Marcel Proust, psychologist in the Darwinian style

Cover of How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain De Botton

Marcel Proust, Parisian novelist of the early twentieth century, was an unknowing evolutionary psychologist adherent to the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis. No, really. That's my conclusion from reading Alain De Botton's friendly little book How Proust Can Change Your Life. De Botton may not have intended this summation; his is a remarkable, witty and not altogether fanciful take on Proust that points out with great and amusing ease much that is wise about the master and his literary output. Darwin doesn't get a mention, naturally. But I was rereading Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature at the same time and my doxastic hungers have forced these two writers together. The result: I declare Proust to be an intellectual ancestor of modern evolutionary psychology or, at worst, an independent co-discoverer born seventy years too soon.

[Published: 07-Dec-04 | Permalink | Category: Read]

Before I take my tangent I'll pause to say that there's a lot more to How Proust Can Change Your Life than some concordances with the edge where molecular biological research overlaps with cognitive psychology. De Botton's book covers a lot more ground than I'm going to mention and also counts as one of the more stimulating, interesting and entertaining books I've read in a while. It is deep and deeply cheery, light and enlightening, funny and fundamentally serious. I borrowed it from a friend but will be buying my own copy, not because I'll reread it immediately but because I'm so pleased with it that I want to make this gesture to the author. I don't usually do that; libraries exist for a reason.

Back on tangent now… My conclusion from De Botton's critique of Proust's famous, famously huge masterwork In Search Of Lost Time (aka Remembrance Of Things Past) is that the ingenious and unprecedented levels of psychological realism Proust brought to his characters resonate with the often unpopular or unpalatable conclusions of modern evolutionary psychology. There is no suggestion that Proust was a Darwinian, that he religiously interbred peas, that he lay in bed (he did that a lot) trying to work out why human babies all smile at the same age, why all societies have an incest taboo, or why we like cheesecake so much. Proust instead recognized and honestly depicted elements of our inner natures which are uncomfortably true and at odds with popular, unexamined beliefs about love, friendship, memory, attention and thought. Modern science, especially in the fields of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, does an analogous or--if we cite Proust as a philosophical progenitor of modern psychological honesty--orthologous task when it sheds light on the workings of same.

Doubtful? Here is De Botton on a moment in In Search Of Lost Time where the female lead character Albertine has, on entering the narrator's room, just experienced a surge of love for him:

If we asked Albertine why she had suddenly felt this rush of affection, one imagines her pointing to her boyfriend's intellectual or spiritual qualities -- and we would of course be inclined to believe her, for this is a dominant societal interpretation of the way affection is generated.

However, Proust quietly lets us know that the real reason why Albertine feels so much love for her boyfriend is that he has had a very close shave this morning, and that she adores smooth skin. The implication is that his cleverness counts for little in her particular enthusiasm; if he refused to shave ever again, she might leave him tomorrow.

This is an inopportune thought. We like to think of love as arising from more profound sources. Albertine might vigorously deny that she ever felt love because of a close shave, accuse you of perversion for suggesting it and attempt to change the subject. It would be a pity. What can replace a clichetic explanation of our functioning is not an image of perversity, but a broader conception of what is normal. If Albertine accepted that her reactions only demonstrated that a feeling of love can have an extraordinary range of origins, some more valid than others, then she might calmly evaluate the foundations of her relationship and identify the role which she wished good shaving to play in her emotional life.

How Proust Can Change Your Life, Picador paperback p108

Compare that with Pinker, on love and the subconscious economics of choosing a life-partner:

How can you be sure that a prospective partner won't leave the minute it is rational to do so--say, when a 10-out-of-10 [i.e. the partner�s perfect mate, objectively measured] moves in next door? One answer is, don't accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with; look for a partner who is committed to staying with you because you are you. Committed by what? Committed by an emotion. An emotion that the person did not decide to have, and so cannot decide not to have. An emotion that was not triggered by your objective mate-value and so will not be alienated by someone with greater mate-value [when measured objectively]. … An emotion like romantic love.

"People who are sensible about love are incapable of it," wrote Douglas Yates. Even when courted by the perfect suitor, people are unable to will themselves to fall in love, often to the bewilderment of the matchmaker, the suitor, and the person himself or herself. Instead it is a glance, a laugh, a manner that steals the heart. Remember […] that spouses of one twin are not attracted to the other; we fall in love with the individual, not with the individual's qualities.

How The Mind Works, Penguin paperback p418

Albertine's reaction to Swann's depilation is one example of a Proustian theme, the uncompromising depiction of a level of truth in human relationships unprecedented in the fiction of the time and one that permits what De Botton calls "a broader conception of what is normal". Similarly, modern science offers explanations of human relationships by, for example, exposing the metaphorical selfishness of genes or delineating the apparently heartless and soulless calculations of the meme-packed mind in the economics of selecting reproductive partners; from this understanding, and in surprising accord with Proust's theme, we again reach a new level of truth and become endowed with a broader conception of what we really are. Science finds truths which we may not like, shines uncompromising light on the way things actually work, shatters comfortable myths. Science's aim is Proust's theme.

Proust wrote the following on the role of art:

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

Quoted (and I suspect translated) by De Botton, p108

If I replace some of words in the phrase "…have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs…" in the quote above, a truism of evolutionary psychology is revealed:

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have evolved over a million years and continue to influence our actions today, and it is the task of science to identify their effects, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

That this is not a truism outside the realms of science is the reason why Pinker and Dawkins and Trivers and the rest must write their books and papers.

How Proust Can Change Your Life elsewhere

De Botton's own page on the book, with links to reviews in major newspapers
Entries on De Botton (sparse) and Proust (fuller) in Wikipedia

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