Proust and Schelling: The Life of Consciousness and the Transcendental Project

Schelling and Proust are two figures in European culture whose thought was aimed at understanding the conditions of the production of a masterpiece as the unity of the infinite and the finite. In this sense they belong to the tradition of transcendental philosophy, which has replaced reality with the products of sensual and intellectual intuition. The transcendental philosophy has emerged as the universal experimentation about regulations of the human existence, which with the abolition of prejudices of a cultural tradition intended to convert forms of affective being and of rational reflection into the reflexes of consciousness and of action, in regulative judgments and values of human experience. The scheme of such human experimental self-knowledge and self-regulation was laid down by the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when Hamlet gives us the image of an internal reflexive experiment, the purpose of which is to develop a will-to-action. This scheme become more complex in the subsequent literary culture, where there emerge the production of sovereign judgment (“tragic age”), the objectification of discharges of moral instinct (sentimentalism), the dynamics of symbolization (romanticism), the forms of affective and reflective consent (classic Russian novel of the 19^th century). With the collapse of humanistic ideals in the catastrophes of the 20^th century, the new modern literature turns into an endless criticism of the natural attitudes of consciousness, which are not adequate, by definition, to the essence of living. Proust frames this criticism as an artistic and intellectual demonstration of his narrator’s projective ontologies on the basis of the author’s pure phenomenological time. À la recherche du temps perdu marks the isolation of the critical intellectual spirit, which is associated with Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, where the singularization of the Jewish God of the word leads to the rejection of the transcendence and of the incarnation.

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