Brave new world, That has such people in't!

'Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?'
'I don't know what you mean, I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays'
He laughed. 'Yes. "Everybody's happy nowadays." We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.'
'I don't know what you mean,' she repeated.
(Aldous Huxley Brave New World Folio Society ed., London 1971 p.70)

Do you know what it means to be free?

Pooh Bear quizzes quissity and quiddity

"On Wednesday, when the sky is blue,
And I have nothing else to do,
I sometimes wonder if it’s true
That who is what and what is who."
A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh 

How come Pooh gets it, but super-smart scientists and perfectly logical philosophers don't?

Death-wish in Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of deprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?" (Hamlet 3, i)

And after that?

"'Where do I wander?' she mused. 'Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All's equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses  there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.'" (Between the Acts Folio Society ed. 1974 p.117)

Shakespeare gives six good reasons to do yourself in, and Woolf outlines a modern (or Greek?) idea of where that may lead. Life is change, and many changes are painful, namely those tribulations issuing from life's interminable power plays with others. Sadly, on the barren, changeless field the hesitant movement of seeking and, perhaps, tentatively finding another also ceases.

George Sand on individuality

“Toutes les existences sont solidaires les unes des autres, et tout être humain qui présenterait la sienne isolément, sans la rattacher à celle de ses semblables, n'offrirait qu'une énigme à débrouiller. Cette individualité n'a par elle seule ni signification ni importance aucune. Elle ne prend un sens quelconque qu'en devenant une parcelle de la vie générale, en se fondant avec l'individualité de chacun de mes semblables, et c'est par là qu'elle devient de l'histoire.” Histoire de ma Vie George Sand pp. 240f.
English: “All lives are supportive of each other, and every human being who would present his own isolation, without connecting to that of his fellows, would offer a riddle to unravel. This individuality has in itself no meaning or no importance. It takes some direction by becoming a piece of the general life, based in itself with the individuality of each of my peers, and this is where it becomes history.”
So, although it seems that in the modern world we are dissociated from each other, each locked in an isolated individuality, in truth we are always already associated with each other, and our individual freedom is only given rein by how we associate within customs and practices of social interplay.

Private freedom and its perversion through publicity

"Private judgement is still free in private and that freedom is the essence of freedom. ... We must extinguish the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity, not merely because the limelight is apt to be held in incompetent hands, but because of the psychological effect of such illumination upon those who receive it. ... [We] guess that ease and freedom, the power to change and the power to grow, can only be preserved by obscurity; and that if we wish to help the human mind to create, and to prevent it from scoring the same rut repeatedly, we must do what we can to shroud it in darkness." (Virginia Woolf Three Guineas pp. 842, 865f)

I have every reason to be mistrusting of the flattery of public attention. That way lies the danger of losing my self. And in this age when modernity has reached its pinnacle and consummation. the pressure to conform to the hegemonic worldview is overwhelming. Anyone putting it into question is 'obviously' not at the forefront of progress, is incomprehensible, is obscure...

Oppressive atmosphere in Virginia Woolf

Further on in Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay, Three Guineas, we read, "Odour then - or shall we call it 'atmosphere' - is a very important element in professional life... It is true that women civil servants deserve to be paid as much as men; but it is also true that they are not paid as much as men. The discrepancy is due to atmosphere. Atmosphere plainly is a very mighty power. Atmosphere not only changes the sizes and shapes of things; it affects solid bodies, like salaries, which might have been thought impervious to atmosphere. ... there is [also] something in the atmosphere of the private house which deflects the wife's spiritual [equal] share of the common income impalpably but irresistibly towards those causes which her husband approves and those pleasures which he enjoys." (SW 2007 pp. 821, 824)

"Atmosphere plainly is a very mighty power." seems to be the core insight here, and it pertains not just to the historical struggle of women for equality. Atmosphere is that mood cultivated in a society's culture in a given time which exudes its own intangible, but nonetheless - or rather: and therefore - all the more effective, social power. A culture's ethos hangs in the air.

Freedom to earn a living as the core of emancipation?

In her 1938 essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes, "... the right to vote, in itself by no means negligible, was mysteriously connected with another right of such immense value to the daughters of educated men that almost every word in the dictionary has been changed by it, ... You will not think these words exaggerated if we explain that they refer to the right to earn one's living. That, sir, was the right that was conferred upon us less than twenty years ago, in the year 1919, by an Act which unbarred the professions. ... Whatever the reason, whether pride, or love of freedom, or hatred of hypocrisy, you will understand the excitement with which in 1919 your sisters began to earn not a guinea but a sixpenny bit, and will not scorn that pride, or deny that it was justly based..." (Selected Works 2007 p.794)
Woolf zeros in on precisely this freedom to strive for an income as core to her conception of the emancipation of women. One could say that this is a bourgeois-liberal, indeed, capitalist right that unleashes individualism in yet one more sector of human living by infecting also the so-called female sex. Or one could point out that the right to earn an income is merely a reified kind of freedom because, after all, income is nothing other than reified value, and such is the element of nihilistic consumerism. Or one could object that the right to strive to earn a living guarantees no specific outcome, that is, that a woman will actually earn enough to live off for herself and her dependants, so that the freedom is hollow. All these objections could be and have been made from the Left. So wherein lies freedom? In the potential to risk a free life-movement? Or in material security, i.e. in the so-called 'freedom from want'? The word 'freedom' seems to be very adaptable (words can be twisted this way and that) to saying entirely opposed and contrary conceptions of what freedom is supposed to consist in. Woolf's thought on the bourgeois-liberal emancipation of women gives us something to chew on.