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Norris, Trevor (2016) D.H. Lawrence: crisis and feeling in nature and art. Masters thesis, London Metropolitan University.
The opening chapter makes an argument against the natural attitude and tries to revalue aesthetic experience as a means of revealing an originary sense of nature in us. I discuss parallels between Heidegger's revaluation of the art work and his sense of nature as phusis and draw out an argument about poetic attention that includes formulations of comparable ideas by Lawrence in order to argue against the assumption that aesthetic sense is secondary to the primacy of the phenomenal world. In the second chapter I discuss the nihilism that proceeds from the combination of the natural attitude and moral idealism, as presented in Lawrence's Australian novel Kangaroo (1923). I discuss Lawrence's idea of the dark gods and reviving patterns of natural relatedness as a new formulation of our aesthetic sense and a counter to instrumentalising will. The following chapter continues this discussion as it develops through Lawrence's experience of wildness in nature and the New Mexican landscape and Indian culture of Taos. I formulate an argument about dynamic nature in relation to Nietzsche's presentation of the will to pow·er as art,·and Heidegger's later commentary on this, which develops the initial argument that the aesthetic sense is primary, and is the foundational mode out of which anything like the possibility of the natural or instrumental attitude can arise. The philosophical presentation of the will to power as art leads into an argument about dynamic relatedness in nature, and a reading of comparable ideas in Lawrence's essays on the New Mexican landscape, the culture of the pueblo Indians and his 1925 novella St Mawr. The argument concludes with reference to Lawrence's final work Apocalypse (1930), which restates his arguments about the place of poetic attention in human and natural life.
The general argument seeks to establish a critical relationship between the poetic imagination, philosophy and forms of natural life and asks what philosophy and literature written from roughly comparable generational experiences has to tell us about the way symbols live in us. The argument also revalues aesthetic experience and moves away from conceiving the object of aesthetic appreciation as a privacy of appearances in psychological space towards the idea that our aesthetic capacity is the foundational form of dynamic and emergent natural life.
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