The Sovereignty of Taste

1. To Thine Own Self Be True

1. To Thine Own Self Be True On a daily basis, the most fundamental problem of human existence is that individuals are called upon to make choices with insufficient knowledge about the consequences. No matter how long one lives or how wise one becomes ,one finds oneself in the same dilemma: one needs to make a decision, but the outcomes of the various possibilities remain unclear. This pragmatic space of individual lives has always been vexing for humans, and over the millennia much thought has been given to various ways of making choices. Many people have attempted to discern the structures through which humans make decisions in order to establish principles that will assist people in the midst of their small and large commitments. But humans have never adequately achieved a coherent sense of the means through which they make sense of their lives.They may have learned a great deal about the actions they take,but most of what they know comes from realizing what they don’t know about their choices. In the contemporary world,Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the most striking expositions of our ethical difficulties . From beginning to end the novel circles around the question of how people make choices and how they consider the choices they make.Although Kundera is among our best essayists, the great value of his work is found in the mechanics of the novel itself, in his unwillingness to reduce his characters and their actions to a plotline that would make their decisions reasonable . Instead, the novel depends on the fact that choice remains a problem for the characters throughout their lives, though they do learn more about how they make decisions. Even with the increased knowledge of their own behavior, though, they remain caught in the existential dilemma at the cen- 18 the sovereignty of taste ter of the novel: how to choose with insufficient information about the situations in which they find themselves.In the end the characters repeatedly find themselves acting on the basis of patterns that derive from their individual sense of taste. Kundera frames the problem of the novel in the opening pages, when Tomas questions whether he should enter into a sustained relationship with Tereza or continue an independent life punctuated by brief affairs with various women. The conclusion that is thrust upon him is one he is forced to deal with throughout the narrative: “We can never know what to want, because , living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”1 The narrator quickly adds that “There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison” (8). The uniqueness of every situation individuals face makes it impossible for them to know what to do. They can establish patterns over time, reduce specific circumstances to a generalized grid, but in the end each context is different and leads to unique consequences.As a result, an eightyyear -old person is often as much at the mercy of chance as a teenager is. The rhythm of past choices is often all one has to rely on. If Kundera had only provided his readers with a vehicle through which to consider the ongoing problem of choice in life, he would have reminded us of difficulties we prefer to hide from.Like Flaubert,he presents ordinary lives in interesting ways while keeping the problem of choice before the characters : even at the end of the novel the characters agonize over specific situations and regret earlier choices that have framed their entire lives. In refusing to reduce the characters to a formula, Kundera charges the boring and everyday aspects of their lives with the aura of the unknown. Both characters and readers learn as they go, even as they discern the consequences of their choices.Kundera’s novel shows the few fundamental ways humans have developed to assess the difficulties inherent in any choice.They have believed that their decisions come from God, that they are part of some larger plan, that they derive from an essential or fabricated self, that they are a function of the social constructions they inhabit, or that their choices are situationally defined without much regard for self or for some larger framework. For the most part these are the categories through which people construe the nature of choice...