Proust and Nussbaum: On Emotion

Spoiler Alert: This entry presumes readers have completed The Fugitive.

In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum speaks a great deal about the philosophical relevance of literature. Nussbaum argues that emotions, if they are not stifled by habit or reasoned away, can give us genuine insight and point towards moral truth. The phrase “upheavals of thought” is a reflection of her theory that emotion breaks through our defense mechanisms, like habit and reasoning. For her, as for Proust, fiction or narrative is an important tool in understanding ourselves and the nature of the world.

Nussbaum reads Proust to show that love is vulnerability and is inherently painful or uncomfortable. She argues that love is an acknowledgement of neediness and lack of self-sufficiency and that, because this acknowledgment is so uncomfortable, we hide it from ourselves and blunt our emotions. When the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is in love with Albertine, he feels the love as an irreconcilable lack of something. In order to protect himself from his jealousy and heartache, the narrator convinces himself that he is not in love. Confrontation with death can be a way to confront the reality of the “otherness” of those we love and this explains why Albertine's death shows the narrator that he loved her all along, saying:

I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallized salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.

(Proust)

While she clearly admires Proust’s understanding of love and of emotion in general, Nussbaum objects to what she sees as the narrator's desire to find some solution to the painfulness of love. For Nussbaum, the goal is to accept or appreciate the dependence on others, rather than to try and overcome it. One of the principle differences between the intellect and the heart is that the intellect quests for objectivity while the heart is fundamentally subjective. Nussbaum notes that “intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance.” Thus, it is individual perspective, the immediacy of our emotions, that gives the heart its power. Any true understanding will be based on an understanding of individual perspective.

Nussbaum says that part of understanding perspective is understanding the unique past of each individual. In order to truly understand love, within ourselves or others, we have to acknowledge that our past story has an impact on our present emotions. In his focus on memory and on time, Proust is able to illustrate how the rational part of us constructs a narrative about our past. Again, through upheavals of thought often signified by involuntary memories, Proust breaks through that rationalized narrative and experiences some genuine relation between past and present that is not created or organized by intellect. Proust and Nussbaum both recognize the importance of literature as a tool to understand subjectivity. As Proust says:

every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's

work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can

discern what he might never have seen in himself without his book.

(Proust)