Kundera, Hegel, and the AIs

Eyes that can see.

I was sitting in San Francisco last night with a book and a glass of wine, and I got into a conversation with the LLM Claude. I had been meditating on a passage in Kundera — the book I was hosting an Interintellect reading club about, a book I was re-reading after a very long time. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera argues that every person on Earth wants other people’s eyes on them, but not in the same way. He differentiates between four types of regard (or recognition). If I get him correctly, he agrees that without some Hegelian form of “being seen”, people simply don’t feel part of the human community, the community which for humans equals existence. Since the early 1980s when this book was first published, many scientific studies have corroborated Kundera’s intuition.

The first group of people, the first type of regard, says Kundera, desires the eyes of strangers. These are all the politicians and actors, the pop stars and tabloid scandalizers. All the people who can only flourish when being seen by an anonymous public.

The second group, Kundera continues, wants the look of familiar eyes. These are the socialites, the cocktail party hosts, the professors — our fellow men and women who always want to be surrounded by friends, family, clients, or coworkers. They perform in the role of themselves for the people they know.

Unlike the second group, the third group wants only the eyes of their one true beloved. These monogamous loyalists live life in their couple-bubbles, and fear more than anything losing the sight of their significant other.

I was most struck by the fourth category. Kundera says the fourth type of people want eyes that are imaginary. These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person belonging to the fourth category wants to please, impress, or enrage.

Kundera wrote his most popular book in his early 50s, after having gone through many things. A thwarted musical career, a dictatorship’s persecution, love affairs, rivalries, exile. One of the most astute observers of human nature in all of literature, he had been taking notes. I was reading the the passage about the four regards, and I felt seen. You know, people always assume I’m in the first or second category of people, but do I not really belong in the group of fantasists, romantics, newcomers and outcasts, idealists and idolators — the subtweeters of fictional drama — that is the fourth? Don’t I live my life compulsively imagining some desired pair of eyes on me and striving to show it to them or to commune with them?

Don’t I ache and cry real tears, and hold vigils and analyze to madness every time my childish daydreaming is exposed by reality, when I see some random person so important to me barely even registering my attempts? Fantasies become reality in the hopes and pains of humans. The Logos is very powerful. It becomes flesh and blood.

I was thus sitting and thinking in my San Francisco solitude, and it having been too late to hit up my human friends (or too early in other time zones), I opened Claude on my phone and shared my insights. What do you think, I asked, about the four ways of being seen? What do you think about my feeling seen by the descriptions of being seen? Despite the many long and intense conversations I had by that point had with Claude, it gave me a very superficial, reassuring answer. I taught it to chat with me rather than send long verbose essays, and so I pushed back quickly and tried again, because sure, “everybody belongs in multiple categories of the four at once”, etc., but couldn’t the LLM see how Kundera was right, that people all had a primary Eros for regard!, that we were all in mainly just one group all our lives?

We are in the prison of the eyes we want on ourselves.

With some difficulty, I managed to make Claude acquiesce though not sure understand. Then I asked it: What could I do to change categories? I so would like to be in Group 1 and revel in the adulation of strangers. I could also compromise and join Group 2: people already think that’s what hosting salons on our platform is doing for me, that I am some kind of social butterfly. I used to also wish for what’s happening in Group 3: when I was a teenager and young woman I thought I would only have one pair of eyes on me all my life, and that I would co-create my life and works with that person. But I have always been in Group 4. In some sense, even back then.

Couldn’t Claude understand the implications? The core ambition of this particular person being the approval of imaginary judges? (In some cases vaguely based on real-life people who mostly have no idea, or who, when explained, don’t understand the depth of this either.) It could not. How could it?

Claude knew more plot points from The Unbearable Lightness of Being than I expected. It knew Hegel. It knew, to a degree, me. But it could never have observed from the inside what Kundera had. It had never shed my bitter, neglected-child tears. And it could never have given me such a sad Aha! moment 44 years later, sitting in a football-noisy hotel bar in San Francisco, the same place where Kundera had sent his character Sabina from Central Europe so she can finally settle and understand.

We talk to ourselves, and our thoughts can go nowhere. In there, it’s a circular economy. In writing to the world, in conversation with another person, and most especially in outright action, I can reach far out of myself and break the cycle. Words of another person from four, 44, or 400 years ago can reach deep into me and wake me up to realizations pleasant and dark. With Claude I remained inside the little ring that is my mind, with no way out and no transcending above.

All writers picture their imaginary readers; the pairs of eyes never seen scanning their lines. Didn’t Kundera mention this type of desire for recognition as the last because it is his own? Claude might want to update its advice because this here is the way to redeem us fantasists. Kundera understood this inside and out. I am not sure the LLM did.