I discovered the pictured device — a note-taking machine invented by one Vincentius Placcius — via a nice opinion piece on the BBC website about how we have dealt with information overload up until today.

In 1689 a professor at the University of Hamburg with a passion for new technologies, unveiled a device for managing information overload – a purpose-built mahogany cabinet designed to hold and organise several thousand hand-written notes taken by an individual reader from the books they were reading.

Along the back of the cabinet were narrow vertical posts, each headed by a letter of the alphabet. Running the length of each post was a sequence of brass plates engraved with alphabetised headings designed to capture topics of particular interest to the reader, each heading furnished with a metal hook, to which slips of paper containing information extracted from the owner’s reading were to be attached, ready to be retrieved for re-use at a moment’s notice.

It is not clear whether this rather cumbersome piece of equipment caught on (though apparently the philosopher Leibniz owned one) but the impetus behind it is obvious.

Sounds like a glorious object, no matter how impractical… I want one.

The danger today is rather that we are reluctant to let go of any information garnered from however recondite a source. Every historian knows that no narrative will be intelligible to a reader if it includes all the detail the author amassed in the course of their research. A clear thread has to be teased from the mass of available evidence, to focus, direct and ultimately give meaning to what has been assembled for analysis. Daring to discard is as crucial as safe-guarding, for effective knowledge management and transmission today.

There is all too little danger of the knowledge currently accumulating in floods – multiply-owned, stored and captured – being lost. Rather, if we are going to make sense for posterity of today’s information-saturated present, one of the things we will have to learn to do is decide how to prune the evidence, and ultimately, what to forget.

Beeb

Addendum: Here’s an interesting article about the Belgian intellectual of the early 20th century Paul Otlet, and his approach to the same problem. Thanks Arnaudt!

An interview with Rem Koolhaas in De Standaard. Lots of interesting ideas about architecture, filmmaking, East/West philosophies and the individual, celebrity…

Dat alles zo geregeld is, dat geldt toch vooral voor het welvarende westerse deel van de wereld?

‘Dat is zo. Dat is het bijzondere van mijn vroege ervaringen in Indonesië. Je hebt al jong ervaren hoe er in andere delen van de wereld geleefd wordt. Het was een chaos en dat was vanzelfsprekend. Daar werd verder geen oordeel over geveld. Ik heb tot mijn twaalfde op zes verschillende scholen gezeten. Nu zou het bijna als een misdaad worden gezien, maar mij heeft het veel gebracht. Talent voor organisatie, openstaan voor mogelijkheden, gretigheid voor het nieuwe.’

Verlangt u terug naar die chaos?

‘Ik lijd niet aan nostalgie.’

Wat voor jongen was u op de middelbare school?

‘Een van de vreemde dingen is dat ik door mijn ervaring in Azië niet zo aan mezelf denk als een ik. Het is niet dat ik de vraag wil ontvluchten. Het is meer dat ik geen westers persoon ben met een duidelijk afgebakend ik.’

‘Toen ik op de middelbare school zat, las ik alles van Dostojevski. Ik begon in film geïnteresseerd te raken, in kunst. School was bijzaak.’

Het individuele is te belangrijk in dit deel van de wereld?

‘Het is niet productief. Het is een obstakel om, eh, de manier waarop ik architect ben en bouw… (Hij tekent met een blauwe balpen vierkantjes op een vel papier.) Het is niet mijn ik dat bouwt en waar anderen dan een relatie mee moeten hebben. Het is: een vormeloze massa die iets wil bereiken en waar ik een onderdeel van ben. Dat heb ik aan Indonesië overgehouden. Ik zag al snel dat die opstelling me grote vrijheden gaf. De openheid, het permanent rekening houden met de andere kant. Ik ben vroeg doordrongen geraakt van het feit dat het Westen niet alles is.’

Waarom ging u in 1972 naar New York?

Opeens monter: ‘Ik had het gevoel dat er met New York iets te doen viel. Ik was geïnteresseerd in moderne architectuur en in Europa waren er vooral manifesten, geen realiseringen. In de VS, of in elk geval in New York, was het andersom: geen manifesten, wel realiseringen. Maar zoals ik dat nu zeg, zo had ik het toen nog niet doorgrond. Er was alleen dat gevoel dat ik daar iets kon doen.’

Hoe is het om ‘stararchitect’ te zijn?

‘Mensen kunnen zich niet meer voorstellen dat een normaal persoon de rol van architect kan vervullen. Ze willen dat je een celebrity bent. Vervolgens is iedere poging tot echte communicatie gedoemd om te mislukken.’

Waarom willen mensen dat?

‘Het is een effect van de markteconomie. Belangstelling voor ideeën heeft plaatsgemaakt voor aanbidding van roem.’

Wilt u dat dan ook het liefst als architect: kunnen doen wat u wilt?

‘Nee. Ik geloof in de tegendruk van de opdrachtgever. Dat meen ik oprecht. Door tegenstand kom je tot betere dingen. Of door samenwerking. Je kunt dit vak niet doen zonder dat andere mensen willen wat jij wilt.’

More here. Thanks Arnaud for the heads-up. The last point reminds me of this quote from Panamarenko.

From a talk by Alan Watts. Shame about the strings added in the background.

From Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind:

We define manliness in terms of aggression, you see, because we’re a little bit frightened as to whether or not we’re really men. And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy. It’s completely unnecessary. If you have what it takes, you don’t need to put on that show. And you don’t need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because after all, you ARE a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in exactly the same way an apple grows off an apple tree.

So let’s say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using ‘apple’ as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody’s skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what’s going on in the organism. But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths–the ceramic and the automatic–not to feel that we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects it. You say ‘I came into this world.’ You didn’t. You came out of it. You say ‘Face facts.’ We talk about ‘encounters’ with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies.

people say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space. Well let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.

It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

A comment on the Guardian book blog speaking out against the tendency in the information age towards a superficial experiencing of the world…

As a former journalist and the author of four narrative histories, I’ll tell you why I wanted to write a book. Journalism is “the first rough draft of history” but writing drafts soon seems as ephemeral as yesterday’s headlines. Writing and researching, especially if the topic is deeper than a memoir about one’s dog, allow a writer to escape the mundane, the puerile, the passing fancies that comprise the present day. To read a good book is to find the same escape. With the rise of Twitter, et al, and the steady decline of book sales, how sad that so many people are choosing to live solely on the surface. This shift will have deep consequences that we are only beginning to see.

Guardian | Books “Should we stop writing books?” Thanks to Alice for the heads up.

Addendum:

… we are a society of distraction, idle talk, and ambiguity. Everybody knows everything has happened, everything is automatically trivial, and, again, nothing means anything. This is the world of blogging, the fake world of Facebook, the world that compensates for an absent set of social experiences. There are virtues to social-networking sites, I’m sure, but you feel an awful vacuum at the heart of them. They compensate for something that is absent. It’s strange, one of the features of the contemporary world is a lack of attention. The world floats, it distracts us in endless ways, one is outside of oneself in a constantly divided attention, and you can multiply the force of distraction, which makes conversation harder and harder as an experience.

Simon Critchley in Vice Magazine — Thanks, Levi!

The material world is sometimes compared to an ocean, and the human body is compared to a solid boat designed especially to cross this ocean. The Vedic scriptures and the acaryas, or saintly teachers, are compared to expert boatmen, and the facilities of the human body are compared to favorable breezes that help the boat ply smoothly to its desired destination. If, with all these facilities, a human being does not fully utilize his life for self-realization, he must be considered atma-ha, a killer of the soul. Sri Isopanishad warns in clear terms that the killer of the soul is destined to enter into the darkest region of ignorance to suffer perpetually.

From the Śrī Īśopaniṣad, verse 3

I like the grandeur and poetry and sometimes the wisdom of religious texts even when I don’t subscribe to the religion in question.

Michail Bakhtin’s ideas on the individual, via wiki:

First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the “soul”; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual’s potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.

Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that,

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.

As such, Bakhtin’s philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.

Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky’s work a true representation of “polyphony”, that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky’s work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.

Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by “a single mouth”. The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply “averaged” or “synthesized”. It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.

When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of “carnival” and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the “threshold” situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin’s way of describing Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

Thanks Levi, who referred me to Bakhtin in response to the D. H. Lawrence text I posted.

I’ve wanted to share this text for a while, but I couldn’t find it online anywhere. I thought about just quoting the parts I like, but I felt like quoting most of it. So now I’ve typed out the whole text, a chapter out of the book The Use of Imagination by William Walsh (Chatto & Windus, 1959).

Even if you don’t agree with all Lawrence’s ideas (and in the latter part there is admittedly a rather questionable proposition for the realization of his philosophies), you can still even just appreciate the elegance of his expression, his clarity of vision, and the poetry of his words.

The book is a collection of essays exploring what some of the biggest names in literature have to teach us about imagination. The book is written for educators, but the insights are universal. This chapter is on D. H. Lawrence’s insights. The chapter is called The Writer as Teacher…

Lawrence was an artist who felt with a racking intensity the wounded nature of man in contemporary society. It was an injury, in Lawrence’s view, which was a wound of negation, a terrible vacancy. An essential part of a healthy human nature had been allowed to sink beneath the level of accessibility, and was no longer operative in the modern consciousness. It was a constant endeavour of Lawrence to recover the lost element, and since he was a diagnostician of extraordinary skill, it was a constant endeavour also to define its character and conditions. This double intention makes Lawrence a writer peculiarly rich in suggestiveness for the educator. On the one hand, his work is sustained by ‘a perceptive wisdom about ends’, and about ends as they need to be seen by the injured modern mind; on the other, his work is made urgent by a moving concern for correction, and made relevant by an unusual power to envisage, in our baffling and tangled circumstances, a route towards spiritual health. To realize, to define, to correct – these are the purposes of Lawrence, as they are the goals of the teacher. Lawrence indeed exemplified, perhaps more brilliantly than any other modern writer, the role of the writer as teacher.

I must at once anticipate the objection that in saying this I am absurdly confining the scope and limiting the purposes of a major literary artist, that I am substituting a moralistic for a creative intention and replacing a dramatic with a didactic aim. But the objection itself rests on an unduly narrow conception of teacher, and certainly on a very inadequate conception of good or ideal teacher. For him instruction — the didactic — is strictly subordinate to a larger purpose which is intimate sympathy with the undertaking of a literary artist, namely the tactful and intelligible communication of life, and of the life of feeling and of value as well as of reason. Furthermore, it will be agreed, the novel has developed in such a way as to make the title — The Writer as Teacher — much more apt to the nature of the novel than it might have been once, when even the best novels were taken to be just cultivated entertainment. In saying this, I am referring to more than an increase in the technical devises at the novelist’s command, to such things as the focusing consciousness or the interior monologue. The novel in the hands of Melville, Conrad, James and Lawrence has become a species of poetry, perhaps the form in which the poetic imagination now expresses itself most naturally, fully and powerfully. And the kind of poetry to which the novel has assimilated itself is not the poetry of concentrated wisdom and sensibility, the kind of which The Divine Comedy is the greatest example, and of which The Prelude is the last unquestioned example, and of which The Waste Land is the nearest modern example.

The transmutation of its form means an astonishing extension of the universe of the novel. The object of the novel is to be, according to Lawrence, no less than ‘ the whole man alive’ — that is both the object to which the novel attends and the object, the audience, to which it is addressed.

The novel [Lawrence says] is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science or any other book-tremulation can do. [...] Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that’s only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit in the strange make-up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount makes the selfless spirit of me quiver. But that too is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the old Adam shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I watch it. But even the old Adam is only a bit of me. I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness some time or other. [...] [Novels] in their wholeness affect the whole man alive, which is the man himself beyond any part of him. They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction.

Because he is concerned to add to the life of the complete person, the novelist, like the teacher, is also — or rather is simultaneously — concerned in a fundamental way with moral issues. ‘Right and wrong is an instinct,’ says Lawrence, ‘but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once. And only in a novel are all things given full play, or at least they may be given full play when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living’. For what, if we think about it, asks Lawrence, ‘does our life consist in? It consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us [...] an infinity of pure relations, big and little [...] and morality is that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness.’ It is the business of art

to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the toils of old relationships art is always ahead of the ‘times’, which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment. [...] Now here we see the beauty of the great value of the novel. [...] The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. [...] The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships.

Clearly the novel so conceived is very different from, more complex, more important than, the novel conventionally understood. The names given by Lawrence in the passage quoted above — Plato and the Sermon on the Mount — help to define the difference. The great theme of the Lawrentian novelist is the discrepancy between what man is, actually, concretely, in his tissues, nerves, feelings and beliefs, and what man ought to be. This is in a radical way a philosophic theme, involving a metaphysical conception and an ethical intention, an idea of being and a doctrine of amendment. It is all the more necessary for the novel to offer itself as a centre for such permanent human concerns since the main trend of current philosophic opinion has decided that such questions are unreal, an astounding finding to the unphilosophic person leading his difficult ordinary life, in which the one sure thing is that he will be confronted with searching, upsetting questions of this kind every day and at every turn. To supply in fiction what philosophy disregards, to rescue the novel from sentimentality and philosophy from the deadest, abstracted unreality — this was an essential undertaking of the novelist in Lawrence’s eyes. ‘It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again — in the novel.’ And of course the novel must pursue this end without doing damage to its own integrity. Lawrence is not recommending the writing of illustrated theses or marginally illuminated propaganda. The novel has to help us develop ‘an instinct for life’, not a ‘theory of right and wrong’. ‘The novel has a future. It’s got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut’. What makes a novel ‘serious’, therefore, is an apprehension of reality as deep as this, its organization about a moral impulse and its translation into the terms of art. It is the novel so understood which can ‘help us to live, as nothing else can; no didactic Scripture, anyhow’. It is of the novel so understood that Lawrence is a master.

A novelist who took his art so seriously, whose intentions were so radical and whose powers were equal to his intentions, had to be more than a fanatical advocate of a mindless cult of blood and sex, more than the apostle of the irrational and the immediate. There are, of course, spheres of human action, in orthodox religion and science for example, where Lawrence’s opinions were eccentric or even, as Aldous Huxley said, absurd, and where we should not be disposed to seek for guidance from him. These failures of discernment and appreciation are perhaps inevitable in a talent so positive and original as Lawrence’s. But Lawrence’s occasional diatribes of incomprehension were no part of a general polemic against consciousness. He was never, what he is often accused of being, an opponent of consciousness. How could he be when his works brilliantly exemplify the most subtle and complex kinds of awareness? What Lawrence was opposed to was not consciousness but ‘the irritable, cerebral consciousness we’re afflicted with’, a consciousness unfed by, even blocked from, the deep springs of spontaneous life. ‘I believe the consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of sex, and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the glimmering edge of our awareness and our field of understanding, in the endless business of knowing ourselves.’ The living consciousness exhibits a flowing continuity between what ‘it thrills to’ and ‘intellectual appreciation’; in the modern mind the one has been almost totally obliterated by the other. Sex, the feeling for and in the origins of life, is only the most intense and immediate form of that organic force, ‘the principle of the universe’ that man should thrill to. But sex itself has become a mental reaction nowadays, and a hopelessly cerebral affair’. And this was so, and increasingly so, both in literature an in life. ‘Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde, Proust: they all did the same thing, or tried to, to kick off, or to intellectualize and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness, which is the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean in the best sense by common sense.’

Lawrence used the terms intellectual and ideal as synonyms for hopelessly cerebral and a merely mental reaction, for the disconnected, rootless, mechanized mind, just as he used physical, naïve and innocent for the mind freely in communication with the deep springs of being. But the idiom was never intended to cloak a plea for oblivion and blind instinctive action, and to think that it was is to be both uncomprehending of and unjust to hum. ‘One had to be intensely conscious,’, he wrote, ‘but not intellectual or ideal.’ Equally uncomprehending, equally unjust is the accusation that Lawrence morbidly encouraged sex. ‘God forbid that I should be taken as urging loose sex activity,’ he exclaimed. ‘There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when it is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be a large quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people have a lovely, quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young free for their sort.’ Sex represented the creative as opposed to the readymade, the unmanipulated and the free as against the fabricated and the calculated, and his attitude to it was reverent and religious. It stood for life at its source and for consciousness at its roots, and it symbolized what the modern mind, a mechanism unacquainted with, or on the barest nodding acquaintance with life most desperately needed. ‘One fights and fights for that living something that stirs way down in the blood, and creates consciousness. But the world won’t have it. To the present human mind, everything is ready made, and since the sun cannot be new there can be nothing new under the sun. But to me, the sun, like the rest of the cosmos, is alive, and therefore not ready made at all.’ Lawrence was concerned to open to the modern consciousness the neglected springs of life which are the origins of a full consciousness, and in separation from which the mind is crippled and incomplete. His purpose was to put man religiously in touch with the natural life of the universe.

And I do think that man is related to the universe in some ‘religious’ way even prior to his relations to his fellow men. And I do think that the only way of true relationship between men is to meet in some common ‘belief’, but physical not mental. [...] There is a principle in the universe towards which man turns religiously — a life of the universe itself. And the hero is he who touches and transmits the life of the universe.

The severance of a religious connexion with the life of the universe produces increasingly disorder in man’s psyche and disharmony in his surroundings. It soils what Lawrence in a striking phrase called ‘the clarity of being’. ‘I am weary of this world of ugly chaos, I am sick to death of struggling in a cauldron of foul feelings with no mind, no thought, no understanding, no clarity of being anywhere, only a stinking welter of sensations’. Everywhere in our world, whether in the character of man or the place in which he lives, we see ‘the clarity of being’ clouded and ‘true relatedness’ distorted. In man’s soul this means an unnatural emphasis on the egotistic will — ‘Shove and be shoved’ is the motto of our civilization — and a compulsion ‘to strive and strain and force things’ so that man has become incapable of growth and acquiescence in the flow of life. ‘That fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving hidden waves that come from the depths of life’ has withered. Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ has been replaced by an imbecility of action, and ‘we toil in a circle of pure egotism’.

Throughout Lawrence’s analysis of his age the stress is on negation, the absence of true being, in man, in his society, in the very place he lives in. In this world the bourgeois and the proletariat are combined in a failure of the sense of pure being, of the instinct for life. But ‘a thing isn’t life just because somebody does it [...] it is just existence [...] By life we mean something that gleams, that has fourth-dimensional quality.’ The proletariat –

these men, whom I love so much — understand mentally so horribly: only industrialism, only wages and money and machinery. [...] They are utterly unable to appreciate any pure ulterior truth: only this industrial-mechanical-wage idea. [...] The strange, dark, sensual life, so violent and hopeless at the bottom, combined with this horrible paucity and materialism of mental consciousness, makes me so sad.

As for the bourgeois —

The modern Englishman has a few borrowed ideas, simply doesn’t know what to feel. [...] The intuitional faculty which alone relates us in direct awareness to physical things and substantial presences, is atrophied and dead, and we don’t know what to feel — Oh tell us what! And this is true of all nations, the French and Italian as much as the English. Look at the new French suburbs! Go through the crockery and furniture department in the Dame de France or any big shop. The blood in the body stands still before such crétin ugliness. One has to decide that the modern bourgeois is a crétin.

The incomplete modern person, whether worker or bourgeois, lives in a world of ‘falsity, a stupendous assertion of non-being’.

Like himself his society is organized about a negation. ‘This present community consists, as far as it is a formed thing, in a myriad contrivances for preventing us from being let down by the meanness in ourselves and in our neighbours.’ It is a society in its extreme manifestations incapable of more than an external, inorganic union. ‘It’s very difficult to do anything with the English: they have so little “togetherness”: like grains of sand that will only fuse if lightning hits them. …’ Such a group can hardly be said to be informed by life, only by ‘extraneous, sporadic, meaningless sensationalism’. Its formlessness of soul — ‘this wretched conglomerated messing’ — is reflected in the hideous disorder of its environment: ‘But what a mess the French make of their places — perfect slums of villadom, appallingly without order or form or place. A ghastly slummy nowhereness.’

Meanness of understanding, ugliness of millieu, the attitudes of the robot, these are the characteristics of an age suffering from an anaemia of the imagination, the organ most vividly and intimately concerned with life.

…the imagination is a kindled stake of consciousness in which intuitional awareness predominates … imagery is the body of our imaginative life, and our imagination is a great joy and fulfilment to us, for the imagination is a more powerful and more comprehensive flow of consciousness than our ordinary flow. In the flow of the imagination we know in full, mentally and physically at once, in a greater, enkindled awareness. At the maximum of our imagination we are religious. And if we deny our imagination and have no imaginative life we are poor worms who have never lived.

The consequence of a life lived or gone through with a starved imagination is boredom, ‘the great and fatal fruit of our civilization’. Man is bored because he experiences nothing and he experiences nothing because the wonder has gone out of him.

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power without wonder is mere force and compulsion. The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to life is wonder … which we may call the religious element inherent in all life: The sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense. Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in a sense of wonder. The pity is when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any religion.

It is characteristic of the versatility of Lawrence’s genius to be able to bring an issue into a more distinct clarity by construing it under a variety of forms. His thought progressed by means of manifold observations taken from many points of view. He would circle and swoop, frequently and from different quarters of the air. The loss or corruption of man’s true condition of wonder is made sharper for us, more explicable and more poignant, by a further distinction which Lawrence draws in his brilliant essay on Galsworthy between the individual and the social being. There he asks why it is that we feel a repulsion from the Forsytes which we never feel for Sairy Gamp or Jane Austen’s characters of even Meredith’s Egoist. The answer he gives is that we feel they have lost caste as human beings in the same category as ourselves. Galsworthy’s characters exemplify the fatal change of today. ‘the collapse from the psychology of the free human individual into the psychology of the social being’. In the true human individual there is a ‘core of innocence and naïveté which defies all analysis, and which you cannot bargain with, you can only deal with it in good faith from your own innocence or naïveté.’ That is not to say that the free individual is all of piece; he is also prudent, calculating or mercenary. ‘He is Mr Worldly Wiseman also to his own degree.’ But material assurance isn’t his controlling principle, the central theme of his being, as it is with the social man.

It seems to me that when the human being becomes too much divided between his subjective and objective consciousness, at last something splits in him and he becomes a social being. When he becomes too much aware of objective reality, and of his own isolation in the face of a universe of objective reality, the core of his identity splits, his nucleus collapses, his innocence or his naïveté perishes, and he becomes only a subjective-objective reality, a divided thing hinged together but not strictly individual.

Social beings keep up convention, but they cannot carry on a tradition. ‘There is a tremendous difference between the two. To carry on a tradition you must add something to the tradition. But to keep up a convention needs only the monotonous persistence of a parasite, the endless endurance of the craven, those who fear life because they are not alive, and who cannot die because they cannot live — the social beings.
In conditions not only fatal to human dignity and the harmony of the soul but even dangerous to its very structure, to ‘the inward order that should be preserved inviolable in the soul’, in conditions like these, no mere palliatives, no superficial rearrangements could prove a remedy adequate to the disorder. Only a revolution can save us. And Lawrence is clear as to the kind of revolution we require: not a revolution for work or money, and least of all for the dead materialism of Marxist socialism, but a revolution to give life itself a chance.
What is involved in revolution for the sake of life may perhaps be indicated by referring to a passage in the writings of George Santayana, a writer in so many ways different from Lawrence and yet sharing with him a disinterested love an an unaffected reverence for life. The passage occurs when Santayana is writing of Protestantism, and we may remember how much a Protestant Lawrence was, how conscious of and grateful for his Congregationalist upbringing and discipline. Santayana discriminates between ‘that antecedent integrity which is at the bottom of every living thing and at its core’ and ‘that ulterior integrity, that sanctity which might be attained at the summit of experience through renunciation and speculative dominion’. The fruit of the former is, he says, ‘vitality’, and of the latter, ‘the spiritual life’. Lawrence’s great gift was an unparalleled sense for ‘the antecedent integrity’ of many forms of existence, of vegetation and animals and above all of man, together with an intimate apprehension both full and subtle of the characteristic ‘vitality’ in each. The great discovery which Lawrence’s gift unfolded, and the moral legacy of his art, was that unless ‘antecedent integrity’, the primary core of innocence and naïveté were sound and free, had room and scope, then ‘ulterior integrity’, the life of reason and the spirit, could only be thwarted and starved, impure and malformed.

It is only from his core of innocence and naïveté that the human being is ultimately a responsible and dependable being. Break his human core of naïveté … and you get either a violent reaction or as is usual nowadays a merely rational creature whose core of spontaneous life is death. … It is one of the terrible qualities of the reason that it has no life of its own, and unless continually kept nourished or modified by the naïve life in man or woman, it becomes a purely parasitic and destructive force.

A revolution for the sake of life, therefore, meant for Lawrence a corrected system of priorities which gave a firmer recognition to the primary and fundamental source of human vitality. It meant a juster estimate of all that restless activity for the sake of possession, pleasure or prestige which our world ordinarily understands by living. It meant a descent into self and a reforming of the broken connexion with the root of being, with the essential spring of every form of human life (of ‘life’ in Lawrence’s sense, not just ‘existence’), from the simplicities of good sense to the most austere discipline of rational thought, from the elements of conduct to the heights of spirituality. This is not a revolution which we can organize collectively or bring into operation by an act of the will because we decide it is necessary. We cannot bully life.

I know [Lawrence wrote] there has to be a return to the older vision of life. But not for the sake of unison. And not from the will. It needs some welling up of religious sources that have been shut down in us: a great yielding rather than an act of the will: a yielding to the darker, older unknown, and a reconciliation. Nothing bossy. Yet the natural mystery of power.

To invite a revolution in favour of life, to encourage a return to an older vision of life: this was a primary intention in the hierarchy of purposes controlling Lawrence’s art. Lawrence was not content to analyse with fidelity and to render with power; he had also to strive to correct. The obligation he felt to truth Lawrence observed in the accuracy of his diagnosis of the individual malady, the social infection; the obligation to his art he honoured in his brilliant figuring of men in such conditions; he had also an obligation to that ‘finer morality’ which, as he said, the ‘true artist always substitutes for a grosser’; and it was because he acknowledged the claims of this morality that he was a teacher. He summarized his educative intentions vividly in these words: ‘How to prevent suburbia spreading over Eden (too late! it’s done!), how to prevent Eden running to a great wild wilderness … ‘How to regain the naïve or innocent soul … and at the same time keep the cognitive mode for defences and adjustment and “work” — voilà!’ These purposes and especially the most central of them – how to regain the naïve or innocent soul — must surely be the concern not just of the novelist as teacher but of every teacher. There could be no theory of education responsive to the deep necessities of the age which neglected it, no practice of education with a genuine feeling for the texture of the period which disregarded it. Or so at least Lawrence thought.

Both desire and impulse tend to fall into mechanical automatism: to fall from spontaneous reality into dead or material reality. All our education should be a guard against this fall … the fall from spontaneous, single, pure being, into what we call materialism or automatism or mechanism of the self. All education must tend against this fall; and all our efforts in all our life must be to preserve the soul free and spontaneous.

No one would want to claim absolute originality for Lawrence either on account of his responsiveness to ‘single, pure being’ or because of the clarity with which he understood that the recovery of the ‘innocent soul’ must be an essential undertaking in education. We must suppose that a like apprehension energized the sounder thought of Rousseau and sustained the more genuine art of Tolstoy. But Lawrence never committed what he called ‘the Tolstoian fallacy of repudiating the educated world and exalting the peasant’. Neither the noble savage nor the peasant nor the American Indian, merely by being what he was, seemed to Lawrence to incorporate this sort of insight into his ordinary perception as a fact of nature. Lawrence understood that the real savage, given the chance, would embrace automatism, mechanism and materialism with haste and pleasure; he knew that the true peasant as an individual was no better than the bourgeois or aristocrat, and in the mass was probably worse, meaner and more cruel, the most greedily selfish and brutal of all. Rousseau and Tolstoy, that is, put their faith in abstractions, turning a genuine perception into a mechanical law, but Lawrence believed only in an idea quick with living actuality, in ‘the concrete universal’. ‘If only we look for God let us look for him in the bush where he sings.’ What Lawrence appealed to was precise and personal, indeed, unique. It was the ‘sincere and vital emotion’ of his own nature, a nature rich in resource, subtle and exact in feeling, strong and lucid in intelligence. There is no better account of his gifts than that given in a remarkable passage where Lawrence sets out the qualities of the literary critic. A critic who ‘must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its complexity and its force’ must be ‘a man of force and complexity himself’. ‘A man with a paltry impudent nature will never write anything but paltry impudent criticism’. More than this, he must be a man of good faith. ‘He must have the courage to admit what he feels. … A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest.’
In what ways, then, can education tend against this fall from pure being, how can it help man to recover his ‘peculiar nuclear innocence’? Lawrence, himself a man ‘emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest’, gave this answer — by helping him to achieve a true relatedness to the living universe about him. ‘This is how I “save my soul” by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and other people, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon: an infinity of pure relations, bug and little…’ ‘There is nothing to do but to maintain a true relationship to the things we move with or amongst or against.’ And in what does a true relationship consist? Not in attitudes held by one towards another, whether they be of superiority, inferiority or even of equality. Equality indeed is doubly deceptive, being both morally commendable and politically fashionable.

Where each thing is unique, there can be no comparison made: one man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, there is another being. That is the first part of the reality. There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.

To have access to this ‘first part of reality’ requires a certain ease and freedom of the inner life, a certain insouciance of the self, unlikely to present in those too consciously engaged in playing — or playing up to — a role assigned by convention or dictated by some personal inadequacy. Then attention which should play unobstructed on the object is deflected to the person attending, as when grit in an eye distracts from the observed to the observer, bringing more consciousness of function and less efficiency of operation. But that ease and freedom of the self, or a freedom from neurosis is first of all a moral condition. ‘It is first freedom from myself, from the lie of myself, from the lie of my all-importance even to myself.’ And this productive modesty again is the quality only of one who has come to the limits of himself and become aware of something beyond him’, who realizes ‘that we are not self-contained or self-accomplished. At every moment we derive from the unknown’.
In cultivating exactness, relevance and purity in relations — a true relatedness — we sacrifice nothing of the flavour of individuality. For it is precisely the richness of our relations which constitutes our individuality. The isolated individual — history is full of examples and every human life in some phase testifies to the truth — goes numb, hardens and petrifies. Individuality does not consist in the set of characteristics contained within a particular skin. Its impulse is connexion, its growth the elaboration of connexion, its quality the refinement of that.

The fact remains [says Lawrence] that when you cut off a man and isolate him in his own pure and wonderful individuality, you haven’t got the man at all. You’ve only got the dreary fag-end of him. … We have our very individuality in relationship. Let us swallow this important and prickly fact. Apart from our connexions with other people, we are barely individuals; we amount, all of us, to next to nothing. It is in the living touch between us and other people, other lives, other phenomena that we move and have our being. Strip us of our human contacts and of contact with the living earth, and we are almost bladders of emptiness.

The means by which we inaugurate, sustain and modify relationships is feeling. Not emotion, Lawrence is careful to warn us, not emotion, not a blind instinctive drive or ‘a helpless unconscious predilection’, but feeling. And the marks of feeling are direction, and a certain degree of precision, of propriety and of intelligibility. On this last Lawrence is especially insistent. For there is no natural antagonism, in his view, set between feeling and thought. ‘Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don’t know how to feel they don’t feel. This is true of all men, and all women and all children. It is true children do have lots of unrecognized feelings. But an unrecognized feeling, if it forces itself into any recognition, is only recognized as “nervousness” or “irritability”.’ And it is just here in our feelings, our trembling organ of communication and mutuality, by which we weave ‘the two ends of darkness together with visible being and presence’, that we are so desperately, so tragically uneducated, thick, crude, uncivilized.

Come now, in what are we educated? In politics, in geography, in history, in machinery, in soft drinks and in hard, in social economy and social extravagance: ugh! a frightful universality of knowing. … (But) we know nothing, or next to nothing about ourselves. After hundreds of years we have learned how to wash our faces and bob our hair, and this is about all we have learned, individually. Collectively, of course, as a species we have combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp. And then what? Here sit I, a two-legged individual with a risky temper, knowing all about — take a pinch of salt — Tierra del Fuego and relativity and the composition of celluloid, the appearance of the anthrax bacillus and solar eclipses and the latest fashions in our shoes; and it don’t do me no good! as the charlady said of near beer. It doesn’t leave me feeling no less lonesome inside! as the old Englishwoman said, long ago, of tea without rum. We are hopelessly uneducated in ourselves. … We have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not exist for us. … Educated! We are not even born, as far as our feelings are concerned.

How then are we to educate our feelings, which in their unfaked state are the true voice of our real identity. How are we to learn a language for our feelings, instead of that rag-bag of clichés which is their customary expression? Well, ‘not by laying down laws or commandments, or axioms and postulates’. Honesty is the first requirement; to be utterly honest with ourselves is the beginning. Never to gloss or varnish according to the social code, which renders us, finally, spurious in our inmost selves, able only to summon up at roughly appropriate moments, not feelings at all, but ‘clues to clichés’. And then by ‘listening. ‘Listening’ is a word which, in Lawrence as in Wordsworth, bears a great weight of meaning. It includes training an ear attentive to our feelings, a mind capable of understanding them, a will ready to accept them. It includes patience in attending, acuteness in recognizing, generosity in admitting. It enfolds within itself references to the faculties which make possible the fruit of real feeling, a complete imaginative experience. ‘What we want is complete imaginative experience which goes through the whole soul and body’: ‘the whole consciousness of men working together in unison and oneness: instinct, intuition, mind, intellect all used into one complete consciousness, and grasping what we may call a complete truth, or a complete vision, a complete revelation. … And the same applies to the genuine appreciation of a work of art, or the grasp of a scientific law, as to the production of the same.’ A comprehending honesty of feeling is the condition of such complete experience in every department of life. But to arrive at such virtue we need help from outside ourselves; our solitary resources are insufficient, and particularly in our broken and divided world. The best help we could have would be to exist in the context of a living tradition, in the remnant of which Lawrence himself grew up, as he acknowledges in his tribute to the Congregationalist worship and discipline that penetrated through and through his childhood. Such an influence, unsentimental, dignified, vital, exerts a profound effect on the consciousness and is the natural education of deep and genuine feeling.
And where are we, living in a society in which neither social nor religious tradition is able to play this powerfully educative part, where are we to discover this essential aid? We are to look for it, says Lawrence, in the tradition of literature, in ‘the poems which after all give the ultimate shape to this life’ and especially in ‘the great novels, ‘the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered’. Here we may learn a living language for our feelings, and not just the vocabulary but the syntax, not just the names, the elements, but these related in subtle and coherent patterns. And because they are subtle and coherent these patterns of thought and feeling in the novel are the remedy for what most ails us: routine thought-forms and conventional feeling-patterns. ‘We are starved to death, fed on the eternal sodom-apples of thought-form.’ ‘This is our true bondage. This is the agony of our human existence, that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns. Because when these feeling patterns become inadequate, when they will no longer body forth the workings of the yeasty soul, then we are in torture. It is like a deaf-mute trying to speak. Something is inadequate in the expression-apparatus, and we hear strange howlings. So are we now howling inarticulate, because what is yeastily working in us has no voice and no language.’ The language of literature can make our dumbness articulate, and release us from servitude to set forms of thought, and established modes of feeling, from the routine of the repetition of the cliché. Literature is so necessary to us because ‘our consciousness is pot-bound. Our ideas, our emotions, our experience are all pot-bound.’ And the essential quality of literature is that ‘it makes a new effort of attention, and “discovers” a new world within the known world’. Literature embodies in itself and provokes in us a free and open consciousness. It is the full, articulate intelligence, the impassioned by, neither driven by the force of unenlightened emotion, nor dry and abstract and subject to the tyranny of the syllogism. It is the product of, it includes and it encourages ‘the whole imagination … that form of complete consciousness in which predominates the intuitive awareness of forms, images, the physical awareness’. It gives a complete vision of a man, of a sort which in our circumstances offers the main hope of health, for modern man is damaged in his primary organs of perception themselves. His injured psyche is only able to see in a restricted and mechanical way. Civilized man has formed during the whole course of civilization ‘the habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees. … He sees what the Kodak has taught him to see. … As vision developed towards the Kodak, man’s idea of himself developed towards the snapshot. … Each of us has a snapshot but not the total man. And we find him only if we go in to novels and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the loud, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny.’

We have no need to make uncertain interferences about the application of Lawrence’s beliefs to education. He has given us an explicit expression of his views in his remarkable treatise Education of the People, posthumously published in Phoenix, and as we would expect, a characteristic combination of the clearest insight, mischievous wit, eccentricity and good sense. Lawrence, it will be remembered, was a trained teacher in the technical, professional sense, certainly the first, probably the only great genius to have undergone this vocational discipline, and he had a deep sense of the fundamental importance of education, ‘that higher form of being’, as he called it in The Rainbow. He understood that education depends upon a metaphysic and that it incorporates a morality and a faith. ‘It is useless to think that we can get along without a conception of what man is, and without a belief in ourselves, and without the morality to support this belief.’ He saw that education, an improved state of being, must have a nature which is in sympathetic correspondence with the nature of man, and the nature of man is of such a sort that it takes its rise from, continually corrects itself by reference to, and finally comes to rest in, principle.

We cannot act without moral bias. Still more we are influenced by our conception of the nature of man. We believe that being men and women, we are therefore such and such and such. … Lastly, though we express it or not, we believe that life has some great goal, of happiness and peace and harmony, and all our judgements are biased by this belief. … Such is man: a creature of beliefs and of foregone conclusions. As a matter of fact we should never put one foot before the other, save for the foregone conclusion that we shall find the earth beneath the outstretched foot.

It is decisively, therefore, on the note of principle that Lawrence conducts his arguments throughout, and it is directly for a defect of principle that he criticizes our modern system of education. It is true that we cannot act by faith and principle. ‘We must have an ideal’. But, says Lawrence, making the point of every reflective educator since Socrates, it is the inveterate tendency of ideals to lose their actuality. Their virtue is drained of its validity. They lose their spring and fold into tired, repetitive forms, or, in Lawrentian language, we habitually find that they have ‘dropped from the Tree of Life’.
The worn ideal, the tired abstraction which in Lawrence’s view controls and distorts our education, is the idea of equality. To us, brought up in a Christian and liberal ethos, or at least in a society where what passes for value is derived from Christian and liberal sources, this opinion of Lawrence may seem disturbing, and even shocking. The excellence of equality is perhaps the most unquestionable of our ‘forgone conclusions’, and the criticism most oven levelled at our education is that it fails sufficiently quickly and sufficiently thoroughly to bring about equality. But perhaps our distress is excessive. We have to remember that the common characteristics of the patterns of belief constructed by the greatest modern writers is that they all, whatever their differences, involve rejection of, or if this is too positive, indifference to, the prevailing system of assumptions and attitudes. They have all chosen solutions which are hard, unpopular and out of sympathy with the present state or foreseeable development of the current ethos. The point has been made by Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination:

And if we were those writers who by the general consent of the most serious criticism are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at least a matter of indifference. … All have their own love of justice and the good life but in not one of them does it take the form of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy has declared respectable.

And Lawrence’s rejection of equality as a necessary aim of education is a case in point. It is also in place to notice that in our materialist society equality means not the absence of status but the raising of status to such an ultimate importance that everyone must possess it, and possess it in the same way. But for Lawrence status was a subordinate and contingent part of life, which deserved to be given only a minor and inconsiderable part of attention.
But when Lawrence maintains that we have shaped education according to ‘a faulty idea of equality and the perfectibility of man’, he is not arguing the superiority of inequality. He is not recommending an education designed to produce inequality. He is insisting not so much on the wrongness of such categories as their irrelevance in determining the relations between man and man. His opinion on this issue is so important to an understanding of his thought and so liable to be misjudged that I must give it at length:

Men are palpably unequal in every sense except the mathematical sense. Every man counts one and this is the root of all equality: here, in a pure intellectual abstraction.
The moment you come to compare them, men are unequal, and their inequalities are infinite. But supposing you don’t compare them. Supposing, when you meet a man, you have the pure decency not to compare him either with yourself or with anything else. Supposing you can meet a man with this same singleness of heart. What then? Is the man your equal, your inferior, your superior? He can’t be if there is no comparison. If there is no comparison, he is the incomparable. He is the single. He is himself. When I am single-hearted, I don’t compare myself with my neighbour. He is immediate to me, I to him. He is not my equal, because this presumes comparison. He is incomparably himself, I am incomparably myself. We behold each other in our pristine and simple being. And this is the first, the finest, the perfect way of human intercourse. …
The moment I begin to pay direct mental attention to my neighbour, however; the moment I begin to scrutinize him and attempt to set myself over against him, the element of comparison enters. Immediately, I am aware of the inequalities between us. But even so, it is inequalities and not inequality. There is never either any equality or any inequality between me and my neighbour. Each of us is himself, and as such single, alone in the universe and not to be compared. Only in our parts are we comparable. And our parts are vastly unequal.

The use of equality as an educational aim means the intrusion of social and political considerations into the educational world. It also means a debasement of standards, for it turns our attention from where it should be fixed on to quite irrelevant ends. ‘We want’, Lawrence says, ‘quality of life, not quantity. We don’t want swarms and swarms of people in back streets. We want distinct individuals, and these are incompatible with swarms and masses. A small, choice population, not a horde of hopeless units.’ Equality makes us want precisely what Lawrence says we should not want. It disturbs a proper hierarchy of purposes. It also involves the supposition that all are theoretically capable of intellectual culture. This is a very dangerous assumption which generates in a large number a profound contempt for education and for all educated people.

Drag a lad who has no capacity for true learning or understanding through the process of education, and what do you produce in him in the end? … Go down in the hearts of the masses of the people and this is what you’ll find: the cynical conviction that every educated man is unmanly, less manly than an uneducated man. Every little Jimmy Shepherd has dabbled his bit in pseudo-science and in the arts; he has seen a test-tube and he has handled plasticine and a camel’s hair brush and he knows that a + a + b = 2a + b. What is there for him to know? Nothing.

If ‘equality’ will not serve as a directing educational principle, on what, in Lawrence’s view, can we construct an educational system? Lawrence’s answer is this:

Here then is the new ideal for society: not that all men are equal, but that each man is himself. … Particularly this is the ideal for a new system of education. Every man shall be himself, shall have every opportunity to come to his own intrinsic fullness of being. … We must have an ideal. So let our ideal be living, spontaneous individuality in every man and woman. Which living, spontaneous individuality, being the hardest thing of all to come at, will need most careful rearing. Educators will take a grave responsibility upon themselves. They will be the priests of life, deep in the wisdom of life.

At first glance and to unsympathetic eyes this might seem a romantic effusion in facour of a facile and undisciplined egotism. But of course it is nothing of the sort. A generalization in Lawrence, as in Wordsworth, is never a mere label attached to a variety of partly similar experiences. It is always most firmly grounded in the particular, the fruit — the organic metaphor irresistibly suggests itself — of deep and living roots. And this particular affirmation is made with full advertence to the objections that might be urged against it. Lawrence knew that when he spoke of ‘intrinsic fullness of being’ and ‘living spontaneous individuality’ he was not advocating an extreme and disorderly individualism.

Which doesn’t mean anarchy and disorder. On the contrary, it means the most delicately and inscrutably established order, delicate, intricate, complicate as the stars in heaven, when seen in their strange groups and goings. Neither does it mean what is nowadays called individualism. The so-called individualism is no more than a cheap egotism, every self-conscious little ego assuming unbounded rights to display his self-consciousness. We mean none of this. We mean, in the first place, the recognition of the exquisite arresting manifoldness of being, multiplicity, plurality, as the stars are plural in their starry singularity.

Lawrence was concerned with what lay beneath the surface of individuality, with being rather than personality, something more objective and impersonal, at once unique and universal.
We are apt in the modern world to believe that an aggregation of many is in some way more real and more important than one alone. Lawrence is quick to expose so gross a fallacy. For him nothing could be more real than the person, ‘in its purity of singleness and perfect solitary integrity’.

Vitally, intensively, one human being is always more than six collective human beings. Because, in the collectivity, what is gained in bulk or number is lost in intrinsic being. The quick of any collective group is some consciousness they have in common. But the quick of the individual is the integral soul, for ever indescribable and unstatable… Being-in-common means the summing-up of one element held in common by many individuals. But this one common element, however many times multiplied, is never more than one mere part in any individual, and therefore much less than any individual.

It is towards this then, ‘the perfected singleness of the individual being’, that we are to educate our children and ourselves. For Lawrence ‘to educate’ entailed the strictest restraint of self on the part of parent and teacher. But it implied no release from responsibility, no encouragement to easy self-expression, nothing passive and acquiescent. It meant indeed a dedicated, active and continuing sacrifice. ‘We’ve got to educate our children … to guide the steps of their young fates seriously and reverently.’ These decisions have to be taken not only by the individual parent and teacher but they are also the responsibility of the community. And that means we must have a system of education.
Lawrence had no patience with those who would trace every defect to the existing system. The system is only the organization of our intentions past and present, and the first stride in modifying the system is to change ourselves; but many who want the first are unwilling to undertake the second. Organization and system are inevitable for they are the direct expression of the organic differentiation present even in the least speck of rudimentary life. ‘There must be a system: there must be classes of men: there must be differentiation: either that, or amorphous nothingness’. Our choice is not between system and no system, but between one like ours established for the purposes of material production, and therefore a mechanism, a social machine, and an organic system of human life capable of producing ‘the real blossoms of life and being’. And since we do not want revolutions and cataclysms , let our reformation begin at once with a new system of education, ‘a forming of new buds upon the tree, under the old harsh foliage’.
Lawrence does not shirk the obligation to give a precise and detailed description of such a sensible system of education. All education, he insists, should be conducted by the State; the children should all start together in a common school to give us ‘a common human basis, a common radical understanding’. A child should begin his schooling at the age of seven — five is too soon — and learn reading, writing and arithmetic as the only necessary mental subjects. Three hours a day is sufficient; another might be devoted to physical and domestic training. At the age of twelve, a division should be made. Teachers, inspectors and parents will carefully decide what children shall be educated further. These will be sent to secondary schools, where the curriculum will be extended to include Latin or French and some true science. These secondary scholars will remain at school till the age of sixteen. Those not judged capable of benefiting from the secondary schools will at the age of twelve have their academic instruction reduced to two hours a day, while three hours a day will be given to physical and domestic training. This is to continue for three years, and at sixteen they will enter on their regular labour. On the completion of their fourteenth year these pupils will be apprenticed half-time to some trade to which they are thought fitting by a consensus of parents, teachers and pupils themselves. For two years they will spend the morning at their own trade, and some two hours in the afternoon in physical and domestic training and in reading. The secondary scholars from twelve to fourteen will do four hours a day of academic study, one hour a day in the workshops, and one hour of physical training. On the completion of the fourteenth year, those whose mental education is apparently complete will be drafted into an apprenticeship. The remaining scholars at the age of sixteen will be drafted into colleges, where those of a scientific bent will receive scientific training, those with an inclination for the liberal arts a corresponding training, and those with gifts in the pure arts or in technical arts an artistic training. An hour every day is to be spent on some craft and another hour on physical training. Every man must be practised in a craft at which he is finally expert, whatever profession he is destined for. These scholars will remain in their colleges till the age of twenty, when they will enter on their years of final training as doctors, lawyers, priests, and so on.
An important, perhaps the most important part of this very Platonic scheme of education is the right judging of the scholars. A primary aim is to recognize the true nature of each child and to give each its natural chance. Children, who are not sufficiently conscious, cannot choose for themselves. ‘A choice is made, even if nobody makes it’. To avoid what happens today, when ‘the bungle of circumstances decrees the fate of almost every child’ and makes ‘most men hate their destinies, circumstantial and false as they are’, the decisions will be taken by teachers, masters, inspectors and parents together. The child will be consulted, but the last decision will rest with the headmaster and the inspector. It may be argued, Lawrence admits, that this arrangement puts too much power in the hands of schoolmasters and inspectors. ‘But better there than in the hands of factory-owners and trades-unions!’
And what is it that has to be decided? Not merely the child’s capacity, not just his aptitude for this or that.

The whole business of educators will be to estimate not the particular faculty of the child for some particular job; not at all: nor even a specific intellectual capacity: the whole business will be to estimate the profound life-quality, the very nature of the child, that which makes him ultimately what he is. … Technical capacity is all the time subsidiary.

And therefore what is to be looked for in education, and above all in headmasters, is ‘living understanding — not intellectual understanding. Intellectual understanding belongs to the technical activities. But vital understanding belongs to masters of life’. The system he wants, Lawrence insists, is primarily religious, and only secondarily practical. It is to be established upon the living religious faculty in men, and conduced in its key places by religious men who recognize that the mind with all its great powers ‘is only the servant of the inscrutable, unfathomable soul’.
Beliefs religious in Lawrence’s sense are at least the same as beliefs religious in a more formal sense in strongly disapproving of our current materialist system, and not least on the grounds on inconsistency. The brutal confidence of a thoroughgoing materialism would hardly be a better breeding ground for vulgarity, and certainly less efficient in producing cynicism, than ours in which we stand for idealism but live by materialism. And materialism for Lawrence means plainly the love of money and keeping up appearances. ‘Our system of education tacitly grants that nothing but money matters, but puts up a little parasol of human ideals under which human divinity can foolishly masquerade for a few hours during school-life, and on Sundays’. Our love of money is born of a fear of penury absurd in a country like ours where, as Lawrence points out, no one is going to starve. There can be no cure for our obsession with money, our abject terror of poverty, except in an education which quickens the human virtues of courage and insouciance.
Courage and independence are two virtues which Lawrence wants home and school to make it their first business to foster. (They were, incidentally, virtues which Lawrence admirably exemplified in his own life.) His repeated advice Leave the child alone is an injunction to parent and teacher to respect the natural form of the child’s being so that ultimately the man’s destiny shall be shaped according to it, ‘not as now, where children are rammed down into ready-made destinies, like so much canned fish!’ It is not a plea for self-expression in children — ‘this foolery’, as Lawrence cals it, which ‘means, presumably incipient Tanagra figurines and Donatello plaques, incipient Iliads and Macbeths and Odes to the Nightingale: a world of infant prodigies’. Like Coleridge, and unlike Wordsworth, Lawrence had no false awe of childhood.

Instead of worshipping the child and seeing it in a divine emission which time will stale, we ought ro realize that there is a new little clue to a human being, laid soft and vulnerable on the face of the earth. Here is our responsibility, to see that this unformed thing shall come to its own final form and fullness, both physical and mental. Which is a long and difficult business.

If the parent is to respect the integrity of the child, the child also must be taught to respect quality in living, and for him that must begin with grace and economy of movement. ‘Let children be taught the pride of clear, clean movement. If it only be putting a cup on the table, or a book on the shelf, let it be a fine pure motion, not a slovenly shove. … When there is no pain of effort there is a wretched, drossy degeneration’. An alert and poised control of his bodily movements will awaken in a child a fine sense of responsibility and self-dependence, something essential to his human development, and particularly valuable in an age when, as Lawrence says, ‘life is a sort of sliding-scale of shifted responsibility.’ In this intimate conviction of responsibility beginning of all true education, and parent and teacher must do everything possible to strengthen and sustain it. ‘Self-dependence is independence’, Lawrence reminds us. To be unnecessarily dependent on others in the details of day-to-day living is a constriction of liberty, a cramping of the possibility of growth. Whatever the child can do, therefore, let him do for himself; let him wash and dress himself, clean his shoes, brush and fold his clothes, fetch and carry for himself, mend and patch and as soon as possible make for himself. And let him do things for the joy of doing them, not for alien motives projected upon him by moralizing adults.

If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surfaces. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me … not self-consciously, however, not watching my own reactions. If I wash dishes, I wash them to get them clean. Nothing else.

Those words convey Lawrence’s final educational principle. We may call it the principle of separation or the exclusion of irrelevant modes of consciousness. We should keep the physical out of the mental, the mental out of the physical, and preserve the moral for genuine moral situations. He gives example after example to enforce his belief that we should keep apart activities that are incompatible, not incompatible in the same individual but incompatible with each other. If we are teaching arithmetic, let it be pure and theoretic, a pure mental act, everything abstracted and not adulterated with ‘objects’. Mindwork should not be handwork. If we are learning to solder a kettle, the theory is told in a dozen words. ‘But it is not a question of applying a theory. It is a question of knowing, by direct physical contact, your kettle-substance, your kettle-curves, your solder, your soldering-iron, your fire, your resin, and all the fusing, slipping interaction of these.’ And again let us keep the mind, the idea, the contemporary school and university, in which we see daily growing stronger a decadent mystique of athletics. ‘A man sweating and grunting to get his muscles up is one of the maddest and most comical sights. … The physique is all right in itself. But to have your physique in your head, like having sex in the head, is unspeakably repulsive … to have one’s own physical self pranking and bulging under one’s own mental direction is a good old perversion.’ We must not muddle and transfuse the two distinct modes of consciousness. ‘If our consciousness is dual, and active in duality; if our human activity is of two incompatible sorts, why try to make a mushy oneness of it. … What connexion is necessary will be effected spontaneously.’
What, we may ask is conclusion, is the most intense and lasting impression we take away from Lawrence’s writings, on education as on anything else? It is that he was an artist with an extraordinarily undeceived and exact sense for ‘truth in being’, a man with a superlative sense of reality. It is this, ultimately, which gives strength to his art and point and meaning to his educational advice. In a letter written in 1917 he has a remarkable comment on an old Viennese lady.

The world doesn’t matter; you have died sufficiently to know tha the world doesn’t matter, ultimately. Ultimately, only the other world of pure being matters. One has to be strong enough to have just sense of values. One sees it in the old sometimes. Old Madame Stepinak was here yesterday. I find her a beauty infinitely lovelier than the beauty of the young women I know. She has lived and suffered, and taken her place in the realities. Now, neither riches nor rank nor violence matter to her, she knows what life consists in, and she never fails in her knowledge.

For Lawrence, too, we are sure, ‘only the other world of pure being matters’. Of him, too, we feel that he has taken his place in the realities, that he knows what life consists in and that he never fails in that knowledge.

See previous posts about D. H. Lawrence.

Interesting insights into the scope of words as language versus other ways of interacting with meaning and environment. Thanks Esther for the tip.

I like especially 01:34 to 04:40.

From Wim Wenders’ Falsche Bewegung (1975).

There wasn’t a time when things were any more spiritual than they are now. There wasn’t a time when there were all these gods around us in this spiritual world and now consciousness has evolved so we don’t need that any more. It’s always there. We happen to live in an age that doesn’t reflect it or encourage it or focus it in the way that cultures have done in the past where religion has been dominant. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

(…)

It’s not that the sacred isn’t all around us, but there’s a problem about having the vision to see it. — Bill Viola

An animated version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.