Virginia Woolf's "Ontoethics" in Her Late Oeuvre from the Perspective of Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism

Abstract

In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf introduces her personal philosophy, her own ontology, based on the idea that all human and nonhuman beings are interconnected in a single work of art. This idea is foregrounded in her novels The Waves, Between the Acts, and the pacifist manifesto Three Guineas, where Woolf fully develops her "ontoethics," which consists in ontological interconnection of human beings and recognition of value of every human and nonhuman being. This article discusses this universal relationality via Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism, which emphasizes the interrelatedness of all constituents of reality and solidarity that springs from this ontological bond.