Proustian Subjectivity, Nietzschean Transhumanism and Post-Modern Deconstructivism
Proust's philosophy can be characterized by his myopic pursuit of self-knowledge and the examination of subjective experience through memory. While Socratic, it is also deeply nostalgic, emotional, and focused on the individual's subjective, hedonistic experience of life. Proust's multidisciplinary approach incorporates elements of psychology (Freud and Jung were published at the same time he was), philosophy, and aesthetics.
Proust moved in the intellectual and artistic circles of Paris, associating with influential figures such as painters, writers, and musicians. His critics contend that Proust's preoccupation with elite circles failed to address the concerns and experiences of a wider range of individuals. His friendships and acquaintanceship with individuals such as Robert de Montesquiou, Reynaldo Hahn, and Jean Cocteau provided him with diverse perspectives and artistic inspiration. Throughout his life, Proust struggled with his writing and devoted immense time and effort to perfecting his prose.
Proust's voracious reading habits and intellectual curiosity allowed him to draw from a wide range of sources including John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert P. One of Proust's greatest influences was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who explored the concept of memory and its relationship to the construction of identity. Proust echoed Nietzsche's exploration, stating, "The memory of things past is not necessarily the memory of things as they were" (À la recherche du temps perdu). Proust argued, as did Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, that this memory is subjective. Proust explores the masks and roles imposed by society, challenging individuals to question the authenticity of their own identities and the societal expectations that shape them. Proust's writing also shows the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, known for his theories of time and duration. Proust's notion of time as a fluid and non-linear entity, captured in his famous line, "The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters and reshapes his present and future" (À la recherche du temps perdu), plagiarizes Bergson's famous phrases about the elusiveness of time.
Camusian Absurdity and Proustian Subjectivity
"I cannot read Proust without feeling that I am taking a bath in someone else's dirty water." - Albert Camus
Perhaps no philosopher hated Proust more than Camus. He began his career in Proust's shadow, publishing The Stranger in 1942, so there was naturally a bit of professional jealousy here. Camus, known for his anti-existentialist and anti-Socratic philosophy, criticized Proust's approach as excessively self-indulgent and overly concerned with introspection. Camus argued that Proust's writing lacked engagement with the outside world and failed to address the larger existential questions that he considered more relevant. Perhaps this is also a recognition that Proust’s philosophy is related to Camus, and Camus had to distinguish himself from his predecessors, as both of these French authors were relativistic, Modernist and deconstructivist in their Subjectivity they both received from Nietzsche.
There are still some existentialist elements in Proust, while Camus was enthusiastically anti-existentialist and Anti-Socratic. While both are solipsistic and unable to posit a trans-personal reality in their subjectivism, Proust at least posits the possibility of knowing oneself. While his work contains elements of psychological realism, he also explores existentialist themes. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre recognized this aspect when he remarked, "Proust is the novelist of the existentialists" (Jean-Paul Sartre). Proust's exploration of the self, the nature of existence, and the search for meaning are consistent with existential concerns. Proust still has an essentially Socratic view of the self, despite his hero Nietzsche's hatred of Socrates and Jesus above all other historical figures.
Like Camus, Proust emphasizes the tactile experience and sees this immediate experience of the material world as therapeutic. Central to Proust's philosophy is the concept of involuntary memory, which he describes as the unexpected resurgence of past sensations triggered by sensory stimuli. Proust believed that these fleeting moments of memory contain profound truths about ourselves and our existence. The transformative power of memory constructs our understanding of the world and enables people to grasp the intricate connections between past and present. Proust's Nietzschean subjectivity centers on the idea that our perception of reality is shaped by individual experiences, memories, and emotions. He explores the transformative power of memory, emphasizing its subjective nature and its ability to reconstruct the past throughout all of his novels. His massive 7-part novel In Search of Lost time exhibits this connectivity perfectly.
The recognition and acceptance of the absurd differs between Camus and Proust. Camus believes in confronting and rebelling against the absurd, while Proust's characters navigate the absurd by delving into the depths of their subjective experiences, finding solace and meaning in their personal narratives. An Epicurean to the core, Camus advocated the avoidance of suffering at all costs and the sacrifice of everyone and everything for one's own benefit. Proust, a bit of a Stoic, argued for the redemptive nature of suffering: "We are cured of a suffering only by experiencing it fully." Camus advocates a personal revolt against the absurd, seeing all suffering as unreal, while Proust advocates accepting the impermanence of suffering and responding with art and emotion.
Nietzsche's Subjectivity and Proust's' Lyrical Hedonism
Aesthetics is severely underdeveloped in Proust compared to his protégé Nietzsche. Nietzsche's emphasis on the resonant power of the antinomies of the Apollonian and Dionysian in the Collective Unconscious and the irrational Will-to-Power contrasts with Proust's more introspective and introspective approach to beauty. Nietzsche’s evolution of Goethe’s "urphänomen" emphasized the unity of different phenomena, where the individual aspects contribute to the overall beauty. Proust deviates from the field of objective Aesthetics and simply locates beauty as and individual experience rather than a communication with a universal or transcendent reality. The experience of Beauty leads Proust not to the divine, but to the sensual, a type of Epicureanism, so his Aesthetic theory is paper-thin. It is merely a way to give life a type of localized meaning, but the “only question that matters” to Camus, why live instead of commit suicide, is unanswered in Proust. In the Prisoner, Proust writes of his renunciation of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics:
I had none of the scruples of those whose duty, like Nietzsche's, dictates that, in art as in life, they flee from the beauty that tempts them, and who tear themselves away from Tristan as they deny Parsifal and, through spiritual asceticism, from mortification to mortification manage, by following the bloodiest of paths of the cross, to rise to the pure knowledge and perfect adoration of the Postillon de Longjumeau. I realized how real Wagner's work is, when I saw again those insistent, fleeting themes that visit an act, only to return, and, at times distant, drowsy, almost detached, are, at other times, while remaining vague, so urgent and so close, so internal, so organic, so visceral that it seems less like the repetition of a motif than of a neuralgia.
There is a latent Phenomenology in all his work, which can be seen as a response to the cold materialistic determinism of the intellectual systems in which he grew up. Like Camus, he sought to find meaning in a world disenchanted by the collapse of the subject-object paradigm, or as Nietzsche called it, the death of God in Europe.
Artistic Legacy
Proust was broadly read immediately, and gained notoriety in his time. The English modernist writer Virginia Woolf was highly influenced by Proust's writing style and thematic exploration- she considered Proust's work to be a major inspiration for her own novel, "To the Lighthouse." Woolf, while acknowledging Proust's genius, noted that his intricate descriptions and labyrinthine sentences could be overwhelming for readers. And certainly- his run on sentences are difficult to follow. Sometimes these are a paragraph long. She argued that his writing style impeded the narrative flow and made it challenging to navigate the core themes of his works.
The impact of Proust's literary corpus cannot be understated. His writings have gained a cult-like following, with devoted readers immersing themselves in his intricate narratives and reveling in his profound insights. One Frenchman, who died in 2023, had the symbol of the original publishing house used by Proust tattooed on his forehead, and before each meal he would stand and recite a passage from Proust. This religious-like devotion, especially in France, reflects exactly what Dostoevsky predicted would happen in post-religious societies; new religions would always replace the old ones. Yet these new religions are even more insidious because they do not understand themselves as religions, as Dostoevsky argues. He helped develop the religion of postmodernism, as shown by his influence on Woolf and Michel Foucault, one of the fathers of postmodern deconstructivism, which replaces logos with power as the core animating force of human reality. Foucault wrote, "Proust's work is an immense labyrinthine system in which the most insignificant details of life are sometimes given symbolic meaning."
To Look Upward is to Look Inward: Fulfillment of the Socratic Command through the Archetype of Self-Consciousness
Proust and Camus’ attempt at Self-knowledge fold in on themselves, and we end up with emotionalism, sentimentality and lyricism in a Solipsistic Tautology. Proust and Camus’ philosophy is at it’s core poorly Intellectualized Solipsistic Hedonism. Perhaps the clearest passage articulating his intellectualized hedonism is here in The Prisoner:
"Our desires are infinite, and yet we are confined within the limitations of our own existence. We long for freedom, for transcendence, but we are bound by the chains of our own desires. The only true freedom lies in accepting our captivity and finding solace in the beauty and depth of our own desires."
The Socratic Oracle’s command goes unfulfilled in Proust, as it does in Nietzsche who believed that there is no “Self” to know in the first place. Likewise Camus found the pursuit of self-awareness and self-knowledge to be the source of pain and suffering, and argues against it. Proust’s contemporary Chesterton that one should know the self, but cannot through introspection “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.”
C.G. Jung would see a cosmic solution to this impossible task. He sees a critical development from the self-less unreflected God-image in Judaism through Clement of Alexandria, who understood the Self as a God-image with a Psychological and reflective Spirit. Clement of Alexandria wrote, "the greatest of all disciplines is to know oneself, for to know oneself is to know God". To Jung, this reality of the Self as a God-image is only realized in the individual consciousness through ritualistic living communion and relationship with the divine.
Proust seeks self0knowledge, but rejects the Archetype of Self-Consciousness, and in doing so falls into a Solipsistic circle ending in nothing but Hedonism. The Christian fish symbol is but one image of the Adam Secundus, who is an apotheosis of all Self-Images preceding it, for "Christ is the Archetype of the Self"- Hegel wrote posited something very close "Christ has reality as self-consciousness." Cardinal Newman understood this, writing" Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its information, a monarch in its peremptoriness". In other words, Consciousness contains both objective and subjective truth; the biologically ingrained Hero Myth is not an illusion of the mind, but a precept of the truest true. He writes in Aion:
Everything hangs together with everything else. By definition, only absolute totality contains everything in itself, and neither need nor compulsion attaches it to anything outside... Which of us can improve himself in total isolation? Even the holy anchorite who lives three days' journey off in the desert not only needs to eat and drink but finds himself utterly and terribly dependent on the ceaseless presence of God. Only absolute totality can renew itself out of itself and generate itself anew. Through this teaching the One and All, the Greatest in the guise of the Smallest, God himself in his everlasting fires [Isaiah 33:14], may be caught like a fish in the deep sea... and that by a Eucharistic act of integration (call Teoqualo, 'God-eating' by the Aztecs), and incorporated into the human body.
As Dostoevsky, a contemporary of both Nietzsche and Proust, details through intimate psychological portraiture, the Materialist, Subjectivist mind replaces the Idea of God (the transcendent point of reference and, in Christ, the Archetype of the Self) with socio-political presuppositions. And this replacement of That-Which-Is-Highest with socio-political dogma results in a "possession" of the Anima or Animus, which eradicates the individual's ability to know oneself, forever stuck in a self-same Tautology of consciousness. Jung likewise argued that Freudian Psychotherapy (which Proust was a reader of) was an important step, but lacks a relationship with something transcendent that can actually heal the νοῦς, not simply mend it enough to function:
No amount of explaining will make the ill-formed tree grow straight... Your picture of God or your idea of Immortality is atrophied; consequently, your psychic metabolism is out of gear... experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment... A religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overrated. And it is precisely for the religious outlook that the sense of historical continuity is indispensable... what we are pleased to call [an illusion] maybe for the psyche a most important factor of life- something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism- a psychic actuality of prime importance... everything that acts is actual.
