Milan Kundera (1929- )

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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 Pragues 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

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His official biography

• Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in
  1929, and since 1975 he has been living in France

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Best known novels

• The Joke (1965)
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
• Immortality (1988)
• Identity (1996)

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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

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• 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

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Existential reality

• Consists of Dionysian existence without entities,
  Apollonian imagination with awareness of
  entities, and Socratic impulses to define such
  appearances objectively

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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)

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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

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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

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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?

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• How does Kundera reflect these ideas in the first
  two chapters?
• What does he say about the values of lightness
  and heaviness?

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The creation of Tomas vs. creation of Tereza
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• 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?

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Nietzches concepts taken from

• Morstein, Petra von. Eternal Return and The
  Unbearable Lightness of Being. Review of
  Contemporary Fiction 9.2 (Summer 1989) 65-78.