St Augustine’s Contemplative Philosophy in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: The Cases of Time and Self-Examination

• Main Author: Salah BOUREGBI
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universitatea "Stefan cel Mare" Suceava 2017-12-01
• Series: Annals of Philosophy, Social and Human Disciplines
• Subjects: St Augustine; Virginia Woolf; Self-examination; Time Dimension; Contemplative philosophy
• Online Access: http://www.fig.usv.ro/socio-umane/arhiva/2017II/APSHUSDec2017_17_40.pdf

The aim of this contribution is to examine and unveil the Augustinian time process and self-examination in Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” The latter is a successful (re)presentation of the interrelation between human consciousness and time “control”. The self cannot be defined without time dimension. Woolf seems to confirm that time is more interior than exterior and is an essential part of human being: it is through it that human being is felt as a part of the world. There are some powerful statements of her characters that show strange similarities to Augustine’s doctrine of time, memory and existence. This triad characterizes his works, mainly “Confessions.” Woolf’s characters are so contemplative. We find them looking outward in order to discover their inside. The internal and the external are the focus of time knowledge and self-discovery. They are dialogically interrelated and define one another. The self is an ever “IS” within the presentness of the present: the “was” (past) is only a memory (“the no-longer”) and the “will be” (future) is only the “not-yet” that has to come in order to become a present. In Augustine’s doctrine, the past and the future do not exist because they are absent in the present. Yet, their only existence is the present – the NOW. Consciousness preserves one’s past within itself. The individual meets and examines himself through consciousness. Mrs. Ramsay in “To the Lighthouse” experiments these dimensions and tries to define herself through time.