Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

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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'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. 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. Cunderra 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 Cundera'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 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 Kundunderra's point doesn't really require this idea to come from Permanity 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

...