Kantian Categories of Ethics and Morality: A Reading of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Abstract

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the most romantic stories set against a volatile political backdrop wherein the author deals with multiple issues on ideology, ethics and morality. Kant is a foundational thinker in terms of theorizing the notion of morality leading to almost universal categories of moral and ethical imperatives. Kundera’s novel quite significantly appears incommensurable to, what we can call as, universal “categories of imperatives.” Not only the question of morality but even the categories of ideological imperatives have also been emphatically interrogated by Kundera in the novel. The paper is an attempt to understand the Kantian categories as propounded in his The Critique of Practical Reason and revisit Kundera’s novel for a critical engagement to relook at the questions of universal categories of morality as well as ideology. Quite significantly, Kundera uses the term “kitsch” in the novel almost as a discursive tool to counter and denounce the proclamations of the superiority of essentialist political ideology. The novel essentially problematises the Kantian notion of universal morality showing how the universal categories of both morality and reason are inadequate propositions to address the limitless terrains of heterogeneous imperatives.