The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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Eternal Return and The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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SOURCE: “Eternal Return and The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 65-78.

[In the following essay, von Morstein examines Kundera's interpretation of existential experience and Nietzsche's philosophical concept of “eternal return” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with a reflection on Nietzsche's idea of “eternal return.” This idea does not represent an objective worldview which could be established by dispassionate scientific investigation. Yet Nietzsche claims that eternal return is the most scientific of all theories. He means that the idea of eternal return provides comprehension of what it is to be. It expresses existential awareness, what it feels like to be human. Traditional science, by contrast, abstracts from the existential aspect of the human condition. Eternal return is a “theory” through which the existential human situation is shown but not explained or described.

Kundera's reflections on the idea of eternal return pervade The Unbearable Lightness of Being in various ways. They are most clearly focused on Tomas, the main protagonist. I will here show how the idea of eternal return is connected with the characters Tomas and Tereza, and their love.

1. NIETZSCHE'S DIONYSIAN CONCEPTION OF EXISTENCE

Nietzsche's idea of eternal return is rooted in his Dionysian conception of existence. Dionysius, Apollo, and Socrates are symbols to express the nature of existence. Dionysius stands for sheer being, prior to structure and organization, prior to individuals and classes of individuals. Dionysian reality is being; but it does not contain beings, entities, things; it contains no-thing.

Apollo stands for reality as immediately given, as present in awareness. Immediate awareness is Einbildungskraft, imagination; it is the power of individuation, of immediate and spontaneous transformation of unstructured Dionysian reality into appearance of individuals. Such appearances or images are immediately given, present, in reality, and yet essentially illusory. They constitute pre-reflective experiences of existence. Human consciousness is rooted in such immediate existential awareness.

Socrates is tied to rational explanation, to identification and classification. Impulses to identify, clarify and explain, to compare and establish interrelations, are immediately given with Apollonian images. But pursuits of Socratic impulses and results of such pursuits by way of rational enquiry are not given. They engender representations of reality which are mediated by rule-bound concepts and propositions. Socratic propositions are not in reality, but about reality. By contrast, Apollonian images are in reality.

Nietzsche understands existential reality as it is immediately given in terms of a symbolic, not a discursive, system. Existential reality consists of Dionysian existence without entities, Apollonian imagination with appearances of entities (i.e., existential awareness), and Socratic impulses to determine such appearances objectively. The three symbols constitute an internally cohesive code through which sheer existence can be comprehended.

This conception gives us a view of existence as dynamic potential, as energy, which is immediately and spontaneously actualized in Apollonian images, as well as mediately and intentionally in Socratic conceptual representations. We have cognitive access to existential reality only through its actualizations. Mere potential without its actualizations is inconceivable.

We can and do intentionally reflect on reality as it is immediately present in Apollonian appearances or images. Appearances differ from moment to moment. They are fleeting, gone forever, as soon as they occur. By means of Socratic reasoning we attempt to arrest the fleeting nature of appearances. We abstract from their immediate lived actuality and represent them through timeless concepts and propositions, thereby losing their component of felt existential awareness. Socratic reasoning typically determines appearances as entities, objective beings; and classes of entities as universals. Thus it is disconnected from, and false to, existential reality.

However, if Socratic reasoning procedures stay grounded in existential awareness; if they are not dissociated from Socratic impulses as constitutive of Apollonian appearances; if entities are established in connection with appearances, differing from moment to moment—then we would come to see entities as processes rather than as fixed beings. Socratic reasoning need not be in opposition to existential awareness, but can be in unity with it.

We must recognize that the roots of any proposition are in existential awareness. Hence objective conditions are not sufficient for the truth of any proposition: “… 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: the sea will cast it up again” [Nietzsche, The Will to Power]. Accordingly, both the fleetingness of appearances and the need for eternity are existential. Socratic impulses spontaneously manifest this need. They compel us to focus on the similarities and dissimilarities of experiences in such a way that we can establish temporal continuity for them and timeless law-governed relations between them. Once we attain these goals we realize that we are thereby dissociated from existential awareness. If we acknowledge that Socratic reasoning is rooted in existential awareness, we must endeavor to reunite them.

Nietzsche's cosmology, as his “theory” of eternal return is often called, is to preserve the original union between existential awareness and Socratic impulses. His idea of eternal return is grounded in the existential need for eternity. It is this need that justifies Nietzsche's idea of eternal return.

The idea is tied to his views of the finitude of energy and the infinitude of time. These views, too, are existentially justified: Our concept of energy or force must be compatible with our existential need for value, i.e., sameness in eternity. Existence does not, in Nietzsche's view, accommodate unlimited force and its consequence of infinite novelty.

Having rejected the infinitude of energy Nietzsche must commit himself to the infinitude of time. Given the finitude of energy, the finitude of time would then defeat our existential need for value and eternity. If time were finite, an end state would have been reached, or would have to be reached. But in existential awareness there is no end to change. The fluidity of change is existentially united with the need for eternity. Thus if energy is finite time must be infinite. But to be consistent with the finitude of energy and our need for eternity and sameness it must be circular. The idea of eternal return follows from the conjunction of the finitude of energy and the infinitude of circular time, and expresses immediate existential awareness: the fleetingness of appearances and the need for sameness in eternity. It also fulfills this need. It thus reflects the original unity of the symbolic system of Dionysius, Apollo, and Socrates which makes existential reality comprehensible.

In a world without eternal return we would have to live with a terrifying sense of weightlessness. If we believe in eternal return we transform the weightlessness of fleeting appearances into the greatest weight. It is just this terrifying sense of weightlessness that Tomas experiences and struggles with. Without a curative device, like the idea of eternal return, the lightness of being is unbearable.

2. “THE GREATEST WEIGHT”

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). …


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.

Das schwerste Gewicht,” “The greatest weight,” is the title of a paragraph on eternal return in Nietzsche's 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?

In this paragraph Nietzsche does not address the cosmological implications of the idea of eternal return, but only its possible psychological impact. A demon follows you into your loneliest loneliness. “You” could be anyone; no specific individual is addressed. But the strict particularity of any “you” is indicated: “… into your loneliest loneliness.” The demon addresses any human being in particular, not human beings in general—the concrete universal of being human, as it were. The demon offers you the exact recurrence of your life, of every event in it, again and again into eternity. Your life and all its occurrences are identical. Zarathustra, the “leader of eternal return,” makes this point more succinctly. This is what he would say, according to his animals:

“Now I die and decay,” you would say, “and in an instant shall be nothingness. Souls are as mortal as bodies.”


“But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I myself am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence.”


“I shall return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life:


“I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, …”

The infinitude and circularity of time entail the return of every occurrence in every detail, however minute. Therefore it is impossible to recognize any occurrence as a recurrence. For an occurrence to recur is for it to occur in the context of the exact same feelings, cognition and surroundings events. The identity of an occurrence is constituted by its total context. This is to say that my life is encompassed in each of its moments, and that history is encompassed in my life. The idea of eternal return entails the numerical identity of an occurrence with its recurrences. Eternity counts only to One.

In a world of eternal return change of life, of history, of any occurrence whatever, is impossible. However, as became evident in our discussion of Nietzsche's Dionysian conception of existence, change in life, in history, in every occurrence is necessary. There is no fixity in Dionysian reality. Life is change, becoming, process.

Whether or not we believe in eternal return, we have only one life to live. In a world without eternal return there is, according to Nietzsche, no cure for the terrifying sense of weightlessness. You are a “speck of dust.” In a world of eternal return every occurrence, every detail of our lives has the weight of eternity. This is Nietzsche's wager: If you accept the idea of eternal return you have nothing to lose and all to gain. But is the greatest weight a gain? This is Tomas's existential question: “What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” Parmenides, for instance, as the author remarks in his reflections, decides that lightness is positive, and weight negative.

The “you” who responds in extreme horror to the demon's proposal must think of the weight of eternity as a weight you have to carry on your shoulders and which must, of course, crush you. The you who responds in extreme joy, on the other hand, must think of the greatest weight as encompassed by your life and every moment in it. Thus for the joyous you the greatest weight is no load, and there is no choice between lightness and weight. For the joyous individual the greatest weight is neither bearable nor unbearable. Tereza, we shall see (section 3), fits the idea of such an individual.

Without eternal return every moment of Dionysian existence is fortuitous. In eternal return chance is immediately transformed into necessity. Every moment is necessary. As every occurrence in a life encompasses the totality of this life, and as every life encompasses the totality of history, we cannot assign lightness to some and weight to other moments. To accept eternal return for one moment is to accept it for one's whole life and for all history. Equally, to reject eternal return for one moment is to reject it for one's whole life and for all history.

The idea of eternal return holds the ideal of integration of every experience with every other, of living in total harmony with oneself, as a being interconnected with all history. There would be no need for forgetting, repression, regrets, resentment, dissociation. The Dionysian, Apollonian, and Socratic elements of existence would be in complete balance, so that happiness and pain could be experienced with equal acceptance. It would be the life of an individual whose every experience is and remains grounded in immediate existential awareness and for whom the elements of existence are always united and balanced. Thus immediate awareness (Apollonian imagination) and Socratic reasoning would not enter into opposition. Such an individual would always be “together,” would never “fall apart.”

Such an individual would love his destiny whatever happened. Amor fati is the optimal consequence of the idea of eternal return.

In the practice of living this ideal cannot be fully realized. The practice of living is process, becoming. In practice the idea of eternal return can work as a device for cultivating amor fati, in striving to integrate every experience rather than rejecting any. In short, the idea of eternal return is a device in making sense of one's experiences, of one's life, of history.

In practice we live uncertainly between eternity and annihilation: “… how well disposed would you have to become toward yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?” (The Gay Science). Such craving would characterize the middle ground between extreme horror and extreme joy in response to the demon's proposal. This middle ground is as varied as human lives. It is marked by ambiguity and uncertainty. Nietzsche's world has no Supreme Judge to justify existence eternally. “This ultimate confirmation and seal” would consist in complete balanced integration of every experience with every other. Life, like a work of art, would cohere by virtue of internal laws only and be free of any laws to be imposed from outside. It would, in other words, be self-determined, from within the totality of human experience, rather than by individuals as isolated, discrete individuals. To be a self, then, is to be interconnected with all of human experience: “… it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Or, as Kundera writes, human lives “are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence … into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life.” The laws of beauty sublate ambiguity and uncertainty, as Tereza's life shows. The laws of reason cannot, as Tomas's life shows.

Kundera's conception of a character in a novel is interwoven with the aspects of the idea of eternal return which I have discussed here. The author's reflections on the idea of eternal return with which the novel begins do not only increase his understandings of Tomas, but of what it is to be a character, any character, in a novel, and how characters in novels are connected with life and lives. To read The Unbearable Lightness of Being is to witness the birth of a novel from the spirit of eternal return. It may hence be difficult to read any (great) novel in any other way. But it is not the task of this essay to pursue this.

3. “LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT”

Kundera's novel has seven parts. Parts 2 and 5 each bear the title “Lightness and Weight.” These two parts are focused on the male protagonist Tomas. Sections 1 and 2 of part 1 (3-6) contain the author's reflections on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return: “… the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them. They appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature.” The reflections end with the statement: “The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most dangerous, most mysterious of all.”

Kundera characterizes Tomas's existential problem as “the lightness of existence in a world where there is no eternal return”: “To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code … the code of this or that character is made up of certain key words” (The Art of the Novel). Tomas's key words are “lightness” and “weight.”

The author's initial reflections on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return provide a setting for Tomas. These reflections do not have the self-sufficiency of a philosophical discourse. They are woven into the author's vision and comprehension of the character Tomas. “Even if I am the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his attitudes, his ways of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself” (The Art of the Novel). “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking at the opposite walls not knowing what to do.” The author's reflections clarify the author's vision of this character. Tomas does not himself entertain the idea of eternal return, nor show any familiarity with it. Tomas is in the grip of the mysterious, ambiguous lightness/weight opposition. This is sufficient evidence that Tomas does not believe that the world eternally returns—whether or not he is familiar with the idea. Belief in a world of eternal return precludes the opposition between lightness and weight, as I showed in section 2.

Tomas, while standing at the window and looking at the opposite walls (also “dirty”) is attempting to call a particular recent moment in his life to account. He wonders whether or not to assign weight to it. It is a moment in the beginning of his relationship with Tereza, a relationship which in his view arose from six chance happenings.

Seven years earlier, a complex neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in Tereza's town. They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the provincial hospital in his place. The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed. He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant. Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's table. It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if he had little inclination to go to her on his own.

After their first chance encounter Tereza arrived in Prague, because Tomas appeared to her “as chance in the absolute” and their love was a matter of immediate unreflected necessity.

Tomas, standing at the window, reflects on a moment in their first might together:

He kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. She was neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed. She fell asleep. He knelt down next to her. Her feverous breath quickened and she gave out a weak moan. He pressed his face to hers and whispered calming words into her sleep After a while he felt her breath return to normal and her face rise unconsciously to meet his He smelled the delicate aroma of her fever and breathed it in, as if trying to glut himself with the intimacy of her body. And all at once he fancied she had been with him for many years and was dying. He had a sudden clear feeling that he would not survive her death. He would lie down beside her and want to die with her. He pressed his face into the pillow beside her head and kept it there for a long time.

In Tomas's reflections every aspect of this moment emerges as ambiguous: Tereza is neither mistress nor wife. His feeling is neither love nor hysteria. He can make no sense of “kneeling at her bed and thinking he would not survive her death.” Even though he recognizes these moments as “the most beautiful moments he had ever experienced,” he is unable to be guided by his sense of beauty (by contrast with Tereza). Not imbued with the perspective that the idea of eternal return implies he realizes “that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite normal”: “We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” That we live only one life is true also in the perspective of eternal return (section 2). But eternal return further implies that, in order to be alive, we must know what we want; and what we want must be everything that occurs. Tereza, by contrast with Tomas, lives through the perspective implied by the idea of eternal return. This, of course, does not mean that she must be familiar with the idea. Like Tomas, she never entertains it. Only the author does, in “the magnetic field of a character” (The Art of the Novel).

Tomas looks out of the window, but fails to see. He endeavors to make rational (Socratic) sense of his experience but does not succeed. His Socratic reflections fall away from his lived experience. Rather, he experiences the disconnection of lived experience and rational reflection.

Weight is tied with necessity. In a world of eternal return, what is must be. But in a world of transience, Tomas's world, one may wonder if there is anything that has weight. Eternal return precludes the distinction between light and weighty moments; one cannot select occurrences as candidates for weightiness. In a transient world, to mitigate the terrifying sense of weightlessness of existence one may seek experiences which may turn out to be weighty and necessary, by contrast with all else. “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.”

What Tomas feels to be love in immediate lived experience fails, under rational scrutiny, to fit under the concept. If love is weighty and necessary, can it, by rational criteria, be based on “six laughable fortuities”? The feeling is neither clearly love, nor is it clearly hysteria. The experience is essentially ambiguous. It is not either love or hysteria. “This ‘either-or’ encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge” (The Art of the Novel). Socratic reasoning precludes “the wisdom of uncertainty” which, according to Kundera is “the novel's wisdom” (The Art of the Novel).

In moments of lived experience, of existential awareness, Tomas “had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger.” Tomas aims to explain what in reality, in immediate awareness, is inexplicable. But he has originally comprehended the experience, albeit in terms of images and metaphor. The passage earlier presents a clear understanding of his experience; but it is expressed in the “language of relativity and ambiguity” (The Art of the Novel). The passage expresses what is in the experience. The question “Is it love or hysteria?” is outside it. An apodictic answer to this question would have to be imposed upon the experience. But Tomas remains sufficiently grounded in his lived experience not to allow a rationally established apodictic answer. His indecision does not stem from weakness or lack of understanding, but from the strength to face the inexplicability of his felt love without therefore denying it.

A decision for love and necessity would mean responsibility. “Should he call her back to Prague for good? He feared the responsibility.” A decision for mere fleeting fortuity would mean freedom from the weight of such responsibility.

He makes a decision, but not on rational grounds. His decision to receive Tereza when she arrives in Prague for the second time, and “the suitcase that contained her life,” is immediate, spontaneous, sudden:

How had he come to make such a sudden decision when for nearly a fortnight he had wavered so much that he could not even bring himself to send a postcard asking her how she was?


He himself was surprised. He had acted against his principles.

Tomas now experiences the weight of Tereza and her “enormously heavy suitcase” as an immediate given which precludes wonderings and rational decision procedures. He acts immediately in the lived experience, not in mediate relation to it. His comprehension of the situation now is immediate, sudden—not Socratic, but Apollonian. He comprehends it by the laws of beauty, not laws of reason.

Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream. He couldn't very well let a basket with a child in it float down a stormy river! If the Pharaoh's daughter hadn't snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we now know it! How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child! If Polybus hadn't taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn't have written his most beautiful tragedy!

But centrally Tomas is a Socratic character. He conducts his life by means of rational reflection. He is born from the image of “staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do.” The suddenness of his decision to receive Tereza and her suitcase becomes an object to further reflection: “He had acted against his principles.” His decision and his principles are in opposition.

Such opposition is not part of Tereza's life. She does not lead her life according to principles but “according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Coincidences which Tomas would try (in vain) to explain are immediately meaningful and compelling for her. Tereza's Socratic thoughts and doubts do not oppose her sudden decision but are aufgehoben by them; of instance:

Her first thought was that he had come back because of her; because of her, he had changed his destiny. Now he would no longer be responsible for her; now she was responsible for him.


The responsibility, she felt, seemed to require more strength than she could muster.


But all at once she recalled that just before he had appeared at the door of their flat the day before, the church bells had chimed six o'clock. On the day they first met, her shift had ended at six. She saw him sitting there in front of her on the yellow bench and heard the bells in the belfry chime six.


No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued here with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear him breathing at her side.

Here is the same scene from Tomas's perspective:

He had gone back to Prague because of her. So fateful a decision resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica seven years earlier. And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.


It was late at night. His stomach started acting up as it tended to do in times of psychic stress.


Once or twice her breathing turned into mild snores. Tomas felt no compassion. All he felt was the pressure in his stomach and the despair of having returned.

Tomas's life, at this stage, continues to be riddled by counterfactuals: “a love that would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica some years earlier.” Tereza's life does not accommodate counterfactuals. Absolute fortuity precludes alternative possibilities. Her life is not open to alternative possibilities. It is always complete, internally cohesive. She is one with the eternal weight of her experiences. The one counter factual she entertains—“If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him”—does not open an alternative possibility for her. It exercises its logical power only on Tomas who responds with jealousy to what might have been.

Tereza's life perspective is one implied by the idea of eternal return. What is must be. What must be precludes alternatives. She is “impelled by the birds of fortuity,” understands “the message of chance.” From her perspective one cannot question or deny what is given. It is, we might say, a Dionysian perspective, by contrast with Tomas's Socratic perspective.

Chance events appear to Tereza in cohesive inevitable order. For her “necessity knows no magic formulae.”

Necessity in experience precludes resentment, revolt. Tomas struggles against the unbearable lightness of being and seeks necessarily, strives to live by necessity. From his Socratic perspective, from the perspective of either-or, the weight of necessity may become irritating, and the formula “Es muss sein” loses its magic.

It is my feeling that Tomas had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn “Es muss sein!” and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go to light. Remember that at one point in his life he broke completely with his first wife and his son and that he was relieved when both parents broke with him. What could be at the bottom of it all but a rash and not quite rational move to reject what proclaimed itself to be his weighty duty, his “Es muss sein!”?


That, of course, was an external “Es muss sein!” reserved for him by social convention, whereas the “Es muss sein!” of his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.

Every “Es muss sein!” is open to the possibility of revolt against it. This does not hold of the necessity determined by the laws of beauty. Tereza who came to be “all that mattered to him” is the reverse side of all his “Es muss sein!”

Tereza had instantly accepted that “this stranger was her fate.” Tomas developed the ability to accept her as his fate. Their love for each other became amor fati. Amor fati, as we have seen (section 2), precludes the category of lightness and weight.

4. KUNDERA'S CONCEPTION OF CHARACTER

Tereza and Tomas are linked with Nietzsche's Dionysian view of existence through the idea of eternal return. This idea is grounded in Dionysian existence, in Nietzsche's thought. It illuminates the existential situation(s) of Tereza and Tomas.

Kundera's conception of character directly connects with Nietzsche's conception of existence. The author's reflections on the idea of eternal return led him to a clear comprehension of Tomas. According to Kundera, the characters in a novel have lives of their own over which the author has little control. The “wisdom of the novel” supercedes the wisdom of its author. A character is to be found and comprehended, not designed and constructed.

We have found that the author's comprehension of Tereza must also have been affected by his reflections on the idea of eternal return. In fact, it turned out that it is Tereza's, not Tomas's, perspective on life which is implied by eternal return. Tomas's dichotomization of lightness and weight, his struggle against lightness, his attempts at rational distinction between light and weighty experiences, and at rational selection between experiences in favor of weight and necessity, manifest a perspective which is precluded by eternal return.

Far from believing in eternal return Tomas holds that life and history are transient, and that what happened once might as well not have happened at all. His characteristic perspective on life is a function of this belief. “Einmal ist keinmal” is another key to his character, as is the image of him standing by the window, looking out on the dirty walls opposite. “Einmal ist keinmal” is his magical formula of fortuity as “Es muss sein!” is his magical formula of necessity.

Tereza's sense of beauty defies the magic of either formula. In the last phase of their life together Tomas comes to partake of her sense of beauty, and thereby to acquire the attitude of amor fati. The experiences that point him in that direction are those of compassion and of “poetic memory.” At the end of their life which fulfills his initial vision of their common death, the perspective implied by eternal return supercedes his perspective from transience and fleetingness. The magical formulae of necessity and fortuity are both invalidated. The process of their invalidation is his story. In a sense other than biological, he is born of woman, for his development from impotent Socratic reflection to amor fati is rooted in Tereza's sense of beauty and her attitude of amor fati by virtue of which Tomas has been her fate from the first moment.

The attitude of amor fati as connected with the idea of eternal return is far removed from resignation and passive acceptance. On the contrary: it entails the clearest possible comprehension of reality, that of “vision of the real.” The vision of the real is tantamount to love. As I have shown in another essay [“Creative Passion in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being”], Tereza's life is one of creative passion. Her life can be understood in terms of the optimal consequence of the belief that the world eternally returns. Her existence is an aesthetic phenomenon and, therefore, in accordance with Nietzsche's views, “eternally justifiable” (The Birth of Tragedy). Note again that it is irrelevant whether she holds the belief that the world eternally returns, or whether she is at all familiar with the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, far from reflecting on objective scientific theory, is a device for overcoming the terrifying sense of the weightlessness of existence that Tomas is characteristically subject to. Tereza does not need such a device. To understand this is a result of reflecting on the idea of eternal return.

Tomas believes that

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.


History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated.

Unaware of the possibility of eternal return and thus of the unity of eternity and sameness (oneness), Tomas is committed to the view that, because life occurs only once, “History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.” In his horror of history's unbearable lightness he conceives of a version of eternal return in the perspective of his belief that existence and the world are transient and fleeting.

Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and all the experience they had amassed here.


And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.


And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.


That was Tomas's version of eternal return.

This is an utopic vision, not a “vision of the real”: that our lives will be repeated again and again, each time a bit better, if all goes well; every life can be a rehearsal for the next, as every performance of a musical composition can be a rehearsal for the next.

This version of eternal return is not only incompatible with Nietzsche's idea but internally incoherent: I cannot possibly step outside my life in order to lead my life. I cannot relate to my life, in the way in which a musical performer relates to a particular musical composition—mysterious though the latter relation may be in its own right. Nietzsche's idea of eternal return precludes repetition, as I have shown. It entails that life occurs only once and precludes its unbearable lightness.

“In the novel, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical” (The Art of the Novel). Kundera's reflections on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return are placed in “the magnetic field” of the character Tomas. The reflections on eternal return, which I offer in this essay, are placed in the magnetic field of the whole novel and, specifically, of the characters Tereza and Tomas.

“The novel is a mediation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters” (The Art of the Novel). The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a mediation on existence according to Nietzsche's Dionysian conception. Its key is the idea of eternal return. The mediation consists in explorations of the novel's characters. “A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self” (The Art of the Novel). “The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities.” Kundera's conception of a character connects this novel directly with Nietzsche's Dionysian conception of existence. The characters in his novels are creatures born and grown from Apollonian images. They are not living beings in the way in which you and I are living beings, nor indeed are they simulations of such living beings. The Apollonian images from which they and born and grown are in existential reality (section 1). Apollonian images are immediate actualizations of Dionysian potential (section 1); they do not represent objectively identifiable individuals, “living beings” like you or me; rather they present possibilities of being, of human existence, possibilities which are centered around an existential problem like that of lightness and weight for Tomas. The author explores the images, the presentations of existential possibilities, directly. He explores them as chance in the absolute—not relative to a conceptual framework or psychological theory. Theories may enter as devices of exploration and orientation, but not of explanation. This is the status that theories have in Nietzsche's philosophy.

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