"My roots go down to the depths of the world": Proto-Environmental Thought in Virginia Woolf's Oeuvre and Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
Abstract
Although Virginia Woolf was not an environmentalist, her fiction often deals with environmental issues and reweaves the gap between the human and the natural. As one of her characters in The Waves is "rooted to the middle of the earth" and Clarissa Dalloway is "being part of the trees at home," Woolf seems to embrace Whitehead's idea of nature conceived as "a complex of related entities" (The Concept of Nature) in which "we cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends" (Modes of Thought).
Therefore, the philosopher and the writer seem to explore a premise of deep ecology, which prioritizes interrelatedness over separation between the human and the nonhuman, and their organicist ideas of continuity between human subjects and nature may be related to the current discussion of the Anthropocene. Moreover, like Whitehead, Woolf rejects the idea or inert and lifeless nature and adopts a panpsychist, or panexperientialist, perspective of materiality-objects in her fiction are capable of some elementary experience, or "prehension," and the writer herself claims in The Waves that "all seems alive".
Last but not least, in Mrs Dalloway Septimus pronounces a profound truth that "Men must not cut trees" and in her essay "The Docks of London," Woolf warns us against the exploitation of natural sources seen as mere commodities, which evokes Whitehead's criticism of modern science and political economy that "directed attention to things as opposed to values" (Science and the Modern World). As a result, both Woolf and Whitehead envisage a speculative philosophy/fiction directed towards a more ecologically sound concept of human-nonhuman relationship.