Alfred Whitehead’s process philosophy, although quite a challenging read, I personally went through a lecture given by a scholar on YouTube since I do not have his book nor the time to delve into, talks about, in a nutshell, the process from being to becoming. There is one section of an idea from his philosophy that firmly resembles the writings of Milan Kundera.
Whitehead’s Idea: All our past experiences are perished objects that get inherited into our present as but one whole object, which thereby further orients us to more experiences.
Kundera’s Idea: All our past experiences get stored in some sort of an existential vocabulary or a code and govern our behaviour and decision-making.
You will see a clear resemblance between both of the ideas. In fact, several times, as it happened, I would see this similar structure of thoughts in different works by different authors. And an immediate sense of wonder would be: Are there some skeleton of thoughts embedded in our society that reflect in all forms of human activity? If so, then how could revolution or totally new forms of novelties arise in society? Maybe, it could be that from thousands of skeletons of thoughts, a few would get transferred to the next generation, and their recombinations would then give rise to different skeletons of thoughts.
Ironically, this latest answer is nothing but the Darwinian selection principle. Again, ending up with these bones! Now, I can apply all biological knowledge of mutability, homology, and analogy to study the recurring structures of thought. But, alas, it is all the same.
How can one be free from these recurrences? Because it is here where true creativity lies, or I think so.