Lady Chatterley’s Nature

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is clearly obsessed with nature. Nature is lovingly described; most of the action takes place in a wood; animals (pheasants, a dog) are among the dramatis personae. The text is replete with naturalistic description. Nature is set over against industrial civilization in the form of collieries, as well as intellectual civilization in the form of works of fiction and pictorial art. Mellors represents nature; Sir Clifford represents predatory capitalism and intellectual refinement. Mellors is a gamekeeper who lives in a wood in a small cottage and hut; Sir Clifford lives in a grand country house with servants. Mellors roams freely through wood and world, while Sir Clifford is confined to a wheelchair (the result of an industrialized war). There is a tremendous amount of discussion of the evils of civilization and the healthy cleansing power of the natural world. The author is clearly on the side of nature.

            This is the context in which to view the most salient and notorious aspect of the novel: its sexual explicitness. Why did Lawrence insist on this? It didn’t even exist in the first version he wrote, and it would obviously prevent the book from being published, as well as generating enormous critical disapproval: so why did he choose to go there? Two suggestions may be made. One is that he relished the technical challenge of writing explicitly about sex—how is the writer to do it, in what vocabulary, in how much detail, to what effect? The other is that he believed not writing about sex explicitly in a novel about adultery was simply cowardly, caving in to an irrational taboo (cf. Joyce’s Ulysses). No doubt both these motives were operative and both are fully justified, but I think the reason goes deeper and is more thematic. It is that Lawrence wanted to treat human sexuality as a fact of nature, as a natural biological phenomenon. He wanted to depict it as he might depict the behavior of the pheasants or the dog Flossie—as we might say, scientifically. He was a great describer of nature, and this was an area of the natural world that had yet to be described. In other words, he wanted to stress the continuity between nature as a whole and the part of it constituted by human sexual behavior (including sexual anatomy). So we are treated to a naturalist’s description of lovemaking between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, right down to penis and vagina. The words “fuck” and “cunt” are not shied away from. Thus sex belongs to nature, which is a Good Thing in Lawrence’s worldview. And it has to be said that he does it remarkably well: that is the marvel of the book—how well he brings off this literary feat. Has sex ever been written about so evocatively, and straight out of the gate too? We come to see sex as part of the natural history of humankind alongside eating and drinking. The body emerges as a site of pre-civilizational innocence and splendor—nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide or euphemize. The body, for Lawrence, is deep. It knows things. In order to convey this message the author needed to engage in some serious corporeal description. He didn’t want to shock; he wanted to recognize, to reflect. He wanted sexual realism. That is the underlying reason for writing about sex in the way he did—to make the novel realistic, not idealized or cowardly or simply false to the facts. There is nothing titillating or pornographic in the way he depicts sex (it is tame by modern standards, though still powerful); he simply gives you the nuts and bolts, the way things actually are (or were at that time).

            Take his use of the word “crisis” to describe orgasm (he also uses that word). Yes, he is going to talk about male and female sexual climax (“coming off”, as the book quaintly says), but the word “crisis” injects a curious ambivalence into the description, producing a kind of literary double take: how is something so good like something generally disagreeable? It also enables the writer to avoid dull and repetitious sexual language that might evoke the wrong kind of response (Lawrence is actually a very moralistic writer). How is it possible to derive the dubious joys of pornography from this odd word? Or consider the famous passage about entwining flowers in Connie’s “maidenhair”: here we see a literal joining of nature and the sexual organs, as if hair and flowers are of the same stuff. Lawrence’s underlying theme is sounded loud and clear: sex and nature are one. And if one is beautiful, so is the other. This is not about playing naughty games with the gamekeeper in classic British “Carry On” style—there is nothing remotely funny about it–but rather an attempt to free sex from its conventional associations and return it to our organic nature. The flowers, the pheasants, the wood, and the lovers—all belong together in the natural scheme of things. And all contrast with the horrors of industrialized working-class life and the dry stiffness of the British aristocracy. It is to be noted that God is never mentioned in the book, and surely that is not an accident: nature worship takes God’s place. The problem Lawrence is unable to solve, though the book shows he was well aware of it, is how to integrate the advantages of industrialized society with the primordial attractions of nature. Money may be bad, as the book continually insists, but do we really want to go back to a world in which money does not exist? And how are comfortable houses to be built and health improved and starvation avoided? It might be nice to run naked in the rain once in a while, as the lovers do, but do you really want to be drenched all winter long?  Still, in that primitive little hut in the woods Mellors and Lady Chatterley can revel in the dream of pristine nature: they can call on their sexual nature to join them with the rest of nature, albeit briefly.

Truly Physical

If we consult the OED on the word “physical” we find the following as the primary definition: “relating to the body as opposed to the mind—involving bodily contact or activity”. Only the third definition given captures the sense intended by philosophers: “relating to physics or the operation of natural forces generally”. The primary definition might be paraphrased as of the body: to be physical is to involve the human body, to be located in the body, to concern the body—as opposed to the mind, the psyche, the spirit, the soul. This is the sense employed in such locutions as: physical education, physical exercise, physical therapy, physical anthropology, physical abuse, physical appetites, physical examination, physical love affair, and physical beauty. The word “physical” in this use is close to “fleshly”, “somatic”, and “carnal”: to be physical is to consist of (or somehow involve) flesh and bone, blood and guts, muscle and mucous. The organs of the body are physical in just this sense, being precisely organs of the body. The brain is no exception: it is indisputably of the body, one of its parts. The mind, by contrast, is not clearly of the body, which is why it has been deemed immortal, separate from the body, a different kind of thing entirely (not even material). Mark that to be physical in this sense is not to be physical in the sense favored by philosophers: something can be of the body without being fully describable by physics. A vitalist could believe that the organs of the body are not reducible to physics, holding that a special force animates living tissue; or you might think that biological concepts are not reducible to the concepts of physics and chemistry.  [1] We can be quite neutral on the science and metaphysics of the living body while declaring certain things to be of the body—or not of the body, as the case may be. In the past the mind was thought to be not of the body and hence not physical in the present sense: it was deemed immaterial, incorruptible, located elsewhere, not beholden to the body for its existence, and maybe not even causally connected to the body. Thought, in particular, was taken to be non-physical in this sense—not an attribute of the body at all. Thinking is not a bodily process like digestion or breathing  [2]: the soul thinks and it is not of the body. Thus we can coherently envisage a doctrine, viewed as radical, that maintains that, contrary to tradition and maybe even common sense, the mind is physical in the sense we are considering: it is of the body. We can call this doctrine “physicalism”, carefully distinguishing it from the doctrine usually so called by philosophers, i.e. the doctrine that the mind is reducible to the entities and properties described by physics. The former doctrine is not hostage to the fortunes of the latter doctrine; indeed, proponents of it might be hostile to that doctrine, viewing it as false, vacuous, or even nonsensical. Being of the body is not to be equated with being as physics describes things, now or in the future: for it may be held, for various reasons, that there is no merit in the idea that the body is purely physical in that sense. In any case, I wish to investigate the former doctrine in its own right: the idea that the mind is really a bodily thing and not a non-bodily thing—which I will call simply “physicalism”. It might also be called “bodyism” or “somaticism”, but the dictionary licenses using the word “physical” to refer to the doctrine in question. Is physicalism in this sense true?

            It is important to see what physicalism, as so defined, opposes. Take mental illness: a non-physicalist would hold that mental illness is caused by evil spirits or impure thoughts or developmental factors operating independently of the body (including the brain). It should therefore be treated by a priest or a psychoanalyst not by a neurologist. But a physicalist about mental illness would hold that it has causes within the body of a chemical nature and that the appropriate treatment should be directed at the body (drugs, surgery, physical exercise, etc.). Even if the etiology is psychogenic, the illness itself is connected to the brain in discoverable ways and could not exist without the brain’s cooperation (so to speak). Mental illness is not a condition of an immaterial substance cut off from the body but is deeply enmeshed in the body’s biological activity. Thus we have a physical (bodily) account of mental illness as opposed to a supernatural (non-bodily) account. Note that we are not saying that the psychological manifestations of mental illness are reducible to brain states or facts described by physics; it is just that mental illness is body-involving, body-located, inextricably bound up with the body. Let’s even boldly state that we have discovered this to be true by empirical investigation, whatever may be the case with respect to the reducibility of psychology to physics. In the same way it may be said that mood swings and depression are physical phenomena, being occasioned by chemical imbalances and the like; they are not perturbations of an immaterial spirit lurking somewhere in the general vicinity the body. Ditto for hunger and thirst. Emotions in general might be similarly viewed: they involve the body in various ways—flight, approach behavior, butterflies in the stomach, genital arousal, and so forth. Specific parts of the brain are activated during emotional excitation. Emotions are bodily phenomena not disembodied states of a quasi-divine soul: they have a “physiological basis and origin”, as one dictionary says under “physical”. As for perceptual experiences, the physicalist will assert that they are intimately joined to the bodily sense organs and hence “of the body”: seeing is a physical process because of the bodily eye, as are tasting and smelling because of the mouth and nose. We don’t see, taste, and smell in some way removed from our bodily nature: these are physical processes (even if the sensations involved are not reducible to brain states). They are anchored in the body, dependent on it, shaped by it. Hence physicalism in the present sense is true of emotions.

            The case of thought presents more of a challenge to this brand of physicalism, because its bodily connections are not so evident. Here the case for a non-bodily immaterial substance has been at its strongest. This tells us that physicalism of the kind under consideration is not a trivial or empty doctrine—it has polemical bite. It might even be false!  [3] But the determined physicalist is not without resources even in the case of thought: putting aside the existence of regular brain correlates, the physicalist might insist that thought has bodily functions in the shape of behavior, and that it plausibly has an evolutionary explanation that invokes aspects of the organism’s body.  [4] It is the function of thought to control the body’s activity so as to secure the organism’s goals, and thought (it may be suggested) arises from features of the body involved in activity involving the hand and mouth. Evolutionary change builds on prior traits of the organism and thought must have developed from earlier properties of the body—or so it may be contended. So thought is not as disconnected from the body as may appear at first sight: there is thus room for a physicalist account of its origin and function. Thought is physical in the sense that it is of the body and not removed from the body, as religious dogma and dualist metaphysics may require. Logical reasoning, like mental derangement, has its somatic roots, its bodily bedrock, its flesh and blood associations. This is not to say that logical reasoning is reducible to the motions of matter, as the usual kind of physicalism claims; it is just to say that it is connected to the body in significant ways. The mind is thus “of the body” not something existing in splendid isolation from the body, as in traditional forms of supernatural dualism. Its ability to exist in disembodied form is accordingly put into question, making physicalism at odds with religious conceptions. I venture to suggest that we have discovered this to be true by a mixture of empirical investigation and philosophical reflection; and it in no way depends on accepting physicalism in the usual sense intended by philosophers of mind. The two doctrines say completely different things. I would say, then, that the former kind of physicalism is true, uncontroversially so in today’s intellectual climate, while the latter kind of physicalism is not true (or even really intelligible). It is a question whether the attraction of the latter doctrine, such as it is, owes anything to the evident appeal of the former doctrine: some sort of physicalism is true, after all, though not the sort commonly advocated today. Do we hear echoes of the one in the other and mistakenly conclude that it must be true because the other is? And let us note that the dubious doctrine itself makes no explicit reference to the body: it simply announces that mental phenomena can be explained in terms of the concepts developed in physics to deal with the inanimate world—the living body as such is left out of account. Clearly this is an extremely ambitious doctrine going far beyond the relatively anodyne suggestion that the mind is inextricably bound up with the body. Neither form of physicalism entails the other, but both can be expressed using the ambiguous term “physical”–one sense yielding something true, the other sense not so much.

            A glance at the history may be helpful. Nineteenth-century science, particularly biological science, made great strides in understanding the body, including the brain. The mind came to be seen as an outgrowth of the body, fostering the doctrine that the mind is really a function of the body.  [5] This superseded older dogmas founded in religion that sought to place the mind in a separate non-bodily realm. The doctrine I am calling “physicalism” was thus firmly established at this time and only confirmed by subsequent study. This intellectual stream is separate from the metaphysical materialism that goes back to Hobbes: that doctrine was never firmly established and, according to some, never will be (for many reasons). I am simply pointing out that the two doctrines labeled  “physicalism” are quite different, so that the fate of one does not depend on the fate of the other. We can therefore be “physicalists” without being physicalists—the mind is “of the body” while not being “material” (whatever that means). This seems like a good thing because the thought that the mind is in some sense “physical” is surely correct: yes, it is physical in that it is an attribute of the body, bound up with the body, situated within the body. It is not something existing separately, proceeding by its own power, capable of life without a body. Does this solve the mind-body problem? Not in the slightest: in fact it is what is needed in order to formulate that problem. For the problem is how the mind can relate to the body in which it is so clearly enmeshed—there would be no such problem if the mind were simply ontologically remote from the body. There could be a mind problem if the mind had a separate existence, but there is only a mind-body problem because the mind and the body are somehow stuck together. The brain is of the body by virtue of being literally inside the body and made of the same kind of stuff as it, but the mind is not of the body in that way—so in what way is it of the body? All I am saying here is that there is a form of physicalism, properly so called, that is not the same as the doctrine usually bearing that name. The mind truly is physical, though it is not true that it is part of the subject matter of physics. The mind is physical by being biological (somatic, organic) but not by being covered by the science of physics. The old opposition between being of the body and being of the mind has collapsed, with the mind now also regarded as being of the body. In the beginning was the body (not just the body’s deeds); the mind came along later firmly attached to the body. Thus the mind is as physical as the heart or kidneys in that sense (though not in the other sense).  [6]    

  [1] We could be mysterians about the body and yet hold that the mind is physical: the mind is of the body and yet the body is a mystery. I suppose we could even be immaterialists about the body and still believe the mind is physical (bodily)!

  [2] I read somewhere that breathing itself was not always regarded as bodily but viewed rather as an influx of spirits that kept the body alive by supernatural means (or did I dream this?). When the lungs were discovered breathing came to be seen as a bodily function sans spirits.

  [3] From a first-person introspective point of view, the essential involvement of the body in all one’s mental life is by no means apparent, so physicalism in the present sense has some work to do to overcome the deliverances of introspection. It is essentially a theoretical position not one founded in phenomenology; hence it has been a matter of controversy.

  [4] I describe a view like this in Prehension (2017), especially chapter 10.

  [5] I can’t resist mentioning Freud at this point: he is a true physicalist in the present sense because he maps psychological formations onto bodily formations in his theory of the development of the psyche. Thus the oral, anal, and genital stages correspond to psychological maturation: if you want to understand human pleasure, you need to see it as emerging from these parts of the body, according to Dr. Freud. Psychoanalysis proceeds by somatic analysis. Of course, psycho-sexuality cannot be disconnected from bodily organs; it was this connection between sexual appetite and the body that led theologians to seek ways of turning the mind to higher things (up there in the soul not down here in the loins). Sexual desire is unavoidably physical (bodily) desire.     

  [6] I don’t think the view I have described here has an accepted label, or is even recognized as a theoretical option, though it evidently exists in the historical record. I have thought it worthwhile to delineate it and distinguish it from other doctrines that are more familiar. And it is nice to be able to report that at least one version of physicalism is actually true!

Personal Pronouns

It has often been observed that there is something funny about “I” referentially speaking yet we use it all the time. I would say that we don’t know what we are referring to: we don’t know what the self is. This is an old story: philosophers have had a difficult time saying what the self is, even to the point of having no satisfactory word for it. People used to speak of the “spirit” and the “soul”, but this is now deemed suspect and spooky; today we prefer “person”, “subject”, or just “self”. None of this verbiage provides any clue as to what we are talking about, however. Is the referent of “I” a body, a brain, a part of a brain, a center of consciousness, a sequence of connected mental states, a primitive person, or nothing at all? The self is a mystery: we don’t know what it is. Yet we talk about it all the time (and think about it too)—the word “I” is always on our lips. You might think that we could define the self as “the bearer of conscious states”, but what is this bearer—is it a body or a brain or a center of consciousness, etc.? Given our ignorance of what it is, shouldn’t it be difficult to refer to it successfully? Some have said that we are acquainted with the self, as we are acquainted with pain or the color red; but if so, it is an acquaintance that provides no illumination as to what we are referring to. Do we introspect the self? Apparently not, as Hume famously observed. True, we know that it exists (at a given moment anyway): the Cogito supplies us with grounds for a bare existential claim. But this is cold comfort given that we don’t know what it is that so indubitably exists. Descartes thought he knew that the self is a thinking thing at least, but again that doesn’t settle what kind of thinking thing—it could be a brain or an immaterial substance or just a loose conglomeration of ideas. Still we happily bandy the word “I” about, as if we grasp clearly what it is that we are designating. We even have a semantics for it (content and character and all that); we just don’t know what kind of entity “I” refers to. The self is just whatever it is that “I” refers to. By contrast, we don’t think that pain is just whatever it is that “pain” refers to: we know quite well what pain is. The self is a stark enigma.  [1]

            It is often supposed that this is a peculiarity of the first-person pronoun, but that is not true. The same point applies to the other personal pronouns: “you”, “he”, “she”, “they” etc.: in each case we are referring to entities whose nature eludes us—the very entities that use ”I” to refer to themselves. I don’t know what I am and I don’t know what you are, or her over there. I don’t even know what it is when I refer to my pet lizard’s self with that demeaning pronoun. All these are words we use to talk about things whose nature we don’t grasp; and I don’t mean we don’t grasp this nature deeply—I mean we really don’t know what kind of thing we mean when we use these words. In a clear sense, we don’t know what it means to say “I am hot” or “She is smart” or “You are funny”. Do we really understand these sentences? True, they have a use, but that is all they have–they have no clear ontological content. No proposition is intelligibly conveyed by them, since we don’t know what the subject of the proposition is. Whatever meaning they have, it doesn’t convey the nature of the thing denoted. The sense is not a mode of presentation of the reference, if that means it enables the speaker or hearer to grasp what kind of thing is denoted. Since these expressions are at the heart of ordinary language use, we can say that our grasp of meaning falls far short of knowledge of the reference of some of our most common expressions. The mystery of the self thus infects linguistic understanding, rendering it at best partial. We are like people referring to colors but who have never seen any: such people would refer to things whose nature they don’t grasp. We know about things that are closely associated with selves, namely mental states, but the self itself is an unknown quantity—an I-know-not-what. Reference to the self thus proceeds in the absence of knowledge of the referent (though of course we know many things about selves).

            Why don’t we know the nature of the self? What is it about the self that precludes knowledge of its nature? I don’t think we know the answer to that question either; indeed, our ignorance seems distinctly odd considering how close we are to our own self (it isn’t as if selves exist on the far side of the moon). We ought to know the self much more intimately, but in fact we have to admit epistemic defeat in the face of the self: nothing in our self-knowledge reveals the kind of thing that the self is. The personal pronouns seem merely to point without specifying what kind of target they are pointing at. They operate in such a way as to compensate for our natural ignorance of the self rather than to express our knowledge of the self (as many acts of reference do). I think their peculiar semantic character should receive more attention.  [2]

  [1] It would be wrong to suppose that our ignorance of the self is like other sorts of philosophical ignorance such as not knowing the correct analysis of knowledge, or the metaphysical status of color, or whether “good” expresses a primitive property. Our ignorance of the self is far more radical than that: we really don’t know what order of thing we are dealing with. Hume was right: we have no concept of the self such that its general nature is revealed by that concept. This is why a person unlettered in philosophy can be made quickly to accept that he or she is ignorant about what a self is. This is ground-floor ignorance, not ignorance of high-flown philosophy. Compare color: a blind person is far more ignorant of color than a sighted theorist trying to come up with the right analysis of color. Similarly, our access to the self reveals almost nothing about what kind of thing it is: we are effectively self-blind (though self-obsessed).

  [2] The connection between meaning and knowledge has been explored but not the connection between meaning and ignorance—ignorance of a very basic sort. Somehow language had to cope with the deep-seated ignorance we labor under in the case of the self, and it came up with the apparatus of personal pronouns (and associated expressions). It converted deep ignorance into a viable system of reference. How did that happen? How did language manage to latch onto selves in an epistemic vacuum? 

I do sometimes wonder whether the appalling degradation in American culture, morality, and intelligence that we have winessed in the last twenty years (including in universities) was caused by the horrific events of 9/11. At the time I feared that the American reaction to these events might exceed in harmfulness the events in question. Can there be any doubt that American paranoia has increased markedly because of that day?