Love, Subjectivity, and Truth in Proust

Abstract:Drawing on Scheler and Merleau-Ponty among others, I develop a framework for interpreting certain themes in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This philosophical novel explores the way love shapes our comportment towards the world of others, and raises the question of whether love is blind or potentially truth-disclosing. Using this literary example, I argue that without the dispositional affects of love, care, or concern — the emotional a priori — nothing in the world around us would be more conspicuous than anything else. In this case we would be faced with a flat, neutral mass of information, without a sense that any of it matters. Thus, for a comprehensively unloving human being, everything would seem empty of meaning. It does not follow, however, that the affective constitution of the world is best viewed as a kind of distortion.