{"id":13015,"date":"2026-05-20T22:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/virginia-woolf-on-how-we-come-to-know-the-world-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T22:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:32:08","slug":"virginia-woolf-on-how-we-come-to-know-the-world-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/virginia-woolf-on-how-we-come-to-know-the-world-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Truth,<\/a><\/p>\n

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality<\/a> \u2014 all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them \u2014 is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia<\/a> of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that tessellated totality than with the mind\u2019s rational analysis of reality. <\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf<\/a> (January 25, 1882\u2013March 28, 1941)explores this with her characteristic rigor of thought and passion for language in a wonderful essay about the Ancient Greeks later included in The Common Reader<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the classic collection that also gave us Woolf on how to hear your soul<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Virginia Woolf<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to \u201cthe indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth\u201d that made Socrates such a timeless fulcrum of wisdom (which, I suppose, is the ultimate use of the truth), and in fiery defiance of Descartes, she insists that we arrive at the truth \u2014 about the world, about ourselves, about the substance life is made of \u2014 with more than the mind:<\/p>\n

\n

What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it\u2026 Truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it\u2026 Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter\u2019s night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The great paradox is that truth \u2014 the truth \u2014 is at once multifarious and unitary, something Woolf captures in her altogether exquisite meditation on creativity as the antipode to the \u201cnon-being\u201d that slips over reality like cotton wool<\/a>, at the end of which she writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern\u2026 The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet<\/em> or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}