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6/27/2015 5:04 am  #1


D.H. Lawrence

I don't know if anyone has ever taken time with Lawrence, but I just make it through Lady Chatterley's Lover- no snickering -and there are clear places where he approaches something like a strong distinction between natural law and decaying convention, which is something I think you all might be interested in (if you can get past the immoralism of it). Just thought I'd put that out there for some literary content.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

6/27/2015 6:52 am  #2


Re: D.H. Lawrence

Ah I've not read much Lawrence though I probably ought to (I'm not usually a big fan of Anglo-modernism so tend to avoid authors associated with that movement). Definitely an interesting topic of conversation though.
 
From the little I do know I had the impression his work was influenced by a sort of Bergsonian schema – with the forces of ‘arid Victorian rationalism’, morality as social convention, bourgeois materialism and most importantly Technology set up as the negative opposed to the positive Vitalistic aspects i.e. mysticism, artistic vision, the sublime in nature and sexual passion. Of course there are elements of Nietzsche in here too but the undertone is not nihlistic.
 
(One can interpret Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a polemic against what Lawrence saw as the dehumanising encroachment of mechanisation personified by the Great War. The ‘visible’ spirit of the English people has been emasculated and rendered impotent by technology and must look to the earth, to people who are closer to the ‘rhythm of life’ to renew itself by re-connecting with the Élan vital.)
 
So in short a book which the Churhlands and Daniel Dennet should avoid.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (6/27/2015 6:53 am)

 

6/28/2015 7:29 am  #3


Re: D.H. Lawrence

Nietzsche is all over the place, but I've never understood Nietzsche as a nihilist. Indeed I've never understood Nietzsche as contrary to classical thought. He doesn't end up in materialism; it's just that the intellectual realm's relationship to the sensible is not in terms of image and origin but much like music and the source of music (will/sentiment?).

The point of contact with our interests in Lawrence (and Nietzsche) is that there is a natural order we have forgotten and need to get back in alignment with in order to attain virtue and the good life. Lawrence accuses modernity of being the imposition of an endless succession of novel images, conversations, sexual encounters, lifestyles, etc with "nothing in them" except the will to do something new for the sake of it.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
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