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Milan Kundera (1929- ). Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia to an intellectual family Studied musicology, film, literature and aesthetics at the university Joined the communist party in 1948, but was expelled in 1950 (rejoined in 1956 to 1970)
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Milan Kundera (1929- ) • Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia to an intellectual family • Studied musicology, film, literature and aesthetics at the university • Joined the communist party in 1948, but was expelled in 1950 (rejoined in 1956 to 1970) • In 1952 joined the faculty at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts: lectured on world literature • Published poems, plays, essays with a clearly communist ideology • Lost his teaching position after Soviet invasion in 1968 • Books banned in Czechoslovakia in 1970 • Became guest prof. in France (1975) • Deprived of Czech citizenship in1979 • Became French citizen in 1981
His official biography: “Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, and since 1975 he has been living in France”
Best known novels: • The Joke (1965) • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) • The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) • Immortality (1988) • Identity (1996)
Nietzche and the eternal return • Provides comprehension of what it is to be • Rooted in a symbolic system through which existence can be comprehended: • Dionysius • Apollo • Socrates
Dionysian reality: • Undifferentiated being • Prior to structure and organization • Prior to individuals and classes of individuals • Apollonian reality: • immediately given, present in awareness • Allows for individuation and transformation of Dionysian reality into appearance of individuals • Imagination • Pre-reflective, but conscious, experiences of existence • Socratic: • Rational explanation, identification and classification • Reality is mediated by rule-bound concepts and propositions
Existential reality Consists of Dionysian existence without entities, Apollonian imagination with awareness of entities, and Socratic impulses to define such appearances objectively
Problem: • Existence = a dynamic potential (energy), which is immediately and spontaneously actualized in Apollonian images as well as mediately and intentionally in Socratic conceptual representations • Since appearances are fleeting, we attempt to fix them through Socratic reasoning • We abstract them from lived reality and represent them through timeless concepts and propositions • Thus, we disconnect them from existential reality and falsify them • On the other hand, “everything seems far too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything: ought one to pour the most precious wines and salves into the sea? My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal” (Nietzche, The Will to Power)
Thus: • Socratic reasoning must stay grounded in existential awareness • Entities must be accepted as differing from moment to moment (process rather than fixed beings) • Yet their eternal nature must also be taken into account • Apollonian and Socratic must be united since both the fleetingness of appearances and the need for eternity are existential
Eternal return • Energy is finite • Time is infinite • Thus, time must be circular • “The idea of eternal return follows from the conjunction of the finitude of energy and the infinity of circular time, and expresses immediate existential awareness: the fleetingness of appearances and the need for sameness in eternity. It thus reflects the original unity of the symbolic system of Dionysius, Apollo and Socrates which make existential reality comprehensible”
Nietzche, The Gay Science The greatest weight. – What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
How does Kundera reflect these ideas in the first two chapters? • What does he say about the values of “lightness” and “heaviness”?
What relationship do these ideas have with the characterization of Tomas and Tereza? • Which one is “light” and which “heavy”? • How are they related to the Apollonian and Socratic means of comprehending the world?
Nietzche’s concepts taken from: Morstein, Petra von. “Eternal Return and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.2 (Summer 1989): 65-78.
