On Lightness of Being (In Memory of Milan Kundera)

 

'Life which disappears once and for all, which does not return is without weight 

and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime means nothing at all.'

 

I. 

 

Milan Kundera, the Czech-French novelist who died earlier this month, aged 94, was one of those writers whom I tried (but failed) to read and to love - Umberto Eco would be another such author. 

 

And so it is that the only work of his to which I ever returned was the philosophical novel for which he is best remembered, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) [1]. And it's this work about which I'd like to make some brief remarks ...

 

 

II.   

 

Set in the late 1960s and early '70s - i.e., during and just after the so-called Prague Spring period - it is the tale of a sex-obsessed surgeon, Tomáš, who eventually learns how to love and remain faithful to his wife, Tereza, an animal-loving photographer with hang-ups about her body. 

 

It is the story also of Tomáš's mistress and confidante, Sabina, an artist who has declared war on kitsch and puritanism and wishes to lead a life of extreme lightness [2].

 

Essentially, the novel challenges Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence; an idea which, were it true - or were we to take it seriously and act as if it were true - would lie upon our actions as the greatest weight. 

 

Kundera obliges his characters (and readers) to ask themselves how they would live were they to know for sure that they only have one life to live and that which occurs in life does so once and once only - would this lightness of being bring freedom and happiness, or become unbearable: for without weight (i.e. existential meaning), do not all our actions become trivial and worthless? [3]

 

 

III.

 

Einmal ist keinmal, as our German friends like to say - i.e., once is never enough; indeed, once is as good as never having happened at all. If a human life, for example, fails to forever return, then once it is over it is truly over and the universe can simply carry on in utter indifference.

 

Obviously, as a floraphile - that is to say, as one who loves flowers and locates their beauty precisely in the fact that they bloom and then fade with no sense of shame, or responsibility, or significance - I am not particularly troubled by such a thought, nor do I accept the logic. 

 

And whilst I don't think we can ever become soulless like the flowers - or that this would be desirable - that doesn't mean that men and women should forever live as beasts of burden, weighed down by moral seriousness.      

 

Similarly, as a lover of birds, I approve of young women like Sabina learning how to fly in defiance of the spirit of gravity - even if that means they must first hollow out their bones; it is better to live in freedom with nothing to eat, than un-free and over-stuffed, as someone once wrote [4]. 

 

However, like Nietzsche, I would also counsel taking things slowly, cautiously. 

 

For if, like Sabina, you want to learn how to fly, then you must first learn how to stand and to walk and to run and to climb. And to do that, you need to develop strong legs and that means remaining true to the earth and practicing a little weight training.     

     

 

Notes

 

[1] Written in 1982, in Czech, as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, it was first published in a French translation as L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être (Gallimard, 1984). That same year, it was also translated into English from Czech by Michael Henry Heim and published by Harper & Row in the US and Faber and Faber in the UK. 

 

[2] The novel also introduces us to Sabina's other lover, Franz - a kindly academic and idealist who might have been better advised to stick to his books and not get mixed up with women like Sabina - and a smiling, cancer-ridden dog belonging to Tomáš and Tereza who, for all their flaws, love this poor mutt and so pass what for Kundera is the true moral test of mankind; namely, whether one can or cannot display kindness for those creatures at one's mercy.

 

[3] Kundera is aware that this debate within philosophy between those who favour weight and those who champion lightness is as old as the Greek hills and can be traced back to the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides (who thought the latter positive and the former negative).

 

[4] See the post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.  

With thanks to Thomas Bonneville for providing the insight into Kundera's animal-based ethics.

 

 

Reflections on the Typewriter 1: The Case of Martin Heidegger

Heidegger at his desk sans typewriter 

I mentioned in a note to a recent post that Heidegger was no fan of the typewriter; that he believed it tore writing away from the domain of the hand, which, along with the word from which it sprang, is the essential distinction of Dasein.

It is neither coincidental nor accidental, says Heidegger, that modern man - enframed as he is by technology - should sit before a keyboard and write with a machine (first the typewriter, then the computer). Now the word is no longer able to come and go by means of the writing hand; it's processed and passed along by mechanical forces, becoming merely an item of information and communication. This not only endangers thinking, it threatens the destruction of the world. 

Today, says Heidegger, the handwritten text is not only regarded as antiquated, it is undesirable; something which, full of individual character, disturbs the homogeniety of the professional and commercial world and disrupts the ability of the reader to read quickly with the eye alone. The person who still writes by hand today is seen as either a loser, a madman, or a rebel; carrying a pen is almost as suspect as carrying a concealed weapon.

When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, concludes Heidegger, and transferred to the machine, "a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man" - and this wasn't a change for the better, no matter what advantages or conveniences were gained.

Should we, therefore, abandon the typewriter and the computer and the mobile phone with which we text and tweet and begin again to write by hand? Or is it not already too late; has technology not become so entrenched in our history and evolution - so much part of ourselves - that it is now of little or no importance that a few eccentrics choose to renounce and avoid it?

See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 80-81 and 85-86. Click here to read the relevant sections online. 

To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.