I found Thursday’s Lecture on Schopenhauer fascinating. I have not yet taken a philosophy class so Thursday was my first introduction to Schopenhauer. I found some of the lecture on his theories to be a bit confusing, but I took great interest in his theory that people represent fragmented bits of will, and that the wills of others are constantly in conflict. From what I understood of the lecture it seemed that Schopenhauer believed the universe to be of a single will until humans arrived on the earth. I interpreted this to mean that Schopenhauer saw the “natural world” as having a single harmonious drive, but that people brought into the world conflict because we see our individual will as being the only one of importance, and are frustrated and confused when others get in the way of us reaching our goals. Such a principal reminds me of the Theory of Mind, which is described as ones ability to understand that others are mental beings with thoughts, feelings, desires, and perspectives of their own. The Theory of Mind principal actually came to me quite a few times as I was reading Swann’s Way. During the first half of Swann’s Way Marcel is though thought to be around 9 or ten, around which age he should have already developed a fairly sound Theory of Mind, and yet he seems to lake this skill which has been deemed by  developmental psychologists as being necessary for proper social interactions. For instance, on page 109 of Swann’s Way the narrator describes his young self as not understanding why his parents would be upset about him meeting his uncle’s mistress. “How could I have thought such a thing, since I did not wish it?” he laments. He fallows this with “And I could not suppose that my parent’s would see any harm in a visit in which I myself saw none.” Such statements demonstrate how young Marcel could not understand how his will did not directly create the outcome that he desired. Schopenhauer believed that we all have problems with the concept of Theory of Mind through out our lives, and that this is why there is conflict in the world.

Proust’s series, In Search of Lost Time, seems to add a whole new dimension to Schopenhauer’s theory of conflict of will and interpersonal discord. Proust does this by having the narrator Marcel dwell repeatedly on the distinctions between the present and past selves. If our present selves are so different from our past selves, that our desires and thus wills change, how do we deal with the resulting internal conflict of wills? On page 54 of Within a Budding Grove the narrator states that “[Love creates] a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.” Here, it is being said that love too can create a new form of our self, a form whose will is obsessed with the goal of obtaining the object of their desire. The notion that both time and love(the falling out of ) can work together to distinguish separate selves is presented on page 804 of The Fugitive. “The newcomer who would find it easy to endure the prospect of life  without Albertine had made his appearance in me… The possible advent of these new selves, which ought each to bear a different name from the preceding one, was something I had always dreaded, because of their indifference to the object of my love…” The conflict here is the distress Marcel experiences over realizing that the person he has become no longer cares for Albertine in the same way as his past self.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will and conflict can be applied numerous times throughout Proust’s masterpiece, not just due to the conflict of interest between the different characters, but due to the differing interests existing within a single character.