Having established that what D. H. Lawrence means by truth is moral truth, we delineate his view of the novel as the best vehicle to communicate with the ‘subtle interrelatedness’ without which morality is merely moralism. We then examine Lawrence’s view that ‘art speech is the only truth’ and his distinction between the creating artist and the man, contrasting it with T. S. Eliot’s. This is done with the help of F. R. Leavis’s understanding of the artist as ‘at once personal and impersonal’ – that is as a great psychologist whose suppression of ego allows the deep and shared power of reality-soaked language to guide the creative flow. This is where art reclaims truth. D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that 'art-speech is the only truth'. If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by 'truth'. Here is the passage in which this expression occurs: Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today. [...] Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. One thing is made clear by the passage: 'truth' here is not used in the sense of absolute truth, something that can never be falsified. This is close to Wittgenstein’s deflationary conception of truth, which is internally linked to what people say or claim is true. For Wittgenstein, what it means to call a statement 'true' is that we currently judge it true, and so may later revise that claim. But nor is Lawrence talking about scientific truth; for even if, as Popper has made clear, science progresses through the falsification of its truths, it is not in the business of telling us what Lawrence calls the truth of our day; rather, it only wants to nail things down: Philosophy, religion, science, they are all of them busy nailing things down, to get a stable equilibrium. Religion with its nailed down One God, who says Thou shalt, Thou shan't, and hammers home every time; philosophy, with its fixed ideas; science with its 'laws': they, all of them, want to nail us on to some tree or other. But the novel, no. The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. If, for Lawrence, artistic truth is not absolute, nor is it mere correspondence with reality. The mere mirroring of reality would coincide with Plato's degrading image of the artist holding Accepted manuscript. Article accepted for publication in Philosophy and Literature, 09/03/2018.

中文翻译：

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DH劳伦斯与文学的真相

确定 DH 劳伦斯所说的真理是道德真理之后，我们将他对小说的看法描述为与“微妙的相互关联”交流的最佳工具，没有这种关联，道德就只是道德主义。然后我们检查劳伦斯的“艺术言论是唯一的真理”的观点，以及他在创作艺术家和人之间的区别，并将其与 TS Eliot 的观点进行对比。这是在 FR Leavis 将艺术家理解为“既是个人的又是非个人的”的帮助下完成的——这是一位伟大的心理学家，他对自我的压制允许浸透现实的语言的深层和共享力量来引导创作流程。这就是艺术回收真理的地方。DH Lawrence 有句名言：“艺术演讲是唯一的真理”。如果我们要使这些话可信，我们必须知道劳伦斯所说的“真相”是什么意思。这是出现这种表达的段落：艺术演讲是唯一的真理。艺术家通常是个该死的骗子，但他的艺术，如果是艺术，会告诉你他那个时代的真相。这才是最重要的。远离永恒的真理。真理日复一日地存在，而昨天伟大的柏拉图今天主要是波西米亚。[...] 两种完全对立的道德，艺术家的和故事的。永远不要相信艺术家。相信故事。这段话清楚地说明了一件事：这里的“真理”不是绝对真理的意思，是永远不能被证伪的东西。这与维特根斯坦对真理的紧缩概念很接近，它与人们所说或声称的真实内容有内在联系。对于维特根斯坦来说，称一个陈述为“真”的意思是我们目前判断它是真的，因此以后可能会修改那个断言。但劳伦斯也不是在谈论科学真理；因为即使，正如波普尔所阐明的那样，科学是通过对其真理的证伪来取得进步的，但它也不是要告诉我们劳伦斯所说的当今真理是什么；相反，它只想把事情搞定：哲学、宗教、科学，他们都在忙着把事情搞定，以获得稳定的平衡。宗教与它钉牢的独一神，谁说你应该，你不，每次都锤回家；哲学，有着固定的观念；科学及其“法则”：他们，所有人，都想把我们钉在某棵树上。但是小说，没有。这部小说是人类发现的微妙相互关联的最高例子。一切在它自己的时间、地点、环境中都是真实的，而在它自己的地点、时间环境之外是不真实的。如果你试图确定任何事情，在小说中，要么它扼杀了小说，要么小说站起来带着钉子走开了。如果对劳伦斯来说，艺术真理不是绝对的，也不是仅仅与现实的对应。仅仅是现实的镜像将与柏拉图关于持有已接受手稿的艺术家的有辱人格的形象相吻合。文章接受发表于哲学与文学，09/03/2018。