D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love: A Tale of the Modernist Psyche, the Continental "Concept," and the Aesthetic Experience

Despite the early twentieth century propensity to expose the impossibility of grounding human knowledge, many prominent modernist aestheticians and poets were obsessed with experiencing and/or understanding ultimate reality, an absolute truth that is mind- and culture-independent as well as universally valid.¹ For instance, Clive Bell argues in 1914 that "Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes" (1958, 182).² Following this line of reasoning, aesthetic truth is as objectively and universally valid as the Pythagorean theorem, because, as Roger Fry argues in 1919, an ideal "apprehension" of the aesthetic object is "unconditioned by considerations of space and time" (1947, 23).³ Such a reality-based orientation is consistent with T. E. Hulme's aesthetic, which presupposes the artist's ability to overcome "Original Sin" and thereby experience an objective reality that is "purified from anthropomorphism" (1965, 45).⁴ For T. S. Eliot, who claims that "esthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into esthetic sensibility" (1977a, 103), orthodox Truth exists whether humans apprehend it or not (1934, 32), so the artist's primary objective is "to train people to be able to think in Christian categories" (1977a, 22), for Christianity, more than anything else, provides humans with epistemological access to a pre-given orthodox Truth.⁵

At the same time that prominent modernist writers were trying to reconstruct an aesthetic theory that would enable humans to access "essential reality" (C. Bell 1958, 142) or "the nature of reality" (Hulme 1965, 4), two concurrent disciplinary developments were radically undermining this aesthetic project. The first was the split between psychology and philosophy. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, "psychology," which "was much more closely affiliated with philosophy than it is today," "began to emancipate itself as a discipline" (Ryan 1991, 2). Such a split had enormous ramifications, for while philosophy conceived of the human primarily in terms of the mind, an ahistorical and universal thinking faculty that uses logic to ascertain immutable, non-relative Truth, psychology conceived of the human primarily in terms of the psyche, a culturally specific thinking faculty that knows only in relation to its cultural context. Martin Jay intelligently articulates the threat that the emancipation of psychology posed to philosophy: "Reducing the mind to the psyche was problematic for logic and mathematics because it opened the door to relativism in which truth was merely a function of the specific thinking mind in which it appeared or of its cumulative experience over time" (1996, 95). In short, psychology's emancipation forced modernists to choose between philosophy's metaphysical mind, which has the capacity to apprehend non-normative and non-relative Truth, or psychology's culturally embedded psyche, which has the capacity to know only in relation to its culture's relative truths. For a prominent modernist like Virginia Woolf, therefore, the choice was clear: "I don't want 'a philosophy' in the least" (1982, 4:126). This was the case because modernism, for her, meant choosing psychology:⁶ "For the moderns 'that,' the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology" (1984, 152).⁷

The second disciplinary crisis was in philosophy, which led to the analytic/Continental split.⁸ While there are many ways of characterizing this split, I find Richard Rorty's recent formulation insightful and compelling. According to Rorty, analytic philosophers treat the concept like an immutable Idea, an ahistorical precept "which philosophical analysis can hope to pin down" (2003, 21). According to this view, there exists a concept that is best suited to represent the world aright and this concept is what it is whether humans perceive it or not. The task of the analytic philosopher, therefore, is to create a system of thinking that would enable humans to access this pre-given, mind-independent...