The problem of other minds is not abstract, first.
First it is loneliness. It’s not the falsifiability issue and its potential solipsism. It’s not epistemological, first. It’s rich in moral quality; it is deeply human. Whitman cried out, awed at our eternal prison: “Yourself! yourself! yourself, for ever and ever!” Plath wondered “is there no way out of the mind?” before melting hers. The archetypally neurotic main character of “Louis” explains to his daughter the nonsense of boredom while we possess infinite inwardness of the soul. But we are infinitely inward, and not infinitely outward. Our outwardness is painfully finite. This is where we land.
A door between infinities
And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is structured so that each character’s finitude and their perception of their finitude is most potently rendered. There is a door at the threshold of one room and another. It wavers in reality, then, in an instant, becomes the richest thing in existence. It vanishes, in an instant.
Peter was once the object of Clarissa Dalloway’s deepest affections. They confided and laughed with each other in their youth, removed from the events of the novel by thirty years across an ocean. And so it is that when Peter sits with Clarissa. They chat aimlessly, the novel suggesting an infinite difference between the words exchanged and the individual interiorities grinding away, as the door wavers and then, immediately and briefly, it solidifies. Peter finds himself weeping, Clarissa finds herself caressing his hand. Overwhelmed with the scene, neither can accurately assess this breach of finitude, the influx of infinite that brought them to such vulnerable behavior. Peter rushes out.
Empathic capacity
Peter and Clarissa meditate and reflect, respectively, on Clarissa’s social ability.
Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
Clarissa is an evangelizer. She understands the potentialities of the inward infinities locked away across London. She wants to unleash those potential energies, so she hosts parties. The capacity to manifest those doorways between people is arresting, and Clarissa is not self-interrogative enough to understand that. Peter’s own love for her, a remnant that until and through the final line of the novel itself wavers in reality, is amplified by her natural imposition upon interiority. This too demystifies Miss Kilwin’s intense hatred for her — Kilwin is an unfortunate but nonetheless ugly, pitiful soul that Clarissa perceives with intuitive clarity. It’s that instantaneous clarity that causes Clarissa to laugh, and Kilwin to spiral into rationalizations of her unprincipled resentiments.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.
Here, Peter imagines the behavior of a general human soul as a female fish. Peter is rationalizing his decision to attend Clarissa’s party, which he has previously in the novel thought of disdainfully, and obscuring his true motivations: to continue to stand in Clarissa’s presence, to once again have that door opened. The tragedy of feeling that Lady Rosseter, previously the Sally Seton of their youth, glimpses in Peter as he sits with her. He is only waiting, waiting to once again weep and be caressed.
They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa.
And why? No one in the novel nor out could say. Mathematically, that is the nature of infinity. One would require more than the finite connection that our sparing empathic capacities permit. So too does our reflexive capacity fail. The infinite gazing in on itself captures only a finite snapshot in any given moment.
“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”
No one does, at least not for long.
Religious experience and the presence of another consciousness
Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another.
Clarissa’s parties, due to the powerful capacity most tenderly perceived by Peter (“But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.”), turn the souls of the attendees into semi-permeable membranes. The unreal is the porousness, the heightened intensity of the wavering, a vulnerability not present or at least not so visible apart from this environment. The real, though, is the presence of consciousnesses that pass the membrane. Those minds are available!
Clarissa is a recurring character in Woolf’s bibliography, because Woolf’s works are about the occasional permeability of consciousness. They are about the overwhelming tedium of separation and the overwhelming unreality of presence.
One of the Bible’s motifs is the “bread of life”, “mana from heaven”, that one can “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” Taste and the olfactory sense is unabstratable — language cannot wholly express the qualia those senses translate, unlike sight which can be almost completely abstracted into colors, shapes, light, etc. Religious experience, as suggested by this motif, is unabstractable, and the faithful hold without confirmation this experience as shared.
What Clarissa calls unreal and what caused Peter to weep was akin to religious experience. It is the rare, undiluted experience of another’s consciousness. It is an escape from the mind.