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

Today we try to produce a philosophical guide for the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. We talk about Parmenides, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, kitsch as something more than just an aesthetic category, existential codes and his animal test of morality. Hope you love it! :) Sponsors: ZocDoc: https://www. ZocDoc.com/PHILO Nord VPN: https://nordvpn.com/philothis Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. 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."

• 0:43Speaker 00

  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's 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 30 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.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  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 kind of weird at first, but you just need to understand where Kundera's 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 2,500 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 thought that lightness is always

• 2:10Speaker 00

  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 going to 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 for us 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

• 2:54Speaker 00

  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, like courage is always the right way to be living. Moderation is 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 going to 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 is building this book on top of is Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his famous idea of the eternal recurrence.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Now, there are many different interpretations of the eternal recurrence, but we're going to 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 that when you're living in a nihilistic universe, where there isn't an afterlife, 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. 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 you choose to do in some other moment.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  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 in all 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 in this world is to believe in a God that's 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

• 5:01Speaker 00

  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 going to be reborn and your life is going to 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'd have to relive that moment endlessly for all eternity. Every time that Saturday came around in some new life you were living,

• 5:44Speaker 00

  you'd have to suffer again in the exact same way for that entire day. You can imagine how this then 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 with critiquing Nietzsche.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Like, 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? Then 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 as well. 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

• 7:08Speaker 00

  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." Now, what he's gonna say, the very different stance 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's a dialectical relationship between lightness and heaviness for Kundera. We oscillate between them in different ways, given our circumstances, and people will often begin life on one side of this and end life on the totally other side of it.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  You may begin life, for example, 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 somebody 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.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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, 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 you're reading this book and paying attention to the characters.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  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 was 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 them," he says, "keep chains on you." But, "Look, my love cannot 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

• 9:43Speaker 00

  the life that makes sense to him towards the beginning. His whole attitude, in fact, can be found in a pretty famous line from the book that just embodies the concept of lightness about as beautifully as he ever could in a single line. He says that, quote, "What happens but once might as well not have happened at all," end quote. 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 the story of lightness that he's telling himself also brings him a lot of inner conflict. He 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. This is made most obvious to him when he first meets a woman named Teresa, who's obviously, for Kundera, the prime example of a life rooted more in heaviness.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  In fact, the symbolism's all over the place with Teresa in this book. In one of the first scenes, we see her and she's carrying a big, heavy suitcase, just trying to lug it around everywhere. And this is pretty commonly interpreted as the emotional baggage she brings into his life and her desire for commitment. See, Teresa is very different than Tomas. She comes from a lot of trauma earlier on in her life. She had a mother that just treated her horribly in the past. She used to say things to her that were brutal. You read about them in the book, and it's obviously something that 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, you know, 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

• 11:13Speaker 00

  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 and they end up living together on a farm, just handling the tasks of the day as they come together, moment by moment. A life, obviously, far different from the place that Tomas began the book in. Now, this is just one example of Kundera showing this transformation from lightness to heaviness, or heaviness to lightness.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Let's talk about one of the biggest ideas you'll run across if you're reading this book. By the way, the kind of idea that gets Kundera banned from Czechoslovakia because he just 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 somebody was describing a piece of art. When somebody calls artwork something that's kitsch, what they mean is that it's something that's 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. We've all seen it. That's kind of the ultimate example of kitsch artwork that people will give.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  But really predictable rom-coms from like the early 2000s, those are an example of something that's kitsch. This happens in music all the time when somebody just recycles old music cliches and then 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 relating to it by any means necessary. Now contrast that with other kinds of artwork where the goal's more to do something risky, something that's challenging or new in a way that's interesting to people, in a way that may make the people consuming it feel a bit uncomfortable. But that's part of the point.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  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 going to 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.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  They have all the best, perfectly prepared answers to everything ahead of time so they never have to offend anyone. Their social media feed is completely manicured, right? 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, they may talk about it like it's the most important thing in the world to them. This is a perfect example of kitsch manifesting in human form. They don't care about conveying who they actually are as a 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 off throughout the book that make us notice how this kitsch goes far beyond just the realm of artwork.

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• 16:36Speaker 00

  On that note, consider this going on 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 out of here. They gotta go. Burn the heretic for daring to say the world's 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

• 17:20Speaker 00

  looking at things that everybody can arrive at, and then it's castigating anyone who dares to go against that 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 today, and whenever there's a narrative, no matter how convincing it may look to the 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 those 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. I mean, how could you possibly disagree with something so obvious that we're all emotionally aligned on right now?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And yet, so often, when this goes on, you know, 10 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 tiers that lead to kitsch going on at the level of ideas like this. Not tiers like levels, but tiers like what comes out of your eyes when something sentimental happens. The idea is that people have one of those single-tier sentimental moments with themselves, you know, congratulating themselves for how touched they are by something when it happens. For example, picture watching a video on YouTube where a raccoon gets rescued from

• 18:50Speaker 00

  a flood. Firefighters pull the raccoon out of the water, they dry him off, and then they send him on their way, and it's a beautiful moment, everybody starts applauding. That's the first tier. 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 comments section and read and nod emphatically 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 tier, 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 that rescuing that raccoon was a beautiful moment, well, screw that person. How do people like that even exist out there?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  As another example of this whole thing, consider that you can pick basically any song or movie out there that you have any kind of nostalgic connection to. And you can think that because it riles up all these emotions in you, that it's the greatest song or movie that's ever been made. And then you can go into the comments section for the video of that song or movie, and you will find people who also say, "This is the greatest song ever written. This is the best scene from any movie that's ever been shot." And 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,

• 20:19Speaker 00

  like when it comes to the communism that Condé was dealing with during his lifetime. Picture somebody 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 that it's a really important thing. That's the first tier. Then imagine the next layer of that, where they congratulate themselves for being a part of a society that's doing things the right way. One that 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." Condé'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, then get overly sentimental about it, and use cliches to relate to things in a shallow way.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  And this is something Condé thinks you can see everywhere, all around you, if you look for it in the modern world. 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 for him. He says, quote, "Kitch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians," end quote. 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 that to demonize anybody that dares to point out how it's not that simple. Kitsch then, becomes a way to control people at the level of ideas, and then maintain power. But he says historically, there's been three safe ...guards we have as people against this all happening.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  And he says, "Anybody who's playing this kind of game is almost certainly going to be hostile towards all three of these 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 these overly sentimental narratives is one way of fragmenting them. And irony, because when somebody 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 once 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

• 22:31Speaker 00

  so much humor throughout this book. All three of these are going to 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, you know, public or personal life, by the way, maybe proceed with caution when it comes to what their intentions might be with you. Now, another really interesting idea that Kundera plays with throughout the book is what he calls existential codes and how they relate to our 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 Teresa. 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.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  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're built through the experiences you've had. But more specifically for Kundera, you are built through your relationship to the past and the way you view your memories. His point is, whenever we use a word, for example, take a word like "security," common word that people use. That word only means something to us in relation to our own history and our position on the 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 Teresa and is influenced by her whole gravitational field that she has, you know, "security" to her means something like stability, reliability. Shared responsibilities.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Security for her is a commitment to the other person's well-being and doing all that that takes. But to Tomas, on the other hand, at the beginning of the book, the exact same word can feel like a kind of entrapment, like it represents a loss of some of this freedom that matters so much to him as, you know, the spontaneous surgeon man that he is. It feels to him like he's not going to be able to be fully 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 they have. 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.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Consider how intimacy, just as a concept, to one type of person, that could represent the most amazing closeness that's possible between two people. But to another person, who maybe comes from trauma, more like Teresa 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 to them. 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. Another example, consider how giving someone some space. To one person, that 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, on the other hand, this can be seen as a kind of withdrawal, a separation

• 25:24Speaker 00

  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. You know, for him, too often, we think that words just come with these preloaded connotations that we are familiar with ourselves, we have privileged access to, and that everybody else needs to understand these words exactly like we do. And then in turn, your life becomes just arguing, you know, 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 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.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Everybody is coming to these things from a slightly different place, and 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 like Kundera starts calling into question our ability to arrive at something like capital T, "objective truth," you know, especially if this is one of the first philosophical books you've read, it's very common to start to wonder, "What are the limitations to that claim he's making 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"? Is that what he's saying? No, he's definitely not saying that, that I can assure you. His position on this is actually pretty complicated.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  And I think if I had to use all my years of reading philosophy to put it in a way that's fair to him here, 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 they get their ideas for how they should be acting from some ideology, usually a kitsch ideology, that he 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, no, we don't have a philosopher that's given us a perfect moral system yet." No, no, it's that people are conforming to other people's morality too easily.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  That's the problem to him. So when he gives moral advice throughout this book, you'll notice, he's not going to be laying out a system. It's going to be the kind of advice that would help someone if they wanted to think about human behavior without giving in to 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 to people. But what is it? So, you know how when you're going on a first date, and your grandma will tell you, "You know, don't pay so much attention to the way the other person's treating you." After all, this is someone that ultimately wants something from you by going on that date. You can't trust the way they treat you. "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," she says, "'cause it's a

• 28:20Speaker 00

  situation where they're treating somebody well with no expectation of return." Now, there's certainly wisdom to these words from grandma, but if we really examine them closely, 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. They're doing it to impress the person they're on a date with. That doesn't seem like a true test of character. Secondly, that server does have at least some level of control over how well your night's gonna go. Treat your server at a restaurant bad, and they might do something less than kind to your food. They might even just leave your food back in the kitchen, be like, "Oh, no, no, you know what? I totally forgot it was sitting back there. You know, you were being so nice to me before.

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  I was beside myself. I just couldn't focus on your food closely enough. Sorry about that." But Kundera is gonna take this idea from Grandma and amplify it to the extremes. He says, quote, "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 towards those who are at its mercy: animals," end quote. 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

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  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. And 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 it creates a situation where because the thing can't give us anything in return when we do stuff for it, it's in those moments that you can see what someone's levels of compassion really are. And this is the 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 at home. That's an animal. She's a Pomeranian named Scruffy.

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  I love that little bundle of joy every day when I get home. I do nice things for Scruffy, and then Scruffy gives me love and affection back." So animals do- Actually 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 kind of like a short-order kitchen. You get what you want, when you want it, and she shows up hoping for the best every day. He'd also say that your relationship to Scruffy isn't like what most people's relationship is to 99.9% of the animals that are on this planet, which is really more of his point here.

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  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 that people decide they're going to be treating 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's 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

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  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 these 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 so far. We're going to look at the parts of his work where he offers people some real hope for a life where we're not captured by the digital panopticon as much. Can't wait to talk to you about it, it'll be out next week. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis. Can never do this without you find people on Patreon, by the way. Lately, I've been trying to answer every single question that comes through the DMs there. So if you have anything I might be able to help with, send it my way. Hope you have a great rest of your week, and as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.