Episode 234 - Transcript

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Patreon.com/philosophizethis if you value the show as an educational resource. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there as well. Hope you love the show today.

So in 1984 there was a Czechoslovakian writer that would create a book that would become…legendary.

This was a man that by THIS point in his life… had NOT ONLY been exiled from his home country for the work he did, he had been kicked out of the Communist Party, TWICE, because his ideas were so AGAINST what it stood for, but this was ALSO a man… that chose to give up everything that he had in life, MULTIPLE times…simply to keep writing… about what HE believed was most important to be writing about.

The author…was Milan Kundera. And the book…was called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. By the end of the episode…we’ll understand the KINDS of ideas he wrote about…that GOT him this sort of wonderful treatment in the FIRST place.

This episode is designed to be a kind of philosophical guide for someone that is trying to READ this book, but it also stands alone as just a collection of the philosophy of Kundera during this time period. Either way: people always ASK me for a first book to READ if you’re trying to get into philosophy more, something that’s funny, interesting. Well, this book would be a good candidate for that.

But as always this podcast is NOT supposed to be a replacement for reading the actual book. There’s no way I could EVER cover how transformative this book can be over the course of thirty minutes…but I DO think I can give you a pretty decent ROADMAP… of the philosophy you’re going to be encountering if you DO read it.

Let’s get INTO it though: at it’s core…the unbearable lightness of being is a book that’s about the lightness… or heaviness of our lives… in terms of meaning.

Now that can sound kind of WEIRD at first, but you just need to understand where Kundera is borrowing this LANGUAGE from… and which philosophers he’s building the rest of this book on top of. There’s TWO of em.

The first one is the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides from about 2500 years ago.

Kundera BEGINS the book by saying that Parmenides saw the universe as something that’s broken down in terms of binary oppositions.

Things like Good/bad, Up/down, Left/right, and most importantly for KUNDERA’S work: light or heavy. He says Parminides ALSO made the claim that FOR these oppositions…there is always ONE of them that is GOOD… and one of them that is bad. And in the case of light and heavy…he says that Parmenides thought that lightness is always good, and heaviness is always bad.

Now, on a philosophy podcast like this I HAVE to give the criticism…that this is ultimately Kundera misunderstanding the work of Parmenides. It just IS. It’s him smuggling in some Pythagoras. It’s him misreading one of the very few poems we HAVE from Parmenides…I need to SAY all that for the sake of my own sanity here… but I’m not gonna linger on it for too long… because Kundera’s point doesn’t really REQUIRE this idea to come from Parmenides specifically.

Because even if the idea he’s representing here from his work isn’t actually from his work…this is STILL, an INCREDIBLY common way of thinking that’s VERY easy to run across in this world.

The more GENERAL thing he’s calling into question here is that THINGS LIKE, lightness and heaviness, are IMBUED with some kind of objective quality, that MAKES them good or bad in our lives, in every circumstance.

This is actually a REMARKABLY common way that people like to simplify human life. They’ll say things like COURAGE is always the right way to be living. MODERATION is always the right way. In other words they’ll try to reduce the world into virtues or one SIDE of these binaries… so that it’s easier to EXPLAIN the world with a set of protocols.

But this is NOT gonna be the case for Kundera in this book. He thinks there’s always a place for BOTH sides of these oppositions given the CONTEXT you’re in— and the point is: ANY attempt to REDUCE the world into a capital T TRUTH like that…is going to come under fire by Kundera as we read the rest of this book.

The SECOND thinker that Kundera’s building this book on top of…is Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically his famous idea of the eternal recurrence.

Now there are many different interpretations of the eternal recurrence, but we’re gonna go with Kundera’s here today obviously.

And for HIM… the eternal recurrence is a THOUGHT experiment that Nietzsche created…that Nietzsche thought added WEIGHT, to our actions and made them more meaningful.

As Kundera explains it…Nietzsche thought when you’re LIVING in a nihilistic universe, where there ISN’T an afterlife and there ISN’T some moral code embedded into things, whenever you do ANYTHING, the THINGS you do have a certain kind of LIGHTNESS to them— that’s ONE way you could put it.

Meaning that when you DO something…it doesn’t REALLY MATTER in any sort of deeper sense…it really only MEANS something IN that particular moment that you’re DOING it.

Then once you’ve DONE the thing…it just sort of evaporates, and you move on to the NEXT fleeting thing that you choose to do in some OTHER moment. If you wanted a word for that: you could say there’s a LIGHTNESS to that whole process.

But contrast that with how people feel when they believe the things they do really MATTER.

They feel more CONNECTED to the things they do. To the PEOPLE they’re affecting when they DO something. In other words, there’s a HEAVINESS to this Nietzsche says, something that tethers people down to the earth, and the events that are going on.

And for Nietzsche the NATURAL question then becomes: how do we manufacture this feeling of HEAVINESS…without giving IN to some kind of renunciative tradition like a religion, like people have done so OFTEN throughout history?

I mean one way of tethering myself to the things I do…is to believe in a God that is constantly watching me and is going to punish me if I do the wrong thing. ANOTHER option here it should be said…is to believe in some philosophical SYSTEM…that tells me CERTAIN decisions I have available to me are bad, and certain ones are good…kind of like what Kundera thought Parmenides was doing.

But to Nietzsche, under Kundera’s reading of him, BOTH of these are problematic…so Nietzsche creates something ENTIRELY NEW…in what he calls the eternal recurrence.

For Kundera, the eternal recurrence asks people to pretend that whenever they do ANYTHING in their life…imagine if by doing it, WHEN you DIE someday you’re gonna be reborn, and your life is gonna repeat, EXACTLY as it was, down to the very last detail.

This would MEAN that whatever it is you DO…say you ate an entire pizza and laid on the ground suffering for an entire Saturday one time…imagine if by making that choice you would have to RELIVE that moment ENDLESSLY for all eternity. EVERY TIME that Saturday came around in some new LIFE you were living…you would have to SUFFER AGAIN, in the exact same way, for that entire day. You can imagine how this applies to all the OTHER decisions we make in life too.

Now the POINT here is to REMOVE some of the LIGHTNESS…that OTHERWISE surrounds our decision making in a world where you only live ONCE. The eternal recurrence then…is an example for Nietzsche of a purely life-affirming way, that we can add HEAVINESS to our actions, giving them bigger consequences, and making them more meaningful.

But whether it’s Parmenides or whether it’s Nietzsche…Milan Kundera thinks we need to move PAST these two ways of thinking.

And his ARGUMENT for this point, among other things, is going to be dramatized over the course of this entire book— if you’re READING this book…think of it as him presenting an ALTERNATIVE way of thinking, to these two philosophers and the points they just made.

Kundera might START…by critiquing Nietzsche. What is it EXACTLY that Nietzsche’s doing when he CREATES something like the eternal recurrence?

Well, he’s showing his HAND as someone that has a pretty significant bias towards that heaviness we just talked about. I mean WHY ELSE create a THOUGHT experiment where the goal is to add WEIGHT to our decisions…than if you thought there was something WRONG with being in a constant state of lightness?

To Kundera… Nietzsche, then, was caught in a place that we ALL find ourselves caught in at some point in our lives…it’s an UNCOMFORTABLE place that ALSO explains MANY of the religious and PHILOSOPHICAL turns people take in their life…Nietzsche creates the eternal recurrence…as a way of escaping…the unbearable lightness of being.

We all FEEL it. We all EXPERIENCE it. And when we do we OFTEN find ways to RUN from it by adding weight that tethers us more to the earth and makes things feel more meaningful.

But HERE’S the important thing to know when it comes to Kundera: he’s NOT SAYING that we shouldn’t be living lives of heaviness. He’s NOT saying: shame on you for RUNNING from the unbearable lightness of being. What HE’S gonna say…the very different stance that he wants to put forward in this book…is that BOTH lightness and heaviness…are appropriate places to BE…depending on the context of who you already are, and the sorts of events that are going on in your life.

In other words: there is a dialectical relationship BETWEEN lightness and heaviness for Kundera. We oscillate BETWEEN them in DIFFERENT ways given our circumstances. And people often will BEGIN life on ONE side of this…and END life on the totally OTHER side of it.

You may BEGIN life…as someone who’s the PICTURE of this concept of lightness. Moving around a lot, changing things about yourself all the time, there’s freedom, spontaneity, there’s fluidity to your life. And you may SWITCH over time into someone that’s more on the side of heaviness. A life with more responsibility, where every action MEANS something in a larger scheme, there’s consequences for things, commitment, permanence. Things more along THOSE lines.

Now the assumption in the Parmenides way of thinking would be that ONE SIDE of this is good or bad: that we need to stay away from ONE of these…and move towards the other. On the Nietzsche side of things we BEGIN life in a state of lightness…and need to FIND a way to introduce more HEAVINESS.

But Kundera is going to say that NEITHER of these are true. He’s gonna say that different combinations of these make sense at different points in our lives, that the IMPORTANT thing is to be aware of where you’re AT in this dialectic…and MORE than that that we don’t NEED some grand thought experiment like the eternal recurrence, for any of this to make sense to us. We can simply, analyze the context of our lives and understand, to what PROPORTION lightness and heaviness makes sense given the situation we’re in.

And THIS, is an important thing you should keep in mind as your READING this book and paying attention to the characters. EVERY ONE of their STORIES throughout the book…represents someone at SOME position in this dialectic.

One of the main characters for example… is named Tomas. Tomas is CLEARLY a character… that Kundera wanted to represent an approach to life that’s rooted in lightness. He’s a surgeon, really good surgeon. And he’s a guy that got divorced from his first wife…. because he didn’t want to be restricted by what he calls, the hysterical little circles of possessiveness, that go ON when you’re in a marriage.

Meaning the way HE sees marriage: people are always trying to tie you DOWN when you’re married to em he says. Keep CHAINS on you! But look my love can’t be restricted to just one woman he says…or five as it turns out. This is a man that has affairs with MANY different people in the book…and this is the life that makes SENSE to him towards the beginning.

His whole attitude can be found in a pretty famous line that just EMBODIES the concept of lightness about as beautifully as you ever could in a single line: he says that “what happens but once… might as well not have happened at all” This describes Tomas and his thinking towards the beginning of the book: there’s no sense of responsibility… when he says those words.

But see it becomes OBVIOUS…that this STORY of LIGHTNESS that he’s TELLING himself…ALSO brings him a lot of inner conflict. DOESN’T seem like a very happy person the deeper he looks into his own experience, and it definitely seems like something is MISSING in his life.

And this is made MOST obvious to him when he first meets a woman named Tereza… who is obviously for Kundera… the prime example of a life rooted more in heaviness.

In fact, the symbolism is all OVER the place with Tereza in this book… in one of the first scenes we see her in, she’s carrying a big heavy suitcase. And this is pretty COMMONLY interpreted as the emotional baggage she brings into his life and her desire for commitment.

See, Tereza, is very different than Tomas… she comes from a lot of TRAUMA earlier on in her life. She had a mother that treated her absolutely horrible. Used to say things to her that are just brutal, you read about them in the book, and it obviously is something she still carries around with her in her relationships. It’s also obvious that she’s at a point in her life… where she’s not trying to go around having random love affairs with a spontaneous surgeon guy…she wants security, she wants commitment. She’s not running from the responsibility that comes with settling your life down in this way that’s much more rooted and permanent. In other words: she’s a person much more oriented in terms of heaviness, rather than lightness.

And for whatever it’s worth: Tomas LOVES this about her.

I mean at first he’s terrified of it— after all… everything she stands for is the OPPOSITE of the more free, spontaneous life that he STARTS the book wanting to live. But over time he becomes so attracted to the way she sees things, this love and responsibility that she wants so badly. That eventually, by the END of the book…they get married. They end up living together on a farm, just handling the tasks of the day as they come, together. A life, obviously, FAR different from the place that Tomas BEGAN the book in.

This is just ONE EXAMPLE of Kundera showing this transformation from lightness to heaviness, or heaviness to lightness. This is ALSO an example of how different combinations of lightness and heaviness, make SENSE for us at different moments in our lives, and that can EVEN come down to just the people that we’ve happened to have MET so far.

Again what Kundera wants to get across…is that there’s no SINGLE virtue that’s the objectively RIGHT way to be living, Parmenides. And there’s no expectation that we all BEGIN in a place of LIGHTNESS… and CULTIVATE our lives into a place of heaviness, like in Nietzsche. No, none of these characters needed a thought experiment: the actual events of our lives, ARE ENOUGH…for us to NAVIGATE this dialectic in REAL TIME between lightness and weight.

So now that we’ve gotten to the general conversation Kundera wants to HAVE in this book…there’s gonna be a lot of philosophy that stems OUT of this, that MAY not seem IMMEDIATELY like it has anything to do with lightness and heaviness. But it DOES.

Let’s talk about one of the BIGGEST ideas you’ll run across if you’re reading this book, by the way it’s the KIND of idea that gets Kundera banned from Czechoslovakia cause he wouldn’t shut UP about it, I’m talking about his idea of Kitsch… as a sort of pandemic that’s overtaking the modern world.

IF you’re listening to this and you’ve ever heard the word kitsch before…it’s LIKELY you heard it when someone was describing a piece of art.

When somebody calls artwork something that is kitsch…what they MEAN that it’s something that is overly sentimental… and that it’s something that uses cliches and cheap, obvious stuff in it SIMPLY to be able to appeal to as many people as possible out there in a shallow way.

Classic examples of this include that painting of the dogs playing poker. That’s kind of the ULTIMATE, example of kitsch artwork that people will give.

But, really predictable romcoms from like the early 2000’s…THOSE are an example of something that’s kitsch. This happens in MUSIC…all the time when someone just recycles old music cliches…and just creates a song that’s really about nothing…but it SOUNDS like a song that’s been made BEFORE that’s supposed to make me FEEL a certain way. So I LISTEN to it.

The point is: it’s a kind of art… that DENIES something important about the complexity of the world…and instead tries to use already existing tropes, where the goal is to get MOST of the people OUT there to RELATE to it by any means necessary.

Now CONTRAST that with OTHER kinds of artwork…where the goal is more to do something risky…something that is challenging or NEW in a way that’s interesting. In a way that MAY MAKE, the people consuming it feel a bit uncomfortable…but that’s part of the point: it’s to inspire growth, or to give people a NEW LOOK on what life can be.

Well, Kundera is going to take kitsch as an aesthetic category…and he’s going to apply it to the world of politics and ideology. In fact, he’s gonna apply it to basically ALL of human relationships it turns out.

Because if you had to think of one…just a challenge for everybody out there: what is the HUMAN EQUIVALENT…of kitsch artwork? What kind of a person…is an overly sentimental collection of cliches… that’s designed MOSTLY, to just have a shallow appeal to as many people as they possibly can?

Well, how about celebrity culture? How about politicians?

Look everybody listening to this can THINK of an EXAMPLE of a celebrity out there… where the WHOLE WAY they PRESENT themselves in public… DENIES, the true complexity, and tragedy of themselves and the world.

They have all the best, perfectly prepared answers to everything ahead of time so that they never have to offend anyone. Their social media feed is completely manicured, basically becoming something that idealizes themselves, in a way that’s just, sad.

Even their AESTHETIC appearance where they may spend a lot of TIME on it, and TALK about it like it’s the most important thing in the world…this is a PERFECT EXAMPLE…of kitsch manifesting in human form. They don’t CARE about conveying who they are as an actual person…in fact in MANY cases, they CAN’T be who they are…or else they’d lose their job.

But people eat it up, don’t they…and for each of their own reasons… both celebrities and politicians want masses of people to have this kind of shallow relationship with them.

And Kundera puts things all throughout that book that make us notice…how this, kitsch, goes BEYOND just the realm of artwork.

Now CONSIDER this at the level of ideas as well. If you fall on one side of the political aisle… think of the OPPOSITE side and how they talk about certain things…if you don’t have strong political views…just pick whatever side you want.

And consider the ideological move that’s often made…where there’s a way of thinking…where everybody on THAT side of the aisle says it’s the gospel truth… and if anybody QUESTIONS this thing…get that person OUTTA here, they gotta go. Burn the heretic for DARING to say the world is more complicated than the current accepted STORY about what’s going on.

For Kundera this is going to bear a STRIKING resemblance…to what masses of people are doing when they enjoy kitsch artwork. It’s IDEALIZING the world…assuming that TRUTH is something where there’s a SINGLE way of LOOKING at things that everyone can ARRIVE at…an then it’s CASTIGATING anyone who DARES to go against the narrative.

But hopefully it’s OBVIOUS by this point: for Kundera…the truth doesn’t WORK in this way to him.

There IS no SINGLE TRUTH about the world that a movement of people have magically arrived at.

And whenever there’s a narrative, no matter how convincing it may LOOK to people on the surface…there’s ALWAYS, OTHER ways of framing the world that will shine a light on the weaknesses of THAT ORIGINAL way of framing the world.

Think of a time when your country may have been TOTALLY UNITED behind a single cause. Can you think of one of these, in your lifetime?

In these sorts of moments… to be AGAINST this cause that everybody agrees on…that would make you into an enemy in a lot of people’s eyes. People would come AFTER you. How could you POSSIBLY…disagree with something so obvious that we all are emotionally aligned on right now?

And yet so OFTEN when this goes ON…ten years passes, and it’s discovered that the so-called CONSENSUS back then… was FILLED with PROBLEMS that are now common knowledge to everyone…and that all the voices that WANTED to say something at the time, were often PRESSURED into not saying anything for fear of backlash.

Kundera breaks the psychology of all this down in a really FUNNY way in the book. He says there’s two “tears” that LEAD to kitsch going on at the level of ideas like this. Not tiers like levels…but tears like what comes out of your eyes when something sentimental happens.

The idea is that people have one of those single tear, sentimental moments… CONGRATULATING themselves for how touched they are by something when it happens. For example.

Picture watching a video where, you know, a RACOON gets rescued from a flood. Firefighters pull the raccoon out of the water, dry em off, they send em on their way and it’s a beautiful moment to you. That’s the FIRST tear, it’s when you’re touched by how BEAUTIFUL of a moment you just witnessed.

Where KITSCH comes into this though…is the moment when you scroll down into the comment section…and read and nod at all the comments that agree at how beautiful of a moment this was. It’s when you have the thought: look at all these OTHER people who recognize how great of a MOMENT this was LIKE I DO! THAT’S the self-congratulatory SECOND tear. Where we deny a piece of the complexity and tragedy of the world…for the sake of idealizing it into something that makes us FEEL good… and if anybody DIDN’T think rescuing the raccoon was a beautiful moment, well screw THAT person… how do people like that even EXIST out there?

As ANOTHER example of this whole thing: consider the fact that you can pick basically, ANY SONG, that you have ANY kind of nostalgic connection to…and you can think because it riles up these emotions in you that it’s the greatest song that’s ever been written…and then you can go into the comment section for the VIDEO of that song…and you will FIND people who ALSO say this is the greatest song ever written. Then you can sit there and say to yourself, see, see, THESE people are smart…THESE people know what great MUSIC is like I do!

Again, this denies the true complexity of the world…in favor of an overly sentimental, self-congratulatory moment.

Now, raccoon videos and music aside… think of how this applies in a more serious situation when it comes to the communism Kundera was dealing with.

Picture someone looking at one of those giant images of a worker raising a hammer, picture them SEEING the people of their country back to work and thinking it’s an important thing, first tear. Then imagine the NEXT layer of that where they congratulate themselves for being part of a society that’s doing things the “right way”. One that really VALUES their workers. One where equality really DOES matter at the level it should! Look at ALL these other people who AGREE with me! We have discovered the WAY a society should BE!

Kundera’s point… is that this is a psychological place that allows for people, en masse, to believe that they’ve arrived at the TRUTH…simply because they’re all willing to idealize a piece of the world, get overly sentimental about it, and use cliches to relate to things in a shallow way.

And this is something Kundera thinks you can see EVERYWHERE, ALL AROUND you, if you look for it in the modern world. It’s certainly something he puts ALL OVER different scenes throughout this book.

See the main PROBLEM with kitsch in this way… is how it’s weaponized. He says, “Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians."

And he doesn’t mean that there’s literally ZERO politicians out there that CARE about what they’re doing, but he IS saying that the vast majority of them USE this strategy where they want masses of people to come together over a shallow, idealized vision of the world…and then to demonize ANYBODY that dares to point out how it’s not that simple.

Kitsch becomes a way to CONTROL people then at the level of ideas…and then maintain power.

But he says historically: there’s been three safeguards we HAVE against this happening. And he says ANYBODY…who is playing this kind of game…is almost certainly going to be hostile towards these three things. Individuality, skepticism and irony.

Individuality… because it’s tough to be reduced into an overly sentimental herd member if you’re TRULY someone that’s thinking for yourself. Skepticism… because QUESTIONING the overly sentimental narratives is one way of fragmenting them. And irony… because when someone like a comedian, TAKES the supposed gospel truth of a political party, and then points out all the holes in it in a way that gets people laughing about how absurd it is…well, as Voltaire said: once people have laughed at something…they never quite see it at the same level of blind respect ever again. To show the limitations of a worldview through comedy…is one of the reasons Kundera uses humor so much throughout this book.

All THREE of these are gonna be CRITICAL TOOLS to prevent this kind of kitsch thinking from taking over…and what’s MORE than that…if you see someone out there HOSTILE towards any ONE of these three, public OR PERSONAL life…maybe proceed with caution when it comes to what their intentions are with you.

Now, one really interesting idea that Kundera plays with throughout the book…is what he calls “existential codes” and how they relate to identity. You’ll SEE this going on whenever characters that are very DIFFERENT from each other are trying to have a conversation, but are talking PAST each other unable to communicate. People like Tomas and Tereza.

The general idea is this: IDENTITY…WHO YOU ARE…is NOT some stable ESSENCE about you…that you got at birth and now you just LIVE with it every day. No, there’s definitely a PIECE of you that you got at birth, no doubt…but understanding who you are MORE comes down to understanding how you are BUILT through the experiences you’ve had, but more SPECIFICALLY for Kundera, you are BUILT through your relationship to the past, in the way you view your memories.

His point is: whenever we use a WORD…for example, take a word like “security”, common word…THAT word only MEANS something to us…in relation to our OWN HISTORY, and our position on this spectrum of lightness and heaviness.

Consider how the word security…MEANS something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT…to Tomas at the beginning of the book, and Tomas at the end of the book. Once he meets Tereza and is influenced by her whole gravitational field…security to HER, means something like stability, reliability, shared responsibilities. Security for her is a commitment to the other person’s wellbeing and doing what it takes.

But to Tomas on the other hand at the BEGINNING of the book, the EXACT SAME WORD…can feel like entrapment. Like it represents, a LOSS… of some of this FREEDOM that matters so much to him as spontaneous surgeon man, it feels to him like he’s NOT going to be able to fully be an individual, and that that’s the COST…of having more SECURITY in your life.

The point is: the RELATIONSHIP of each person to their particular history…will reveal a different kind of existential code. And it’s a CODE… that is required to TRANSLATE…what any one concept will MEAN to someone when they’re experiencing it.

Consider a couple MORE examples of this just to see how far reaching this is for Kundera. Consider how intimacy, just as a concept…to ONE type of person could represent the most amazing closeness that’s POSSIBLE between two people. But to another person, who maybe comes from trauma more like Tereza in the book, to THEM, intimacy could represent the possibility of betrayal or danger. Their EXPERIENCE of intimacy could GENUINELY be rooted in constant FEAR, of what might happen.

Again, SEEMS like it should be the exact same concept…but it’s just NOT when considering our relationship to very different MEMORIES, of a different PAST.

Consider how giving someone SPACE…to ONE person, could be what they absolutely NEED to be able to recharge and show up in life the MOST for the people they love. To someone else this can be seen… as a kind of withdrawal, a SEPARATION someone’s imposing on them…like they’re being emotionally deserted in a moment by someone they CARE about.

The examples of these, as you can imagine, are endless.

For Kundera, too often we think that words just come with this pre-loaded connotation that WE are familiar with OURSELVES…and that everybody ELSE needs to understand exactly like WE do.

And then in turn… we spend our lives ARGUING, trying to CONVINCE the people we love about our OWN definitions of things…not considering that through their OWN existential code…these words LITERALLY represent something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in their own experience of things.

And maybe the most important thing for Kundera to recognize is that this process… isn’t ORGANIZED by there being one HEALTHY, relationship to a word… and then all the other UNHEALTHY ones…EVERYBODY is coming to these things from a slightly different place, that it’s NAVIGATING these differences that will DETERMINE the quality of your understanding of where people are coming from, and the characters in this book PUT this on display in a way that you should keep an eye out for as you’re reading it.

Now whenever ANYONE… starts calling into question our ability to arrive at capital T, objective truth…you know, ESPECIALLY if this is one of the first philosophical books you’ve read, it’s VERY common to wonder: what are the limitations to that claim exactly?

Like, Is Kundera saying we live in a universe of complete moral relativism? Where EVERYBODY’S perspective, is EQUALLY VALID and there’s NO real way to say whether one’s better than any other?

Well he’s DEFINITELY not saying that. THAT I can assure you. His position’s actually pretty complicated.

I think if I had to use all my years of reading philosophy to PUT it in a way that’s fair to him… I’d describe what he’s trying to say about morality in this book in THIS way:

Kundera is LESS interested in presenting some giant MORAL THEORY to people, you know, with specific criteria that determine what’s MORAL or not in EVERY SINGLE SITUATION…and he’s FAR MORE interested, in making sure that people aren’t going in the OTHER direction… where they DON’T think about things very much… and then get their ideas for how they should be acting… from some ideology, usually a kitsch ideology that they just happened to have STUMBLED across from some form of media.

THAT… is the greater DANGER in the world right now he thinks. It’s not that, OH NO, we don’t have a philosopher that’s given us the perfect moral SYSTEM yet!...no, it’s that people are conforming to OTHER people’s morality too easily. THAT’S the PROBLEM.

So when he GIVES moral advice throughout this book…you’ll notice it’s NOT gonna be laying out a SYSTEM… it’s gonna be the kind of advice that would HELP someone if they wanted to think about human behavior, WITHOUT giving into one of these ideological systems Case in point:

FAMOUS concept from this book…is what Kundera called his Animal Test of Morality. This is a good example of the KIND of moral advice he DOES feel comfortable giving. But what is it.

So you know how when you’re going on a first date…and your grandma will tell ya DON’T pay so much attention to the way the other person is treating YOU…after all, this IS someone that ultimately WANTS something from you by going on that date. You can’t TRUST it.

Pay MORE attention she might say…to the way they treat the server at the restaurant…THAT’S where you see their true CHARACTER shine through…because it’s a situation where they’re treating somebody well, with no expectation of a return.

Now there’s WISDOM to these words from grandma. But if we REALLY examine them…well, sorry grandma, but EVEN THIS that you just said…is a situation where someone might be GETTING something from TREATING the server NICELY.

I mean first of all, someone could just be KIND to the server…PREDICTING what grandma just said: to impress the person they’re on a date with. Secondly, that server DOES have at least SOME level of control over how well your NIGHT is going to go. Treat your server at a restaurant bad…they might do something, uh less than kind, to your food.

They might just LEAVE your food back in the kitchen and be like oh no, I totally forgot it was sitting back there! You were being so NICE to me before I was BESIDE myself I just couldn’t FOCUS on the food.

But Kundera’s going to take this idea from grandma…and AMPLIFY it to the extremes. He says:

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals.”

In other words: MOST behavior that passes for morality or kindness between people…is ALWAYS tied up in power dynamics or negotiation. Meaning everybody’s treating people in the way they are, maybe they’re kind maybe they’re unkind…but you can’t ever SEPARATE their actions from the social context that all of us exist in, where the people they choose to BE kind to, have some kind of sway over the quality of their life.

And at some base level, for Kundera, this CHEAPENS the stuff we do.

If you REALLY… wanted to see someone’s moral worth…the only place we can TRULY see it as clear as possible he says…is when they’re acting towards something that is POWERLESS to do anything against THEM.

See, this REMOVES the POWER dynamics that usually determine things…and introduces a situation where BECAUSE the thing can’t give us anything in return when we do stuff for them…it’s IN those moments that you can SEE what someone’s levels of compassion really are. And this is a dynamic Kundera says you can FIND… in the relationship between PEOPLE and most ANIMALS on this planet.

Now maybe you say back to this, wait a second…I have a pet dog. THAT’S an animal She’s a pomeranian named scruffy, I love that little bundle of joy…I do nice things for scruffy…and scruffy gives me love and affection back! So animals DO have something to offer me IN this kind of negotiation he’s talking about!

Okay, but for Kundera it’s important to remember how EASY it is for you to IGNORE that love and affection, should you ever CHOOSE to. There’s nothing that you OWE scruffy BACK in this kind of relationship…she has no CHOICE but to go along with it. The whole relationship’s like short order kitchen. You get what YOU want, WHEN you want it, and she shows up hoping for the best everyday.

He’d ALSO say…that your relationship to scruffy ISN’T LIKE most people’s relationship to 99.9% of animals that are ON this planet. Which is REALLY more of his point.

See because while most PEOPLE…can always bargain, and resist, and manipulate and make deals: an animal has ZERO LEVERAGE in that way…when it comes to the way people decide they’re going to treat it. And to Kundera: there’s SOMETHING… about the way that people treat animals…that REVEALS the kind of person they truly are.

Anyway AS I said at the beginning of all this…there’s no way I can cover this entire book in a single outing. There’s still SO much more IN this book about free will, a deeper look at the concept of responsibility, he even explores the relationship between body and soul in a way that is actually INTERESTING for someone coming from a purely secular place.

What I’m saying is: there’s a REASON this book is so popular, and I hope…actually I don’t hope…I KNOW…that having ACCESS to this philosophical context will improve your experience of reading it if you ever get around to it. And for everyone else out there I hope you just enjoyed the ideas for the sake of the ideas as usual.

Up next, is going to be an episode on Byung Chul Han, that is FAR LESS pessimistic than all the other episodes we’ve done on him. We’re going to look at the parts of his work…where he offers people some hope… for a life where we’re not CAPTURED by, the digital panopticon.

Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Could never do this without you fine people on patreon. Trying to answer every single question that comes through the DMs there if you have anything I might be able to help with. Hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.