The Intuition of Good/Evil in Marcel Proust’s à la Recherche du Temps Perdu: From the Axis of Time to the Axis of Desire

Abstract

Proust’s readers could conclude that the intuition of good/evil in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu could give birth to a king of Nietzschean notion of nothingness. Indeed, Proust actually said that the world is the kingdom of nothingness (LP: 264–265). Our world is a world where everything is perishable (AD: 271). Proust was indeed quite influenced by Eastern religious beliefs (through Schopenhauer’s ideas). Above all, we could say that according to Proust, life is ambiguous. Life is a set of ambiguities we are confronted with and from which we try to get our meaning of life. But we should also remember that Proust did not express a nihilistic state of mind. When Proust is dealing with notions of good and evil, he is only searching for the the moral borders of that meaning of life and thus the foundations of human behavior. Both Time and desire actually reveal the grounds he was searching for. Any intuition of good/evil cannot exclude their basic influential role.