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 (5th century BC) stresses the harmony between the body and the environment, while Galenic medicine (2nd 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 16th 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 (10th-13th 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.
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