The pendulum of weight/lightness – From Kundera’s book

When I was doing biology in Ann Arbor, I had many interesting conversations in the lab with my friend Martha, who had a degree in English.

“You should read Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is such a beautiful book.” She once said to me.

I heard of the book, as well as the movie, and knew what it is famous for. Intuitively, I put it in the same category as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The eternal appeal of the exotic literature. As a movie buff, I checked out the namesake movie (directed by Philip Kaufman) during a Thanksgiving weekend, but never had the chance to watch it. Perhaps it was not the right time.

A fast winding of time forward. A few months ago. Cambridge, MA. I was sitting in K’s office discussing my generals readings with him. We were in the middle of a conversation about the history of medicine. Then suddenly he asked me:

“Do you know who Milan Kundera is?”

“Yes. The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

“It is a very good book.”

Although it was typical of K’s expansive thinking, I knew there was clear logic why he brought the book to my attention, and he only explicated it implicitly. Since I hadn’t read the book, I was clueless.

“Perhaps it is the time for me to knock down this one.” I thought to myself.

I did after I finished my exam, and I love it (as you can see from my previous post).

True. It is a beautiful love story. But the underlying philosophical insights are what fascinate me the most. The key issue Kundera contemplates is the dialectic of weight and lightness in our lives, as “the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”

Yes, the heaviness of burdens could crush us, but is also “simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

“Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

“What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

This is an eternal dialectic. Because it is a dialectic, there is no black-or-white answer for it.

As the title of his book implies, Kundera does not regard lightness as unquestionably positive, despite his distaste on the suffocating homogeneity of the force of “the grand march.” Tomas, the protagnist in the novel, made a decision to forsake his promising career and comfortable life (a life of lightness) in Switzerland and come back to his wife Tereza in Prague. Why?

“Es Muss Sein.” (It must be.) That is from a musical piece of Beethoven, who viewed weight as something positive, and believed that “the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.” Beethoven’s hero is “a lifter of metaphysical weights.”

How could Tomas gauge that it is the right decision for him to follow his passion and go back to Tereza? How long could it last? He simply could not know, because he has only one life to live and cannot test his hypotheses as what scientists do in the lab.

A while ago, I read another book, of a completely different kind, titled A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism by Lee Braver. Explicit from the title, the book surveys the evolution of continental philosophy from Kant to Derrida in the anti-realism tradition. To summarize it in a simple and simplistic way, analytical philosophers, those who embrace realism and follow the path of Plato, believes in the metaphysical existence of a mind-independent reality, be it the concrete objects in the world or the general principles that organize these things, that human mind can approach to and with effort, comprehend. In contrast, continental philosophers, following the Kantian tradition, claim that because everything in the world is mediated by our mind, there is no existence of a separate reality apart from what we perceive. Everything is “a thing of this world,” a world created by us.

How does it relate to Kundera’s novel? Perhaps we can equate realist perspective with Kundera’s idea of weight, and anti-realist perspective with that of lightness. Throughtout the development of continental thoughts, philosophers have been trying very hard to progressively eliminate the realist components in their system. And they are largely successful - Hegel’s complete dismissal of noumena, Heidegger’s development of phenomenology, and Derrida’s play with language. But in the end, even at the time of Derrida, who seems to deconstruct everything and create a system without any attachment - we have nothing to lift! - he still could not entirely eliminate realism. After all, even if we are able to reject the concept of a mind-independent reality, it is much harder to reject the idea that there exist some realist principles that organize our thoughts and act as a platform for our basic communications. Without that, we might very well be completely lost in a chaos.

In this sense, the lightness is not just unbearable, but impossible.

Let’s go to the other direction. In E.R Dodds’s classic work The Greeks and the Irrational, it cites a wonderful quote by T.H. Huxley in an appropriately named chapter “The fear of freedom.”

“A man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.”

Freedom could be the worst nightmare of humans. In fact, Dodds shows us that in the Hellenistic Age, especially the time of Plato and Aristotle, rationalism flourished in Greece, but only ephemerally. This was followed by a long dark age, and not until the Renaissance did Europe see the light of rationalism again (of course this is an over-simplistic point of view.) Why did Greek rationalism fail to persist? Dodds’s answer is that too much freedom, fostered by competing schools of thought and an open intellectual environment, created a deep psychological anxiety for the Greeks. They desired things that were more stable and palliating, even if they entailed illusion. That is why they resorted to the irrational such as magic, divination, and various cult practices. I am not going to elaborate the psychological impact of religions here, but it seems that deep in our psyche we all long for something that we can lean on. In the final pages of the book, Dodds claims that we live in a similar era as that of the Greeks, with the rise of rationalism and the impediment it encountered. He then optimitically predicts that modern man, equipped with proper instruments of modern science and psychology, will eventually overcome his fears and successfully take the decisive jump to rationalism. I wonder whether this could be the case given the eternal dialectic of lightness/weight. Quite on the contrary, since the book was published (in early 50s), it appears that the pendulum has swung to the opposite direction, with the rise of post-modernism (continetal philosophy has played a significant role here).

Pendulum is the key word here. The OED offers the following explanation for the word: “A rod, cord, wire, etc., with a weight or bob at or near one end, suspended from a fixed point so as to swing or oscillate freely under the influence of gravity.” In my discussion here, the rod is our thought; the fixed point is our sense of truth; the gravity is something deep in our mind that I may feebly call “human nature”.

We oscillate between wight and lightness, rationalism and spiritualism, realism and anti-realism, modern and post-modern…

Now I become to understand the initial idea of K to bring up Kundera’s novel. We were actually discussing a similar dialectic in the evolution of medical thought throughout history. Hippocratic medicine (5^th century BC) stresses the harmony between the body and the environment, while Galenic medicine (2^nd century AD) highlights individual volition. Medieval Europe witnessed the rise of astrology, which correlated the human body to astral events. The pendulum then swang back from the 16^th century when modern medicine focused on the pathology and physiology of the individual body. We see a similar oscillation in Chinese context: the Neijing stresses correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, while Song physicians (10^th-13^th centuries) perceived the body as an isolate entity immune to external influences.

Yet perhaps pendulum is not a precise metaphor. For the history of thought, every time it swings back, it does not go back the same point, but instead reaches to a different position. Perhaps it is better to see it as a three-dimentional picture: a pendulum swings in a spiral along the axis of time. We have history on our back, and presumably that has made us more intelligent to make our next move. Hopefully we can learn from history and progress. (In the postscript of Ray Huang’s book 1587: A Year of No Significance, he conceptualizes a similar spiral dialectic between our moral ideals and everyday practicality.)

“What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” Kundera’s voice rings back.

We are in the web of multiple pendulums in our lives. With that prescience, perhaps we can better cultivate ourselves to achieve a balance, a golden mean that would render stability, fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction.

Mirror, dissection and desire

Contemporary art is something that I cannot appreciate a great deal, since its conceptual frameworks and means of representations are usually not immediately accessible to an uninitiated viewer such as me. But I have been trying to understand it more nonetheless. The reason is simple: Art and humanities are inseparable. As a historian sympathetic with post-modern approach, I think there should exist common grounds between historical and artistic views of the world. Indeed that is what I found.

Early today, I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston (this is the third museum I explored in Boston, besides MFA and the Gardner's Museum). The museum is located along the seaport. With its vast glass walls, it offers a spectacular view of the sea (there is an awesome computer lounge in the museum where you can sit on a stair-type structure, with a huge window facing the sea, creating a visual illusion that the lounge descends to the water.) Overall, the museum is not very big, with a few galleries on the fourth floor. My first impression was that there are almost no paintings in this museum. Instead, multi-media production, photography, sculpture and performance art prevail. This perhaps bespeaks the current fad of western contemporary art, a strong sensitivity toward materiality.

Although most of the works did not appeal to me (not surprisingly), several pieces in the sculptor room attracted my attention. One piece presents two wooden boxes with hollowed centers. Along the inside walls at the centers are a series of lightened bulbs stretching down to the floor, where a mirror is placed. Viewing from a distance, I could only see the exterior of two boxes, which were rather non-descriptive. Yet once I approached the items and looked down through the central hollows, something nauseatingly spectacular happened: I saw lines of lights extending infinitely to the abysmal! In other words, the mirror created a visual effect that expands space infinitely. How fascinating! The work is created by Ivan Navarro and Courtney Smith, with the title "11 Upside Down." In fact, this visual gimmick has dark message to convey: the artists intend to use the visual vertigo to mimic the psychological terror created after the collapse of twin towers, and more generally our psychological anxiety derived even from the most mundane things.

There is another piece in the room created by Mexican artist Damian Ortega called "Olympus." The artist meticulously dissembled an Olympus camera into multiple layers, and hung them within a series of glass chambers. Here Ortega acted as a surgeon, skillfully using his scalpel to dissect apart his "eyes" -- the camera. It reminds me of the confocal microscope I used in the biology lab, where a laser-camera scans through a sample and re-constructs a 3D image from a series of 2D images. Ortega's approach is the reverse, that is, he flattens a functional 3D object into its minute constituents. There is ineffable beauty in it. Somehow I found some tiny pieces from this dissembly resembled the appendages of the insect specimen that my friend made. Perhaps it is proper to contemplate further the relationship between art and science in history, at the focal point of dissection. When Andreas Vesalius published his On the Fabric of Human Body in 1543, he was particularly meticulous on the anatomical images of the body. Indeed, he hired a professional artist Jan van Calcar to illustrate his book, and paid out of his own pocket to employ the most reputable print shop in Basel to publish his book so as to guarantee the high quality of the art work. His effort paid off: On the Fabric of Human Body became the foundational text for modern anatomy, with its many "accurate" illustrations of the body. Coming back to the present, we can view Ortega's work as a continuous fascination and perhaps a modern subversion of this conjunction of art and dissection.

Another piece by Josiah McElheny also plays with mirror's effect. Here the artist positioned a group of shiny, beautiful decanters in front of a mirror. Similar to Navarro and Smith's work except a different dimensionality, these decanters infinitely extend toward the posterior. Yet since there exists a glass window in front of the decanters, I could only see one reflection of my face. In other words, the viewer by no means could catch up with the speedy, and seemingly infinite extension of these desirable objects. Surely we can regard this piece as a revelation of the psyche of modern consumerism; the customers' insatiable needs, seduced by modern materials' never-ending allure, are doomed to lead to disappointment. The glass window even resembles the one in the shop, which separates the costumer and the object he/she desires. But I think that we can even go beyond the layer of consumerism, and take this piece as an exploration of human desire (yes, "that obscure object of desire"). Isn't it true that deep in our psyche, we all desire things that we cannot get? Isn't it also true that we ourselves create those never-reacheable objects, not unlike the infinite shadows of the decanters in this piece, so we can satisfy this basic need of us? But can we truly be satisfied, as the process undoubtedly entails disappointment?

Randomness

This may not be the best time to open a blog. On the contrary, the time is in fact quite inopportune, given the following incident that occurred to me early today.

In Georges Remi’s comic series The Adventures of Tintin, there is an episode called “The Seven Crystal Balls,” in which members of an excursion group who recently explored an ancient Peruvian tomb were mysteriously killed by crystal balls. I myself got such a ball.

Yesterday was the day of the annual Antrim Street Yale Sale. Despite the lousy weather, my neighbors still enthusiastically put up quite a display of their old stuff. As I was meandering around, I found a mini-globe with a magnet in it, hanging down from a tablelamp kind of frame. The globe could even spin when I pushed it a bit.

“50 cents.” A middle-age woman said with a smile.

“I’ll take it.” I always wanted a globe.

Early this morning, as I was sitting in front of my computer and staring at my globe behind, an idea, a rather random idea came to my mind.

“It is quite dirty. I should clean it.” I thought.

I did. But right after that I accidentally dropped it on the floor, and it sounded that something fell off inside the globe.

“Does my little-thinny still work?”

With that thought, I placed the globe on the keyboard of my labtop, for one second. Perhaps even shorter than that.

Clearly the globe worked fine, as it was tightly sucked to the computer. Yet, for that one second, the globe killed my computer.

A lethal magnetic ball!

But friends, think about how random the whole thing happened. Had I not randomly placed the globe behind my computer, I would not have stared at it this morning. Had I not taken up this random thought of cleaning it, I would not have dropped it afterwards. Then had I not dropped it, again quite a random event, I would not have tested it on my computer. Surely my lack of knowledge on the destructive power of magnet on computers contributed to the disaster, but think about how many random events had to accumulate before that!

How much of our lives are constituted by such random events? How much of these random, seemingly trivial events shape the trajectories of our lives?

This is not a passivist or a fatalist perspective, because in those cases events are pre-determined, the opposite of randomness. Here we are enmeshed in the labyrinth of probability.

In the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s namesake story, we see a series of scenes showing how Benjamin’s lover Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett) was struck by a car. It was a series of mundane and random events that led to Daisy’s accident. It did not have to happen to her; it just happened to her. It was not what was meant to be; it was an outcome of an accumulation of many random events. If we do the math, we will conclude that the probability of what happened to Daisy is less than a thousandth of one percent. It is infinitesimal, yet it is a solid infinitesimal.

In Milan Kundera’s magnificent book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we find a similar story, this time the outcome was good, about how Franz and Tereza met. Again, their initial encounter, which triggered the following love story, derived sheerly from randomness, or fortuities in Kundera’s word. Here is Kundera:

“After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessary, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress… it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

Kundera’s acumen and wisdom are at his full strength.

In the movie Run Lola Run, we see another way of portraying fortuities. Lola ran three times in the movie for her boyfriend, with slightly different speeds. The difference was slight to the extant that Lola passed the same spot only a few seconds later than her previous run. But that tiny difference got quickly amplified into the difference of life or death at the end of Lola’s run.

In our lives, we only run once.

Here is Kundera again:

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all… History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

Perhaps that is the way I should think about the incident early today. It occurred only once, therefore it is unbearably light. Because of its randomness, there is a dimension of beauty in it.

More on Kundera’s book in the future.