FAZ Saba

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  • The Unconscious Is Everything You Almost Were

    The Unconscious Is Everything You Almost Were

    Introduction

    – Unconsciousness is not too complicated to use in everyday talk, but not so simple that we can put a bridle on it. It sits somewhere between mystery and familiarity, between the reachable and the untouchable. Enough depth to keep pulling you in, enough vagueness to never let you settle. Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology — everyone tries to catch it, define it, cage it.

    – We usually picture it as a layer beneath consciousness. Something underneath. Something hidden. Something that navigates our behaviour while we look somewhere else. The iceberg picture. The shadow. The “real you” behind the scenes.

    – This article tries to overturn this picture and, at the same time, redefine it within a new framework:

    – Try to overturn:
    Unconsciousness is not a layer beneath consciousness.
    It is not a hidden room/castle behind our vision.
    It is not a process that makes/causes/touches all of our consciousness states.
    We are not passengers driven by unconsciousness.

    – Instead:
    Unconsciousness is a collection of mental states that are unmanifested/potential.
    Every mental state could be an unconscious state; it doesn’t matter how important or how deep it is for us, or whether it is just a simple, everyday mental state.
    It changes constantly; every moment, our unconsciousness is different from the moment before.
    Distance from what we could be at a given moment is central to defining unconsciousness.

    – From here, two questions arise, both at the heart of this paper:
    What is the meaning beneath consciousness? Or, where is unconsciousness?
    And also, what is unconsciousness made of? Is it just a process of mind/brain, or mental states, or just some huge emotional experience, or …?

    – Most approaches to unconsciousness — Freudian, folk psychology, neuroscience, … — try to tell us how unconsciousness works. They tell beautiful stories, but:
    When asked where unconsciousness is and what it is made of, their answers are not interesting/convincing enough to be trusted. The devil shows itself / comes out once you ask for details.

    – Here, I try to redefine unconsciousness with the help of the book: The Repository of Understandings (2025), by Arbabi. I try to overturn some presuppositions in order to set up a new framework.
    Shall we start? ….

    Unconsciousness: a term with several faces

    – The most famous face of unconsciousness is the Freudian face. A sophisticated, beautiful face, behind which dark/scary secrets hide. Freudians have become a major part of almost any (general) discussion of unconsciousness. After that, (folk) psychologists, cognitive scientists (neuroscience) and … have started to build their own views of it.

    – For Freud, unconsciousness is something repressed, as a high-pressure dumping ground. Toxic thoughts, forbidden urges, and past trauma are locked away because the mind cannot handle them, forcing their way out sideways through dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue.

    – For psychology, a bit after Freud, it is not a dumping ground; it is like a second person living in your brain. A mystical force that knows your “true self,” that carries deep creative wisdom. The hidden self, the alter ego.

    – For a modern scientific approach (neuroscience), the unconscious is not something mysterious to deal with; the term itself is replaced by “non-conscious process”. Just the brain running background programs. Balance, vision, blood sugar, all handled below the one thing your attention can hold at a time. No secrets, just autopilot.

    – Despite all differences, some similarities hold:
    All see the mind as an iceberg, consciousness the tip, something larger beneath. All treat the conscious mind as a bottleneck/slow/limited while the unconscious runs a massive number of operations in parallel.
    All agree that unconsciousness drives behaviour, each in its own idiom. For example:
    – Freud: repressed trauma sabotages your relationships.
    – Folk psychology: your gut tells you who to trust.
    – Neuroscience: your basal ganglia and amygdala move your body before your conscious mind registers the danger.

    – In all models:
    You are a passenger. Unconsciousness is driving.

    – All models agree:
    The hidden material is not sealed off permanently; it crosses into awareness through context.
    Like a slip of the tongue, a hypnotic trance, a dream, a sudden crisis, or a change in brain chemistry, there is always a door.

    – All of this is, in its own way, trying to support naive intuition:
    Unconsciousness is larger than consciousness.
    It shapes what we are and do beyond what we see in an aware state and is always context-related.

    – People use unconsciousness to anticipate their own actions, and just as often to justify them.
    Why didn’t I say no? Why do I keep trusting people who hurt me? Why this anxiety, in this room, with these people?
    We need stories to explain ourselves to ourselves, and most approaches to unconsciousness supply the material, especially for what we don’t like (want to change) about our own behaviour.

    – But of the two questions we asked before ¾ especially “where unconsciousness is” ¾ none of these approaches likes to talk about it.
    They believe (mostly explicitly and less implicitly) unconsciousness is a sort of process, like any physiological process in our brain.
    – Process is a fine definition as far as it goes: input, activation, output. Like the process that lets your eyes see. Acceptable. But not very interesting.

    – Freud and folk psychology, even where they lean on process, both mean that unconsciousness is something bigger than a process. Why?
    Because they expect an unconscious state to eventually become conscious, and a process alone never does.
    Because unconsciousness is always related to consciousness; the iceberg metaphor shows that it is intertwined with consciousness.
    But picture unconsciousness as a process, it is like digestion, or any physiological activity when we see a bird: it can make a mental state, or affect it, but it cannot become a conscious state itself.
    So, it cannot be unconsciousness either, because unconsciousness can, and should, be conscious eventually.
    Here, I am using unconsciousness in a narrower sense: not everything that happens without consciousness, but the unmanifested part of the space of mental states.

    – So, if unconsciousness is more than a process, the question returns: where is it? What is it built with, exactly?
    Even in Freud’s own terms, sexual drives, aggressive urges, trauma, locked away somewhere and surfacing in dreams and behaviour, where, exactly, is that somewhere?
    Is unconsciousness itself changing, or is there a fixed repository whose contents change?
    What decides, or how do we decide, that something belongs to the unconscious and something else doesn’t?
     If there is a criterion, unconsciousness can affect the criterion too, which then affects unconsciousness, a loop with no outside.

    – My question is not how unconsciousness works. Every approach above already answers that beautifully. My question is where it is, and how it got there. Framed this way, the clarity these approaches promise falls away. And after that, we can explain how it works.

    – Now, let me introduce a new framework.

    Two Collections/Spaces of Mental States

    First collection: all manifested mental states

    – Each moment we are in one mental state (it could be anything). Each moment we are in one unique situation, which leads/provides us with one unique mental state. It could be a thought, a belief, a feeling, a sense, an emotion, a dream, …
    A moment after a moment, having a mental state after a mental state, being in a situation after a situation. (It doesn’t matter how long it takes: a moment, a second, a few seconds, a minute, a few minutes, or more.)
    Something like a flowing stream of consciousness (James).

    – Now, imagine that all of the mental states one can have are in one collection: the First Collection.
    Every mental state/understanding a person has across their whole life. A track of a lifetime.
    There are a lot of mental states, but ultimately not an infinite number of them; counting them is not impossible.
    The whole collection of mental states a grandma has had from her childhood to now, as a collection, can be seen together. All of the changes, all the thinking, senses, beliefs, …
    It can be one possible definition/imagination of a “person”. What imagination do we have of a being called a “person”? A possible answer could be this:
    A collection of all of the mental states one actually has (all of the situations someone actually is in).

    – All actual mental states one has are related to consciousness. It is the territory of the conscious mind.
    But, how about unconsciousness? From here, the paper shifts to the second collection of mental states, which is related to unconsciousness.

    Second collection: an infinity of unmanifested mental states

    – We already know a lot of things. Think about all of the information/beliefs/thoughts/knowledge/feelings/experiences/… we have read, learned, seen, heard, touched, smelled, intuited, … They are somewhere, and somehow, they work.
    Even the trauma we have, the unspeakable experiences we have, down to the simple ideas, thoughts, feelings we have.
    A whole world sitting within us (almost Mawlana).
    When we are in one conscious mental state, all of these things are unconscious.
    And every unconscious state can become conscious.

    – So…
    We know Melbourne is a city in Australia. Or, we know white storks do not carry newborn babies.
    A question: Where is this information when we think about something else?
    Where are all of the unmanifested mental states when we have just one actual mental state?

    – It (unmanifested mental states) could be more like things we already know.
    You don’t know all of the sentences you may encounter, but to some extent you would almost know the meaning of them.
    You don’t already know all of the mental states you may possibly face, but you will be in one unique mental state (at t1) when you are in that particular situation.

    – Every mental state a person could have at one specific moment (t1). Only one of them actually happens. One of the members of the First Collection, but …
    But instead of this mental state, instead of being in a certain situation, we could have had an infinite number of possible situations and had another mental state.
    From tasting a new ice cream, to seeing a cheating partner, to exploring a new idea, to falling down, to being bitten by a giant in a dream, to…
    Meaning, in one moment we have one actual mental state and infinite other possible mental states, because instead of being in this situation we could have been in countless others.
    Consider a stone (a strange example): it could be in a lot of potential situations that are not happening now. For example, that it can dissolve in water is not something the stone is doing, but it is still part of what the stone can be.
    In a similar way, the mental states we could have had in other situations are not actual now, but they are still part of “what we can be” / “who we are”.

    – Now, freeze a moment! One has an active mental state, the situation they are actually in, and an infinite number of mental states they could have had if they were in different situations.
    A space/collection of infinite mental states, of which just one is actual/manifested, and the rest are unmanifested/potential, in one moment.
    If mind is nothing but this collection at t1, if we can somehow say that talking about mind means talking about all mental states (including everything) in t1.
    If the mind is also understood through what it can be, not only through what it actually is, then the unmanifested part of this space is not nothing. Then unconsciousness…
    Unconsciousness is nothing but all of the unmanifested mental states. All the mental states that could potentially be, instead of the actual one.
    In other words: infinite mental states; just one of them active, the rest unconsciousness.
    This does not mean that an infinite number of mental states are stored somewhere like objects. It means that:
    At a given moment, the space of what a person could mentally be is not exhausted by the one state that is actual.

    – Let’s call this space/collection the Personal Cognitive World. A space holding every understanding a person could have at a given moment, across every possible situation. One is active. The rest sit in potential/unmanifested.
    I will explain what I mean next.

    Space of Mental States as Personal Cognitive World

    – The personal cognitive world sits close to character.
    Everything you are (beliefs, desires, personal history, and culture) shapes your mental state when faced with a situation. Based on who you are, you have a certain mental state.
    And, of course, this mental state / situation shapes your beliefs, history, culture; shapes who you are. So it is a mutual relationship.
    If someone wants to talk about character as a term, to talk about who you are — the Socratic question — they would, as a plausible answer, consider all of the possible mental states someone could have. But how is it possible to consider all mental states?

    – Here, our categorising of mental states into two spaces could be useful.
    First collection: a track of life is a collection of what you actually were at each moment, but it doesn’t show what you could have been if a different situation had happened…
    For drawing what the character of one person is, we should consider all “what if …” situations, which tell us who/what someone/something exactly is.

    – Second collection: it could tell us, at every moment, all the possible mental states you would have in different situations.
    If someone can imagine this collection/space (a shadow of the imagination of this unimaginable space/collection), they come closest to describing what the cognitive world / character of one person is in a moment.
    Of course, the next moment, a different world is there, but (likely) like the previous.

    – In a nutshell: the collection of every such unique mental state, across every possible moment, is the nearest thing to a definition of who we/you are.
    Each moment, you have a different collection of unmanifested mental states.
    One unique mental state exists because all your other possible/unmanifested mental states, in other situations, exist alongside it.

    – It is odd, but I want to consider/imagine this:
    You feel sad in that moment, but at this moment you could potentially be happy, or just see a chair, be hungry, dream, talk, …, read a book, …, swim in the ocean, …
    All of these mental states are unique, they are blended with a lot of senses, experiences, beliefs, … which you have simply because your personal experience, your view, your desires, your …, are unique.
    If even one of these mental states were different, then it would not belong to you. This changes all of the space/collection of mental states, including the active one.

    – Feel shy, face turns red, at a sarcastic remark, with exactly that shade of shyness blended with whatever else is moving through you. That specific mental state is only what it is because of its relation to the mental state you’d have facing a monster in a dream, or seeing a dead bird, or hearing criticism from your boss. Not interchangeable. Coherent with each other, all part of the same world; your world/ your persona / your cognitive world.
    Together, active and unmanifested, they form the personal cognitive world.

    – Now, except for one active mental state, all of the unmanifested/potential mental states could be considered unconscious mental states at t1.
    They (unconscious states) are mental states which could become active (conscious); their being unmanifested does not mean that they are already occurring somewhere outside consciousness; it means that they belong to what the person could be in another situation.
    They are involved in/shape what we are and what we think each moment; they are changing constantly (a change explained in the section on distance below), and they are not a mysterious layer on/in/under the mind/consciousness, but something addressable/reachable.

    – In fact, all of the “what if …” situations and mental states that could be active make up our unconsciousness, no matter how dark, mysterious, secretive, disgusting or valuable they are; how real or delusional; how important or trivial. All of them build our cognitive world, in which every mental state lives.
    So what if smelling Indian food is, at t1, part of our unconsciousness, as well as being afraid of white bed sheets (because of some childhood trauma), to… All of these mental states, regardless of how important they are, are part of our unconsciousness.

    – Even though common sense believes some mental states are more valuable for us, some have more impact on our other mental states, while others do not have, for a person who has them, such a big influence.
    For a person at t1, some of the unmanifested mental states are more important, have more depth, and make up a bigger part of who they are, but some of the unmanifested mental states do not have such a role for the person. So, …
    A question arises: how does the framework evaluate mental states? How are all of the mental states at t1 related to each other? How do we figure out that one of them has more depth than another?

    Distance in the Space of Mental States

    – Let me use your imagination to address the questions above.

    – Imagine you are in a mental state at t1 that is a joyful feeling from seeing a scene in a movie, which may remind you of something personal from your past. Your actual mental state is this sense, of course blended with a lot of personal experience.
    Based on what I have said up to this point, instead of this mental state, you could be in countless other mental states.
    But the chances of these mental states happening are not the same. The chance of a sense of fear/wonder/confusion arising from seeing a lion talking to you is not the same as the chance of enjoying your drink. Still, the chance of accepting a talking lion in your dream is higher than when you are awake.

    – The chance of having a certain mental state depends on the context, on your cognitive background, your culture, and … For example, accepting a talking tree is more likely for people thousands of years ago than for people in modern times.
    All I want to say now is this: having a certain mental state means a lot of conditions happening at that moment. So considering this, the chance of some mental states happening instead of this one is different (more/less) than for other potential mental states.

    – Let’s use “distance” instead of chance of happening. We can say every mental state has to traverse a distance to happen (to be the next mental state among countless mental states). The distance it has to traverse is not the same; depending on the situation, it could be more or less.
    Say you are in mental state A. You could, potentially, meet countless situations B (B1, B2, … Bn). Meeting one gives you a mental state AB, one of countless possible ABs. Only one is actual; the rest unmanifested. Not all ABs are equally likely. That likelihood depends on A, on where you already are.
    Distance is part of AB, not fixed to it, not separate from it. The Bs available to A and A’s distance to them, both shift as A shifts. So the set of ABs at t1 is not the set of ABs at t2. Ordinary language and imagination struggle to hold this picture steady.

    – In a dangerous situation, some mental states sit closer than others. In sleep, mental states far from waking awareness sit close (like the sense of falling from a building). Betrayal by a partner shortens the distance to hatred and anger and lengthens it from the love you started with.
    Put a person through radical shifts — wealth, loss of everything, illness, the death of someone close — and record the states that surface. That record is their unconsciousness.

    – Every mental state you are not in belongs to this collection. All unmanifested states, not only the repressed ones Freud names, but the unimportant, the misunderstood, the illusions, and beliefs tied to situations you are not in right now.
    And the whole collection shifts moment to moment because what happens at t1 changes your distance to everything at t2.

    – Some potential mental states are far from reaching, far from describing, far from having. For example:
    You are far from having the feeling of tasting ice cream as a child. Or we are far from having a sense of admiration for a stone, the way people thousands of years ago did when they thought it was a kind of god.
    To have these senses, we need a system/an atmosphere/a structure of understanding to hold that kind of belief, which we don’t have now, so we are too far from this kind of mental state.
    Even if we can be close in this sense, like having some childlike feeling, it is more like an intuition, something passing, something you can barely hold in your hand, and definitely can’t explain or describe.
    So this explains why, even knowing we are afraid of a white bedsheet, it is not like having/accessing that fear, the way we have a simple feeling of humour when we see a comedy.

    – I mean, when we are far from some mental states, explaining them, describing them, finding their structure is difficult, and this explains why people work on some deep feelings; they try to reach them because they want to have less and less distance from having them.
    Having some mental states articulated (in language, in behaviour, in …) is easier; for others you only get a sense of them, one you can barely catch, like a joyful feeling from childhood that you smell once or twice in your adult life.
    Having some suppressed ones is far out of reach; they need footholds to come up.
    This is why distance matters: it is the shape of unconsciousness itself.

    In a Nutshell

    – Here, I try to redefine unconsciousness as something imaginable, which can show the following:
    Unconscious states could be conscious; they are not just a process (of the mind/brain).
    They are not just fixed/constant, but constantly changing.
    They are not selective; they are not just important/suppressed/milestone experiences/dark secrets, hidden somewhere in the depths of the mind. At each moment, except for the one that is active, all of the mental states someone has at t1 are unconscious states. A collection/space of mental states at t1.

    – By introducing “distance” as a new term, we can measure how far unmanifested mental states are from happening, from becoming actual in the next moment.
    Some of them depend on the situation (like culture, personal experiences, the quality of our present circumstances, the quality of our own presence, …) and have more distance from happening at t2.
    This explains why experience, culture, relationships, and even a shift in the wider society reshape a person’s unconsciousness. Not by adding or removing hidden content, but by changing distance.
    Distance is not incidental to a mental state; it is part of it.
    Every experience, every belief, every action, everything seen or heard, resets your distance to what remains unmanifested.
    Unconsciousness, on this account, is the collection of every mental state you would have had, had you been somewhere else, at this same moment. Infinite, unmanifested. Defined entirely by its distance from the one state that is actually yours.

    – Reaching some mental states requires building footholds. For example, having a mental state like the joy of a drink is not difficult, but grasping some trauma from childhood requires more effort.
    This explains why, while psychological approaches cannot explain unconsciousness satisfactorily, they (sometimes) can succeed in bringing up some old senses; they somehow just make a foothold.
    Like novels do for our culture, they bring up unmanifested states (an unfaithful feeling, a new Nazi party ruling the country, …) that are far from active in our conscious culture, working as a collective thought experiment for our society.

    – So unconsciousness is not a hidden layer or a buried archive; it is the shifting space of everything you almost were.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Choose Reality Over the Cup of Tea: Why We Should Be Afraid of Virginia Woolf

    Choose Reality Over the Cup of Tea: Why We Should Be Afraid of Virginia Woolf

    Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1962 play, later a film, about a single night in a marriage. Two couples, too much alcohol, a brutal argument that lasts until dawn. But the film is asking something much larger. Camus wrote that the most fundamental question of philosophy is whether to commit suicide or go on living, whether to face the absurdity of existence or distract ourselves with another cup of coffee. After watching this film, that question no longer feels like philosophy. It feels like something we all face, though we hide it as if it were too absurd to name.

    Think about it: if someone asks, “Are you truly happy with your life?” what would our honest answer be? Is it one that forces us to face reality, or just the story we tell ourselves? This question isn’t really about happiness. It’s about whether we’re willing to confront what truly makes our lives meaningful.

    At the end of the play, after a storm of chaos and the realisation that her child, the only thing giving the main character’s life meaning, is actually imaginary, Martha, instead of facing reality, simply chooses to go to bed, akin to taking another cup of tea. Choosing reality is frightening.

    This retreat into imagination when reality becomes unbearable is not unique to Martha. We all create stories to protect ourselves from the terrifying emptiness that might exist without them. Maybe that’s why we fear those who don’t choose illusion over reality, people like Virginia Woolf. We, the “normal” ones who prefer to live inside our safe illusions until forced to confront reality, are afraid of those who show us there are other options. People like Virginia Woolf, the great British novelist, who found life unbearable and ultimately took her own life.

    Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a three-act play that unfolds over a single night in the home of a middle-aged couple, George and Martha. George is a history professor at a fictional New England college, where Martha’s father is the university president. After returning from a faculty party at two in the morning, when everyone is exhausted, drunk, and vulnerable, Martha tells George she has invited a young couple over for drinks: Nick, a new biology professor, and his wife, Honey.

    What begins as casual late-night socialising spirals into a series of increasingly hostile “games” the couples play, including Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, and Bringing Up Baby. The alcohol-fueled evening strips away their pretences as painful truths about their marriages and themselves are revealed.

    At the centre of the play is George and Martha’s imaginary son, whom they have invented and nurtured in their minds for years. This illusion becomes the final battleground in their war of words. By dawn, when Nick and Honey leave, George and Martha are left to face a new reality—one without the comforting fiction that has sustained their relationship.

    Against this dramatic framework, Albee’s masterpiece unfolds on multiple levels. It has often been interpreted as a portrayal of American society after World War II, exposing the cracks in the American Dream and revealing that families were not as idyllic as national mythology suggested. The play shows how dreams remain unspoken and die when confronted with reality, symbolised by the imaginary child, who disappears once the truth is spoken. It is a shared illusion that survives only as long as everyone agrees not to question it. The moment Martha breaks that rule and tells Honey about the child, their fragile protection is gone.

    The main characters’ names—George and Martha—echo America’s founders, while the New England college setting represents the intellectual foundation of American society.

    The play also explores deep psychological layers in the marriage between Martha and George, and in the relationship between Martha and her father, a complex mix of love, hate, admiration, and fear toward a cold patriarch. We encounter an orphan shockingly accused of killing his parents, prompting the haunting question: “Did I?” Dysfunctional relationships permeate every interaction. The supposedly affectionate young guests are bound not by love but by money and power. Ultimately, we witness humans so desperate for love and meaning that they create imaginary figures—the child—that vanish when brought out of the mind and into reality.

    I want to explore another layer—perhaps a personal interpretation, but one worth examining. At its heart, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about existential loneliness. Humanity is represented by Martha (whose father is the university president, symbolically representing God), who, with all her playfulness, sins, beliefs, and struggles, tries to find purpose or meaning—except for what she fabricates herself.

    Religion (or Tradition) is represented by George, which has accompanied humanity for centuries, protecting us from such loneliness by providing meaning in life. When religion begins to fail, we grasp at new solutions—science and technology, represented by Nick—hoping these might shield us from emptiness and reality.

    As the competition between religion and science intensifies, George (tradition) warns that a world built only by science will be soulless and cold. Martha (humanity) also acknowledges this once. In the end, George holds the power to destroy the most important purpose in Martha’s life, her child. After that, humanity is left alone in a cold, empty world.

    At the end of the play, Martha doesn’t want to kill her son, but she must. And when everything finally becomes a little calmer, she asks George to go to bed.

    Let me explain why I interpret the script this way.

    At first glance, some parts of the play don’t seem to make sense. That was my first clue that there might be another layer of meaning. For instance, the play never actually mentions Virginia Woolf (except once in a song). And then, in the middle of a tense exchange between husband and wife, George says:

    “…so I don’t really hear you, which is the only way to manage it. But you’ve taken a new tack, Martha, over the past couple of centuries—or however long it’s been I’ve lived in this house with you…”

    Why does he say “centuries”? And why, at the end, does George perform a kind of exorcism in Latin? Why is the child imaginary? These strange details made me think there was something deeper going on.

    When George says he has lived with Martha for “centuries,” he’s not only talking about their marriage, but he’s also referring to how long tradition and religion have accompanied humanity. When he performs an exorcism, he’s not just a jealous husband; He’s acting as a priest removing an illusion. And when the child is imaginary, it’s not simply about a couple’s private fantasy—it’s about all the imaginary purposes we create to survive.

    Shall we start?

    1. Disappointing Games

    The play begins with tension between a wife (Martha) and her husband (George). From the start, we see that Martha does not respect her husband. In the first few pages, she describes George as a failure:

    “You didn’t do anything; you never do anything; you never mix. You just sit around and talk.”
    “I swear … if you existed, I’d divorce you.”

    “I can’t even see you … I haven’t been able to see you for years ….”

    We can see that Martha has no hope for George, but still, these are strange things to say to someone you live with.

    Later, Martha says:

    Well, maybe you’re right, baby. You can’t come together with nothing, and you’re nothing! SNAP! It went snap tonight at Daddy’s party. (Dripping contempt, but there is fury and loss under it.) I sat there at Daddy’s party, and I watched you … I watched you sitting there, and I watched the younger men around you, the men who were going to go somewhere. And I sat there and I watched you, and you weren’t there! And it snapped! It finally snapped! And I’m going to howl it out, and I’m not going to give a damn what I do, and I’m going to make the damned biggest explosion you ever heard.

    This moment shows Martha’s deep disappointment. She believes George has given up, or more accurately, that he has nothing left to offer. George sits there silent, passive, with nothing new to say. He once gave Martha meaning and purpose, but now he simply exists. He hasn’t evolved or adapted to new challenges. Meanwhile, the younger men (like Nick) represent new ideas—science, technology, progress—and they seem full of energy, ambition, and effort, ready to go somewhere. But George has nothing to bring to the table, nothing to give Martha, or humanity.

    For centuries, religion answered the big questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What happens when we die? But for Martha, George can no longer answer these questions satisfactorily. The disappointment isn’t personal. it’s existential. It’s a nihilistic feeling: that moment when you realise something you once held onto is now empty, and it can no longer give you purpose.

    The disappointment isn’t personal. it’s existential.

    Martha mentions several times that George is not the head of the history department but only a member of it. She says her father once had great ambitions for George, but after a while, when he saw that George’s potential was low or ignored, he lost interest. Martha emphasises that although George had good opportunities, he failed to use them. Instead of taking on a major role at the university, or even replacing her father as president, he stays just a simple employee, held back by his lack of ambition and effort.

    In another part, George says to Nick:

    Martha is changing … and Martha is not changing for me. Martha hasn’t changed for me in years. If Martha is changing, it means we’ll be here for … days. You are being accorded an honour, and you must not forget that Martha is the daughter of our beloved boss.

    This line also shows Martha’s disappointment with George. She is looking for a new kind of revival, which she finds in Nick, the man of science. George says that “Martha hasn’t changed for me in years,” which reflects the deep disappointment Martha feels toward him.

    2. Rivalry Between the Natural and the Supernatural

    The tension between George and Nick is visible from the very beginning. Early in the play, Martha says she invited a young couple over after the party, around 2 a.m. She believes Nick, the young man, is one of the new faculty members in the math department.

    George is tired and wants to rest, but Martha insists he be a good host to their guests. When George and Nick are alone, George asks, “What were you drinking over at Parnassus?” He wants to know what kind of literature, history, or cultural interests Nick has. This is George’s territory—he represents tradition and religion. He has a long relationship with cultural ideas, and mathematics (which George assumes Nick comes from) is never a threat in this space; in fact, tradition sometimes even uses mathematics for its own purposes. But Nick doesn’t understand what George means, one of the first signs that he is not part of George’s world.

    “Parnassus” is a mountain from Greek mythology, the home of art and poetry. George is testing whether Nick knows about culture and tradition. But Nick has no idea. He comes from a different world, the world of empirical facts, laboratories, and biological experiments. They don’t speak the same language.

    When George realises that Nick is actually a biologist, his reaction is revealing. Albee’s choice of biology (especially in the 1960s) reflects how much attention the field was getting at the time, as people hoped biology could finally decode the secrets of human life. George responds:

    You’re the one! You’re the one who’s going to make all that trouble … making everyone the same, rearranging the chromosomes, or whatever it is. Isn’t that right?

    From George’s point of view, Nick is the one causing trouble. He sees science as a threat to his territory and its claim to explain how the world works. In the 1960s, when Albee wrote the play, science was promising incredible things—decoding DNA, curing diseases, even engineering better humans. To George, this is dangerous. There’s a moment when he realises this is not just personal rivalry but it’s a competition between two worldviews.

    Soon after, George discovers that Martha has told Honey about their child—something that was forbidden. It seems there was a secret between George and Martha, and Martha has broken it. This moment shows Martha as a symbol of humanity—someone who finds something powerful enough (like Nick, or science) to reveal old secrets.

    Another sign for George is when Martha changes her clothes to become more comfortable. This is when George says:

    Martha is changing … and Martha is not changing for me.

    George tries to show that the world created by science is not worth living in. It’s a world of soullessness and boredom—a world without culture or art, without music or painting. As George says, “Naturally, I am the opposite of all of them.”

    Later, Nick reveals to George that he married his wife not purely for love, but because her father was rich. There was an instrumental purpose. He also says that Honey started to “blow up,” so they thought they were going to become parents and got married, but then she “blew down,” and he doesn’t know why it happened.

    This suggests that science doesn’t necessarily do better than religion for humanity. There is no pure sincerity. Science promised to give us control over life itself, to create and manage our lives meaningfully. But Nick, as the representative of science, cannot even create a real child. He can only create false hope—“blow up and blow down.” Science is not better than the previous dominant power, religion; it simply pursues its own goals and sees humans as tools. If religion could provide a “child” (a symbol of meaning or purpose), science cannot even provide that. It offers only utopia and disappointment (blow up and blow down). I will explore this further later.

    One of the most powerful moments showing the deeper debate behind the surface of marriage is when George tells Nick how his efforts have failed:

    You take the trouble to construct a civilization … to … to build a society, based on the principles of … of principle … you endeavor to make communicable sense out of natural order, morality out of the unnatural disorder of man’s mind … you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same … you bring things to the saddest of all points … to the point where there is something to lose … then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours. I suppose there’s justice to it, after all the years … Up yours.

    It seems George is saying that despite all his efforts to make human society civilised, he has failed. When George realises Nick is a powerful competitor, he senses that his own era may soon be over. That’s why he mentions the Dies Irae, the Latin hymn of the Day of Judgment. George means that no matter how much civilisation and meaning you build, death and destruction always come. All the culture, all the art, all the moral systems—they all end with “Up yours.”

    George sees his replacement (Nick) arriving, and he knows Nick will fail, too. It’s a warning from the old king to the new: you may try to build something valuable, but sooner or later, it will collapse.

    3. The Exorcism of Reality

    Martha expresses a mix of emotions and contradictions toward Nick—behaviours that he cannot understand. Eventually, he says to her, “You’re crazy too.” Before this, Martha and Nick flirted, but once she reached out to him, she began to treat him the same way she treats George. When someone knocks at the door, Martha orders Nick to answer it as if he were her servant.

    Earlier, when Nick tells Martha she’s crazy too, she calls him a “flop.” This moment is crucial. Martha had placed her hopes in Nick—she thought maybe science could give her what religion and tradition could not. But after being with him, she realises he’s empty as well. He becomes just another disappointment. She even admits that he once seemed to have more potential than anyone she had met in a long time, but his performance shows that he’s also a failure, just like all the others.

    After Nick claims that all men, including George, are flops, Martha replies:

    You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you’re all flops. (More or less to herself.) I disgust me. I pass my life in crummy, totally pointless infidelities … (Laughs ruefully.) would-be infidelities. Hump the Hostess? That’s a laugh. A bunch of boozed-up … impotent lunk-heads…

    This dialogue shows that the play is much more than a story about a marriage. When Martha calls herself the ‘Earth Mother,’ she is saying she has offered herself to many men who seemed promising. She offered them courage, strength, and intimacy, but they all failed her. These “infidelities” are not sexual. They represent humanity’s repeated search for meaning through new systems of belief—each one promising to make us happy, and each one ending in disappointment. Every new ideology or faith becomes another “flop.” Martha has come to realise that all these pursuits are meaningless and that she may never be happy again.

    Then she says:

    There is only one man in my life who has ever … made me happy. Do you know that? One!

    She means George.

    The first time humanity was promised a better world, something larger than itself that could give life meaning, it came from religion. Within those systems and powers, the world felt coherent and meaningful. People believed that everything had its rightful place, grounded in something greater. Humanity was happy then, and has perhaps never been happier than when it believed in that certainty.

    Alternatives like science couldn’t give us the same feeling that we are not alone. When we believed, there was certainty; within a system like religion, we felt clear and complete. But once a flaw appears in that system, once certainty disappears, nothing can restore that same feeling, the sense of not being alone, the quiet assurance that there are still things we truly know. Martha’s love for George is a love for the past, for the time when she had absolute faith in him. After that, she could never feel the same again.

    When Martha tells Nick, “You don’t believe it,” and Nick insists, “No, I do,” she replies, “You always deal in appearances.” Why does she say this to someone she has only just met, and with such certainty? This isn’t just about Nick as a person; it’s about what he represents: science. For Martha, science cannot reach the human inner world. It remains cold, rational, and superficial, concerned only with appearances. It cannot touch the emotions, contradictions, and paradoxes that define human life. Science cannot explain why we need illusions to survive, or why we invent imaginary children to give our lives meaning.

    The conversation between Martha and Nick captures this tension perfectly:

    MARTHA: Oh, little boy, you got yourself hunched over that microphone of yours…

    NICK: Microscope…

    MARTHA: …yes… and you don’t see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specks and crap, but you don’t see what goes on, do you?

    NICK: I know when a man’s had his back broken; I can see that.

    MARTHA: Can you!

    NICK: You’re damn right.

    MARTHA: Oh… you know so little. And you’re going to take over the world, hunh?

    NICK: All right, now…

    MARTHA: You think a man’s got his back broken ’cause he makes like a clown and walks bent, hunh? Is that really all you know?

    Here, Martha humiliates Nick (science) as a “little man,” mocking his claim that science will take over the world. This is not a rivalry of love; it is about which force will rule humanity next, after George (tradition) becomes the fading king.

    At the end of the play, George invites them to play the final game to the death. He begins to talk about their son, though Martha resists, perhaps because she has already realised that Nick cannot offer the power or comfort she sought. Earlier, it was Martha who broke the rule by speaking of their son; now it is George who reopens the topic. Previously, George had told Honey that their son was dead, though Martha did not know it yet.

    George accuses Martha of behaving toward their son in an inappropriate, almost erotic way, saying that the boy was ashamed of it. George implies that humans project their sins and desires onto everything they create. Even our illusions—our gods, ideals, meanings—become corrupted by our own weaknesses.

    As Martha speaks tenderly of their son, George begins chanting Latin prayers in a ritualistic tone. This, in my interpretation, shows that George represents an old spiritual power. The chant is a ceremony linked to death and exorcism, a symbolic act of mourning and, more importantly, an exorcism of the imaginary son.

    In fact, this imagined child gave Martha the strength to carry on. It wasn’t something that protected her from George, but it was something that shielded humans from reality, from confronting all their weaknesses and unanswered questions that George (tradition) could not resolve. When she breaks the rule and reveals the secret, George—as the final arrow—exorcises the illusion, showing how fragile she is without it.

    George tells Martha that their son has died. The scene unfolds with heartbreaking intensity:

    MARTHA: NO! NO! YOU CANNOT DO THAT!

    MARTHA: You cannot. You may not decide these things.

    NICK: (Tenderly.) He hasn’t decided anything, lady. It’s not his doing. He doesn’t have the power.

    GEORGE: That’s right, Martha; I’m not a god. I don’t have power over life and death, do I?

    MARTHA: YOU CAN’T KILL HIM! YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM DIE!

    GEORGE: I can kill him, Martha, if I want to.

    MARTHA: HE IS OUR CHILD!

    GEORGE: AND I HAVE KILLED HIM!

    MARTHA: NO!

    GEORGE: YES! (Long silence.)

    GEORGE: (Tenderly.) I have the right, Martha. We never spoke of it; that’s all. I could kill him any time I wanted to.

    MARTHA: But why? Why?

    GEORGE: You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him… You mentioned him to someone else.

    MARTHA: (Tearfully.) I did not. I never did.

    GEORGE: Yes, you did.

    MARTHA: Who? WHO?!

    HONEY: (Crying.) To me. You mentioned him to me.

    After this emotional climax, the guests (Nick and Honey) leave. The chaos subsides. George gently asks Martha if it’s time for bed. She’s exhausted and says yes.

    Finally, George places his hand on Martha and softly sings:

    Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?…

    Martha answers:

    I… am… George… I… am…

    This final scene is one of the most luminous moments in modern drama. It captures the loneliness of being human, and the ways we escape it. It’s not merely about confronting reality but about the choice we make. George can offer Martha an illusion—a child, a meaning, a purpose—but if she breaks the rule and seeks another source of meaning (like Nick), he can take it away. Without the illusion, she must face the harsh reality, the unbearable emptiness of a world without meaning, without something to hold onto like her child.

    Virginia Woolf chose to face that reality, and it destroyed her. But most people cannot. We live through our illusions, and that is not a wrong choice, but it is part of being human. We may search for alternatives to what we once had, but the process is painful and constantly reminds us of our solitude.

    Science may serve as a modern alternative, but it remains cold and logical. It cannot provide what religion once did—a living sense of purpose. Science cannot give a real child; it only gives false hope, like Honey’s “blow up” and “blow down” pregnancy.

    We fear Virginia Woolf because she chose truth over illusion, because she forces us to leave our shells and confront the world. But the consequences for her were costly. We don’t know what awaits us behind our choices, but it’s worth thinking about before something controls us simply by threatening to take away our illusions.

    We fear Virginia Woolf because she forces us to leave our shells and confront the world.

    Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not just a play about a dysfunctional marriage; it is a profound reflection on the human condition, an existential exploration showing how we rely on illusions to make life bearable and meaningful. It asks: what lies are we willing to believe to survive? To whom do we give the power to control those lies? And most importantly, which lies do we choose to embrace? We should remember that these lies can destroy us at any moment (like George) or offer false hope (like science). But whatever we believe, Albee forces us to confront the question: what are we truly afraid of? Will we face our fear, or simply have another cup of tea and go to bed?