Proust's Consciousness

The argument

A Proustian impression belongs to one consciousness and still discloses something outside it. The chapter asks how. It treats impressions as more than private contents projected onto the world. Using information theory and complex systems, it shows them arising from relations between inner and outer conditions, with qualitative experience carrying information about a wider web of relations. The information does not interpret itself. The narrator has to respond to his impressions and work out what they mean, and the novel tests how a pattern can emerge from events that start out looking accidental. On this reading the self is neither sovereign nor merely passive, and a particular subject can become more connected to what lies beyond it.

Publication details

Author

Katherine Elkins

Publication

In Katherine Elkins, ed., Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 217–244.

DOI

10.1093/oso/9780190921576.003.0009

Proust's Consciousness at the publisher →

Elkins edited the volume and wrote its introduction. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives · Volume DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001

Key concepts

Proust; philosophy of mind; consciousness; information theory; qualia; complex systems; emergence; causality; inner and outer states; relational self; shared world.

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