Abstract
British modernist author Virginia Woolf rejected pure materialism dominating the fiction at the turn of the 20th century, similarly as process philosophy rejected long-dominating substance theories of mechanistic stable matter. She turned away from descriptions of external material reality towards the emphasis on "manifestations of consciousness" in fiction, which goes hand in hand with Alfred North Whitehead's refusal of substance theories lacking experiential grounding.
Both strived to level the distinction between the ontological categories of the mental and the physical. Whitehead underlines the conscious experience and psychological field of a human perceiver in the same way as Woolf depicts an individual's subjective perspective of reality.
Whitehead, as the other propagators of New Physics, attempted to reconsider the traditional conception of matter by defining all objects not as composed of particle-like solid matter but as fields that have temporal and spatial extensions. The philosopher's view of the physical world comprised of constantly changing processes and his refutation of "senseless, valueless and purposeless material" (Science and the Modern World) coincides with Woolf's idea of matter that is never stable, inert and lifeless in her fiction.
The attempts to include experience and mental aspect to every constituent of reality is manifested in Woolf's fiction via physical objects, or appearances of physical objects, that give rise to a character's sense experience. The perceiving subject often merges with the object perceived, and dissolves in the pure experience, which echoes Whitehead's idea that in every natural occurrence "the mental occasion supersedes the physical occasion" ("Time").
Moreover, Whitehead's view of the world as organic unity of interdependent processes mirrors Woolf's holistic philosophy outlined in her autobiographical essay "A Sketch of the Past". Although Woolf's pursuit of unity and interconnectivity pervades every aspect of the author's fiction, it dominates her novel The Waves.
This novel explores the interconnectivity of the characters, the unity of their mental fields, their merged consciousness, and the inseparability of the characters and their environment. Woolf writes in her diary that she sets out to capture "the continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night, all flowing together".
Similarly, Whitehead states in Science and the Modern World that his conception of nature is based on the organic unity of "electrons, protons, molecules, and living bodies". While sharing experience, the characters in The Waves are capable of co-creation of the external reality.
Woolf emphasizes an individual's unique contribution to the final image, which corresponds to Whitehead's idea of creative process in which "the many become one, and are increased by one" (Process and Reality). In addition, Whitehead's focus on the past experience as the accumulative basis of the present experience hints at Woolf's idea about the continuity of experience expressed in The Waves by Louis who feels to be "woven in and out of the long summers and winters" and does not conceive himself as "a single and passing being".