Episode #234 ... The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize this if you value the show as an educational resource. Philosophical writing on Substack had Philosophize This on there as well. I 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 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's trying to read this book, But it also stands alone as just a collection of the philosophy of Kundera during this time period. I mean, either way, people always ask me for a first book that they can read if they're trying to get into philosophy more, something that's maybe funny, interesting. Well, this book would be a really good candidate for that if you were looking for one. 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 road map of the philosophy you're gonna be encountering if you do read it. Let's get into it though. At its 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 kinda 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 them. The first one is the ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides, from around twenty five hundred years ago. Kundera begins this 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, but most importantly for Kundera's work, light or heavy. He says Parmenides also made the claim that for these oppositions, there's always one of them that's good and one of them that's bad. And in the case of light and heavy, he says Parmenides sought that lightness is always good and heaviness is always bad. Now, on a philosophy podcast like this, I I have to give the criticism …