Nietzsche and Creative Passion in Milan Kundera’s the Unbearable Lightness of Being

Abstract

The need to ask the question of being is an aspect of being human. To be human, essentially, is to be self-aware. This is to say: For me to be is to be aware of any of my experiences as mine. Whatever appearance is present in my awareness is untransferably mine, is constitutive of my being, of being self. This existential factor is inseparable from the impulse to ask the questions “Who am I?” “What is this?” (“What is this an appearance of?”). This impulse and its pursuit presuppose the capacity to classify and identify entities as distinct individuals of certain kinds: What is immediately present in self-awareness — sensations, feelings, appearances, intuitions — must be mediated through rule-bound procedures of understanding and knowledge acquisition. It must be generalized and thus restricted. What constitutes self, my being, cannot be fully known or understood by discursive means.

But in art the form is always more than a form. Every novel, wish it or not, offers an answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?¹