Music, Memory, and Desire: Proust, Augustine, and Whitehead

Music, Memory, and Desire

Proust, Augustine, and Whitehead

Music gathers what has been, intensifies what is, and lures us toward what can be—making audible the way time, memory, and desire are woven into a moment of lived experience. In such moments there is a longing for fulfillment: in this life, says Proust; in the divine life, says Augustine; and in both at once, says Whitehead. Music is what feelings sound like.

Proust and Augustine

"Both Proust and Augustine experience time as a distension of the self, something that we ought to pursue and attempt to grasp despite its elusiveness; and both, in different ways, seek to better comprehend time through music. For Proust, music is a point of contact between temporal, material life and the transcendent, immaterial realm of art, an entity that sounds in time without fully inhabiting it. For Augustine, music is an image both of time’s transience and of its divine source. (Claire Murphy, “Music as a Key to Time in Proust and Augustine,”)

"In his autobiographical as well as his philosophical writings, Augustine deploys the example of music to illustrate key aspects of life and temporality. In the example of the psalm we find a finite model of the incomprehensible time that is never fully present except (perhaps) in the memory; in the harmony of the cosmos we see the work of the divine artisan whose beauty inspires us to compose our own lives after its pattern; and we can attempt to imagine the knowledge and life of this artisan as even more perfect, beautiful, and self-sufficient than our comprehension of a musical piece. In each of these cases, the peculiar status of music as successive and ever-fleeting, yet articulating order and beauty, makes it an apt example by which we come to better understand our place in relation to the universe and to God, and in particular the finitude of our temporal existence in relation to God’s eternity." (Claire Murphy, “Music as a Key to Time in Proust and Augustine,”)

Proust, Augustine, and Whitehead

In “Music as a Key to Time in Proust and Augustine,” Claire Murphy, a PhD student in the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame at the time of writing, offers a compelling account of the distinctive role music can play in human life by reading Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and Augustine of Hippo (354–430) side by side. Her essay, published in 2022, appears in Church Life Journal: A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, and can be found by clicking here. If you are interested in Proust, Augustine, music or desire, it is well worth the read.

I was drawn to Murphy’s essay because I share these interests. I also want to bring Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) into the conversation, because I believe his philosophy offers a way of appreciating—and learning from—both Proust and Augustine. Whitehead had a great deal to say about art, beauty, and aesthetic experience, even though he did not write about music in any sustained or systematic way. Still, it is arguable that music itself—and the act of listening to it—provides a particularly accessible entry point into process philosophy, because it so vividly exemplifies temporality, becoming, feeling, and the achievement of satisfaction in experience.

In Whitehead's philosophy, energy and feeling are two sides of the same coin. Wherever there is energy in any form, physical or psychological, in organic or inorganic life, beneath the surface of the earth or in outer space, there is feeling or, to use his term, prehending. In human life, music is what feeling sounds like. It is an acoustic expression of feeling, as is the act of listening to it.

Like Proust, Whitehead understands the world as a world of becoming, composed of fleeting moments that he calls actual occasions or occasions of experience. These occasions are the basic building blocks not only of human life but of the entire universe. “The actual world is a process,” he says at the outset of Process and Reality. Each moment of experience begins not with clear and distinct conscious awareness, but with involuntary memories—data inherited from the past actual world that are felt before they are explicitly known. Whitehead describes this inheritance as experience in the mode of causal efficacy: the way the past lives on in the present as felt influence.

In a manner resonant with Augustine, Whitehead also speaks of an eternal realm of pure potentialities, which he calls eternal objects. These are the patterns and forms that can be realized in experience, including the structures of music. Whitehead understands these potentialities as belonging to what he calls the primordial nature of God. Music, then, though fleeting like experience itself, points beyond itself—not away from the world, but toward the depth of reality that makes patterned experience possible at all.

Thus, for Whitehead, the whole of reality, in its actual and potential dimensions, includes both temporality and eternality. For Whitehead, temporality does not pre-exist the universe as a container in which events unfold; it is created through the unfolding of events themselves. Actual occasions quite literally make time. Each moment of experience—indeed each subject of experience—remembers and is affected by the past actual world while also anticipating a future that has not yet arrived. This creative advance happens moment by moment, in a rhythm strikingly akin to the way the narrator of In Search of Lost Time lives through experience: holding together what has been, what is being felt now, and what may yet come, not all at once, but through a living temporal synthesis that becomes intelligible only as it unfolds.

Moreover—and on this point Proust and Augustine would agree—the feeling of temporality is suffused with desire. Musical experience is not neutral or detached; it carries with it a longing for fulfillment. Whitehead names this orienting pull the subjective aim of experience: a desire for satisfaction, for wholeness, for harmony and intensity held together. In this sense, Proust, Augustine, and Whitehead each offer a philosophy of desire, even as they differ on where its deepest fulfillment is to be found.
What follows, then, are a set of theses concerning time, music, and desire—points at which Proustian, Augustinian, and Whiteheadian themes converge. I offer them in the hope that you, my readers, will critique, revise, and amplify them, developing outlooks of your own.

1. Music discloses the temporal structure of experience

Both Proust and Augustine understand music as uniquely capable of revealing the structure of time as it is lived. In Proust, musical experience gathers past, present, and future into a thickened moment of felt meaning. In Augustine, music exemplifies the distension of the soul, in which memory, attention, and expectation are held together in the present act of singing or listening. Whitehead’s notion of an occasion of experience offers a shared conceptual language for this insight: listening to music is a concrete event in which inheritance of the past and anticipation of the future are unified in the present.

2. Time is remembered and anticipated, not merely measured

For both thinkers, time is not fundamentally what clocks measure. Proust shows how time reappears through involuntary memory, collapsing years into a single sensation. Augustine argues that time exists within the soul as remembering and expecting. Whitehead generalizes this claim metaphysically: time is constituted by acts of experience that remember and anticipate. In all three, time is something that happens through feeling.

3. Musical experience intensifies desire

Proust and Augustine agree that music awakens desire, though they interpret its aim differently. In Proust, music intensifies longing by revealing depths of meaning otherwise inaccessible; desire is heightened rather than resolved. Augustine likewise recognizes music’s power to move the heart, though he worries about mistaking emotional intensity for spiritual fulfillment. Whitehead helps articulate this shared insight by naming desire as the subjective aim present in every occasion of experience.

4. Music offers real but partial fulfillment

Proust treats musical experience as a genuine fulfillment—moments in which life achieves coherence and intensity. Augustine agrees that such fulfillment is real, but insists it is partial and provisional. Music satisfies, but it does not satisfy finally. Whitehead mediates this tension by distinguishing between satisfaction as a momentary achievement and peace as a deeper mode of fulfillment.

5. Experience is inwardly unified, not merely successive

For Proust, a musical phrase can unify disparate moments of life into a single expressive form. For Augustine, singing a psalm unifies memory, present attention, and anticipation within one act of devotion. Whitehead conceptualizes this unity as concrescence: the many become one in the immediacy of experience.

6. Music reveals forms that exceed any single performance

Both Proust and Augustine recognize that music transcends any particular act of hearing or singing. A melody can recur years later with renewed power; a psalm can be sung countless times without exhaustion. Whitehead names this excess pure potentiality: forms that can be repeatedly realized without being exhausted by any one realization.

7. Art and God as differing horizons of ultimacy

Here the divergence becomes explicit. Proust locates the highest intensity of meaning within art itself; music offers a secular transcendence. Augustine insists that art points beyond itself to God, the true source of harmony and rest. Whitehead reframes this difference by distinguishing between the integrity of aesthetic fulfillment and the depth of its source.

8. God as listener and preserver of meaning

Augustine imagines God as hearing the psalm as a whole, even as humans hear it successively. Whitehead gives metaphysical substance to this image: God prehends every occasion of experience, receiving the world’s music without loss. Proust, though not theistic, gestures toward a similar intuition when he portrays art as preserving fleeting moments against oblivion.

9. Restlessness as a shared insight, not a disagreement

Proust and Augustine both take restlessness seriously. For Proust, desire is never finally satisfied, even by art; it must be continually renewed. For Augustine, this restlessness signals the soul’s orientation toward God. Whitehead allows us to see both as articulations of the same structure of desire: an openness to more intensity, more harmony, more meaning than any finite moment can provide.

10. Music educates desire toward wholeness

Finally, both thinkers see music as formative. Proust shows how music teaches us to listen more deeply to life; Augustine sees it as training the soul for worship and peace. Whitehead interprets both as instances of experience being shaped toward harmonious intensity. Music does not end desire, but refines it—preparing us, whether religiously or secularly, for a more capacious way of inhabiting time. With his understanding of God as a Harmony of Harmonies by which the universe is held together in tragic beauty, Whitehead offers a hint that the soul seeks (and can find) this harmony in the sense of Peace.

It is noteworthy that, for Whitehead and for Augustine, a kind of rest stands as the crowning experience of the soul. In Whitehead’s philosophy, this rest takes the form of Peace: a resting in what he calls a harmony of harmonies—a fulfillment that includes the world in all its achieved values and sufferings, yet is more than the world. Peace is not withdrawal from life, nor indifference to its struggles; rather, it involves a release from acquisitive desire and a surpassing of narrowly self-centered concerns, accompanied by a quiet trust in the efficacy of Beauty. This harmony of harmonies is more than human life. It is God as experienced through the trust.

Augustine, I suspect, would agree more deeply than first appearances might suggest. His famous claim that the human heart is restless until it rests in God names a similar movement: not the annihilation of desire, but its transformation. Resting in God does not mean the end of feeling or concern for the world, but the reorientation of desire away from anxious grasping and toward a love that can finally let things be. In both thinkers, rest is not inertia but fulfillment; not emptiness but fullness.

Seen together, Whitehead’s Peace and Augustine’s resting in God can be understood as two ways of naming a shared intuition: that the deepest satisfaction of desire arrives not through possession or control, but through participation in a larger harmony—one that gathers the many into a meaningful whole, and in doing so frees the soul from its compulsive preoccupation with itself. Certain forms of music may well awaken a soul to this desire for freedom and, in moments of liberation from self-preoccupation, offer a fleeting yet genuine taste of the freedom itself—an anticipation, however brief, of the rest for which both Whitehead and Augustine believe the soul ultimately longs.

What Proust evinces so well is that restlessness itself can possess a kind of beauty. The longing for wholeness, even when it remains unfulfilled, is aesthetically rich. In À la recherche du temps perdu, desire does not simply point toward satisfaction; it shimmers in its own right, charged with intensity, vulnerability, and promise. The ache of wanting, the ache of remembering, and the ache of anticipating are not merely deficiencies to be overcome, but modes of heightened aliveness. Proust thus teaches us that the beauty of human experience need not wait for rest or resolution: the very movement of desire—the stretching of the soul toward what it does not yet have—can itself be a source of meaning, depth, and aesthetic truth

Proust

A Scholarly Discussion

Augustine

A Scholarly Discussion

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work Marcel Proust whose novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, has been called the definitive modern novel. His stylistic innovation, sensory exploration and fascination with memory were to influence a whole body of thinkers, from the German intellectuals of the 1930s to the Bloomsbury set, chief among them Virginia Woolf, and innumerable critics and novelists since. But how did he succeed in creating a 3000 page novel with such an artistic coherence? To what extent did John Ruskin influence Proust? Is his fascination with memory and recall simply a nostalgia for the past? And what impact did he have on the 20th century novel? With Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London and author of Albertine; Malcolm Bowie, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge and author of Proust among the Stars; Dr Robert Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in the Literature Department at the Open University and author of Proust and the Victorians.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss St Augustine of Hippo's account of his conversion to Christianity and his life up to that point. Written c397AD, it has many elements of autobiography with his scrutiny of his earlier life, his long relationship with a concubine, his theft of pears as a child, his work as an orator and his embrace of other philosophies and Manichaeism. Significantly for the development of Christianity, he explores the idea of original sin in the context of his own experience. The work is often seen as an argument for his Roman Catholicism, a less powerful force where he was living in North Africa where another form of Christianity was dominant, Donatism. While Augustine retells many episodes from his own life, the greater strength of his Confessions has come to be seen as his examination of his own emotional development, and the growth of his soul.

More on Proust

As quoted by Claire Murphy in “Music as a Key to Time in Proust and Augustine,”

Few readers will have read the entirety of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) The book is well over a million words long—arguably the longest novel in the history of the English language—and it moves very slowly, sometimes with inordinately long and convoluted sentences, and without the overtures of a plot. It is best read as a vast series of episodes. Different English editions range from roughly 3,000 to more than 4,000 pages, across seven volumes, depending on the typescript, formatting, and translation. Scenes linger, sentences unfold with extraordinary patience, and pages may pass with little overt “plot” movement. The plot, as such, follows an unnamed narrator as he reflects on his life, tracing how memory—especially involuntary memory—reveals the deeper meanings of past experiences. Beginning with childhood in Combray, the novel moves through Parisian society, love affairs, jealousy, friendship, and disillusionment, portraying the social worlds of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in meticulous detail. As the narrator suffers losses, disappointments, and the passage of time, he gradually comes to see how desire, art, and memory shape a life more profoundly than external success or failure. In the final volumes, he realizes that his vocation is to transform these lived experiences into art, discovering in writing itself a way to redeem time by giving it form and meaning.

But to put it this way is to miss the point. The task is to relax into the slowness of the passages and rest in their evocative capacities: Proust is training the reader to inhabit time as it is lived rather than rushed, to notice how meaning accrues through memory, repetition, and minute shifts of feeling—much as music discloses its sense only through duration.

I offer some passages from Proust, taken from Claire Murphy's essay (see below) to give you a feel for his writing. In this context Proust - or, more accurately, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, is talking about a character named Charles Swann.

Then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils (Proust, Swann’s Way, 308).

Perhaps it was owing to his ignorance of music that [Swann] had received so confused an impression, one of those that are none the less the only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, sine materia . . . And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognized only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instill, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable—did not our memory, like a laborer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow (Proust, Swann’s Way, 294-295).

[It] was so peculiarly itself, it had so individual, so irreplaceable a charm, that Swann felt as though he had met, in a friend’s drawing-room, a woman whom he had seen and admired in the street and had despaired of ever seeing again. Finally the phrase receded, diligently guiding its successors through the ramifications of its fragrance, leaving on Swann’s features the reflection of its smile (Swann's Way, 299).

He began to realize how much that was painful, perhaps even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong! He played with the melancholy which the music diffused, he felt it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness (Swann's Way, 337)

And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening and to say to himself: “It’s the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata—I mustn’t listen!,” all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness (Swann's Way, 490-491).

Passages from Augustine

As quoted by Claire Murphy in “Music as a Key to Time in Proust and Augustine,”

My expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past (Confessions, 243).[2]

What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that psalm is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are part of a whole, and of the total history of “the sons of men,” where all human lives are but parts (Confessions, 243).

Let us, our Lord and God helping, order ourselves between those below us and those above us, so we are not troubled by lower, and take delight only in higher things. For delight is a kind of weight in the soul. Therefore, delight orders the soul. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Where delight, there the treasure; where the heart, there happiness or misery. But what are the higher things, if not those where the highest unchangeable undisturbed and eternal equality resides? . . . So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe.[4]

We can imagine that God knows events all at once as we know an entire psalm while singing each part, but the Creator's knowledge must be “far more wonderful and hidden” than that (Conf. XI.41). Presumably it is superior to human memory and anticipation because its simultaneous grasp is not embedded in time as ours is.[5]