The construction of subjectivity in relation to the “real” world of objects has long been a concern for critics of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. In his seminal work, Mimesis, Eric Auerbach argues that the novel inverts the conventional relationship in fiction between internal and external events: “In Virginia Woolf's case external events have effectively lost their hegemony, they serve to liberate and interpret internal events, while first its time…inner movements function predominantly to prepare and motivate significant outward events” (Auerbach 1). According to his analysis of the novel, events external to the characters are subordinated to the subjective thoughts or "chains of ideas" (Auerbach, 477) that they evoke, as if the function of the external world should provide mere stimulus to the internal one. : «the objective external reality of the momentary present... is nothing more than an occasion... The emphasis is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things that are not seen directly but through reflection, which are linked to the present of the present. framing event that liberates them" (Auerbach, 478). In this way the very notion of reality is transformed. What happens as an "external event", although unquestionably concrete and current in itself, simply becomes the context or frame in which “a more real reality” unfolds (Auerbach, 477). Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned”? Get an original essay. A series of critical studies have further elaborated on the implications philosophical aspects of Virginia Woolf's work Jane Duran argues that "some of Woolf's best-known works – particularly To the Lighthouse – exemplify a concern with time, reality and a sense of lived inner life that is overtly philosophical in its construction" (Duran, 300) Both Lucio Ruotolo and Heidi Storl use Martin Heidegger's existential analysis of Dasein, or “being there,” found in his seminal work Being and Time. In portraying Mrs. Dalloway, Ruotolo uses the concept “to illuminate Clarissa Dalloway's complex interaction with nothingness, 'the void that borders on meaning'” (Ruotolo, 17) while Storl argues that in To the Lighthouse “Woolf illustrated the nature and implications of being” as proposed by Heidegger (Storl, 303). In The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf's Fiction, Mark Hussey links Woolf's perpetual attention to moments of sensation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory to analyze the various senses in which "self" or soul". to define its reality. Using the work of Merleau-Ponty as well as that of Emmanuel Levinas, Justine Dymond argues in “'The Outside of its Inside and the Inside of its Outside': Phenomenology in To the Lighthouse” that the novel effectively represents “the phenomenological challenge to the internal/external dichotomy theorized by Levinas and Merleau-Ponty” (Dymond, 140). In Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself Pamela Caughie explores Woolf's work in terms of "a conceptual model" rooted in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, "for narrative discourse [. . .] in terms of multiple and mutability. relations between significant systems" (Caughie, 81). Finally, in The Phantom Table Ann Banfield argues that the theory of knowledge formulated by GE Moore and Bertrand Russell had a profound effect on Woolf's conception of reality and, through the work of Roger Fry, on her artistic expression. Despite, and in response to, this scholarship, Michael Lackey argues in "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf'sCritic of Philosophy" that "philosophy was a discipline in crisis in Woolf's time, and a casual look at philosophy and the philosopher in Woolf's time works indicates not only that he was aware of the unprecedented onslaught on the most precious axioms and methods of philosophy, but who was also trying to deal the death blow to philosophy itself. Given Woolf's overt critique of philosophy, I argue that using philosophy to analyze and interpret her corpus places the critic at odds with Woolf's political and aesthetic agenda” (Lackey, 76). While rightly noting that in Woolf's time the discipline of philosophy was in a deep state of crisis, Lackey misreads the location of this crisis within Woolf's work. Regardless of Woolf's inclination towards or against philosophy, I find that her politically motivated feminist deconstruction of gender identity within To the Lighthouse remains indebted to philosophical shifts in understanding the male subject in relation to the external object, both material and feminine. Indeed, these changes form the intellectual foundation of Woolf's reformulation of gender identity and relations and are therefore responsible for opening up a space that made such re-imagining possible. In this way, the philosophical interpretation of Woolf's work does not undermine its political or aesthetic intent, but rather confirms and illuminates the framework that enabled its development. The thematic importance of philosophy in To the Lighthouse is embodied in the character of Ramsay, a professional philosopher called the "greatest metaphysician of the time" by his disciple, Charles Tansley (Woolf TL, 59). His son, Andrew Ramsay, answers painter Lily Briscoe's question about “his father's books…'Subject, object and the nature of reality,'” Andrew had said. And when he said Heaven, he had no idea what it meant. 'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there'” (Woolf TL, 38). This episode alludes to one of the fundamental problems of Western empirical thought, which Bertrand Russell describes in The Problems of Philosophy: “It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with written or prints” (Russell, 7). Ann Banfield identifies the table as “the paradigmatic object of knowledge” that “any philosophy that addresses our knowledge of the external world addresses first” (Banfield, 66). In this episode, then, we find the novel's engagement with "the themes of the British empiricists, Locke, Hume, Berkeley - the survival of the object without perceiver, the nature of identity and non-entity, skepticism about substance -" which “lie below the activity of narration” (Beer, 32). Woolf criticizes this empirical strand of metaphysical speculation through the characterization of both Mr. Ramsay and his wife, who observes her husband's philosophical errors: Indeed, he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, for to ordinary things, but to extraordinary things, with an eye like that of an eagle. His understanding often amazed her. But did you notice the flowers? No. Did you notice the view? No. Did he notice how beautiful his daughter was, or whether there was pudding or roast beef on her plate? He sat at a table with them like a person in a dream (Woolf TL, 107). This passage demonstrates how “reality…is always haunted by its spectral negation, unreality” so that probing the reality of the object transforms it “into something strange, unreal, yet so insistently present that one wonders whether its strangeness be its reality” (Banfield, 60). In this sense, despite his speculative work, Ramsay remains paradoxically alien to the reality of the world he seeks tocomprehend. Storl's reading of To the Lighthouse alongside Heidegger's Being and Time is illuminating in relation to Ramsay's detached subjectivity. Heidegger was above all concerned with the recovery of the question of the "Being" of human life and the failure of Platonic idealism in reaching the true foundation of "Being": in the history of Western thought, in fact, continuously from the beginning what is it is thought in reference to Being; however the truth of being remains unthought, and not only in that truth denied to thought as a possible experience, but Western thought itself, and indeed in the form of metaphysics, expressly, but nevertheless unconsciously, veils the occurrence of that denial (Heidegger IM, 20). According to Heidegger, Western philosophy had hitherto formulated the terrain of philosophical inquiry from the perspective of the thinking subject. His aim was to reverse “the Cartesian suggestion…'I think, therefore I am'” through a new understanding in which “my being (the fact that I am) makes possible my various ways of being, including that of think or think.” (Storl, 306). The consistent error within Western philosophy has been to attribute "Being" to an immaterial essence, the "Form" of which the object comprises a mere representation, thus reducing the world to an object for the subject thinking. This perspective is found in Mr Ramsay with the alternative proposed by his wife who, seeing "the first pulse of the pulsating star", wants to show it to her husband and make him look at it, "since the sight has given her so much pleasure. But he stopped. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be: Poor little world, with one of his sighs. At that moment he said: "very good", to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew full well that he did not admire them, or even realize they were there” (Woolf TL, 108). Instead of seeing the flowers he merely “notic[es] something red, something brown” (Woolf TL, 93). In this passage, rather than understanding the “Being” of nature in its fullness, Ramsay chose the reductive perspective of narrow conceptual or empirical analysis and the belief that the world is a mere shadow image, a “poor[er] ” and “ little[r]” version of the truth. For these reasons it can only see one aspect of the object in question. In this sense, Mrs. Ramsay effectively acts as an obstacle to her husband's subjectivity and a model of Heidegger's alternative connective “being there.” In the novel's opening scene, Mr. Ramsay insists that a trip to the lighthouse is impossible in the current weather conditions, steadfastly insisting on the truth despite the damage this does to the feelings of James, his son. Instead, Mrs. Ramsay elaborates on multiple factors in the same situation, connecting them associatively rather than by cause and effect: James's eagerness to take the trip; her husband's rational approach to weather forecasting; the barometer reading; the socks she knits for the lighthouse keeper's son; her desire for her husband and him to find common ground; the gaze of the sea and the sky; the mood of the day (Woolf TL, 49-51). Unlike her husband, historical perspective and the distant future are not of interest to Mrs. Ramsay. Rather, the immediate sensations of the flow of life engage her completely. By assembling disparate focal points into an organic whole and moving from image to image, Ms. Ramsay remains more aware of the present than of her relationship between past and future. Observing the family and guests around the dining table, he "unveils each of these people, their thoughts and feelings... effortlessly, like a light hiding under water so that its ripples and reeds and the troutsuddenly are all illuminated and suspended." , trembling" (Woolf TL, 160). Reading poems after dinner, he imagined climbing upwards through a flowering tree, "... swinging, zigzagging this way and that, from line to line as from branch to branch" (Woolf TL, 179). These individual images and the larger pattern they suggest illustrate Mrs. Ramsay's spatially centered perception of seeing and connecting things in motion - disparate parts of the flow of life – in a web-like set of associations where “the whole is held together” for brief moments of synthesis ( WoolfTL, 160). In opposition to this perspective of connectivity, Ramsay seeks security and safety in the linearity of a male perspective objectifying, against the nagging worry that time will erase his work. His walks through local alleys and clichés always take him to the sea, for him a symbol of confusion and a reflection of the violent destruction of his contribution of knowledge by time. The images of the sea highlight his fear of ignorance, a powerful chaos surrounding intellectual history that resists the fragile structures of human thought. Throughout "The Window" section of the novel, Mr. Ramsay's fear that history will erase his work translates into images of him guarding the edge of the land, watching the sea erode the land beneath him: it was his destiny ...whether he wanted it or not. , to thus emerge onto a spit of land that the sea is slowly devouring, and remain there, like a desolate sea bird, alone. …and so stand on his little ledge facing the darkness of human ignorance, as we know nothing and the sea devours the ground we stand on… (Woolf TL, 68-69). Separation and opposition thus define Ramsay's perspective. In opposition to this conception of the thinking subject, Heidegger argued that “[s]elf and world… belong together in the single entity, Dasein,” literally translated as “being there.” In short, “[s]ign and world are not two entities, like subject and object… but self and world are the fundamental determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world” (Heidegger BPP , 297 ). There remains the "empirical sense" of the "human body" which is "distinct from the desk and chair in which it is situated", but the underlying "being of the human being merges with, or becomes indistinguishable from, the keyboards at hand" (Storl, 306) Storl sees To the Lighthouse as an illustration of this “subject-object collapse” and the “convergence of being” which is “traditionally interpreted as a collection of independently existing subjects and objects” (Storl, 306) . The dinner scene of the novel illustrates such a fusion of "Being": "Light the candles", and immediately they jumped up and went to tinker with the sideboard... Now eight candles stood on the table, and after the first lowering of the flames rose up and brought the entire long table with it into visibility... Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought together by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been at dusk, at a party around a table, because the night was now closed by sheets of glass which, far from giving an exact view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, it seemed that there was order and dry land... (Woolf TL, 96-97). The critique of the metaphysical division between subject and object is also identified in Gillian Beer's essay “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse” as the most important philosophical narrative “passionately explored”” in the novel, “not only by the painter Lily Briscoe, but by the entire narrative process” (Beer, 60). Beer quotes Woolf's father Leslie Stephen's comments on Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher she most admired: The whole storyof philosophical thought is nothing more than a history of attempts to separate the object and the subject, and each new attempt implies that the previous line of separation has been drawn incorrectly or partially 'fictitious' (Beer 30 - quote the original) This division is the fundamental premise of the tradition through which Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Bankes, the Ramsays' friend and host, regard themselves as "knowing subjects who examine and manipulate the order of nature – conceptually (as in the case of Mr. Ramsay) or empirically (as in the case of Mr. Bankes)” (Storl, 305), this division and the philosophical tradition associated with it are deconstructed and replaced by an alternative vision of perception that makes the “thinking subject” superfluous. As Banfield outlines in careful detail, Woolffu's understanding of philosophy largely influenced by the work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore seeks to reconcile in epistemological terms the fundamental problem of the relationship between subject and object: “That the mind can 'knowing' one's private experience is not contestable, but that one can have knowledge that goes beyond immediate experience, a knowledge of the external world, is subject to doubt” (Banfield, 22). Woolf's understanding of philosophy was largely defined by the conflict between "two versions of one knowledge of the external world, a direct understanding of it through the senses and the other scientific knowledge, chiefly modern physics." Both made some empirical statements: “All we know immediately is not matter, but our own sensations. The object of science goes beyond immediate knowledge. But the sensation is the proof. The empirical basis of objective knowledge therefore rests on subjective foundations” (Banfield, 6). The truth, therefore, cannot be perceived from a singular and detached perspective. Russell formulated this position in a 1926 lecture at Cambridge University: All empirical evidence consists ultimately in perception, for it is the latter which provides the evidence for the law of physics. In Galileo's time this fact did not seem to pose major problems, since the world of physics had not yet become as abstract and remote as subsequent research made it... The problem arises because the world of physics is, prima facie, so different from the world of perception that it is difficult to see how one can provide evidence in favor of the other (Banfield, 6). Russell responds to the "doubt" of the external world by restoring the possibility of a reality independent of subjective perception through his argument that we can logically infer knowledge of the unobserved object not directly from the observed experience of it, but through "the apparent paradox of unoccupied perspectives and senseless sensitivity". That is, through the fact that any human perspective can perceive it (Banfield, 59-107). The consequence for Woolf was an “impressionistic” mode of storytelling in which the individual “I” is effectively superfluous. Banfield thus characterizes Woolf's novels as a Leibizian “monadology,” an atomized universe – not an “unbroken whole” – in which the “table is not one table, but many” (Banfield, 108). This universe “is founded on a philosophical system, a theory of knowledge” in which “[o]bjects are reduced to 'sensory data' separable from sensations and observing subjects to 'perspectives'. Atomism multiplies these perspectives”. From this point of view, “the idea of ​​death” is “the separation of otherwise interconnected subject and object” (Banfield, 1). In this context, we can understand Lily Briscoe's difficulty in understanding the subject of Mr. Ramsay's work: So now she always saw, whenhe thought of Mr. Ramsay's work, a clean kitchen table. Now it was stuck in the fork of a pear tree, because they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, he focused his mind, not on the tree's silver-studded bark, or its fish-shaped leaves, but on a phantom kitchen table, one of those tables of smooth, grainy planks and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, standing there, with its four legs in the air” (Woolf TL, 23). The inadequacy of a singular perspective is further observed after Mrs. Ramsay's death, in Lily Briscoe reflecting that "[one] wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with... Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get around that woman, he thought" (Woolf TL, 294). To penetrate Mrs. Ramsay's essence and identity, a pair of eyes would need to "enter through the keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silently at the window alone" (Woolf TL , 294) and capture a subsequent external portrait of Mrs. Ramsay in all her settings. Another pair would pass into Mrs. Ramsay's consciousness to see what was “stirring and shaking in her mind” and reveal answers to questions of perception: “What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when was a wave breaking?” (WoolfTL, 294). Yet, to fully embrace Mrs. Ramsay's being, even these “fifty pairs of eyes” are insufficient, as Lily contemplates Mrs. Ramsay's “chambers of mind and heart,” imagining them as “treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if they could be spelled, would teach everything” (Woolf TL, 79). In coordinating narrative perspectives, Woolf effectively constructs multiple “pairs of eyes” in her portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay, including the omniscient eyes of the narrator, the external eyes of the characters, and the internal eyes of the character herself. Banfield describes this method in terms of an “infinite number of possible perspectives” that constitute Woolf's universe and “as London at night, outside a multitude of rooms and houses, is dotted with points of light, private worlds” (Banfield , 109). While Woolf enacts this privilege of crossing the spatial and temporal boundaries of her characters, she also recognizes that “fifty pairs of eyes” cannot satisfy the breadth and depth of any identity. Lily, without access to more than one perspective, wonders early in the novel how "could one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?" (WoolfTL, 79); however, even the "unsealed" identity in the narrator's eyes is elusive, as Lily herself eventually discovers and ultimately wonders "how many forms could a person wear" (Woolf TL, 290). The possibilities of identity are thus expanded and multiplied, and this is largely due to the deconstruction of the rigid separation between subject and object. Furthermore, the dominion that the subject holds over the object is diffuse, as the subject must recognize that understanding reality occurs in power with additional perspectives, rather than in power. The philosophical shifts outlined above where the division and power relationship between subject and object open up the space of aesthetic possibilities that further Woolf's political concerns. In A Room of One's Own, she protests against the mystification of the objectified female image: women have served throughout these centuries as mirrors that possess the magical and delightful power to reflect the figure of man at twice its natural size... Mirrors are essential for all violent and heroic action. This is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insistso emphatically about the inferiority of women, because if they were not inferior, they would stop expanding (Woolf ROO, 44). The true “object” of this projected vision is obscured – but how does this change the male perspective so as to recognize this darkness and consequently improve the condition of women? As Nancy Armstrong points out, in the modernist period “the genre of human identity provided the metaphysical beams of modern culture – its reigning mythology – [me] instead of a 'soul' – Locke's word for that which exists before the process of self-development. begins: the essential self was commonly understood in terms of gender.” As a result, men and women were divided into separate spheres according to the determining “essence” of their apparent masculine or feminine characteristics. Public employment, earning money, public interaction, and verbal articulation were masculine, while domestic work, private family interaction, modesty, and verbal inarticulation were feminine (Armstrong, 18-19). In short, masculinity was associated with “economic and political qualities” while femininity was associated with “emotional qualities”, and these roles were considered natural and essential: writing in 1913, Walter Heape, “an anti-suffragist zoologist”, could claim that since the reproductive system differs structurally and functionally “in Male and Female; and as all other organs and organ systems are influenced by this system, it is certain that the male and the female are essentially different” (Gilbert and Gubar, xvi). In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown” Woolf challenges the underlying power relations that dictate women's lives in terms of knowledge of their seemingly innate “nature”: “I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” (Woolf BB, 239). In this passage we can find Woolf's criticism of the male subject who struggles to control the material world through logical thought, as Ramsay strives to achieve in To the Lighthouse: For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into many notes , or as the alphabet is arranged into twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no difficulty in running through those letters one by one, steadily and precisely, until he reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q Very few people in all England have ever reached Q,... But after Q? What comes next? Following the Q are a number of letters, the last of which is barely visible to mortal eyes, but glows red in the distance. Z is only achieved by one man in a generation. However, if he could reach R, that would be something...Q could prove. If Q then it is Q – R— (Woolf TL, 53-4). In “Getting to Q: Sexual Lines in To the Lighthouse” Rachel Bowlby finds in this passage the “structure of male subjectivity” as a linear progression of “human development” from which women are excluded: There is no subjectivity without sexual difference, and not There is no natural and programmed progression for those who belong to one or the other biological sex towards achieving the socially attributed "male" or "female" identity. Since the dominant line is that of masculinity, the girl's understanding of the meaning of sexual difference implies dealing with her de facto eccentricity, forced to take a position with respect to the norm from which she is by definition excluded: like the image of maternal fulfillment seen from the train window, as the 'woman' despised for her lack of the masculine attribute, or as an intruder in the men's compartment (Bowlby GQ, 57). In “The Trained Mind” Bowlby comments on a passage from A Room of One's Own, in which Woolf writes: “Because if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows howexpress it, will light a torch in that vast chamber where no one has yet been. It is all half-light and deep shadow like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle looking down, without knowing where one is putting one's feet” (ROO, 80). Bowlby observes: The subterranean and dark images of this passage recall the frequent allusions in a region of contemporary feminist theory to two of Freud's metaphors for femininity. In his essay on “Female Sexuality” (1931), Freud compares the discovery of the meaning of the “initial, pre-Oedipal phase for girls” to that “in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the Greek civilization”. '. And in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), he states that "the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology." The conflation of historical and spatial darkness in the archaeological analogy suggests that femininity somehow escapes or precedes the parameters of rationalistic representation; the “dark continent” suggests a vast expanse awaiting its illumination, but also the enigma of a space not assimilable to the norms of “civilized” thought (Bowlby TM, 28). This passage highlights the problems of knowledge that mark the imbalance of power between men and women. The naturalized norm exemplified by men, rather than seen as their own sexual difference, is upheld as that which is known, while women's sexual difference is mystified and marginalized as that which is unknowable. However, as the interpretations of Al Faro above demonstrate, it is possible to access the truth only through a perspective limited by its singularity. Banfield notes that "Moore and Russell's revolt against idealism...allow[ed] the possibility that there is an unknowable truth...denying...the Berkeleyan proposition 'nothing can be true without being known,' as he puts it Russell in The Philosophy of Leibniz" (Banfield, 153). In this sense, the loss of the philosophical assumption of absolute access to the knowable leaves room for the possibility of an autonomous female subjectivity. It is in this context that we can understand Mrs Ramsay's retreat into her private space as an expression of this possibility. Mrs. Ramsay finds this imaginary empty space strangely comforting. When she enjoys solitude, sitting alone before dinner, she shrinks into herself into the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” (Woolf TL, 95-96). Here, Mrs. Ramsay turns away from public or social identity and sinks into a “dark,” “omnipresent,” “unfathomably deep” place where “the horizon [seems] limitless to her.” Rising “not as himself… but as a wedge of darkness,” a person can go anywhere, “because no one [sees] him” or can stop him: “There [is] freedom… peace… a calling together, a rest the platform of stability” (Woolf TL, 96). This free space is liberating, allowing Mrs. Ramsay to abandon the surface identity and sink down to where she can be and see anything. Freud's “dark continent” of unknowable female sexual identity is thus reformulated as a space of possibility in which a female subjectivity is not limited by the dominance of the male norm of development or “knowability.” In other words, “[t]he invisible table, a logical possibility, leads knowledge outside the comfortable sphere of certainty to another uncertain knowledge” (Banfield, 51). As numerous critics have observed, Woolf's awareness of philosophy through the work of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the work of "Cambridge" philosophers such as Russell and Moore, had a noticeable effect on her novels. This is particularly illustrated by the problematic posed by “subject and object” and the independent existence of the “table” within To the.