Fourth Form of Madness

Since I was 19 and read “The unbearable lightness of being” I’ve been wondering if I would ever know what the hell that book was about. I’ll be honest, I read it so I would have plenty to talk about whilst hanging out around the trendy, arty coffee places I used to frequent between clubs. I may have had plenty to talk about discussing Sabina’s hat, Tomas’s adultery and Theresa’s big child like eyes but I didn’t realise there was a whole different conversation going on in that book, one I couldn’t hear. However, the title stayed with me and intrigued me over the years.

I am always amazed what depths of passion awaken in me when I read philosophy. I liken it to the feeling I get when I am on the mat. Philosophy and yoga seem to decipher this world, this existence to me in a language that speaks directly to my subconscious, a land of strong symbols and mythologies shared by all of us, that does not ask our permission to be members of it. Enter my latest philosophical unit, “Existence and Freedom”. I have been waiting a very long time to do this unit. I have purposely not read Sartre as I wanted to be a place where I really understood what he was writing about and not merely reading words and hoping to pass a unit. I think over the years my life education, yoga and reading hindu philosophy had brought me to the bottom of a staircase, ready to take the first step up his body of knowledge.

Anyway, before Sartre comes Soren Kierkegaard. SK and I go back a long way. I was pulled to his writings when I was an atheist, to be fair I was just an intellectual atheist, my heart was never in it. I was lazy and it was always easier and trendier to argue that God didn’t exist than to take a leap (that’s borrowing from SK) and have faith and argue for God’s existence. Now I don’t want to get into the nitty gritties of what is God? I don’t want to know the unknown, I just want to love it and have faith in it. Whether you believe there is a kindly elderly being up there that hears your personal prayers and choices to favour you over and above the rest of humankind, or you see God as a impersonal almighty force, and energy that isn’t really bothered about your personal whims or fancies but rather what energy you are contributing to the collective, I don’t really care. It’s how you arrived at that belief that I am interested in, what backs it up. And here I don’t mean only the thinking behind your decision, as you will never arrive at these truths by purely thinking your way there. Thought must at some point, take a leave of absence and let nothing replace it.

But how does all this come back to “The unbearable lightness of being”, which I watched again today in film form. SK gave us a beautiful description of the stages of life (there are several) but here we will focus on the aesthete. The lover of pleasure and art, the seeker of fun and frivolity. At all costs avoiding responsibility, commitment anything that would weigh them down, bring weight to their soul. Tomas in unbearable lightness of being is a beautiful example of an aesthete (I’m not just guessing here Milan Kundera said that he modelled Tomas on SK’s aesthete). Tomas could continue with his aesthetic lifestyle, his lightness until Teresa came along. A woman that admitted to finding life heavy (ethical) and who demanded to be loved with such weight. Throw in a dash of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had a theory that life is eternally reoccurring that is every joy and every sorrow, every moment of your life just keeps on repeating continuously though out time for ever more. Nietzsche used this as a gauge to how you had created your own life, own person. If you shuttered at the thought of your life repeating, then you weren’t living out your own goals and desires, if you didn’t then you were. To me now, Kundera seems to argue in this film that even if life is a straight line and not reoccurring it is our decisions our choices that bring weight to our lives and that the unbearable lightness of being in this context is that if you continue on as an aesthetic and never develop to the ethicist stage, that is truly choosing as the aesthetic never choses they always go with what they like, life is unbearably light not because it is by nature but because it is by lack of choice.

If I learn nothing else in this unit, if I fail to understand Sartre, at least I got to finally get a chance to delve deeper into understanding this haunting title, “The unbearable lightness of being” . I’m happy with that……for now.