Lightness and Weight in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Zarathustra’s Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit

Abstract

The key problem of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in connection to Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same is manifest on the very first pages of the novel: lightness or weight. If we consider weight as life, which repeats itself in infinity and is, as such, heaviness of each human decision or, in other words, the heaviness of the spirit that endlessly bears itself, then lightness presents itself as the lack of burden emerging from Thomas’s motto Einmal ist keinmal. From this perspective, lightness shows itself as a relaxed and non-binding existence, free from the absolute. The dichotomy of lightness and weight invites us to rethink the European spiritual tradition, which, stemming from its ancient Greek origins, moves within Plato’s chorismos between the intelligible world of extrasensory ideas and the cave world of sensory experience. The emergence and unfolding of metaphysics from Plato’s philosophy onward, which Heidegger proclaims as the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics, appears to overcome the sensory world and therefore decides Kundera’s question in favor of weight – at least until Nietzsche’s insight into the nihilist nature of the constitution of metaphysics. In the second part, the introduction of Zarathustra’s speech about the three metamorphoses (of the spirit) will provide a path to the appropriation of the relationship between lightness and weight with regard to the life of four protagonists of Kundera’s novel.