Masashi Asai
Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan
To Know, or Not To Know, That is the Question: Lawrence's "Blood Consciousness" and "Mental Consciousness" Reconsidered
Lawrence's clearest motto concerning the issue of the action called "knowing" is epitomized in his words: "The final aim is not to know, but to be. There never was a more risky motto than that: Know thyself.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at least be yourself. 'Be yourself' is the last motto" (Fantasia, 68). This motto is untiringly supported by his life-long assertion that "blood consciousness," or knowing through the blood, is more essential than "mental consciousness" or knowing through the intellect or reason. This assertion varied from time to time, but the essence of his message is: man has an innate core of being which he calls "naïve core," but over time this core is cumulatively covered, and eventually dominated, by man's later attainment of intellect, and this phenomenon has overturned the original balance that man once had, resulting in the present human ailment of self-consciousness and the loss of spontaneity. What we need to do, then, is to recover this balance. The latter part of this message seems very sound, but the premise of his assertion needs reconsideration. What does Lawrence mean by saying that "blood consciousness" is dominated by "mental consciousness"? Presuming that this is true, is it such an abominable thing as he asserts? Aren't there any positive aspects in the phenomenon? An important question to be asked is whether or not Lawrence's dichotomy of "blood consciousness" and "mental consciousness" on the issue of "knowing" is still valid. An even more fundamental issue is his dichotomy of "to know" and "to be," or to expand the question, his dichotomic world view itself. Having become so familiar with these dualities or parallelisms in his works, we tend to take them for granted. In this paper I reconsider the relationship between the two concepts and the validity of such world view.