- 1 Some notable exceptions include Daniel Scheidner’s The Consciousness of D.H. Lawrence which undersc (...)
1In this article I will be looking at an aspect that has hitherto received relatively little attention from critics, namely Lawrence’s interest in freedom.1 This lack of previous attention is somewhat surprising in light of the numerous references to freedom that are to be found in his non-fictional works: “And this is why man is always crying out for freedom, to be free. He wants to be free to be himself” (STH 35:15).
2As is well known, he wrote a series of pieces about freedom with Middleton Murray for the periodical The Signature,2 and frequently discussed the founding of a new society to be known as Rananim, writing to Lady Ottoline Morrel that “this shall be the new hope: that there shall be a life wherein the struggle shall not be for money or for power, but for individual freedom and common effort towards good” (Letters ii, 272, my italics). Indeed, the idea of liberating people drives much of Lawrence’s thought, although the term the people is a problematical term for Lawrence, since it is nothing more than a general, abstract term we employ to designate the totality of all the individual people. Indeed, he writes in Democracy, the people must consist of “men who are somebody, not men who are something,” (Preface to Touch and Go), and not just “the people smelted into oneness” (RDP 73:24).3 Nonetheless Lawrence is most emphatically interested in individual people, and even more significantly in a kind of salvation for humanity, it we understand by salvation, the idea of saving or delivering humankind, as a whole or in part, from some dire situation.4 Thus, unravelling the threads of Lawrence’s notion of freedom constitutes the key not only to explaining his interest in the people, but also sheds light on his philosophy as a whole.
3Indeed, an important book like Studies in Classic American Literature, which is ostensibly about literature, can also be seen as a long meditation on what it would mean for a people to be liberated. The various versions of the Americans in Studies in Classic American Literature show, if anything, that Lawrence becomes more and more interested in freedom (as the number of references increase). Yet even in the earlier version (1918-1919), although there seem to be fewer allusions, the theme remains implicit as we can see from the following citation from the first version: “I, being what I am, salute you, Whitman, before any other man, because I owe the last strides into freedom to you. And in saluting you, I salute your great America” (SCAL 369: 13).
4The term freedom is an elusive one, a term which possesses many different senses and Lawrence’s conception of freedom is strikingly different to the kind of meaning ordinarily attached to it, as is made clear by this paradoxical statement: “Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free! The freest are perhaps the least free” (SCAL 17: 31).
5How are we to make sense of this kind of statement? One starting point is the well-established philosophical distinction between two different types of freedom, negative and positive, of which Lawrence was aware. This could be very briefly summed up, for now, as being freedom from (negative) and freedom to (positive). Negative liberty is the most traditional conception of freedom, signifying freedom from external impediments (for example, we are free when we have not been put in prison, when we are able to say what we like, when we are not subject to tyranny or oppression).
- 5 It is no accident that Lawrence’s non-fiction abounds with images of the grain, the seed. The seed (...)
6Positive freedom is the idea that “men are not free when they are doing just what they like” (SCAL 18), as Lawrence expresses it. Indeed, the term liberty is etymologically derived from the Roman God Liber, (the god of germination, of wine, of fertility, and as such closely related to the God Bacchus, or Dionysus in Greek). Like a seed which grows into the form which is its destiny, individual freedom can be seen as fulfilment of one’s potential.5 Indeed, this is, as Lawrence points out, the real meaning of the word education. Thus, positive freedom is the freedom to become what one really is, which means liberating oneself from internal rather than external constraints. Obvious examples of people who are not really free include alcoholics, drug addicts, insane people etc., all of whom are not fully free to determine their actions. But other cases can be less obvious, since we may not be aware of the extent to which we may be trapped by social, cultural or internal beliefs.
- 6 On Lawrence’s Spinozistic tendencies see my article (Gupwell 2021).
7All of these threads are interwoven throughout Lawrence’s non-fiction and in what follows, I hope to show, in the first place, why it is that Lawrence considers people are not really free in the modern world, and secondly, how people might become freer as individuals. But there is also another, more fundamental, sense of freedom, which is far more important for Lawrence. This type of freedom – which stems from a kind of communion with the cosmos and one’s fellow men – is extremely important to Lawrence.6 It is freedom, in a deeper sense, as a state of blessedness, beatitude. Lawrence’s mission for humanity is heavily influenced by this quest for transcendence of the phenomenal world.
8We rarely conceive of the inadequacies of a merely negative conception of freedom because historically all the emphasis has been laid on defeating the old forms of authority, namely arbitrary power, religious intolerance, censorship, unequal rights, and so on. Unless (which is rare) we are able to think about it more deeply, as the French thinker Bernard Charbonneau points out, the modern understanding of freedom tends to be reduced to the Liberal tradition of the 18th and 19th century (Charbonneau 2021). Earlier definitions (like those of Helvetius) defined being free in purely negative terms, viz. not being in chains, not being in prison, not being terrorized into doing something against one’s will, and in the previously mentioned essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin defines negative liberty by stating that, “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity […] if I am prevented by others from doing what I would otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree” (Berlin 1969, 122). Logically, then, the concept of negative liberty has been most commonly associated with democracy, free speech, freedom of worship, equal rights, to the extent that those obstacles which had prevented one from being free have been. Unsurprisingly, this kind of liberty has been most frequently identified with America and yet Lawrence categorically asserts that America is no “land of the free”: “The land of the free! This is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen” (SCAL 15).
9One of the best-known analyses of the limitations of negative freedom is to be found in Erich Fromm’s book The Fear of Freedom (1942). According to Fromm, freedom of speech is meaningless if we have not acquired the capacity to think originally. We rejoice in the fact that external authorities no longer tell us what to do but neglect the fact that anonymous authorities like public opinion and common sense make us conform:
We are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern human history is all that is necessary. We forget that although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one but a qualitative one […]. (Fromm 91)
10This, then, is the meaning of Lawrence’s paradoxical statement when he says that: “the freest are perhaps the least free.” That Lawrence understood the distinction between negative and positive freedom is manifest in the essay Love was Once a Little Boy where he writes as follows:
Only a slave would take the trouble to shout: I am free! That is to say in the face of the open heavens. In the face of men, and their institutions and prisons, Yes-yes! But in the face of the open heavens, I would be ashamed to talk about freedom. (RDP 345)
11We can be free from “men, and their institutions” (negative freedom) but Lawrence is well aware that achieving genuine freedom must be about far more than mere freedom from external restraint, that there is another sense of freedom.
- 7 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, 17.
12As previously mentioned, Lawrence is particularly scathing about the American model which he describes as “their bullying, detestable negative creed of liberty and democracy.”7 Such invective may surprise those brought up in modern western democracies, but Lawrence considers (as did Fromm in the passage cited above) that modern democracy confused the quantitative with the qualitative. Lawrence’s fundamental objection to American democracy is that to treat everyone alike is, in reality, to try to impose a norm on people who are fundamentally dissimilar (“by turning ourselves into integers: every man to himself and every woman to herself a Number One; an infinite number of number Ones; we have destroyed ourselves as desirous or desirable individuals,” RDP 341:17). We need to get back to what people are rather than dictate what they ought to be. In the essay Love he writes:
How can there be liberty when I am not free to be other than fraternal and equal? I must be free to be separate and unequal in the finest sense if I am to be free. Fraternité and égalité, these are tyrannies of tyrannies. (RDP 11: 39)
- 8 Rousseau first developed this concept in his second treatise. Mankind is unique amongst beings in i (...)
13Related to this first point is his criticism of the idea of perfectibility,8 which he develops most clearly in the essay Democracy. Perfectibility, for Lawrence, is the presupposition that there exists a kind of perfect human being to which one might aspire, and which is promoted by modern democracies; a model which traps us into conforming to a certain type of paradigm:
Perfect him quickly: the Average, the Normal, the Man-in-the-Street. He is so many inches high, broad, deep, he weighs so many pounds. He must eat so much, and sleep so much, and work so much, and play so much, and love so much, and think so much, and argue so much and read so many newspapers and have so many children. Somebody, quick, some Professor of Social Economy draws us up a perfect Average, and let us have him before the middle of next week. (RDP 65: 10)
14It is obvious from the above description that on the one hand, the concept of the average man is a mere extrapolation (since the average man does not actually exist), and on the other hand that Lawrence believes that this extrapolation must conform to a kind of economic model that could only be conceived by a “Professor of Social Economy.” What is apparent, too is that the model, having once been elaborated in the minds of some men, ends up subjecting all men to a particular ideal, in exactly the same way (as he points out) as we have ended up being subjected to the machines we ourselves have created. For Lawrence, the trouble is that this “invented, ideal world of man is superimposed upon living men and women, and men and women are thus turned into abstracted, functioning mechanical units” (RDP 69).
15Furthermore, the system, based as it is, on a conception of man as a rational centre seeking to maximize his material needs, accumulate money, and so forth, seems only to take account of material needs, neglecting both our emotional and spiritual needs (RDP 69). We are thus trapped into a way of life that fails to satisfy fundamental aspects of our being:
The law of the Average holds good for the stomach. All young animals suck milk, without exception. But in the creative or spontaneous or religious self, one man’s meat is frequently another’s poison. And therefore, you can’t draw any average. You can’t have any average; unless you are going to poison everybody. (RDP 65: 32)
- 9 Frieda’s sister Else was a friend of Max Weber, and the lover of Max Weber’s brother, Alfred.
16In his pitiless essay on Benjamin Franklin Lawrence describes the model of production that arises from this conception of freedom, pointing out that Franklin’s teleological conception of perfection converts God himself into the kind of figure that would have perfectly suited a millionaire like Andrew Carnegie. Lawrence may well have been aware of Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic9 in which Weber wrote the following about Franklin:
- 10 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, (Penguin, 2004).
In fact, the summum bonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or the utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of life.10
17Weber had concluded that protestant thinking had led to the privileging of the value of work and accumulation over the value of living spontaneously. Likewise, Lawrence rejects the teleological idea that there is (or should be) a kind of ideal, perfect person (perfectibility), in the manner Franklin outlines, towards which we might aim.
18Consequently, Lawrence criticizes the manner in which modern political systems and arrangements (democracies, nations, peoples etc.), seem to be entirely based on this principle of the materialistic collective.
It is a pity we have insisted on being individuals only in the communistic, semi-abstract or generalised sense: as voters, money-owners, “free men” and women: free in so far as we are all alike, and individual in so far as we are commensurable integers. (RDP 341: 12)
19The best scenario according to Lawrence would be that the highest collective had “for its true goal the purest individualism, pure individual spontaneity” (RDP 66), but modern societies have ended up as nothing more than logistical and materialistic entities: democracies and socialism alike have become mere “contrivances for the supplying of the lowest material needs of a people” (RDP 66: 17). This, for Lawrence, basically misses the point of what any state ought to be about. Freedom is an individual affair, not a collective one, and it goes far beyond mere economical needs:
And then, when the people of the world have finally got over the state of giddy idealising of Governments, Nations, Internations, politics, democracies, empires, and so forth, when they really understand that their collective activities are only cook-housemaid to their sheer individual activities, when they at last calmly accept a business concern for what it is, then at last we may actually see free men in the streets. (RDP 68, italics mine)
- 11 See Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration (2010) on the pressure created by the forces of compe (...)
20The net result of the collective, negative type of freedom, has been a world dominated by the principle of competition in which people fruitlessly divert all their energies, their will, into getting ahead of one another.11 As a result, Lawrence flatly denies that America is the land of the free:
And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own “productive” machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce. (SCAL 30: 39)
21For Lawrence, democracy is an attempt to impose through laws, institutions and conventions a model which does not correspond to the real nature of man, we are only “free in as far as we are all alike” (RDP 341). People cannot be freed if one asserts, as Franklin does, that there is a model of perfection to which everyone must conform. In reality, this constitutes a system which alienates people from their real essences. A democracy cannot bring people genuine freedom because it is made up of “myriad, dis-united fragments,” and the men composing it are not in themselves free, they are incomplete. Without someone to show them how to live differently, they will remain a mere “collection of fragmentary beings” (APOC 146: 32). Moreover, even, if in reality, the materialistic model were to be accepted as the best model, any talk of equal opportunity is “bunk, ridiculous bunk. It is the old fable of the fox asking the stork to dinner. All the food is to be served in a shallow dish, ‘levelled to perfect equality,’ and you get what you can” (RDP 326: 36). Of course, the fox gets nearly everything.
22Studies in Classic American Literature itself is so full of references to freedom that it is possible to make the case that Lawrence was more interested in American freedom than American literature. In it Lawrence asserts, for instance, that Whitman’s greatness consists in the fact that his unconscious project is ultimately about liberating the American peoples. As Lawrence understands it: “it is obvious that Whitman’s Democracy is not merely a political system, or a system of government – or even a social system. It is an attempt to conceive a new way of life, to establish new values. It is a struggle to liberate human beings from the fixed, arbitrary control of ideals, into free spontaneity (RDP 78: 8, italics mine). What is more, Lawrence ends the first chapter with the following statement:
American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal of democracy. But underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American whole soul. You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath. (SCAL 19: 8)
- 12 This is what the idea of positive freedom is about; Charbonneau writes that “Freedom is the self, a (...)
23What Lawrence means by this capitalized IT will be dealt with later, but for now, it is enough to note that Lawrence’s explicitly considers negative freedom to be insufficient. This is the reason why he often puts the term freedom in quotation marks, for example, “At the very best schools, where there is most ‘freedom’” […] (LEA 158: 7). Most people are “susceptible to falsification” as he puts it in “Education of the People,”12 because they pursue ideas which are not really their own. A democratic system, therefore, merely gives an illusion of freedom. America, he writes, “pushed a pin through its body, and on that pin it still flaps and buzzes and twists in misery. The pin of democratic equality. Freedom” (SCAL 49: 24).
24It is, therefore, clear from what precedes not only that Lawrence felt that conventional notions of freedom were insufficient for real liberation but also that he was aware that a different type of freedom, (i. e., positive freedom) was a prerequisite to real freedom – a freedom which may only be found in the individual and not in society as a whole. Indeed, freedom, according to Spinoza, entails living in accordance with what our essence dictates (“That thing is said to be FREE (libera) which exists by the mere necessity of its nature and is determined to act by itself alone,” Ethics I, VII). Hence, freeing people involves much more than removing external obstacles, as Erich Fromm expresses eloquently in Fear of Freedom:
What then is the meaning of freedom for modern man? He has become free from the external bonds that would prevent him doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act according to his own will, if he knew what he wanted, thought and felt. But he does not know. He conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self which is not his. The more he does this, the more powerless he feels, the more is he forced to conform. In spite of a veneer of optimism and initiative, modern man is overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness which makes him gaze towards approaching catastrophes as though he were paralyzed. Looked at superficially, people appear to function well enough in economic and social life; yet it would be dangerous to overlook the deep-seated unhappiness behind that comforting veneer. If life loses its meaning because it is not lived, man becomes desperate. (Fromm 220)
25As Lawrence makes clear in The Crown, our actions are often false, we act according to false representations, to such an extent that we can even accept dying for them in times of war (“But we must always lie, always convert our action to a lie. We know that we are living in a state of falsity, that all our social and religious form is dead, a crystallised lie. Yet we say: ‘We will die for our social and religious form’). From this we must burst as a chicken bursts out of its egg. (RDP 305: 15-36). In other words, freedom requires another attitude to the world, as well as the consciousness that the social world imposes its false truths upon us (“the present seeming is a ridiculous travesty,” RDP 306:1).
Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom from myself, from the lie of myself, from the lie of my all-importance, even to myself; it is freedom from the self-conscious masturbating thing I am, self-enclosed. And second, freedom from the vast lie of the social world […]. (LEA 251)
- 13 The terms are reminiscent of Kant’s distinction between heteronomy and autonomy in Groundwork of th (...)
As stated earlier, positive freedom is defined by Isaiah Berlin as the wish to be one’s own master, “the instrument of my own will and not that of others”13 but Fromm describes it, in terms more closely aligned with Lawrence’s understanding, as follows: Positive freedom as the realization of the self implies the full affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual. Men are born equal but they are also different […] The genuine growth of the self is always a growth on this particular basis; it is an organic growth, the unfolding of a nucleus that is peculiar to this one person and only for him. The development of the automaton, in contrast, is not an organic growth. The growth of the basis of the self is blocked and a pseudo self is superimposed upon this self […]. (Fromm 227)
- 14 The similarity of language strongly suggests that Lawrence directly derived this definition from Sc (...)
26Fromm underlines, as Lawrence does, the way in which our personality may be imposed upon us from without it can be a false self. In fact, the word personality, as Lawrence notes in the essay Democracy is derived from the Latin word persona meaning mask. What we call our consciousness is in fact self-consciousness, which is a mask, and not derived from our real self: “We are a million things which we don’t know we are” (RDP 115).14 For Lawrence, what we do know is merely the secondary self: “the man I know myself to be must be destroyed before the true man I am can exist”; only then can we become, “free and whole” (34). Hence he writes as follows in an Introduction to Pictures:
We can escape from the trap of the human spirit, the self aware of itself, in which we are entrapped, by going quite, quite still and letting our whole sanity assert itself inside us and set us into rhythm.
But first of all we must know we are entrapped. We most certainly are. […] In modern civilisation we are all self-conscious. All our emotions are mental, self-conscious. Our passions are self-conscious. Our feelings are self-conscious. (LAA 170:1)
27Thus the fact that nothing prevents us from doing what we want to do does not automatically entail freedom, since internal factors may prevent us from exercising our will as we really desire. This explains the prevalence of images of entrapment and imprisonment which abound in Lawrence’s non-fiction—because whilst we may have freed ourselves from traditional tyrannies we have fallen into new ones. Indeed, Lawrence believed that the whole socio-economic and cultural system militated against genuine freedom being achieved.
The shoots of London trees have force to burst through the London pavements. Is there not life in us to break out of this system? Let every man take his own, and go his way, regardless of system and state […]. (STH 38: 30)
28A whole host of internalized factors may limit peoples’ freedom, for we are, as he writes in Education of the People, “creatures of ‘beliefs and of foregone conclusions’” (RDP 114: 36). Man is trapped, too, in his own paradigms. As Jeff Wallace and others have noted, Lawrence’s philosophy is characterized by “his critique of abstraction”15 (Wallace, Fernihough). People may even be trapped by an abstraction or generalisation like Clym in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: “he must identify with the system, he must live as Man or Humanity, or as the Community” (STH 26: 14). In other words, Clym lives in “a mapped world” and takes the mapped world for the real one. He fails to realize that he is not free. Lawrence himself is incandescent at the Italians who won’t see him as an individual but only as “a perfected abstraction, England-coal-exchange” complaining that he has been reduced to “a walking column statistics, which adds up badly for Italy” (SS 51). We must put an end to this domination of the idée fixe. Thus the real job of the scientist should be, he argues in Psychology and the Unconscious, to “free us from the most helpful of shackles, the shackles of ideas and ideals” (PATU 32: 14). Or in Fantasia of the Unconscious: “It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions” (PATU 105: 16).
29A very great part of Lawrence’s non-fiction is dedicated to exposing the false ideals (work, money, education, social roles, ideas, abstractions), which must be understood and mastered before man can be liberated. For people must first realize they are trapped before they can liberate their true selves, our potential for freedom being limited by the ideas, often internalized, which we live by. Mankind has been enslaved to industrialism: money, machines, wages, and fear dominate peoples’ minds. Lawrence frequently criticizes the effect of the money system on people, “our social system of money and grab […] the awful fight for money, into which we are all forced” (LAA 221):
So cannot we see, rich and poor alike, how we have circumscribed, hampered, imprisoned ourselves within the limits of our poor-and-rich system, till our life is utterly pot-bound? (STH 38: 24).
30Thus, society is in crisis because it is based on the false premise that “the struggle for the means of life is the essence and whole of life. As if it would be anything so futile, […] as if any external power could give us the right to ourselves. That we have within ourselves” (STH 13). Likewise, we have become hampered by an obsession with work: “My life is to be utilised for work […] Only, or very largely in the work that I do, must I live, must my life take movement. And why do I work? To eat, – is the original answer. When I have earned enough to eat, what then? Work for more […]” (STH 32: 18).
31Lawrence’s understanding of positive freedom is actually very different to Berlin’s, who defines positive freedom in the following manner: “I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that is not” (Berlin 131). By contrast, what is radical about Lawrence is that whereas for Berlin we are free when our consciousness and reason determines our actions, for Lawrence we are free when it is the unconscious that determines our actions. Thus in Love Was Once a Little Boy (RDP 345), Lawrence rejects the message of Henley’s short poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate!/I am the captain of my soul!” For we cannot be freed by merely using our wills. The closing message of Psychology of the Unconscious is that mankind, to liberate itself, needs to learn how to get back into contact with inner, spontaneous life:
There is so much to know, and every step of the progress in knowledge is a death to the human idealism which governs us now so ruthlessly and vilely. It must die, and we will break free. But what tyranny is so hideous as that of an automatically ideal humanity? (PATU 43: 37)
32This spontaneous, impersonal self is not only a concrete reality, a pre-conscious reality; it is also life itself, part of the whole, and as such it offers a clue to the universe. Therefore, this is why man “wearies for his own limitless being, for the unresolved, quivering, infinitely complex and indefinite movement of living, he wants to be free” (STH 35: 28, italics mine).
33Earlier, I quoted Lawrence as saying in Studies in Classic American Literature that the negative ideal of democracy had been a false dawn, and that to get to the whole soul of America it would be necessary to reveal the IT underneath. In Lawrence’s successive rewritings of the essay “The Spirit of Place” in Studies of Classic American Literature, he adds into the later version the use of the word IT in capital letters to designate the impersonal self. Calling the inner self the IT is Lawrence’s way of emphasizing that it has nothing to do with the self we are aware of; it is our deepest desire, the desire of the body and not what we call the mind. The possibility of liberating America lies with the IT since “men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes” (SCAL 18:3). Which is to say that for the American peoples to be freed, they will need first to understand and secondly, to learn how to liberate themselves from, their false selves. Lawrence had long been interested in the impersonal self, and for his planned contributions to The Signature he wrote: “I am to write my ideas of the other, the impersonal freedom, the freedom of me in relation to all the world, me and all the world, a free thing.”16 This impersonal self is the real self, the self that reflects not our self-conscious mind, but all the desires of our spontaneous being. The unconscious self is not, he insists in Psychology of the Unconscious, abstract but concrete, anchored in the body. He writes as much in a letter to Frieda’s sister Elsa:
Frieda, like you, always secretly hankered after America and its freedom, its very freedom not to feel. But now she is just beginning to taste the iron ugliness of what it means to live by will against the spontaneous inner life, superimposing the individual, egoistic will over the real genuine sacred life. Of course I know you will jeer when I say there is such a thing as sacred spontaneous inner life, with its pride and its sacred power. I know you too believe in the screwed-up human will dominating human life. But I don’t. And that’s why I think America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everyone else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it. So much for them – cowards! You can have the Land of the free – as much as I know of it. In the spring I want to come back to Europe. (Letter to Else, Not I, But the Wind 138)
34Lawrence insists not merely upon the Americans’ attempt to impose their will on nature and on their fellow men, but also on their failure to acquiesce, to submit to life (“they can’t trust life”). “For to be free is to be myself and I am only really myself when desire is flowing from me, and being consummated with creation” (RDP 345). True freedom comes from the meeting of my desire with the world around, from a kind of communion which leads to a state of peace or blessedness. This communion comes from both a communion amongst men and a communion with the cosmos: “The only thing of me that is alone is my mind; the rest is part of the great whole. Hence, there is no freedom in isolation. If I deny my connections then I am wretched” (APOC 149).
- 17 Agapé designating a disinterested love which is not based on mutual convenience.
35In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence finds in writers like Whitman and Fenimore Cooper’s the nucleus of a new, freer society based on a genuine friendship which would no longer be based on mutual interest but would constitute a kind of agape17:
What did Cooper dream beyond democracy? Why, in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he dreamed the nucleus of a new society. That is, he dreamed a new human relationship. A stark stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than love. So deep that it is loveless. The stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves. This is the new nucleus of a new society, the clue to a new world-epoch. (SCAL 58)
36Indeed, throughout his work, Lawrence constantly emphasizes the message of the Psychology of the Unconscious that “the whole of life is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human” (PATU 91). Lawrence consistently maintains that the individual self is nothing without its connection to the circumambient world—without connections, no thing or living creature can exist. Denying this is to deny the essence of what that thing is. To understand things, then, we must understand its “illimitable background,” the web of relations in which it is enmeshed: “How can any man be free, without an illimitable background?’ (SCAL 28: 29). Consequently, “the spark of contact,” as he writes in Mornings in Mexico, is all that matters, it is ‘the clue itself’ (MM 55) and the basis for a new world order based on other values. Lawrence’s message is that people need connections with others, there is no genuine freedom without this contact: “We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away and be isolate. We call that free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen suicide” (APOC 149).
37But one cannot be free in the absence of others. On his or her own, an individual is meaningless; even Jesus and Napoleon would have been meaningless without other human beings to interact with: “Strip us of our human contacts and of our contact with the living earth and the sun, and we are almost bladders of emptiness” (LAA 298: 38). In fact, as Lawrence states in Apocalypse: “man is individual only in part of his nature. In another great part of him, he is collective” (APOC 67: 34). Thus, part of Lawrence’s interest in the people resides in the yearning for the collective, for communion with fellow men and women, for communion with the whole cosmos. This is the tenor of the letter he writes to Lady Ottoline Morrel on the 1st of March 1915:
To live, we must all unite, and bring all the knowledge into a coherent whole, we must all set to for the joining together of the multifarious parts, we must knit all Words together into a great new utterance. we must cast all personalities into the melting pot, and give a new Humanity its birth. Remember, it is not honor nor personal satisfaction, it is the incorporation in the great impulse whereby a great people shall come into being, a free race as well as a race of free individuals. The individual is now more free than the race. His race hurts him and cribs him in. No one man can create a new race. It needs all of us. So we must all unite for this purpose, It makes me quite glad to think how splendid it will be, when more and more of us fasten our hands on the chains, and pull and pull, and break them apart. One must always destroy the old Moloch of greediness and love of property and love of power. But think what a splendid world we shall have, when each man shall seek joy and understanding rather than getting and having. Don’t think that I am important. But this thing which is in all of us is so important and splendid that the skies shiver with delight when it is mentioned. (Letters ii, 297)
38This letter shows, in condensed form, the way in which Lawrence’s philosophy is intimately bound up with the notion of freedom. Lawrence’s talk here of the great impulse, of a new birth for humanity, of something disinterested (“not anything personal,” not for “honor nor personal satisfaction”) closely resembles the final passages on freedom in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, where Schopenhauer writes as follows:
In truth. real freedom, in other words, independence from the principle of sufficient reason, belongs to the will as thing-in-itself, not to its phenomenon, whose essential form is everywhere this principle of sufficient reason, the element of necessity. (Schopenhauer 402)
- 18 I discuss Lawrence and the fourth dimension in “Pluralists and Pantheists” (Gupwell 2021).
39In other words, Schopenhauer draws a distinction between the causal world and the thing-in-itself, which corresponds to Lawrence’s distinction between the third dimensional world (phenomenon) and the fourth dimensional world (the eternal, the absolute). He goes on to state that real freedom is not to be found in the phenomenal world, the visible world, but in the noumenal world of the thing-in-itself. What Schopenhauer calls the will as thing-in-itself is what Lawrence terms, in the letter above, the great impulse, in contrast to the phenomenal world (the world whose form is necessarily determined, Schopenhauer’s world of sufficient reason). This is expressed particularly clearly in Lawrence’s introduction to Frederick Carter’s The Dragon of the Apocalypse where Lawrence writes that “three-dimensional space is homogeneous and no matter how big it is, it is a kind of prison […]. In astronomical space, one can only move, one cannot be. In the astrological heavens […] the whole man is set free” (APOC 46: 12). As for Schopenhauer true freedom is thus only really to be found in the fourth dimension.18 “In our whole understanding, when sense and spirit and mind are consummated into pure unison, then we are free in the world of the absolute” (RDP 38: 22).
- 19 It should be noted, despite the similarities outlined here, that Schopenhauer views the will as an (...)
40For them both the living body is the point of interaction between these two dimensions since the will that drives the individual body is a part of the will (i. e. the great impulse) that drives the whole universe. According to Schopenhauer, “entrance into freedom is not to be to forcibly arrived at by intention or design, but comes from the innermost relation of knowing and willing in man, hence it comes suddenly as if flying in from without” (Schopenhauer 404). And Schopenhauer states that such an act of knowledge or insight (although it is perhaps a misnomer to call it knowledge since it is “accessible only to one’s own experience that cannot further be communicated,” Schopenhauer 410), changes man’s whole inner nature in such a way that “a new man, so to speak, actually takes place of the old. For this reason, the Church calls this consequence of the effect of grace new birth or regeneration” (Schopenhauer 404).19 For Schopenhauer, as for Lawrence, individual beings are objectifications in time and space of this eternal will. Hence, everyone contains within him or herself a part of the cosmos, something eternal: “See all men according to the Holy Ghost that is within them,” Lawrence retorts to Benjamin Franklin. This is the reason why, he writes in Studies in Classic American Literature, that he couldn’t stand Benjamin Franklin, because “he tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom” (SCAL 28: 27). “And how can I be free, without gods that come and go” (SCAL 28). Franklin denies the inexplicable, and for Lawrence, without the “gods, strange gods” that come into the clearing of the known self (SCAL 26: 31), there is no real freedom – without this we are trapped in the phenomenal world.
41Moreover, Lawrence believes like Spinoza that: “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God” (Ethics, V, 24). And to understand things, as Deleuze makes clear in his lectures on Spinoza, is to understand their relations. This it is that gives us intuitive knowledge of the nature of the Cosmos. For Spinoza, human beings are free when they act in accordance with their nature (positive freedom), but there is also another freedom accessed through the third type of knowledge, intuitive science, which enables us to transcend the sensible world. When there is a match between our finite experiences and the infinity of the cosmos, between existence and eternity “we feel and experience that we are eternal” (V, 23). Thus, this is a freedom which is derived by surpassing the limits of the temporal, spatial world. Lawrence’s final interest in the people is the attempt to show that an ultimate kind of freedom can be attained through communion with God. Like Spinoza, Lawrence does not believe in a personal God, but rather in a kind of impersonal God which is the totality of all that is, nature or Pan for example. Lawrence writes, for example, in The Real Thing: “Out of the great World comes my strength, and my reassurance. I could say ‘God’ but the word ‘God’ is somehow tainted. But there is a flame or a Life Everlasting wreathing through the cosmos forever, and giving us our renewal, when we can get in touch with it” (LAA 310: 6).
- 20 Spinoza, Ethics, V, 36, note.
42This effort towards ultimate freedom is what Lawrence lyrically calls, “a strange wild fluttering of freedom: of true freedom, really, an escape to somewhere, not an escape to nowhere. An escape from the tight little cage of our universe” (APOC 76). At times, when he is discussing freedom the vocabulary Lawrence employs is particularly reminiscent of Spinoza’s (peace, bliss, desire, freedom, the absolute), such as in the wartime essay The Reality of Peace. For Spinoza this kind of freedom can only be achieved due to the fact that “the mind’s intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love with which God loves himself” (Ethics V, 36), and, consequently, that “the love of God for men and the mind’s intellectual love of God is one and the same” (corollary) and thus Spinoza concludes that: “from this we clearly understand in what consists our salvation, blessedness, or freedom (nostra salus seu beatitudo, seu libertas), namely, in the constant and eternal love for God, or in the love of God for men.”20 We are part of the cosmos, and if we deny this, we cannot be free, as Lawrence makes clear when he writes; “We are free only so long as we obey” (SCAL 18). Freedom comes from accepting our communion with the cosmos and peace is the result of a state of bliss, which comes from “fulfilling the deepest desire of the soul”: “Peace is that perfect state of understanding, of acquiescence, when we sleep upon the living drift of the unknown” (RDP 27). In the essay We Need One Another, Lawrence contrasts this sense of peace with the sense of emptiness that we have without connections: “We lack peace because we are not whole. And we are not whole because we have known only a tithe of the vital relationships we might have had.” (LAA 301).
43At the heart of Lawrence’s thought is the conviction that what humanity tends to call freedom is a misnomer, and that mankind as a whole is unhappy. Lawrence strives to put forward a new conception which will put authentic freedom at the very heart of mankind’s concerns. Freeing mankind from traditional bonds has hitherto “made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness” (Fromm 93). Lawrence non-fictional writings make a clear link between our lack of real, positive freedom and a resultant state a state of isolation and anguish. For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into a state of ennui, torpor, and lifelessness. In “the horror of nullity,” “terrified by his own incapacity to feel anything at all,” modern man turns to “drink, jazz, speed, ‘petting,’ all modern forms of thrill,” “a process of suicide” (LAA 174: 7-15). But the key to real freedom for Lawrence, is to live in harmony with the universe, whose nature we can only apprehend in our deepest, spontaneous self: “Freedom lies in the honorable yielding towards the new flame […] In heaven, in the perfected relationship, is peace: in the fourth dimension” (RDP 362).
44As he writes in Apocalypse: “when I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. – It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life” (APOC 78).