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Rare is the writer whom right-thinking philosophers
have designated nihilist with such force and insistence as Cioran. This
Romanian established in France is in fact one of the freest spirits of our age.
A man who is able to condemn the very fact of birth (“Every being brought into
the world is one cursed”) and for whom life is “extraordinary and empty”—a man
whose books are called, for example, De
l’inconvénient d’être né (On the
Inconvenience of Having Been Born) or Précis
de decomposition (Synopsis of Decay)—will
always be distant from dominant ideologies. “Sooner in a ditch than on a
pedestal”: that’s his choice. To read Cioran is a cathartic experience; he
simply poses the questions that we alone would never pose ourselves: “To think
is to excavate, to excavate oneself.” We find in Cioran a multitude of subjects
that obsess him. But he always approaches them in the same way: “To be an agent
of the dissolution of a philosophy, of a power: can we imagine for ourselves a
sadder or more majestic pride?” The theme of the decadence of civilisations,
however, is what most often preoccupies him. Beginning with his radical
anthropological pessimism, his loss of faith in Man as Promethean being—since
he’s been eclipsed—and possessed by the “sickness of being,” our author mocks
mercilessly the notion of Progress, the “ecumenism of illusion” that follows,
and sees nothing in History but a “sewer of utopias.” But even here he
passionately cultivates both the philosophy of history and the history of
civilisations from which he draws a large part of his philosophy: “On account
of my prejudice against all that ends well, I developed a taste for reading
history” (De l’inconvénient d’être né [1973]).
And in the process he soon discovered his “weakness for condemned dynasties,
for crumbling empires” (I.Ê.N.).
Furious Contradiction
It’s certainly difficult to lay out clearly the ideas
found in Cioran’s work: “The worst kind of despotism is the system, in
philosophy as in everything” (I.Ê.N.).
What he says regarding Nietzsche might equally be applied to himself:
There is nothing more irritating than those works in which the rebellious ideas of a spirit that aspires to everything are arrayed, except a system. To what end should one give an appearance of coherence to those of Nietzsche […]? Nietzsche is an ensemble of attitudes; and to seek in him a will to order, a preoccupation with unity, is to diminish it [La Tentation d’exister (1956)].
We find in his work frankly contradictory positions.
Furiously contradictory. Let’s take for example his attitude towards
Christianity. “Whatever of folklore that still lives is anterior to
Christianity; whatever of ourselves that still lives, likewise” (I.Ê.N.). But this fierce critic of
Christianity, dominated by nostalgia for the pagan gods, evinces a boundless
admiration for the Spanish mystics; and he comes to write: “If I had
experienced the beginnings of Christianity, I fear I would have succumbed to
its seduction” (I.Ê.N.). An insoluble
contradiction? Maybe not. Cioran doesn’t evaluate Christianity as an
ideological ensemble in its historical manifestations but as the form in which
these ideas were experienced by the first Christians and by the mystics.
In Praise of Irrationalism
Let’s now return to the line of argument. Despite its
complexity and its contradiction, we should state some fundamental postulates
of Cioran’s philosophy before approaching our subject, at least as these idées-forces appear to me. “As creator
of values, man is the delirious being par
excellence,” writes Cioran (Précis de
decomposition [1949]). Does he condemn this delirium? Yes and no. “Life
creates itself in delirium and defeats itself in disgust” (P.D.). Without a doubt, as we’ve seen, his anthropological
pessimism is radical: “Science demonstrates our nothingness.” But “who has
learned the last lesson?” (P.D.).
Thus his manifest devotion to Diogenes, the only philosopher to merit his praises:
“He was the only one to bare to us the repulsive face of man” (P.D.).
But does Cioran condemn every type of man? The Hero
alone merits his esteem: for this is a figure that our western civilisation has
eliminated: “Psychology is the hero’s sepulchre. Thousands of years of religion
and of rationality have weakened the muscles, the will and the adventurous
impulse” (P.D.). Faced with the
philosopher and the writer, faced with the refined man who vituperates, Cioran
marvels at the “true hero who fights and dies in the name of his destiny, not
in the name of a belief” (P.D.). This
estimation of the role of the hero rests on the idea that life is inconceivable
without struggle. Struggle constitutes the essence of life, as much of peoples
as of persons: “When the animals cease to feel a mutual fear, they fall into
stupidity and acquire that gloomy aspect that zoological gardens present.
Individuals and peoples present the same aspect from the day they come to live
in harmony” (I.Ê.N.). We find in
Cioran a nostalgia for the Hero and for times of strife, a nostalgia that he
himself lives internally: “To be of a combative, aggressive, intolerant nature
and to be unable to confess any creed!” (Le
Mauvais Démiurge [1959]). Ideas disappear, as much as those who struggled
for them; but this never leads to utopian universal peace: “And who would fight
on? The hero has passed away: only the butchery continues” (La Chute dans le temps [1964]). The
passage from Crusading warrior to a soldier operating intercontinental missiles:
that’s the fruit of the western civilisation that, claiming to eradicate
conflict, has introduced extermination.
For Cioran, all our civilisation’s decadence has a
clear origin: “Reason [is] the rust of our vitality” (T.E.). But that isn’t all. Nowhere does Cioran see the advantages
of this civilisation constructed upon rationalism:
Our truths no longer have the value of our ancestors’. Having replaced their myths and their symbols, we believe ourselves more advanced; but those myths and those symbols expressed no less than our concepts […] and if the gods no longer intervene in events, these events are no more nor less disconcerting for all that […] for science captures them no more intimately than poetic tales [P.D.].
Consequently Cioran repudiates all the trumpery of
Progress, that fruit of reason: “Hegel is the major culprit of modern optimism.
How does he not see that consciousness changes only forms and modalities and
progresses in nothing?” On this account he doesn’t believe in historical linearity
or finalism; becoming is innocent: “That History has no meaning is something
that should cheer us” (P.D.).
Against the System
Every culture, every people, must express an organic ensemble
of values which is its own. Every moral universalism ends in corroding the
people that practices it. That’s the tragedy of Europe: “Since the Age of
Enlightenment, Europe has never ceased to tear down its idols in the name of
the idea of tolerance […]. Indeed, prejudices—a civilisation’s organic fictions—assure longevity,
conserve physiognomy. It must respect them: if not all, at least those that are
its own and which, in the past, held for them the importance of a superstition
or a rite” (T.E.). In a world such as
ours, which scorns myths and rites, whatever they might be, Cioran adopts this
position: “A civilisation begins in myth and ends in doubt” (C.T.), passing through corrosive
rationalism. So without these myths, peoples lose their bearings. Without their
own gods, peoples lose the meaning of their own existence. Rome paid dearly for
this error: “To abandon the gods that made Rome is to abandon Rome itself” (M.D.). It’s interesting to note that
Cioran sees precisely in the substitution of paganism with Judaeo-Christian
monotheism one of the causes of the decadence of our civilisation, of which
polytheism gave an authentic expression:
The more we recognise gods, the better we serve Divinity. […] Polytheism corresponds better to the diversity of our tendencies and of our urges […]. The one God renders life unbearable […] monotheism contains the germ of every form of tyranny [M.D.].
In the midst of a civilisation corrupting itself with
its tomfoolery, Cioran, clairvoyant, passes brutal sentence on our culture:
“The West: a comfortable rot, a perfumed corpse” (I.Ê.N.). Nostalgia is an important feeling for Cioran. Nostalgia
for heroes, for myth, and likewise for a Europe which has disappeared.
Christianity and the Enlightenment have annihilated its vitality, have sapped
its force and the meaning of its existence. “The West? A possible without tomorrow” (C.T.).
Assuredly Cioran does not commit the sin of ethnocentrism. The influence of the
philosophy of oriental religions is palpable in his books and in many places
throughout his work. He asserts that the western European, his philosophy, his
science, his morals are not above those of other peoples. (A sole exception: he
thinks that nothing is superior to European music.) But this cultural polycentrism
doesn’t represent an obstacle to (perhaps it’s rather a consequence of) the
expression of his anguish in the face of the decadence of Europe and Europeans
“cornered into insignificance, Helvetians in power” (C.T.). Finally, Europe created something fundamental for Cioran:
Freedom. A Freedom that was complete in paganism, when men were mortal gods and
gods mortal men; when, consequently, man could try to overcome himself, since
nothing above him could stop him. Today there remains nothing of this pagan idea
of Freedom but a fading shadow: parliamentary democracy: “A marvel which has
nothing more to offer, democracy is at once the paradise and the sepulchre of a
people” (C.T.).
Of the Europe that knew Freedom nothing remains today
but its reflection in a distorting glass: the hedonist and vacuous consumerism
of “the American Way of Life”: “America stands before the world as an impetuous
nonentity, as a fatality without substance” (T.E.). Then who will come to Europe; who will prevail?
So many conquests, acquisitions, ideas: where will they live on? In Russia? In North America? Both have already taken the consequences of the worst of Europe… Latin America? South Africa? Australia? It is from here, it seems, that one must expect the successor. A cartoonish successor. The future belongs to the Globe’s banlieue [T.E.].
A People with a Destiny
Cioran passionately analyses the historical destiny of
great European peoples: Greece, Rome, France, England, Germany, Spain, Russia…
As a Romanian, member of a “people without destiny” (P.D.), he lived as he writes in De
l’inconvénient d’être né: “in perpetual revolt against my descent, all my
life I have desired to be another—Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything but what I
am.” Spain especially attracted Cioran’s attention. For what reason? Perhaps
her dazzling ascent and long decadence are bound especially to captivate that
lover of twilight: “Light prostitutes itself as dawn passes and the day
progresses, and redeems itself—a twilight ethic—only at its moment of
disappearance” (I.Ê.N.). Perhaps it’s
that Spain was able to create literary myths that captivated him all the more:
To live means: to create and to aspire, to deceive and to be deceived. For this reason the truest image ever made of man is still that of the Caballero de la Triste Figura […]. Dust in love with phantoms: such is man: his absolute image, ideal resemblance, would be embodied by a Don Quixote as seen by Aeschylus [P.D.]
Or perhaps it’s the extraordinary vigour displayed by
a land poor in resources, almost void of inhabitants, situated at the periphery
of Europe and which, however, was close to conquering the whole world in the
name of its ideals.
Every people translates divine attributes into becoming and in its own way; Spain’s ardour, however, remains unique; were it shared by the rest of the world, God would be exhausted, diminished, emptied of Himself. And it is not to disappear—in self-defence—that He makes atheism to prosper in His land […]. He fears Spain as he fears Russia: there he makes atheists multiply. […] All Sanctity is more or less Spanish: if God were Cyclops, Spain would serve him for an eye [P.D.].
Or perhaps it’s simply because Spain’s historical
cycle of apogee and decadence, which surpasses Europe’s as a whole, has a
paradigmatic value for him, maximal since Spain is fully conscious of its
decadence, which is not the case with other Europeans.
A civilisation, at the end of its journey, happy
anomaly that it was, fades into the norm […], it rolls itself in failure and
transforms its destiny into a unique problem. Of this self-obsession Spain
offers the perfect model. Having known at the time of the Conquistadors a
bestial superhumanity, she broods over her past […], leaving her virtue and her
genius to fester; to the contrary, adoring her twilight, she has adopted it as
a new supremacy. How can one not see that this historical masochism ceases to
be a Spanish singularity, becoming the mood and the formula for the expiry of a
continent?
Spain, Splendour and Delirium
The two European peoples that obsess Cioran are the
Russian and Spanish: for these two “are so obsessed with themselves that they
present a unique problem” (T.E.).
Cioran is especially fascinated by the attitude of the Spanish faced with the
decadence of their country:
Spain interrogates herself […]. She too made a dazzling début; but that was long ago. Come too soon, she overthrew the world, then let herself fall: one day I had a revelation of this fall. It was at Valladolid, at the house of Cervantes. An old woman of unremarkable appearance was contemplating the portrait of Phillip III: “It was with him that our decadence began!” I was at the heart of the problem. “Our decadence!” Well then, I thought, decadence in Spain is a current, national concept, a cliché, an official slogan. The nation which in the sixteenth century offered to the world a spectacle of magnificence and folly, here it is, reduced to codifying its numbness. Had they the time, no doubt the Romans would not have done otherwise; they could not brood over their end: the Barbarians had already encircled them. Better served, the Spanish had the leisure (three centuries!) to contemplate and to wallow in their miseries. Chatterers in despair, improvisers of illusions, they live in a kind of lyrical bitterness, a tragic unseriousness, which saves them from vulgarity, happiness and success. Should they one day exchange their old hobby-horses for others, more modern, they would remain nonetheless marked by so long an absence. Incapable of following the rhythm of “civilisation,” churchgoers or anarchists, they cannot renounce their outdatedness. How are they to catch other nations up; how are they to reach the same page, when they have exhausted the best of themselves to ruminate on death, to smear themselves with it, to make theirs a visceral existence? Backsliding inexorably towards the essential, they have lost themselves in an excess of profundity. The idea of decadence would not preoccupy them so, were it not to translate into historical terms their weakness for nothingness, their obsession with the skeleton. No surprise that for each of them, his country is his problem. Reading Ganivet, Unamuno or Ortega, one senses that for each, Spain is a paradox which touches him intimately, and which he cannot reduce to a rational formula. They always return to it, fascinated by the attraction of the insoluble which it represents. Unable to resolve it by analysis, they meditate on Don Quixote, in whom the paradox is still more insoluble because a symbol… One cannot imagine a Valéry or a Proust meditating on France to discover themselves: an accomplished country, without serious ruptures which provoke disquiet; a non-tragic country, it is not a specimen: having succeeded, having secured its destiny, how can it be “interesting”? [T.E.].
However, our country and Russia don’t interest Cioran
only because “the natural evolution of Russia and of Spain has led them to
interrogate their own destiny”; this question offers much of interest to one
who, like him, unceasingly interrogates the destiny of our European
civilisation. It’s not only our decadence that fascinated him. Imperial Spain,
that of the Conquistadors and Mystics, offers him the most realised example of
an eventful epoch in which he should like to live:
It is Spain’s merit to demonstrate a type of strange development, a tremendous and unrealised destiny. (One might say a Rimbaud incarnated in a collective.) Think of the frenzy she unleashed in the pursuit of gold; of her collapse into anonymity; think of the Conquistadors; of their banditry and of their piety; of the way in which they associated the Gospel with murder, the crucifix with the sword. In its finest hour, Catholicism was bloodstained, as befits any truly inspired religion [T.E.]
In reference to these last lines, it is worth noting
that, unlike fashionable moralists, Cioran will condemn neither the will to
expansion nor the aggressive spirit of peoples and cultures: “A civilisation
neither exists not affirms but by acts of provocation. It relents? It crumbles”
T.E.).
Conquest and Inquisition, Grandiose Vices
While philosophers and historians domestic and foreign
describe the Conquest of America or the religious repression in Spain during
the Counter-Reformation with horror, Cioran takes a radically opposite
attitude:
Conquest and Inquisition—parallel phenomena flowing from Spain’s grandiose vices. For as long as she was strong, she excelled at massacre, and brought to it not only her commitment to pageantry but also the most intimate of her sensibility. Only cruel peoples are able to approach the very sources of life, its palpitations, its mysteries that enthuse: life discloses its essence only to bloodshot eyes… How to believe in philosophers when one knows of what pale glances they are the reflection? The habit of ratiocination and speculation is an indication of a vital insufficiency and of a deterioration of affectivity. Only those who, thanks to their deficiencies, succeed in forgetting themselves, in no longer being at one with their ideas, think methodically: philosophy, the preserve of biologically superficial individuals and societies [T.E.].
It’s the loss of their capacity to dominate, of their
disposition to impose themselves beyond humanitarian conceptions, beyond irenic
dreams, that ruins civilisations:
Once [a nation] has abandoned its schemes for domination and conquest, depression, generalised boredom, erode it. Scourge of nations on the defensive, it devastates their vitality; rather than shoring themselves up, they submit to it, accustom themselves to it, until they can no longer do without it. Between life and death they always find room to obscure the one and the other: to avoid living; to avoid dying. Fallen into a lucid catalepsy, dreaming of an eternal status quo, how can they react against the obscurity that besieges them, against the advance of opaque civilisations? The spiritual and physical tension of ages of conquest, as of instants of creativity, rapidly exhaust the energies of peoples and men: why did Dutch painting or Spanish mysticism flourish for an instant? […] Tribes of imperious instinct agglutinate to form a great power; then comes the moment when, resigned and reeling, they aspire to a subaltern role. When one no longer knows how to be the invader, one agrees to be an invalid [C.T.].
Cioran admires two things in Spain: her period of
splendour and her period of decadence. It occurred to our land as “to any
people [which], at a given moment in its trajectory, believes itself to be
chosen. But this is when it gives the best and worst of itself” (I.Ê.N.). And among the best things that
Spain has given, we find her Christian religious mysticism; though this seems
strange from an agnostic and paganising Cioran. Clearly it’s not the Christian
content that interests him but the intensity of the sentiment, its will to
conquest:
But it is an error regarding mysticism to believe that it derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vigour. A Luis de León, a St. John of the Cross crowned an age of grand enterprise, and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest. Far from being defectives, they struggled for their faith, attacking God head on, appropriating Heaven for themselves. Their idolatry of non-will, of gentleness and of passivity, ensured them against a barely endurable tension, against that superabundant hysteria from which their intolerance, their proselytism, their power over this world and the next, flowed. To understand them, one must imagine Hernán Cortés amidst an invisible geography [T.E.].
As we’ve seen, Cioran is captivated by the image of
decadence. “How not to fall for the great sunsets? The moribund enchantment
that enfolds a civilisation, after it has dealt with all its problems and
falsified them marvellously, is more attractive than the unblemished ignorance
in which it began” (P.D.). Spain’s
long agony, its “exit from History,” has moulded a human type:
It’s nigh impossible to speak with a Spaniard about anything but his country, a closed universe, the subject of his lyricism and his reflections, an absolute province, above the world. By turns exalted and dejected, he wears dazzled and morose expressions; drawing and quartering is the form of his discipline. If he admits a future, he does not truly believe in it. His discovery: the sombre illusion, the pride of despair; his genius: the genius of regret. Whatever his political orientation, the Spaniard or Russian who contemplates his country approaches the only question that counts in his eyes. We grasp the reason neither Russian nor Spaniard have produced a philosophy of any magnitude. It is that the philosopher must attack ideas as a spectator; before assimilating them, adopting them, he must consider them from above, dissociate from them, weigh them and, if need be, play with them; then, with the help of maturity, he elaborates a system with which he never altogether confuses himself. It is this superiority with respect to their own philosophy that we admire in the Greeks. The same holds for all those who apply themselves to the problem of knowledge and make it the essential object of their meditation. This problem troubles neither the Russians nor Spanish. Unsuited to intellectual contemplation, they maintain rather bizarre relations with the Idea. Do they grapple with it? They always take the lower hand; it seizes them, subjugates them, oppresses them; demurring martyrs, they ask only to suffer for it. With them we are far from the domain in which the spirit plays with itself and with things; far from all methodological perplexity [T.E.].
According to Cioran, feeble thinking, cold ideas, are
not made for the Spanish.
Before, when St. Theresa, patroness of Spain and of your soul, prescribed for you a trajectory of temptations and vertigoes, the transcendent abyss astonished you like a fall from the heavens. But these heavens have vanished—like the temptations and vertigoes—and the fevers of Ávila dwindle in her cold heart [P.D.].
We know that Cioran is an almost absolute pessimist.
But he who wrote that “the tree of Life knows no more spring; it is now a dry
stump” (P.D.) has also said that “to
live amounts to the inability to abstain” (C.T.).
This is the great anguish that overwhelms him. Which overwhelms us: “How to
repair the damage when, like Don Quixote on his deathbed, we have lost—at the
end of madness, exhausted—the vigour and illusion to face the paths, the
combats and the defeats” (P.D.). Only
history gives reason to pessimism: “My memory accumulates sunken horizons” (M.D.). Christianity, which has spoken to
us of our salvation in moralising, humanitarian terms and as an individual
fact, has alienated us from grand collective destinies and from the possibility
of overcoming our all-too-human condition in establishing an absolute frontier
between the human and the divine. The light of Reason, that of the Aufklärung, has disclosed to us only
shadows. Cioran has dared to call problems by their names. Will European man be
able to overcome his nihilism and his anguish; to abandon pure nostalgia?
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