• 2 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New Y (...)

3For Lawrence the crucifixion was not redemptive but an image of man’s self-destruction by false idealism and the Cartesian split, a view which was given its classic philosophical expression by his contemporary Martin Heidegger whose work Lawrence did not know and whose style of thought he would not, I imagine, have found sympathetic. For Heidegger, mankind had since the earliest phases of civilisation been losing the awareness of Being; a word usually capitalised in translation to distinguish it from the multiple individual beings that make up the world. Mankind’s increasingly successful development of an instrumental relation to these beings has eroded the awareness of Being as such: the inexplicable fact of presence at all. Lawrence and Heidegger even lighted upon the same practical theme as a focus: the nature of modern coal-mining.2 Neither of them disapproved in principle of using the earth’s resources, including the mining of coal. What matters is the spirit in which this is done. In Women in Love Lawrence defines the new spirit of efficiency with which Gerald Crich exploits both the mine and the miners.

• 3 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William MacNeill and Nicholas Wal (...)

5The transcendence of the human standpoint also shows how, despite their philosophical commonality, Lawrence differs from Heidegger and anticipates later attitudes. Twenty years after Lawrence’s death, in a series of lectures on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1950), Heidegger contrasted the phenomenological worlds of human beings and animals. The lizard sunning itself on a rock, he claimed, undoubtedly has some phenomenological experience of world by which it seeks out heat, food and safety from predators yet this is not the human world and Heidegger characterises the difference as the lizard’s being relatively “poor in world.”3 In effect, Heidegger is following a nearly unbroken tradition from ancient times by which man is separated from other animals by the logos: the capacity for reason, language, tool-making etc. Darwinian science had threatened this separation, if not the superiority, of the human and Heidegger, despite his radical critique of enlightenment rationalism, still resists the loss of human specialness. But over the course of the twentieth century the supposed barriers between human and animal became increasingly porous and uncertain while interest shifted decisively towards what humans have in common with these fellow creatures including, for example, the need for subsistence in a livable environment and the likely capacity to feel pain.

• 4 See Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
• 5 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge U (...)

6Jacques Derrida is among those who have shown how Lawrence anticipated this seismic shift.4 As is well known, Lawrence responded to the unique mystery of every living being and saw in each one a manifestation of the larger mystery of life itself. The world for him seemed to be aflame with being, like a Van Gogh painting. Hence, rather than see these fellow creatures as “poor in world,” he saw both their intensity of being and the utter incomparability of their worlds with ours. Accordingly, where Heidegger privileged the human world Lawrence already inhabited the post-human outlook implicit in the word “Anthropocene.” Human being may be no more than an evolutionary and geological phase, a prospect that Rupert Birkin, in one mood at least, regards with equanimity.5 I say “in one mood,” however, because the post-human is a paradoxical and problematic posture for a human being to adopt.

• 6 D.H. Lawrence, Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 351-2 (...)

7Lawrence’s depictions of animals in his poetry and fiction are a deceptively subtle exploration of the human response and partly so because he is not concerned to provide a systematic philosophical rationale. When he did attempt a rationale, in his relatively late essay Reflections on the Death of Porcupine (1925), he was driven to comment that a consistent standpoint is impossible. Man’s inescapable participation in the predatory condition of physical life cannot be logically squared with absolute appreciation of each unique being. So, for example, in one of his poems Lawrence movingly regrets the gap in being when a mountain lion is killed but is himself obliged to kill the porcupine.6 Lawrence most importantly anticipates later debate not by resolving it but by encapsulating its irresolvability, the sense of a dilemma in which there is no fixed formula to apply but a subtle and flexible appreciation of life’s conflicting imperatives.

• 7 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 165-80.

8Hence, the “trembling balance” of incompatible requirements manifests itself in Lawrence’s animal poetry not by analytic definition but by sustained rhetorical enactment. This is focused particularly in his humorously elusive use of anthropomorphic language. A first recognition of the radical otherness of the animal kingdom can promote a sense of quasi-religious revelation and the desire to expose anthropomorphic discourse as philosophical and moral error. In so far as such language represents naively the illusory human appropriation of the world, anthropocentricism is indeed an ideological sin. But as Thomas Nagel has pointed out, if we cannot know what “it is like to be a bat,” or any non-human creature, that does not mean it is like nothing at all and it is striking that many people who live and work closely with animals are accustomed to respect their affective needs even to a high level of individuality.7 They do not treat these creatures as human but they relate to them as personalities through the human resources of sympathetic and experienced intuition within a common condition of physical being. How else could we relate to them?

• 8 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 19 (...)

10But in so far as the animal poems dramatise an ecological theme, the encounter with radical otherness, they also raise an ecocritical question: to what extent is poetry a necessary condition of this experience? In late essays on language and being Heidegger constantly warns against the illusions generated by rationalistic tradition which are so embedded in language as to mislead philosophers and non-philosophers alike. To circumvent these misprisions he turns to poetry in a double sense. First, he draws crucially on poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. Poetic texts figure in these essays not just as illustrative supplements but as the primary experience from which the argument unfolds. And the word “argument” has itself to be used here in a broad sense that points to the further poetic dimension of these texts: Heidegger typically offers not the forward movement of logical process so much as a successive uncovering of meaning in the initial terms. The pursuit of truth, for which he often uses the Greek term, Aletheia, is a linguistic unveiling and thereby enacts a philosophical equivalent of the way poets create meanings and recognitions by drawing on non-rational dimensions such as rhyme, rhythm and double entendre. So, for example, in the course of a brief essay, the word “thing” reverses its meaning from a neutrally external object to a matter of concern. His discourse enforces the kind of meditative slowness characteristic of poetic language.8

• 9 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1965), 153.

12Heidegger’s exemplary poets all have a distinctively, if not ostentatiously, poetic idiom which enforces his challenge both to everyday language and to traditional philosophical discourse. But ever since European romanticism the specialness of poetic language has contained a radical ambiguity. For a pre-romantic poet such as Alexander Pope the discursive specialness of poetry, as enshrined in what was known as “poetic diction,” still presumed a commonality of world. Poetry as the dress of thought could express “What oft was Thought but ne’er so well Expresst.”9 But increasingly the idea grew up that poetry was a vision of the world radically different from everyday prosaic understanding. The specialness of poetry is philosophical rather than merely rhetorical and Heidegger clearly inherits this conception even while claiming the normative status of poetry. He is in the tradition of German romantic thinking which saw poetry as the necessary vehicle for philosophical thought and it makes sense, therefore, that his thought draws on the powerfully distinctive medium of Hölderlin, Trakl or Rilke.

• 10 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2(...)
• 11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Nigel Leask (London: Dent, 1997), 211.
• 12 D.H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N.H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni (...)

13Lawrence, by contrast, even when writing as a poet seems, just as ostentatiously, to eschew specialness. Maybe this is the underlying meaning of his preference for a “poetry of the present” as opposed to the “measured gem-like lyrics of Keats and Shelley” (Poems, I, 545). For what is at stake is not just the overt question of time, honouring the transience of the moment, but the suspicion of aesthetic stasis. When Wordsworth rejected specialised “poetic diction” and sought to write in the “real language of men” he put into question the nature of poetry as such.10 Although Coleridge readily exposed incoherences in Wordsworth’s notion of ordinary language, Wordsworth had thrown up a real problem about the specialness or otherwise of poetry.11 Lawrence, of course, appreciated the achievement of Wordsworth’s early poetry as a new vision. He saw Wordsworth to have opened a hole, as he put it, in our enclosed understanding of the world.12 Yet in his later verse, for many readers, Wordsworth loses this visionary power and much nineteenth-century post-romantic English poetry wears its specialness to signal merely an escapist alternative to the real. Neither Heidegger nor Lawrence accepted an escapist view of poetic specialness but, whereas Heidegger required the heightened language of poetry to define a mode of Being otherwise unattainable, Lawrence lived ordinarily in the “fourth dimensional” world and expressed it with the minimum of poetic difference or aesthetic framing. His poetry typically presents itself as autobiographical and occasional, an apparently direct expression of his life in the most everyday language. Both Heidegger and Lawrence, therefore, see poetry as the human norm but differed with respect to its assumed availability.

• 13 See, for example, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
• 14 Peter Wohleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 2 (...)

14The problematic of specialness continues in the tree books of Peter Wohleben and Richard Powell for the new inclusivity has not stopped with animals: it now encompasses the vegetable kingdom and even the inanimate.13 But Lawrence, once again, was ahead of the game In Fantasia of the Unconscious he imagines the impact of the German forest on a Roman legionary and speculates on the life of the tree as if it is endowed with some form of consciousness. Wohleben is a present-day German forester who, after years of using trees in the spirit of Heidegger’s “standing reserve,” came to a quite different appreciation of them as effectively fellow creatures. His complete title undertakes to reveal the “hidden life of trees” including “what they feel” and “how they communicate.” Like Lawrence, he anthropomorphises the tree in a spirit of deliberate challenge to the reader. Wohleben, for example, wonders “what mating feels like for trees” (23) and speaks of the tree feeling “pain.”14 The closeness in substance, however, between these authors makes their differences the more revealing. We could say that Lawrence writes as a poet and Wohleben as a scientist but only with some internal modification of these terms. Where Heidegger saw mythopoeic sensibility buried beneath the world-view of science, Lawrence sought to expose it within scientific thought as such.

• 15 William Wordsworth, “Nutting,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt ( (...)

19In that respect he seems to have resolved the question of specialness. He has moved from an instrumental to an appreciative relation to trees without a discursive shift towards the poetic unless we say that his book is poetic at the level of vision rather than discourse. It may be that professional students of culture have a tendency to fetishise language as the revelatory embodiment of world views and social attitudes although the same words and phrases may be differently lived by different individuals. Moreover, the notorious conflict between poetry and science may exist more in the minds of cultural commentators and educational administrators than in the minds of great poets and scientists. Real creativity may have something in common in all spheres and Wohleben seems to be driven by a Wordsworthian sense that “there is a spirit in the woods.”15 The ready popularity of Wohleben’s book in our day suggests that Lawrence has contributed to a change in sensibility whereby poetic specialness is no longer a discursive necessity. Poetic dwelling in the world combines with scientific understanding without needing to be ostentatiously signalled. In so far, therefore, as these works may be historically representative Wohleben suggests we may live well by bidding farewell to the supposed conflict of “scientific” knowledge and “poetic” dwelling. It is an uplifting book that well deserves its popularity.

• 16 Letter to Edward Garnett 5 June 1914. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ii, ed. George J. Zytaruk and J (...)

21But the narrative design of the book addresses more subtly the internal obstacles to understanding the post-human viewpoint for which Lawrence was a predecessor and perhaps a partial model for it is said of the artist character, Nick, that reading Lawrence’s novels helped him to “survive high school” (Overstory 19). The difficulty of appreciating the life of trees, and their vital relation to our own place in the Tree of Life, arises partly from the different time-scale in which they live. The novel has a number of ingenious images for rendering visible this clash of incomparable scales. The Norwegian pioneer farmer, Hoel, takes a monthly photograph of a chestnut tree he has grown from seed. As his son and grandson continue this practice, the sheaf of photos becomes a flick-book in which the hundred-year growth of the tree can be seen in a few seconds. By such means, the reader is constantly reminded from inside the narrative of a different order of time by which the human present is dwarfed. Meanwhile the several human stories are kept in parallel, relating to each other across a distance rather as the trees are said to do, with the effect that none of them gets to dominate the whole. All the human stories are placed within the overstory: the life of trees. Whereas Lawrence pushed against the boundaries of the novel to open a vision of the non-human, Powell creates a book in which the novel form, as representing traditional human concerns, is itself deliberately contained and critiqued within the non-human scale of the overstory. It is with a quasi-religious revelation that some characters learn to see beyond their novelistic lives while the reader increasingly acclimatises to the non-human scale and understands the frustration of the characters who cannot communicate it to others. In that respect, Patricia Westerford’s televised lecture is reminiscent of Elizabeth Costello’s ill-fated talk in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. The audience could only be persuaded by undergoing a radical shift in world view. Failing that, argument is fruitless. In his well-known ambition to represent what is “nonhuman in humanity” Lawrence insisted against Tommaso Marinetti that both aspects, the human and the non-human, have to be respected.16 In his own way Powell does precisely this and it is a pity we cannot step out of historical time to have Lawrence’s review of his book.

• 17 See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero o (...)

22But indeed our own relation to historical time bears on the issue of Lawrence’s possible anticipation of the present. On the one hand, it is clear that these books by Wohleben and Powers show both difference and continuity with Lawrence. Their mutual understanding of the life of trees, and of the Tree of Life, is now closer to mainstream and has a securely scientific basis. Their major thrust no longer seems so eccentric as Lawrence felt his to be. Yet on the other hand, both writers also recognise that in the life of the individual something like a poetic vision or a religious conversion seems to be required and the changes that have occurred in the general culture do not necessarily produce this effect in the individual even in the face of looming historical catastrophe. In that respect the relation to science in all three writers is less to affirm the truth value of scientific method than to focus the requirement for something more than science. A scientific colleague of mine reported a conference encounter with a governmental minister who asked him if he believed in climate change – to which my colleague replied that no, he does not believe in it, he is a scientist so he knows it. If this was a naïve question to put to a scientist it nonetheless gets at the heart of the matter in suggesting the something more than science that seems to be required, something akin to religious conversion and not so subject to time. The first great exponent of the interconnectedness of life and environmental degradation was Alexander von Humboldt to whose understanding Darwin brought the branching tree of evolution.17 In the succession of great thinkers science progresses, while history moves on although not necessarily as progress. The individual, however, always stands before eternity. In so far as individuals throughout time face the same range of radical values, we are still Lawrence’s contemporaries and that is why for Powell, as for Lawrence, there remains important work to be done by poets and novelists.