“Why a Novel?”

In Search of Lost Time contains plenty of standard-issue philosophy—reflections and questions about love, art, selfhood, and so on—but it’s still a novel. A novel, indeed, that takes years to read, challenges us with intricate sentences, and features a famously unreliable narrator. So why? Doesn’t that get in the way of the philosophizing? If Proust’s sole aim had been to communicate truths, wouldn’t a treatise have been a better choice?

This paper considers six potential beneficial effects of reading Proust, only one of which involves the transmission of propositional content. Specific formal moves, it suggests, prompt a particular kind of work, which leads in turn to a finite set of likely outcomes. And these outcomes are philosophical too, as long as we remember that philosophy involves living well, not merely thinking straight. Beliefs remain extremely important; they just aren’t, even for philosophers, the only thing that should matter.