The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf: Moments of Becoming

by Thomas Nail

Towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf defined her “philosophy”-the “constant idea” that “makes her a writer.” She wrote that this idea had given her “the strongest pleasure known to [her].” She called these “exceptional moments,” or “moments of being.”

Thomas Nail contends that Woolf is a philosopher of being. And these "moments of being" as forming a unique process philosophy of motion. In her description of these moments Woolf gives us access to a world in motion and process; where all of nature and matter flows, ripples, and quivers. In these moments the anthropocentric division between humans and nature dissolves into metastable patterns-without essences or vital forces. Matter becomes dynamic, and what originally appeared solid is perceived as woven, porous, and fluid.

The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf begins by defining the basic idea of the moment of being, why it is important and how to understand it and its philosophical implications. It recounts a series of 14 'moments' each of which explores an aspect of Woolf's philosophy. They show how the moments evolve and articulate Woolf's process philosophy of movement. Each moment reveals unique aspects of how moments work and the kind of philosophical vision Woolf held. Nail concludes by addressing some of the ethical and political consequences of these moments in Woolf 's thinking. In the end, the book contends that Woolf offers us an absolutely unique philosophical and aesthetic understanding of phenomena, including nature, culture, desire, gender, writing/reading, consciousness, art, ecology, and sensation. It shows that Woolf is a philosopher in her own right, and held a unique philosophical position that makes a unique contribution to how to think in the world.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published May 29, 2025

Reviews

[Searnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, in the beginning Thomas Nail writes, “I want to read Woolf as a philosopher in her own right.” Three Reasons for the Woolf Charmed Clan to gather in this text:

Second, Nail writes, “she chose her own unique path.”

Third, Nail warns, “We must be careful not to use canonical philosophers to validate Woolf’s philosophy…”

In the text that follows, Nail makes it so.

This sinfully readable work, which avoids both philosophical jargon and obscure allusions, follows from its dominate paragraph structure. That is that Nail typically begins with a premise, “I am arguing here specifically that Woolf’s entire philosophy, regardless of who we compare it with, stems from a single concept: her moments of being.” And the paragraph ends with a tidy summation, “More specifically, and uniquely, my argument is that, after carefully reading as many of Woolf’s moments I could find, the description of reality common to all of them is that we live in material and interrelated world of patterned processes. Even more precisely, and distinct from other readings, argue here that Woolf was a philosopher of movement.” (p16-17)

The above paragraph presents key terms such as ‘moments of being’, ‘material’, ‘interrelated’, ‘patterned’ and ‘process’ that inform Woolf’s philosophy. A few pages later, Nail writes (again the first sentence of a paragraph), “For Woolf, we must remember that naturalism did not mean determinism, hierarchy, reductionism, essentialism, or discrete objects.” (p-20) In fact, for Woolf, nature is “an indeterminate process of aberrant swerving that weaves together metastable patterns.” (p-20) The phrase, ‘metastable patterns’, introduces two important features of Woolf’s philosophy. First, because here the term ‘metastable’, which means a slow, imperceptible change, refers to our ‘every day’ or empirical world. Woolf simply describes our empirical world as a ‘cotton-wool’ veil. Second, and more importantly, Woolf’s cotton-wool veil differs greatly, for example, from Cpt. Ahab’s ‘pasteboard masks’ and ‘linked analogies’, which reflect a Platonic assumption that there is a ‘real’ world of Forms vs our illusory world of corporeal Content. In contrast, Woolf’s ‘patterns’ close the gap between Plato’s forms and its everyday contents. To illustrate this relationship or rather the identity of form with content-meaning the inside is the outside- Nail uses the image of a Mobius strip. To nail (ha,ha) this intimate connection together, I cite from the ‘Kinetic Patterns’ section of Nail’s book a quote Nail cites from Woolf’s essay, “Moments of Being”: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we; I mean all human beings; are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of that work of art.”(MB 72, p36) In short, the sightless mix and flow of kinetic patterns (ever deforming, always becoming, tessellations of fractal shapes) constitute our empirical world of ‘metastable’ or “discrete objects”. To summarize: ‘nature’, for Woolf, is not only an “indeterminate process of aberrant swerving that weaves together metastable patterns” (p20) but also where “there is no God, no immortal soul, no transcendence, or unchanging Platonic forms beneath the cotton wool…”. (p35)

But wait, if “the whole world is a work of art”, then it must have an art maker. If the “whole world’s a stage”, so to speak, and we are “merely”, that is to say, passive “players in it”, who or what then is the artist? Woolf’s answer: we are; because we are continuous with the protean flow, the whirlpool of self- generating patterns, which, (conveniently can) ‘crystalize’ into the metastabilities that inform our phenomenal lives. So, in this twisting Mobius fashion we become the ‘thing-in -itself’. (Pace Kant) The character that best pictures the intimate relationship of art to artist at a moment of being is Lily Briscoe. (Well examined in ‘Moment 8: The Fluidity of Life” section. (pp124-135) In spite of the fact that Woolf’s philosophy disallows the intrusion of any Transcendent Puppet Master, I will nevertheless offer that the phrase, “Shiva dances and the world dances with him” as a useful way of describing/understanding Lily’s ‘moment of being/becoming and painting’. Recall that Shive’s relationship to the world is, to quote Cpt Ahab, “far beyond utterance.” This suggests that Shive’s relation to the world is not a mechanical causal one; but, perhaps, a quantum one. Thus, when Shive dances, which includes the rhythms created by his poses, his moves radiate great sensuous waves out to the world. And the world responds to these good, good vibrations synesthetically mixing colors, shapes, scents, textures, sounds and movement. (To see what this might look like watch a Bharata Natyam performance of Shive dances.) So likewise, “The marks (on the canvas) are not Lily’s alone but are continuations of the world’s marks carried through Lily. The patterns of her brush strokes are not representations of reality but performances or dances of reality itself on canvas. The painting is only the record of the motions.” (p126) “The human body and its arts are a continuation of the pattern of nature’s art.” (p127) “The dance of the body is the dance of the world folded back on itself. In short, rhythms and patterns do not represent the world but iterate it.” (p127)

So, what does all this philosophy mean? It means that for Woolf, “Aesthetics… is not about representation or the meaning of life but about weaving metastable patterns from the flow of things. The task is…to make something stable from the flow, to shape the chaos into something more permanent so others can see it too.” (p134)