Philosophies of Milan Kundera

This article details the Philosophies of Milan Kundera as referenced in three of his most important works.

Overview

Love, death, happiness, sadness, these are all common themes found in our everyday existence through various situations and mediums. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera explores each of these themes to great depths by sustaining a deep spiritual connection between his characters and the reader. As readers we are invited to participate and connect with Kundera’s characters just as Kundera often places himself with the pages of his novels to interact with his own creations. Throughout Kundera’s novels, one major theme speaks out: life is nothing more than a departure to and a departure from. Kundera takes this theme in several different directions in his novels, a journey that touches on the idea of human life through Kundera’s philosophy-driven approach.

Milan Kundera is able to write in such great depth and with such great knowledge about the themes and characters in each of his novels because of his own personal experience. The greatest example of the personal understanding he has with his characters is in his novel, Ignorance. Like the two émigrés of his novel, Irena and Josef, Kundera left his native home of the Czech Republic, and like Irena he moved to France, where he has lived for the thirty past years or so. His personal experience, which goes into his novels and the deeper connection he has with his characters, helps to make the situations more believable and real to his readers. A deeply influenced writer, Kundera also draws inspiration from places outside of his personal life; he crafts his novels around the ideas of such people as the Austrian writer Robert Musil, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Musil’s most famous novel The Man Without Qualities, similar to some of Kundera’s works, examines a societal moral and intellectual decline and observes the mental and spiritual lives of a multitude of characters. Nietzsche heavily discussed the theory of eternal recurrence and das schwerste Gewicht or the “heaviest weight”, the main theme of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The combination of the influences of his outside sources and the influences of his own life add to the great depth of Kundera’s themes.

Novels
Ignorance

An almost impenetrable bond is the one created between a person and his or her homeland. Kundera considers the deep, sometimes unrealized, connection all humans have with the land of their birth, and often with their need to separate themselves from their pasts in the novel Ignorance. Within the first forty pages of Ignorance, Kundera already begins a deep analysis of the connection between person and homeland. Irena, a native of Prague, is advised by her friend Sylvie to return to her hometown. Although Irena does not like the idea of leaving her new home and new life in France, she cannot help but romanticize the idea of a “Great Return” to Prague:

“She dropped her resistance: she was captivated by images suddenly welling up from books read long ago, from films, from her own memory, and maybe from her ancestral memory: the lost son home again with his aged mother; the man returning to his beloved from whom cruel destiny had torn him away; the family homestead we all carry within us; the rediscovered trail still marked by the forgotten footprints of childhood; Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of the return” (4).

In this passage, Irena is struck by one of the most primal of human needs, to return to her roots. This almost instinctual desire is best characterized through the epic story of the Odyssey. Kundera’s comparison of Irena to Odysseus shows his intent to prove to the reader that every human has a similar internal struggle with belonging.

Kundera’s comparison also foreshadows the fact that like Odysseus, Irena will find she no longer relates to her old life in the homeland. We see this when later on in the novel, Kundera again references the story of Odysseus:

“For twenty years he had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it” (34).

Irena’s feelings directly reflect the same disappointments of Odysseus. She returns to Prague hoping to be reunited with the happy memories of her past life there, but instead is confronted with the fact that she is too changed a person to find her place amongst a too unchanged of a city. The people of Prague are happy to welcome Irena back, but aren’t willing to accept the new person she has become, a woman of independence and maturity who embraces the new and appears to scorn the old. In many ways, it seems as if Prague has given Irena an ultimatum, we will take you back only if you continue the life you left behind twenty years ago.

Never is there a time when Irena feels more out-of-place and misunderstood than the reunion she plans with her former friends. The point of the small party is to see how she will be treated after so many years away:

“And that was exactly her gamble: that they’d accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a naïve young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she’s proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas, it’ll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won’t stay” (37).

While the women do not openly reject the new Irena, they don’t accept her either. Far more important to them than Irena’s remarks on her new life are the concerns of their own world. They ask questions of Irena not to show interest in what she might have to say, but to recall past times together, evoke memories, in essence “stitch her old past onto her present life” (43). Irena doesn’t see how her past and her present fit together in any way and is horrified at the thought that if she would like to be readmitted into her old circle of friends, she has to completely set fire to her last twenty years spent in France.

Irena feels alone in her dislocation between two worlds, but does acknowledge the idea of the collective soul of the émigré: “one thing was certain: on any give night, thousands of émigrés were all dreaming the same dream in numberless variants. The emigration-dream …” (16). Kundera introduces the thought that all émigrés have ties to their past and have continuous dreams concerning their past no matter how many years pass by. Irena has these dreams both during the day and at night. The range of emotions she experiences due to the dreams is confusing to her. In Irena’s opinion, one can not feel both happiness and extreme horror at once. According to Kundera, the conflicting symptoms Irena is experiencing are only natural for one who has left her homeland. Through the story of Irena, the novel Ignorance comes to one of many conclusions: leaving one’s birthplace will always create an irreparable sense of displacement.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Within The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera gives voice to the lightness and heaviness of human existence, humanity’s natural tendency towards compassion, and most importantly, to one of humankind’s most basic characteristics, the ability to long for something of the past, present, or future. As a way of setting up the novel for what will follow, Kundera begins The Unbearable Lightness of Being with a description of the myth of eternal return which states, "that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing” (3). Since this is a depressing outlook on human existence, Kundera moves from this first thought into another idea: “If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness” (5). Finally, he addresses the reader with a question: 'But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?'” (5) This is the key to the core of the novel: human existence is little more than the balance between what is heavy and what is light. According to Kundera’s philosophy, what we as humans decide to do with the time allotted us should be in heaviness, a life of substance, spirituality, knowledge, maturity, and purpose. Choosing a life of heaviness is the longer, harder road, but by choosing heaviness, our lives will mean something, which will ultimately uplift us from the overall heavy burden of life into a state of lightness. Kundera adds that by living life with value and compassion, not only do we raise ourselves into a position of lightness, but we are also able to ease the heaviness of others’ existences.

The profound ideas of eternal return make for the perfect opening into the world of Kundera’s characters. In fact, the very title of the novel is an introduction to the belief systems of two of Kundera’s main characters, Tereza and Tomas. Tomas is the character who feels the curse of the unbearable lightness of being the most. By making the choice to be an unstoppable womanizer, in his own mind, Tomas feels he lives life with no ties, light as a feather, until he meets Tereza. Tereza makes Tomas question aspects of his life he’s used to completely disregarding, such as love:

“But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!” (7)

Knowing little about love, Tomas fears that falling in love with Tereza will drag him down and ultimately cost him everything. Not only is his character not emotionally mature enough to handle a commitment with Tereza, but Tereza’s character, for as much as she wants to belong to someone, is not ready for a serious relationship with Tomas. By listening to the false calls of love, Tomas and Tereza enter into a relationship that limits their happiness and their lightness.

Tomas sees his mistake in taking Tereza under his wing after he realizes the time and devotion she requires: “Einmal ist keinmal," says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all” (8). Tomas applies this German proverb to Tereza and the restrictions she places on him. He’s told that being consumed by love happens only once in life and in his mind, life is far too brief to spend the vast amount of time needed to cultivate this one love. Also, Tomas feels by limiting himself to loving just one person in life, like the saying goes, he “might as well not have lived at all”. Tomas is a free spirited individual who really holds true to the idea of "einmal ist keinmal." "Einmal ist keinmal" is another example of what is meant by the unbearable lightness of being; to truly live, one must always live within heaviness, but with the beyond goal of lightness in mind.

Immortality

Most humans have a desire to be remembered beyond their deaths. In Immortality, Kundera follows several individual’s struggles to create out of their mortality, immortality. To gain even a slice of immortality requires a lifetime of mortal work for Kundera’s characters. Kundera takes a much closer look at two obstacles that limit his characters’ ability to become unique before gaining immortality. Within the first chapter of Immortality, he examines the fact that something as simple as a gesture can take away from the uniqueness of a human being:

“Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people few gestures … a gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations” (7-8).

To start a novel, that celebrates and focuses on the human’s fight to be an individual and become immortal, in such a negative manner seems strange, but it helps to highlight one of the struggles individuals face on their path towards being immortalized. By so brazenly pointing out one of the universal spots of unoriginality in humanity, as Kundera does, he brings true realism, concerning immortality, into the rest of the text of his novel.

The second obstacle that humans need to overcome, according to Kundera, is the complete banality of their make. Agnés, the heroine of Immortality, remembers her father referring to God as “the Creator’s computer” (12). Agnés’s father said that,

“the computer did not plan an Agnés or a Paul, but only a prototype known as a human being, giving rise to a large number of specimens that are based on the original model and haven’t any individual essence … The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, now what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen” (13).

Agnés does not hold value to the idea of being original. She agrees with her father’s idea that humans are no more than “a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance” (12-13). Agnés feels that the only reason people live life passionately or find things to be passionate about is to stand out and appear to have one’s own essence separate of that of the prototype’s. In her own life, Agnés has come to a full acceptance of the fact that she is a prototype like everyone else and she feels that that in itself is what distinguishes her and makes her different from all the rest of humanity. The fact that Agnés is able to recognize her own unoriginality enables her to become original; only by knowing and understanding the source can one find a way to separate oneself from it. Agnés’s acknowledgement of her own lack of inimitability is the drive that pushes her to be less like her brethren of the world.

What makes Agnés such a heroine in Immortality is that she accepts truth, but at the same time strives to change truth, at least in her own life. Agnés sees that the fatal flaw in humanity is its extreme need to be recognized, to be acknowledged, to be immortalized. She is disgusted with humanity and,

“she said to herself: when once the onslaught of ugliness became unbearable, she would go to a florist and buy a forget-me-not, a single forget-me-not, a slender stalk with miniature blue flowers. She would go out into the streets holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love. She would walk like that through the streets of Paris, she would soon become a familiar sight, children would run after her, laugh at her, throw things at her, and all Paris would call her the crazy woman with the forget-me-not…” (22).

The irony of this passage is laughable. Agnés chooses a forget-me-not, a flower of remembrance, and although she says she does not want to be remembered, by planning to become the “the crazy woman with the forget-me-not”, she is choosing to immortalize herself. Later on, Agnés lays a heavy claim upon her separation from society: “I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them” (26). Her claim to not belong to humanity helps the reader to understand what kind of immortality Agnés craves, an immortality that will have her remembered in the light of striving to not be immortal.

During an argument with her husband, Paul, Agnés disagrees on the idea of individualism:

“If you put the pictures of two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it’s all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed” (34-35).

Agnés goes on to make the further, more powerful remark that “my face is not my self” (35) and defends this idea by saying, “Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You’d dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You’d see the face of a stranger. And you’d know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you” (35). Agnés touches on the truth that society is far too concerned with image and that the image one portrays is what will either lead to immortality or keep one away from it. In her idealistic thinking, people will be remembered for their selves, not their faces and their outward acts and gestures.

The other characters in Kundera’s novel have a far different idea of what creates immortality. The German poet Goethe sees immortality as “eternal trial”; the young Bettina née Brentano, friend of Goethe, sees immortality as the one goal in life, which can only be accomplished through association; Agnés’s sister, Laura, views immortality as the human need to fill up one’s only chance at life and in the process leave something behind. Kundera defines immortality as follows: “There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless” (4).

Milan Kundera’s novels appeal so greatly to the reader because of the writing style he uses, psychological realism. Psychological realism is a technique where the writer is more concerned with the thought processes of his characters than their physical appearances and where the writer holds the belief that the reader’s imagination is able to automatically complete that of the writer’s. Kundera himself puts it best why his novels are so powerful: ”A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”

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