solution was to recognize that there is some sort of fiction that interferes with Socrates’ theory of forms. Socrates had perceived something true about the universe, but he repeated his theory with a bit of leeway each time he repeated his so-called inviolable truth. (See my post on Atlantis for part of my dissertation discussion on the folly of believing that Plato ever thought that Atlantis was real).

But in the modern world, things are different. Rene Descartes had kicked off the Enlightenment by promising mankind that the universe could be explained through reason. This is why I believe that post-Enlightenment thinkers still grasp on to the belief that somebody (Plato, for instance) can square the circle, even though they themselves cannot. Somebody knows, even if I myself don’t know. This is why we listen to Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow: these are people who agree with us and they have organized the chaotic world into hierarchy more efficiently than you or I have time to do.

Unlike Plato, who built those limits into his philosophical system, the Romantics reacted to the failures of the promise of Enlightenment science to close all the gaps in our experience by turning our minds away from rational science altogether. If life was not perfectly rational, it must be perfectly irrational. So Western, post-Enlightenment mankind traveled from one extreme to the other.

Moreover, reason is capable of producing a lot of bad stuff, like bureaucratic Nazis and communists like Joseph Stalin. And for these reasons the race away from reason had come to dominate aesthetic experience of the 20th century. Art, we are told, is the domain of the irrational. This is the result of the artist’s belief that he is carrying the metaphysical inheritance of the now-fallen medieval order. And metaphysics has always the same charge: metaphysics is the theory of everything, and the irrational is part of everything.

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

This can go so far that some authors have written about their contempt for the human race. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, confused the hell out me when I was reading Women in Love during my sophomore year in college. This was the last book I read before turning away from college and reading the Glass Bead Game. I have even found the exact point where I put the book down. I put it down because what the author was saying did not jibe with my experience. I did not have an explanation for my behavior. At this point in my life I was stupid and confused. But when I asked my professor to explain the book’s insane position to me, he told me that it was because of the insane position that we were reading the novel. That didn’t make as much sense to me as a Glass Bead Game reader, so I put down the stupid book and started reading the book written by a wiser man.

So this week, I decided to go back and read the book that I put down over 30 years ago, this time from the position of organizational knowledge rather than instinctive knowledge. (For the value of this distinction in understanding my approach to life, see my Writing for People Who Hate Writing). Here’s what I found.

Hermione on the Perfection of Mind and Outward Beauty

One of the main characters, Hermione, speaks of the distinction between her “perfect” outward beauty and her tortured soul (all lines are from the Project Gutenberg online text):

And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking up the path to the church, confident as she was that in every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment, knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and perfect, according to the first standards, yet she suffered a torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite.

[This line was the genesis of my project to complete “Tortured Soul Comics” when I was a younger man. I grew up before I had the chance to complete that project.] She believes that she is perfect in her outward beauty, but doesn’t believe that the things that really matter inside her perfectly beautiful body are so organized.

She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.

She needs the love of another to close up the gaps in her life, and she turns to another Birkin:

And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to close it up for ever. She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole. For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency.

But this Birkin doesn’t have answers to the problems that beset her, either. In a chapter called “Classroom,” she questions Rupert Birkin about the education of children.

‘Do you really think, Rupert,’ she asked, as if Ursula were not present, ‘do you really think it is worth while? Do you really think the children are better for being roused to consciousness?’

This is a flashback to Rousseau’s educational novel, Emile, where Rousseau had chided schoolmarms and scholars for teaching kids things. It’s better to let them grow up ‘naturally,’ said Rousseau, without the stuff that robs them of their ‘natural’ inheritance. This, in Rousseau’s mind, is all that stands in the way of our lost perfection. His followers believed this stuff.

They believed is so much that they decided that the world had gone awry and that revolution was the cure. I believe it was Jefferson who summed up Rousseau’s Romantic tendency towards revolution best: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” So they overthrew governments, embraced revolution, and spread their manure of ‘naturally’ educating children—which is to say that, like Mao, they stopped educating children at all—never thinking that perhaps what goes around comes around and that they, too, would be put under the sacrificial knife (as Robespierre was) by the stupid and dangerous children they had let grow up in their midst.

Any way, that’s a little off the point. Rupert Birkin is like the ultimate tortured soul, and women like Hermione go for those sorts of guys.

A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was hollow-cheeked and pale, almost unearthly. And the woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing question tortured him on the quick.

This Birkin is convinced that

‘They are not roused to consciousness,’ he said. ‘Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.’

‘But do you think they are better for having it quickened, stimulated? Isn’t it better that they should remain unconscious of the hazel, isn’t it better that they should see as a whole, without all this pulling to pieces, all this knowledge?’

Science v Aesthetics

The question of science is put in the context of aesthetics. Hermione asks him about the One and many. Isn’t it better to have people look at the whole object, rather than a part of the object? Art and metaphysics would have us look at the whole object. Science would have us look at a part of the object.

Birkin puts the question of how flowers grow. They do not grow out of a metaphysical, vertically-oriented hierarchy. They grow horizontally, as one flower spreads its pollen to the next.

‘Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know, that the little red flowers are there, putting out for the pollen?’ he asked harshly. His voice was brutal, scornful, cruel.

By orienting herself to the metaphysical vertical hierarchy, this Birkin seems to be saying that she loses sight of the real world, which is formed out of horizontal processes. This is not a new thought. In the modern world it has been taken up by Derrida and his student Paul de Man. In the medieval world, it was taken up by the authors of the Roman de la Rose. In both cases, reason failed to climb up to the goal of heaven. As a result, in both cases a horizontal hierarchy replaced the failed vertical hierarchy.

The differences between medieval experience and the modern experience are significant. In the Middle Ages, reason produced a nice hierarchical tree. When the tree failed to reach heaven, the horizontal hierarchy took over. The love of God, charity, was replaced by the love of sex in a dream. Only upon waking could the dream become reality.

In the modern world, where Stephen Daedalus had famously said “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” (Ulysses Chapter 2), people felt that they were too much in history and had lost the medieval sense of hierarchy and order.

The order that Stephen, Hermione, and this Birkin are after is not, however, the same as the medieval order. There is no thought of reason of rational order that comes from the systematic separation of things on the basis of similarities and difference, which you and I, who have read our Aristotle, know is the basis of our philosophical definition. Raw experience is enough for Hermione to make sense of the historical world. Reason is abstract, and so is useless, and being useless for the purposes of the goals of art is not even considered in Lawrence’s consideration of art.

Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted. He hung silent in irritation.

In this ‘abstracted’ state, she says she doesn’t know, as she balances her mind.

‘

I don’t know,’ she replied, balancing mildly. ‘I don’t know.’

This line gives the key to modern literary practice. People in literature are seeking to restore ‘balance’ in an imbalanced world. Believe it or not, this was the approach of Reason in the Roman de la Rose. She balances things in her scales, and it was when the Lover rejected the balance of Reason as insufficient to his cause that the medieval program really got moving.

But this is not the Middle Ages. This Birkin is relentless.

‘But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,’ he broke out. She slowly looked at him.

Now what she should do at this point is she should laugh at him and walk way. This was my reaction to reading this book the first time. I didn’t actually read much farther than this and picked up the Glass Bead Game instead. But she, like me, is a weak woman—how else can we explain her reaction here?—and she stays and questions this Birkin sort of person, hoping that he will be able to fill in her own dearth of knowledge about exactly what’s going on in her own life.

‘Is it?’ she said.

‘To know, that is your all, that is your life–you have only this, this knowledge,’ he cried. ‘There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.’

Really, I would now ask. I would ask whether he really believes this, because it relies on the vertical metaphysical hierarchy that I thought he had just rejected. I am confused now as to the disposition towards reason and rational hierarchy in the modern world. The medieval world makes a lot more sense to me at this point.

But she doesn’t ask him this, and at the time, neither did I.

Again she was some time silent.

‘Is there?’ she said at last, with the same untouched calm. And then in a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness: ‘What fruit, Rupert?’

‘The eternal apple,’ he replied in exasperation, hating his own metaphors.

The Intrusion of Metaphor

The intrusion of metaphor is critical, here. Can one speak about the universe without metaphor? I don’t think so. Plato didn’t think so. But the moderns did, and this is why the Birkin hates his metaphors. Their existence bespeaks the distance of the human mind from the absolute truth. They bespeak the distance of the Birkin’s mind from the truth. The problem here is that the individual was all in the 20th century, but the individual was not competent to perceive the truth all by himself. The moderns needed others, a collective experience, to perceive what any individual could not perceive alone. This is the genesis of progressive thought in politics in the early part of the 20th century. It’s why Marx was so popular before the McCarthy hearings. It’s why it takes a village.

Artists and aestheticians got another message, as well. They thought—they still do, as far as I can tell—that money is not merely a transparent metaphor that makes our lives easier (see my essay on Why Fido Can’t Drive in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing). They believed, following Aristotle (the inventor of economics) and Plato, that money represented a contact with the lower aspects of our human existence. This philosophical approach to the problem of money colors the artist’s approach to money. They do not want to write for money, nor do they wish to be perceived as writing for money. Money is the instrument that interferes with the ‘natural’ universe. If we follow the few who do not have contact with money, we will be able to usher in the golden age.

Lawrence’s Birkin turns on metaphor because he feels that he should be a genius but that sadly he is not. He has not managed to achieve the ultimate goal of knowledge, just as Stephen could not escape from the nightmare of history on Sandymount Strand. But Hermione, once again inexplicably in my later stage of my life way of looking at my life, looks to the deep, dark, and brooding Birkin to make up for the absences she feels so deeply in her crippled (and tortured) soul:

‘Yes,’ she said. There was a look of exhaustion about her. For some moments there was silence. Then, pulling herself together with a convulsed movement, Hermione resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice:

‘But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the children are better, richer, happier, for all this knowledge; do you really think they are? Or is it better to leave them untouched, spontaneous. Hadn’t they better be animals, simple animals, crude, violent, ANYTHING, rather than this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.’

Ah, spontaneity. The last refuge of the disorganized human being.

They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she resumed, ‘Hadn’t they better be anything than grow up crippled, crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings–so thrown back–so turned back on themselves–incapable–’ Hermione clenched her fist like one in a trance–’of any spontaneous action, always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away.’

Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody–’never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn’t ANYTHING better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this NOTHINGNESS–’

Yes, disorganization is the opposite of organization, and organization is to be fled from. Now, to my mind, organization in your life and your thought is a good thing, but Hermione makes it sound like a bad thing, here. Perhaps—and I’m just supposing here—Hermione could use a bit of rational organization in her thoughts, rather than looking to deep, dark, and brooding Birkin’s to make sense of her own weakness. She doesn’t HAVE any answers. And neither does he. Isn’t being mere ANIMALS better than the alternative, which is NOTHINGNESS? The loss of REASON is what she laments, is it not? But she is making no attempt to USE her reason. Instead, she looks at this Birkin for answers, which I say again, he does not have, either. After she is done with her rave, Birkin gives his answer, which is, of course, nothing more than a question:

‘But do you think it is knowledge that makes us unliving and selfconscious?’ he asked irritably.

For some unknown reason, this non-answer satisfies Hermione, who has been raving about nothing being at the base of our experience and who had been looking to this Birkin for answers that she doesn’t have herself.

She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.

‘Yes,’ she said. She paused, watching him all the while, her eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly.

Philosophy is Preparation for Death

Then she starts equating life of the mind with death. This, too, has a long history in Western culture.

‘It is the mind,’ she said, ‘and that is death.’ She raised her eyes slowly to him: ‘Isn’t the mind–’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’

Okay, D. H. has lost me at this point. I went to college to pursue the life of the mind, and now this Birkin is equating the life of the mind with death. Okay, that’s D. H.’s opinion, but I would look somewhere else for answers rather than giving up. My initial solution was to pursue a life of abandon, particularly the abandonment of consciousness, but after abandoning school as a false path (after reading The Glass Bead Game), and after abandoning consciousness for the free play of a drug-washed mind, I realized that if I didn’t shape up, I would never learn what I had abandoned my consciousness to learn. I would merely remain unconscious. Hermione’s mind and my mind were not on the same page. And the Birkin couldn’t help me either.

‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.

‘Are you SURE?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are overconscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’

‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.

The Birkin may be quoting Marx, who talked in terms of ‘false consciousness.’ And Marx is key to understanding the difference between the medieval and the modern mind.

Marx

Marx had written as though he was the first to discover the ‘true’ mode of social organization in the world (interestingly, he was not the last). Note, in the following excerpt from the Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ how much of the language of determinism and definition Marx uses:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

This sense of definiteness, which was missing from Plato and Ovid’s sense of the universe, as well as the medieval picture of the Roman de la Rose, allows Marx to overturn consciousness from ‘false’ consciousness to ‘true’ consciousness. It’s like turning on and off a light.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

The notion that someone—in this case Marx—has a true and perfect consciousness is a pipe dream to people like you and I. But, according to Marx (and a whole lot of academics in my experience), all that is required is a revolution to restore the golden age of man—again, see Ovid and Rousseau—from the ‘unnatural’ inequities given to us by the intrusion of science into the natural world. The human world may be corrupt. The natural world, according to these thinkers, never can be. This is why people get so upset when people in the business world operate on the principle that we should operate by dividing up our resources unevenly so as to increase our profit. They should operate evenly, equitably. That’s what Mother Nature would do.

But that has not been my experience. I started out as a liberal, and found that liberalism didn’t have all the answers. I became a conservative, and found out that conservatism didn’t have all the answers. My solution was to decide that politics and politicians did not have answers. Nobody has a perfect answer. And this is not a matter that liberal progress or conservative nostalgia for the past will fix, but is a matter of the insecure relationship between the individual’s mind and the larger universe. This is why the universe of Plato has left a little wiggle room that Marx’s ‘definite stages’ and ‘sum total’s leave no room for. Whatever is human must be motivated, and so Marx can’t leave any wiggle room. Differences of opinion must be the result of ‘false consciousness.’

This is the importance of ‘the scab and traitor Liu Shaoqi’ in the deaf mute video about the helpful doctors in Mao’s China. It makes more sense to accuse others of suffering from false consciousness than it is to change your way of life and traditions of thought (changing people’s minds is hard; blaming others is easy).

My Academic Experience

My academic colleagues thought that they were operating in a universe of discrete monads (individual, culturally conditioned opinions for the lay folks if there are any left reading). Each individual had the right to their opinion. This was thought secure by my academic colleagues. I think that that is true in music (see my Introduction to What I am Reading This Week).

The sense of the discrete atom of taste means that each individual had the ability to decide for themselves what they like, what they don’t like, without reference to a permanent order. But the privatization of taste means that the public sphere of debate is rapidly being turned into people who get their opinions by listening to people who agree with them and shouting down the ‘other,’ who is not someone who has a different opinion but is actually a moral threat that suffers from ‘false consciousness.’ This is done, not in the public sphere of rational debate, but in the private sphere of people who know what they know, like what they like, and want to hear what they want to hear. You’re either with ‘us’ of against ‘us.’ In or out. ‘Us’ or ‘other.’

The experience that I had as the perpetual ‘other’—excoriated by the left and right because I didn’t wholeheartedly and entirely agree that the position of either was “perfect”, in the sense that Hermione talks about her imperfect mind—has scarred me. But it leads me to make a point that if I cared anymore about politics would be called politically incorrect. My point is this: Just because your grandmother handed down a cultural tradition that has been in your family for generations, doesn’t save you from the charge that your cherished cultural tradition isn’t foolish.

Okay, I know that people don’t operate this way in real life. Nor do I believe they should. They have traditions and it usually doesn’t matter whether you follow them of not. In general, traditions die slow deaths, as people realize that dressing up in an ostrich costume and dancing the ostrich rain dance doesn’t really bring thunderstorms.

Tradition in America

In fact, dispensing with tradition is part of the American way of life, because American are constantly looking for new things. One of the products of the search for the next big thing is a parade of useless things, but we also got electricity, the light bulb, the telephone, the radio, the television, the airplane, space flight, and the mainframe and personal computer out of our restless search for new things. So, on average, American are willing to put up with a certain amount of over-electrification of our cities, groups of people who watch too much television, kids who talk on the phone too much, and people who look at too much pornography while sitting naked with a six pack at home.

This offends more traditional people, not all certainly, but some. And they bomb our over-electrified cities, declaring their outrage over our use of freely available pornography. And this is when it behooves traditional people to do a cost-benefit analysis of why America has been the most productive country in the world. It is because we have so much leeway in our lives. That is the definition of freedom. To go back in the past to a less efficient use of human resources in which women were not allowed to work would be a disaster, for by keeping women at home, they rob their work force of 51% of their labor force.

That doesn’t mean that there are not people who want to do exactly that—bomb our electric cities—but American make the case that they are crazy because we are freely offering our help so that other countries can have what we have. We are bewildered when, in response to our extended helping hand people decide they would prefer to do it their own, time-tested and traditional way.

And there is no necessity of using a cost-benefit analysis to determine your place in the hierarchy of cultures. But that doesn’t mean that the reality–mathematical or otherwise–goes away just because your culture hasn’t invented math of other cultural tools yet. Your culture is not as prepared as a culture that does have those tools. If you want to keep up, you need to learn math and other stuff.

The Place of Human Nature in Our Rationally Constructed Hierarchy

We would not be so surprised if we had a more rationally organized hierarchy on which we could put human nature. First priority usually goes to the preservation of the individual. What use are you if you are dead (although, as in all cases with reason and rational hierarchies, there are exceptions). Second is your family. Third is your local community. And so on up the line to your nation, and then the coming world government.

There are other configurations. My point is to set up the question of where we place our humanity on the rational scale. Is it at the bottom, a premise on which all other things depend? If so, what do we believe about the Al-Qaida suicide bomber who professes to have no care for life, dismissing it as a ‘western’ ideal. Is he lying? Is he telling us the truth? How can we tell?

And moreover, if we believe the suicide bomber, what about the ideal professed by everyone from Elton John to Nina Hagen of ‘to-each-his-own?’ Is that a culturally conditioned behavior? Or is it ‘natural?’ The fact of the matter is that the barrier between human experience that we westerners think of as so ‘natural’ may not be ‘natural’ at all.

My adult response is to turn away from rationality at a certain point. That is not Hermione’s response to the same fact. Hermione thinks that her attempt to rationalize her behavior has some cracks in it, She wants to go back down under the rational structures that the Romantics had shown to have failed to get back to the underlying metaphysical coherence that the Romantics had promised if only we would embrace the ‘irrational’ component of ‘nature.’ There is no thought in Lawrence’s universe, or in Hermione’s, that the mind does not correspond perfectly with the universe. But that is exactly the lesson I learned from my experience with the most famous work of medieval literature.

The harsh, politically incorrect conclusion I draw from my attempt to put my base experience into an admittedly imperfect rational framework is not that everyone in the universe has the right to a cost-free private taste. Just because Hermione has withdrawn herself back into her little prive world, she cannot make sense of it on her own. When she reappears in the public sphere, she does so unarmed with the tools of reason, which, though imperfect, are her own. In that sense, they are closer to the center of the circle than Birkin, who doesn’t know, either, but whom she asks because she’s just a weak woman.

My Position as a Teacher

That is my position when I walk into a classroom. I constantly refer to myself as an idiot, as a fool, and as knowing nothing—after all, I spent 10 years in college getting a degree in English, so there must be something wrong with me. But I do value the mere smattering of knowledge that I have managed to cobble together over the course of my 48 years, and I recommend that my students do not neglect the mind’s ability to place things in imperfect and ultimately relative hierarchies.

Hermione’s Different Position

But this is not what Hermione does when confronted by the Socratic problem of the relationship between consciousness, knowledge, and ontology.

But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation.

‘When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically. ‘If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.’

This Birkin accuses her of merely reciting words, words, words (Where have I heard that before?). He posits ‘knowledge’ in place of empty words, and he hates that, too, if it ever joined to a concept.

‘You are merely making words,’ he said; ‘knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to BE an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary–and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts–you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won’t be conscious of what ACTUALLY is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture.’

So in this Birkin’s mind, Hermione is too ‘intellectual,’ which apparently means attaching ‘concepts’ to words. This is ‘the lie that will match the rest of your furniture.’ Nature, in Kant, provides concepts of thought, so he is attempting to deliver her out of her own mind, where she is trapped, into the universe of ‘nature.’ Only if Birkin can guarantee access to certain without the interference of any sort of imagination can he deliver her out of her error. Alas, he will never be able to. Metaphor, which he hates, is part of his imaginative framework that interferes with his ‘natural’ attempt to join the mind with nature as it is.

I usually deal with such people by asking them the skeleton-key question ‘How do you know?’ (This question is not original with me; Socrates used to ask it). In this case, I would ask Lawrence’s Birkin how he knows that nature is the ground of his existence.

Perspective, Imagination, and Truth

Old D. H. does something else. He changes the perspective, as though changing the perspective will change the underlying reality of the fact that human beings exist within a framework of imagination. In other words, our perception of the world is always interfered with by our imaginative reconstruction of the universe within our minds. Universes have 11 dimensions (this week); the human imagination has trouble dealing with a mere five. And we’re not finished with our perfect description of the universe. But we’re not following my thoughts here; we’re following D. H.’s thoughts here.

Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other.

‘It’s all that Lady of Shalott business,’ he said, in his strong abstract voice.

Wait! This raises a question that I can’t answer. Wasn’t he just talking about Hermione’s use of (abstract and abstracting) reason? Is he being more abstract or less? I think D. H. is pushing his Birkin’s reasoning beyond the limit of normal, everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill reason, just like those old scholastic philosophers that the moderns used to make fun of but who nobody actually reads. Anyway, that’s another sidetrack. Back to our text, in which Birkin is charging through the (surely metaphorical) air:

He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. ‘You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it.

Yep, that’s a metaphor, all right. And this Birkin continues with the metaphor, leading me to think that this Birkin going to see things the way I was things, as a skeptic when it comes to reason’s ability to connect itself with external nature. But then he seems to offer the hope of something more, something deeper, beyond reason but still accessible to this Birkin.

There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge.

This is the conclusion that I reached by reading Roman de la Rose in graduate school. If we use reason in our exploration of the universe, we will turn a mirror back on ourselves and not perceive the universe completely. But there was nothing else in the medieval universe. This Birkin seems to sense there’s something more.

You want a life of pure sensation and “passion.”‘

He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.

‘But your passion is a lie,’ he went on violently. ‘It isn’t passion at all, it is your WILL. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to KNOW.’

Wow! That’s amazing! He had discovered things that I had discovered written in the 1270s in the Roman de la Rose. What, I ask myself, is he going to do with his medieval knowledge? Is he going to take up the challenge that Chaucer took on himself of answering the Roman de la Rose? Alas, no. There is no attempt at order, here. D. H.’s Birkin slips into a non-scientific bit of masochism, rather than fgving us a full account of what he might mean here.

He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking.

Help Me Out, Reader

Help me out, here, reader. What does he mean when he says he became ‘unconscious of her?’ Is the unconscious brought about by passion the new consciousness? I have no idea what D. H. is talking about here. Anyway, that’s the beauty of reading. If you don’t understand something, wait awhile and you’ll find something that does appeal to you. That’s what happened to me when I went back and read this book a second time (the first time I can’t honestly say I knew what was going on here; I just knew I didn’t like it).

‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be verily deliberately spontaneous–that’s you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut.

Love Birkin’s imagery of the nut, here. Do you suppose he means it to be taken literally? Is so, why doesn’t he get crackin’? If not, why does he say what he clearly does not mean? Where is the ‘truth’ beyond imagination that he is aiming at, here? Oh well, D. H.’s mind is too large a nut for me to crack, so once again I’ll just move on.

For you’ll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography–looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’

Oooh! Pornography. We’re getting pretty close to that other Birkin now.

There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems, in the light of his words. She was pale and abstracted.

Why is the abstraction associated with paleness, here? I use reason and am frequently lost in abstract thought, yet I get out into the sun often enough that I am not pale. Okay, I admit it. I’m getting tired here. But I’m almost done.

‘But do you really WANT sensuality?’ she asked, puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfilment–the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head–the dark involuntary being. It is death to one’s self–but it is the coming into being of another.’

The End

Well, this is not the end of the novel, but this is where I stopped reading again. What’s the point, I asked myself? But D. H. Lawrence has drawn the Birkin of his novel back to the position where we can see parallels between Rupert and Jane Birkin. Both want to express their sexuality openly and both think that it is enough to release ourselves from the constraints of reason—which is nothing more than the oppressive values of a repressed and oppressing middle class (Europeans: read ‘bourgeios’).

Lawrence was a creature of his time. He is following the model of Modern men, from Hermann Hesse to W. B. Yeats. It survived until Nina Hagen. The death of the self is what I was talking about in chronicling the journey of Nina Hagen into Western freedom and then into the self-destructive Indian religion.

We can take Freud as one of a thousand examples of Modernism in action. Freud had put himself at the forefront of the avant-garde by foretelling the new unconscious as the answer to nature’s ultimately unanswerable questions (the same holds true of Hesse and Yeats). But with the death of Freud as a viable school of thought, my academic colleagues had gone from the avant-garde of human thought in the early 20th century to looking backward at the failure but without having answers as to what had gone wrong. They went from being on the avant-garde to being people who turned conservative (like Milt Rosenberg) or more liberal (like my friend Michael Bérubé), each blaming the other for all the faults of the system that they both share but neither being able to do without an enemy ‘other.’

My report on this book is an entry into the field on the side of including reason, which is excluded on the left by virtue of its not having answers to the metaphysical questions that aestheticians pride themselves on providing. It is included on the right as meeting the metaphysical conditions laid out by the aestheticians that we include everything in our aesthetic picture of the universe. But that, too, is a pipe dream.

By following the metaphysics of the other world as the path to ourselves we are led down false paths. That path is clearly marked out by both Birkins. Lawrence’s Birkin wants to travel back beyond mere reason, beyond even the will to power that ‘knowledge’ provides, to the world where thought joins with elusive nature in the realm, I think, of the unconscious. That project failed to yield the promised results.

Jane Birkin just flings her clothes off, confident that her fabulous good looks, perfect butt, and firm breasts—she is outwardly perfect in the way that Hermione is outwardly perfect—will be enough to break her free from the condition of the ugly, poor, and insignificant. She has switched off entirely the intellectual component of her experience for a physical experience of unfettered freedom. That, too, is in the process of failing, although we are still experiencing that failure, so it still succeeds more often than it will in the future.

My point is rather different than either Birkin’s. I believe, based in my experience reading medieval literature, that we should include a limited reason in our calculation of ourselves in the world, rather than leaving it out on account of its not yielding the promise of a complete and total metaphysical worldview. Through reason we construct our social institutions as protections against a hostile nature that reduces us to the condition of beasts if we follow it too closely (that’s the lesson of the animalistic Jane Birkin). We need a new aesthetic to deal with the failure of artists and critics alike to close the gap between their imagined realities, which have traveled too far along the path of fantasy unchecked by reason, and the world as it actually is. This would not matter at all if we lived exclusively in a private sphere, but reason is the best way to make sense of things in a public environment where we are beset by competitive pressures.

It was in attempting to fit Pareto into my academic training that I came to understand the weakness of my academic training. I think thinkers along all spectrums of academic thought—from Rush Limbaugh to Michael Bérubé—should seriously consider the implications of leaving out the alternate picture of nature as radically unequal painted by its inclusion. This is the basis of Reason’s ‘balance’ in the Roman de la Rose. The medieval poet rejected Reason as too balanced. The Lover in the poem got his reward by circumventing Reason’s balanced perspective for an unequal perspective in which reason plays no part and God’s metaphysical perspective is beyond the ken of a human being to comprehend.

I was still unsatisfied with Women in Love, so I put it down once more without finishing it a second time. But the process of learning to organize my intuitive knowledge of what I have read into a more complete picture through the intermediary of reason means that I have control of myself , and of D. H. Lawrence, control I did not have when I first put down the book because I sort of thought that perhaps Lawrence was confused. I still think so, but now I can explain what I think he left out in the public sphere to you, my readers. That was the benefit of my much-maligned (by me on these pages) education.

Just my 2 cents.

Categories: Philosophy, What I'm Reading This Week
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