Now let me try to synthesize Proust and Nietzsche in the context of Rorty’s book. I’ve been thinking and writing about Rorty’s thoughts, especially as they related to Nietzsche, for more than 13 years now. I closed my Montaigne Project at the time by examining Michel de Montaigne’s essay On Experience and led off with the following several pargraphs.
Writing a insightful analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche, Rorty interpreted Nietzsche to believe that understanding your personal narrative is akin to creating an entirely new language:
The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language – that is, of thinking up some new metaphors. For any literal description of one’s individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language-game for this purpose, will necessarily fail.
Defining myself as a writer, I found this description fascinating. Rorty went on:
To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language.
And then I went on in the essay to write about how this theory of Nietzsche prompted me to begin my Montaigne Project, and I’m still at it today. The parts about Nietzsche that I quoted came very early in Rorty’s book, but in this chapter, he continues to expand upon it with this:
(Ironists’) criterion for resolving doubts, their criterion of private perfection, is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves. All any ironist can measure success against is the past – not by living up to it, but by redescribing it in his terms, thereby becoming able to say, “Thus I willed it.”
That’s how Rorty draws (and keeps) Nietzsche into his story, but what about Proust? How does he relate Proust’s grand project to the theory of personal narratives? Rorty writes:
For Proust and Nietzsche, however, there is nothing more powerful or important than self-redescription. They are not trying to surmount time and chance, but to use them. They are quite aware that what counts as resolution, perfection, and autonomy will always be a function of when one happens to die or to go mad. But this relativity does not entail futility. For there is no big secret which the ironist hopes to discover, and which he might die or decay before discovering. There are only little mortal things to be rearranged by being redescribed. If he had been alive or sane longer, there would have been more material to be rearranged, and thus different redescriptions, but there would never have been the right description.
Ok, so there we have it—Rorty says that to Proust and Nietzsche, nothing is more important than self-description. But that’s not the Proust and Nietzsche that I’ve read.
The Proust I read was telling a grand social story, one that involved his family, his community, social scenes, friends, rivals and lovers. The things Proust writes about himself are entirely banal and, to be honest, pretty tedious. His narrator is an effete hypochondriac. He has fascinating things to say about art and culture, but he’s fairly humorless. He whines about his lack of romantic success, and yet he treats the women he pines after horribly. It’s a wonder they want to have any association with him at all.
But his story is still riveting because the characters around Marcel the narrator are fascinating. And the main reason why they are so appealing is that Marcel is constantly misunderstanding them. He draws all kinds of conclusions about the people he knows and reshapes his narratives within those inaccurate observations—then regularly has to rewrite his own story when he discovers the truth about those characters.
Proust doesn’t shift his narrative so much because he acquires new wisdom, he’s forced to shift it because he comes to understand how he misunderstood other people.
So yes, there is an ironist’s mission here of constant rewriting, but in large part that is due to Marcel’s misunderstanding of how he fits within his social imaginary. Because he so regularly misunderstands others, he misunderstands himself. And as his beautiful thoughts about intermittences of the heart reminds us, it’s so easy to routinely get understandings of your own past wrong because our deepest feelings are sometimes hidden in our body and can only come out when properly unlocked
It’s important to not blame people for getting others’ wrong. In fact, if someone gets something about you wrong, that’s an excellent opportunity to look in the mirror and think about how you might have contributed to the mistaken belief.
If Proust is an example of achieving some kind of “private perfection,” he certainly took a highly round-about way of getting there. To the extent he succeeded, it was only because he didn’t rely purely on his thoughts expressed in a personal narrative. Proust found himself by getting to better understand others, with a great deal of trial and error, and finding unique ways to connect with his embodied self.
And this brings me to the thoughts in my previous essay about Nietzsche. When he writes about creating this new language, Nietzsche is not telling us to find more elaborate ways to talk to ourselves. Nietzsche understood that all talk and writing happens within a social context. There is always an implied audience, even if you have no idea who will come across the pages and how they will react.
When we start telling our stories and communicate with the common vocabulary of our times, it is very easy to reach for superlatives and overstate our feelings about every subject we come upon. The effect of this is to create a cartoon version of ourselves that is far more fanatical than we really are.
But Nietzsche didn’t say the problem with this was the way it distorted our personal narrative. Instead, he said the real problem is how it makes others misunderstand you. So now bring back Proust. If we are constantly expressing ourselves in ways that misrepresent the way we feel, and people are then placing themselves in a social context based on those misunderstandings, we create a culture of entirely fictional characters, everyone reacting to personas that have little or no resemblance to the real people underneath.
And that is exactly what the vast majority of the 3500 pages of In Search of Lost Time is about, a fake world of post Belle Epoque Paris filled with people who play act every moment of the day.
While I believe there is merit to what Rorty is saying in regards to people finding the right contingent vocabulary to own their lives and to love whatever becomes of them, Rorty is making this too much about the solitary human being heroically rising above. You can’t do that through language. Language is a tool of connection between people and any new vocabulary you form needs to find an audience of others interested in reading and understanding it.
Note to reader: as noted on the Expressive story, I am appending a note here because this site receives no traffic and I feel safe doing so, at least over a short period. If pinging this story is a message to me about the way I have expressed myself and theorized about various aspects of you, purely speculative theories on my part in most cases, I am sorry if this has done you any harm. I hope you appreciate that the silent, distant nature of these interactions helped spawn much of my theorizing, which is a big reason I’m trying hard to bring this project to a conclusion and to stop the speculation.
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