Self in Proust: Part Three

What's remarkable about Proust's philosophy of self is how closely it parallels insights from radically different traditions—Buddhist philosophy, Nietzschean psychology, and contemporary neuroscience. These convergences suggest that Proust wasn't just making a literary observation but identifying something fundamental about human consciousness.

The Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no-self) teaches that there is no permanent, unchanging essence we can call "I." Instead, what we experience as self is merely a collection of five aggregates (skandhas): form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These aggregates are in constant flux, arising and passing away moment by moment. This is precisely what Proust describes: selves as temporary configurations of sensations, perceptions, desires, and beliefs—compounds that form and dissolve as circumstances change.

Buddhism's principle of anicca (impermanence) holds that clinging to any state as permanent causes suffering. We suffer when we try to hold onto a self that is inherently impermanent. Proust's narrator experiences this exact anguish: "Our dread of a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love... this dread... is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all" (p. 579). The narrator fears not just loss but the transformation that will make loss irrelevant—the death of the self that cares. This is the suffering that comes from attachment to a particular self-state.

Even more striking is the parallel between Proust's "multiple deaths and rebirths" within a single lifetime and Buddhist teachings on rebirth without a soul. In Buddhism, what continues after death isn't a permanent self but a stream of consciousness that takes on new form based on past karma (actions and their consequences). Proust's selves similarly continue as potentials, as dormant configurations that can be reactivated, even after the "death" of the self that originally lived them. The self that loved Albertine doesn't have a soul that persists—it's a pattern that can be triggered back into active consciousness.

Buddhism also teaches that we construct identity through tanha (craving, attachment). We become who we are through our attachments to objects of desire. This is exactly Landy's reading of Proust: "subsidiary selves consist in a set of identifications with different objects of desire, belief, and adherence." (p. 107) Remove the object of attachment, and the self organized around that object dissolves. Both traditions recognize that identity is relational rather than essential.

Beyond the possible Buddhist connection, Proust's contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche developed a remarkably similar psychology of the self as multiplicity. In Beyond Good and Evil and other works, Nietzsche argues that what we call the "self" or "soul" is actually a "social structure of the drives and affects"—multiple competing forces, each with its own perspective and agenda, constantly struggling for dominance. There is no unified "I" that controls these drives; rather, whichever drive is currently strongest becomes the temporary "self."

This anticipates Proust's observation that "on entering any social gathering, when one is young, one loses consciousness of one's old self, one becomes a different man." (p. 736) For Nietzsche, different contexts activate different drives, and we become whoever that dominant drive makes us. The drive to power might dominate in one context, the drive to pleasure in another, the drive to knowledge in a third. Each creates a different temporary self.

Nietzsche is also explicit about what Proust shows through narrative: consciousness is retrospective and superficial. The "I" that seems to be making decisions is actually just becoming aware of what unconscious drives have already determined. Proust's narrator experiences this when he realizes he's been "goading myself with untiring energy" toward "the slow and painful suicide of that self which loved Gilberte" (pp. 530-531). He's not consciously choosing to stop loving her—unconscious processes are already transforming him, and his conscious self only recognizes this after the fact.

The parallel extends to Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power" as the fundamental drive. While Proust doesn't use this language, his description of the will is strikingly similar: "that will which is the persevering and unalterable servant of our successive personalities; hidden away in the shadow, despised, downtrodden, untiringly faithful, toiling incessantly, and with no thought for the variability of the self." (pp. 735-736) Both thinkers identify something persistent beneath the multiplicity of conscious selves—not a unified "I" but an unconscious force that ensures survival and satisfaction across all transformations.

Modern psychology and neuroscience have largely confirmed what Proust, Nietzsche, and Buddhist philosophers intuited. Neuroscientists have searched for a "self center" in the brain and found only distributed networks with no central controller. Different brain regions process different aspects of experience—sensation, emotion, memory, planning—and what we experience as unified consciousness is actually the brain's continuous reconstruction of coherence from competing processes.

Memory research has shown that remembering isn't retrieval but reconstruction. Each time we recall something, we alter it slightly, incorporating new context and perspective. Yet Proust's insight goes further than this: involuntary memory doesn't just reconstruct the past but reactivates an entire self-state with its original attitudes, desires, and beliefs intact. This is closer to what trauma research has discovered: traumatic memories can return with such vividness that the person doesn't just remember the trauma but re-experiences it from within, complete with the original physiological and emotional responses. Proust suggests this happens not just with trauma but with any strongly encoded self-state.

Modern attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, demonstrates that our early attachments to caregivers fundamentally shape our identity and relationship patterns. We develop "internal working models" based on these attachments that determine how we relate to others throughout life. This is precisely what Proust shows: selves constituted by their attachments to loved objects. The narrator's attachment to his grandmother creates one self; his attachment to Gilberte creates another; his attachment to Albertine creates a third. Change the attachment, and you change the self.

Contemporary psychology has also moved toward recognizing multiple self-states rather than a unified personality. Trauma therapy, particularly Internal Family Systems and other parts-work approaches, treats different "parts" of the person as having distinct perspectives, emotions, and needs—much like Proust's subsidiary selves. Even outside trauma, research on cognitive dissonance, context-dependent behavior, and situational personality shows that we're remarkably different people in different contexts, and we work hard to maintain the illusion of consistency.

Most significantly, the narrative theory of self—developed by philosophers like Daniel Dennett and psychologists like Dan McAdams—argues that the self is fundamentally a story we tell about ourselves, constantly revised and updated. There is no "real" self beneath the story; the story is the self. Proust anticipates this but with a crucial addition: the various selves we've been continue to exist as dormant potentials, not just as narrative elements. They can return and temporarily be us again, not just be remembered by us.

That these different traditions—Buddhist meditation, Nietzschean philosophy, Proustian literature, and contemporary neuroscience—all arrive at similar conclusions about the multiplicity and impermanence of self suggests something profound. This isn't just a theoretical position or an aesthetic choice. It appears to be a genuine feature of human consciousness that becomes visible once we look carefully at our actual experience rather than accepting conventional assumptions about identity.

What makes Proust unique isn't that he discovered multiplicity—Buddhist monks were teaching this 2,500 years ago, and Nietzsche was writing about it in the 1880's. Proust's achievement is showing how it feels to be multiple, how we experience the transitions between selves, what it's like when an old self suddenly returns through involuntary memory. He gives us the phenomenology of multiplicity in such precise detail that we recognize it in ourselves. Reading Proust, we remember our own experiences of becoming different people, of encountering old selves we'd forgotten, of watching former selves die without being able to grieve them.

This convergence also suggests that Landy's chemical metaphor is more than just interpretation—it reflects something real about how consciousness works. Whether we describe it as aggregates (Buddhism), drives (Nietzsche), compound-selves (Landy), or distributed neural networks (neuroscience), we're all pointing to the same phenomenon: identity as a temporary configuration of elements, stable enough to feel unified in the moment but fundamentally multiple and subject to radical reorganization.

Joshua Landy's reading of Proust in Philosophy as Fiction provides a precise theoretical framework for what Proust demonstrates phenomenologically and what Buddhism, Nietzsche, and contemporary psychology confirm from different angles. His contribution is to show the mechanism by which the self remains multiple while feeling unified.

Landy's key insight is that each self is a "hierarchical arrangement in which, as in a physical compound, the various parts, blended together in their relative proportions, combine to form what looks and feels like a single substance." (p. 108) This chemical metaphor explains something the phenomenological description alone cannot: how we experience ourselves as unified at any given moment despite being fundamentally multiple. Like a chemical solution, the self's elements are mixed so thoroughly that they appear as one substance. Only when the proportions shift dramatically—when jealousy gives way to indifference, when love dissolves into apathy—do we recognize that what seemed unified was actually a temporary configuration.

Most crucially, Landy resolves the apparent contradiction between death and resurrection that runs through Proust's text. Past selves are described as dead, yet involuntary memory brings them back to life. Landy's answer: they're dormant, not destroyed. "When an odor, texture, or sound returns us to a former state, we are not dragging into the light a set of impressions that have long since departed but, instead, summoning up part of us that is still very much present within our mind." (p. 110) This transforms memory from retrieval to reactivation, from representation to ontological transformation. It's why Proust's model "has the merit of explaining a wide variety of phenomena that alternative schemata simply cannot capture" (p. 110)—particularly how we can "reexperience from within a situation we approached with a radically different set of attitudes, beliefs and desires."

Where Buddhism emphasizes the impermanence and suffering of attachment, where Nietzsche stresses the struggle of competing drives, and where neuroscience maps distributed networks, Landy shows how these insights manifest in lived experience and literary form. He demonstrates that Proust's elaborate model isn't just novelistic invention but rigorous psychology—a way of understanding consciousness that, though "rebarbatively elaborate," captures truths about identity that simpler theories miss.

Throughout In Search of Lost Time, Proust develops a philosophy of the self that anticipates insights from Buddhism, Nietzschean psychology, and contemporary neuroscience. As Landy demonstrates, the self is not one continuous person but a succession of "compound-selves"—each constituted by different configurations of desire, belief, and knowledge, each feeling unified while it lasts, but fundamentally multiple and impermanent.

What sets Proust apart isn't the discovery of multiplicity but the precision with which he maps its phenomenology. He shows us exactly how it feels to become someone else gradually, to encounter a former self suddenly, to experience the terror of transformation and the mercy of forgetting. Where Buddhist philosophy teaches the doctrine of no-self and Nietzsche analyzes the social structure of drives, Proust gives us the lived experience of being multiple—the texture and detail that make an abstract insight viscerally real.

The narrator captures our blindness to this multiplicity when he observes: "Just as, throughout the whole course of one's life, one's egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that 'I' itself which is perpetually observing them, so the desire which directs our actions descends towards them, but does not reach back to itself." (p. 2108) We're so absorbed in the objects of our desire and belief that we never perceive the "I" doing the desiring and believing. That "I" remains always just behind our field of vision.

Yet through involuntary memory, Proust discovers something most other theories miss: past selves don't simply vanish—they remain dormant, layered within us like geological strata. As Landy emphasizes, this isn't metaphor but mechanism. When the right sensory trigger appears, an entire former self can be reactivated, complete with its original attitudes, emotions, and perspective. This is why the novel takes its massive form—thousands of pages mapping the terrain of memory, tracking the transformations of self, demonstrating through art what philosophy can only describe.

The novel itself becomes what Landy calls a "gallery" where all our past selves can coexist (p. 105)—not unified into coherent narrative, not resolved into essential self, but maintained in their original multiplicity. This is Proust's ultimate achievement: showing that consciousness is not one thing but many, not permanent but constantly reformed, not graspable by introspection but recoverable through sensation. In reading him, we recognize ourselves—not as we imagine ourselves to be, but as we actually are.

My fourth tour of In Search of Lost Time began almost a year ago, in late December 2024. I finished, as I have mentioned, in late March - early April of this year. I rushed off a couple of quick posts and then attended to the rest of my life. Of course, Proust stayed in the back of mind, coming into the foreground now and then. That always happens whenever I enjoy some great work of literature. Proust is different though. He is always there, emerging in my consciousness ofttimes when I am not thinking of him at all. As with Tolkien. As with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Faulkner. Along with only a few others, they abide within me. My life is in constant discourse with them, in a way. Isn't that what great literature does to one who re-experiences from time to time?

Past posts on Proust:

Reading Proust (Again) - November 2008

"The precious little patch of yellow wall" - January 2009

Prepping for Proust - December 2018

Reading Proust: The First 200 Pages - February 2019

Reading Proust: Swann's Way - March 2019

Reading Proust: Madam Swann at Home - March 2019

Reading Proust: Place-Names: The Place - April 2019

Reading Proust: The Guermantes Way - May 2019

Metaphors in Proust: The Guermantes Fog - May 2019

Reading Proust: Beginning Sodom and Gomorrah - June 2019

Reading Proust: Continuing Sodom and Gomorrah - June 2019