Proust, Art, and the Search for Essence

  “Bien qu’on dise avec raison qu’il n’y a pas de progress, pas de découvertes en art, mais seule, dans les sciences, et que chaque artiste recommençant pour son compte un effort individual ne peut y être aidé, ni entravé par les efforts de tout autre…” Marcel Proust
   Trans. " It is rightly said that there is no progress, no discoveries in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist re starting for himself an individual effort cannot be neither helped, nor impeded by the efforts of all the others"
   Scientific discoveries become obsolete, when replaced by newer findings.  Science is a constant dethroning of the old in favor of the newer. But artistic works are timeless.
Among Proust's extensive reflections on art, he talks about the book he had within and that had already been written for him; transcended him. He also asserts that all of us have his own book inwardly, expressing thereby the transcendence and individualism of each. He also says that he (like each of us) only has to discover this book and bring to light. A task which he says people will do anything to escape from. Escaping from something that exists within, independently of one's will,  means escaping from one's own essence. 
    Every artwork is contextual, in the sense of being traceable to a period in Art History, or to a determinate culture. In this sense, it is bound to time. But insofar as an expression of the uniqueness of the artist, of its absoluteness, it is timeless.
   Scientific discoveries dethrone one another, because they are stages of a collective and objective development, like Nietzsche said, "Science is democratic". The subject of science objectifies the world, abstracting his field of inquiry into knowledge, and being, therefore, split from it. The artist, on the other hand, feels, senses, or communes with his. His rules are his own, because they express his uniqueness.  Thus, Nietzsche said that art is aristocratic.

 The miracle of art concerns precisely  the point in which subjectivity is soul, instead of arbitrariness. The elevation of what would be mere particularity to absoluteness. 
   Proust contends that the duty of artists is to live for themselves; for their inner world. Like his narrator, they have to look within, to discover this world in the depths of themselves. To discover what has been already there, uniquely for them: their essence. Their struggle is, paradoxically, that of being led by it as they discover it, bypassing their ego. The artist is alone in being.
While science reaches for the truth, art is beyond the polarity between true and false. While science is conquest, art  is surrender, and if science "tames" the world, art gives it a new birth.