The (In)authenticity of Being-with: Virginia Woolf and Collective Consciousness

Małgorzata HOŁDA

Abstract

The body of Virginia Woolf’s work is marked by a shifting interest from the nature of individual to collective consciousness. Her most preeminent novels, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, are mostly exemplars of the former, while The Waves and Between the Acts demonstrate a progressively deepening inquiry into the significance of collectivity. A deep dive into the dichotomies between unity and disunity, Between the Acts explores the intricate texture of collective consciousness. Simultaneously, Woolf encourages us to view authenticity and inauthenticity of being-with as an interweaving profoundly expressive of our human condition. At the core of the binary oppositions the novelist evokes, such as togetherness and separateness, genuineness and falsehood, stands the question of human Dasein. Proposing a hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation of the dialectic of the individual and the collective in Between the Acts, I draw on the affinities between Virginia Woolf’s philosophy of existentiality and Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and more specifically on his understanding of truth as Aletheia. While doing so, I focus on the interlocking nature of social (outer) and personal (inner) meanings of dispersion, encapsulated in Woolf’s laconic but potent statement in the novel: “Dispersed are we.”