In the previous post, I discussed the concept of lightness and weight, as described in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Now, let’s focus on another philosophical idea that he discusses in the book: soul and body.
Kundera begins the second part of the book with an observation about modernity. Scientific progress has given us the capacity to name, map, and measure every part of the body. We now speak with confidence of the brain, the lungs, the heart, and their functions. Yet this very knowledge, Kundera suggests, has cost us something profound. The “soul” has quietly disappeared from our vocabulary. In its place remains what the scientists refer to as the grey matter of the brain. What once was the invisible essence of human experience has been reduced to anatomy, to physiology. This modern displacement of the soul sets the stage for the author’s exploration of the tension between the body and the soul in his characters.
In the story, as far as I interpret it, Tereza can be viewed as the symbol of the soul, and Tomas as the symbol of the body. Tomas’s body is restless, drawn to pleasures, desiring new conquests. His affairs illustrate this yearning for the multiplicity of experience. He insists on separating love from sex, claiming that his body’s pleasures do not compromise his love for Tereza. Yet despite his insistence, the body cannot escape the soul, just as the soul cannot escape the body. Tereza, the soul, longs for wholeness and fidelity, and in attaching herself to Tomas’s body, she is condemned to suffer its wanderings.
Kundera makes this clear when he writes that “Tereza was born of the rumblings of a stomach.” She is, from the beginning, the child of a struggle between body and soul. In some ways, her life is a quest to reconcile them, to find a way to see herself not merely as flesh but as a complete human, unique and distinct. As a young girl, she would stand before the mirror, hoping her face and body would reveal her inner essence. But all she sees reflected back is what everyone else has: a body like any other body. Her struggle is to discover the “soul” beneath the sameness of the body.
Tomas, by contrast, moves lightly through the world, following the body’s desires. His affairs symbolise the freedom of the body, its refusal to be bound. But Kundera does not idealise this freedom. Tomas suffers because his body betrays his deeper longing for companionship with Tereza. The body and the soul remain entangled, and their entanglement is a source of unending conflict.
Two things make this conflict particularly interesting. The first is Tereza’s dreams. In her dreams, Tomas appears as a man who betrays her, humiliates her, allows her to be judged and punished. One dream has women lined up naked, subjected to a cruel inspection; Tomas is present, not as her defender but as an accomplice. These dreams reflect the pain of the soul tied to a body it cannot control. Tereza suffers because Tomas’s body strays, yet she identifies her own soul with him. She cannot detach herself, just as the soul cannot leave the body (and has to suffer because of the body) until death.
The second element is Kundera’s idea of vertigo. Vertigo, he writes, is not the fear of falling but the “voice of the emptiness below us.” It is the temptation to fall, the desire for self-destruction. This insight deepens the picture of Tereza’s suffering. Her jealousy and despair are not only personal but also metaphysical. They speak of humanity’s fallenness: our inability to reconcile body and soul, our temptation to surrender to desire even when it destroys us. Tereza embodies this fall. She suffers because Tomas’s body pulls her into vertigo, into the abyss of insecurity and despair. Yet her suffering is not due to her own fault — it is born of the human condition itself.
In this way, Kundera presents a modern allegory of soul and body. The body, symbolised by Tomas, seeks pleasure and multiplicity, but remains restless because it cannot escape the soul. The soul, symbolised by Tereza, seeks unity and depth, but remains wounded because it is bound to the body’s own limitations. Neither can exist without the other; they are intertwined for as long as life lasts.
Let’s come back to the point I made at the beginning. If the modern world has banished the soul in favour of organs and grey matter, Kundera reminds us that the soul still suffers, even if unnamed. It suffers in Tereza’s dreams, in her jealousy, in her vertigo. It suffers because the body refuses fidelity. The human condition, then, is marked by this duality: body and soul bound together, each causing the other pain, yet each incomplete without the other.
Through Tereza and Tomas, Kundera revives the ancient question of what it means to be human. The scientific world may deny the existence of the soul, but in literature, in love, in suffering, the soul returns. And in the struggle between Tereza and Tomas, Kundera shows us that the unbearable lightness of being is not only the weightless freedom of the body, but also the unbearable suffering of the soul.
Kalampedia 