| Title | : | The Temptation to Exist |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0226106756 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780226106755 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1956 |
"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post
"An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly
The Temptation to Exist Reviews
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The Sin of Obsessive Assurance
Susan Sontag’s introduction to these essays cites their dependence on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. But I don’t think she is correct in her claim that Cioran merely restates their arguments. Rather he makes them even more extreme in their already radical alienation by recognising the source of the problem: language, that very tool through which the problem is formulated. This self-referentiality is spiritually, politically, and very often physically intolerable.
Being trapped within the bubble of language is a horrible fate. It obsesses us; it frustrates us; and it can often drive us insane. So Cioran laments, “The fact... that our first ancestor left us, for our entire legacy, only the horror of paradise. By giving names to things, he prepared his own Fall and ours. And if we seek a remedy, we must begin by debaptizing the universe, by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance, isolates it and lends it a simulacrum of meaning.”
There is no escape from the bubble. We increase its strength every time we attempt to denounce it. It is a universe that expands without limit faster than we can measure it. Because we casually use it, we believe we control it. But this is its hidden strength: it feigns impotence. Cioran speaks of “the stupidities inherent in the cult of truth.” Language simply never approaches reality. Truth is merely a conceit that language insinuates into defective lives.
The therapy we typically employ to break out of the bubble is action. Action is real; action seems to pierce the bubble, to neutralise it. But, of course, the motive for action, the ideal, the goal, the value and intended effects of action are already infected by the contents of the bubble. Even in action we cannot but increase its power: “The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths.”
Cioran says, “The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is a morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth.” Youth eventually finds that saving the world demands power. Power is the universal currency of the idealists who have emerged from youth strengthened in their resolve to push on. So they spend their lives collecting it. “Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something.” Language leads us into an abyss of delusion that we seek to impose everywhere, on everything and everyone.
Those who seek power within the bubble don’t realise that to the degree they succeed in their quest, they become oppressed under the weight of their own language. Their personal bubble collapses to the literary density of a neutron star in which substance is so uniform that there is no chemical or atomic interaction. Their expression becomes repetitive and formulaic. Cant is the ultimate reduction of language to disassociated atoms of linguistic matter. Action becomes increasingly violent to compensate for the vacuity of language. The result is predictable:“Faithful to his appearances, the man of violence is not discouraged, he starts all over again, and persists, since he cannot exempt himself from suffering. His occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction. Beneath his self-confidence, his braggadocio, lurks a fanatic of disaster. Hence it is among the violent that we meet the enemies of themselves. And we are all violent— men of anger who, having lost the key of quietude, now have access only to the secrets of laceration.”*
Most people are satisfied to remain placidly within the bubble of language because it promises happiness, contentment, advancement, and ultimate peace. Liberation, redemption, and salvation are the terms used to provide assurance that the bubble is fundamentally benign. That this is a delusion is rejected by the mass and exploited by the rest. Language provides to the ambitious an unlimited vocabulary of novel ideas that please those who need assurance:“As for our redeemers, come among us for our greater harm, we love the noxiousness of their hopes and their remedies, their eagerness to favor and exalt our ills, the venom that infuses their “lifegiving” words. To them we owe our expertise in a suffering that has no exit.”
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had some minimal confidence that their writing might be noted, perhaps heeded by some to improve life within the bubble. Cioran had no such hope. He knows that attacking the bubble is a task of intellectual vanity. The compulsion to carry out such attacks leads only to exhausted compliance:“One does not abuse one’s capacity to doubt with impunity... Those who have found answers for nothing are better at enduring the effects of tyranny than those who have found an answer for everything.”
Cioran, therefore presents more than an atheist spirituality. He wants to combat the grave sin of optimism rampant in a world that considers idealism a virtue. Salvation does not come from triumph against physical or social adversity but the renunciation of ideals tout court. Seen in this light, as a mystical prophet, Cioran presents a call perhaps not heard since Isaiah to attend to oneself rather than everyone else’s defects.
*It is difficult for me to read this passage without thinking of Trump’s incitement to riot on January 6th. -
Really, Emil? You’re tempted to exist? God, talk about your first-world problems. Outside the Latin Quarter, has anyone ever troubled their head about such a ridiculous pseudo-dilemma?
A lot of smart people around here seem to love Cioran, but I just don’t get the attraction. True, he’s a gifted stylist, but what’s the point of filling book after book with beautiful sentences if your only theme is the utter futility of everything, including beautiful sentences? And what enlightenment, if any, are we supposed to derive from windy aphorisms like this: “The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.” Um, okay. But just FYI, Emil: we do that all the freaking time. It’s called television.
But why am I even bothering? George Orwell has already said everything that needed to be said about this strain of high-toned whining. Reviewing a book by Cyril Connolly, who happened to be an old friend of his, Orwell wrote:
Obviously, modern mechanised life becomes dreary if you let it. The awful thraldom of money is upon everyone and there are only three immediately obvious escapes. One is religion, another is unending work, the third is the kind of sluttish antinomianism - lying in bed till four in the afternoon, drinking Pernod - that Mr. Connolly seems to admire. The third is certainly the worst, but in any case the essential evil is to think in terms of escape. The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
Well, exactly. And for what it's worth, I'd say that last line contains more wisdom and nobility than the entire published output of Emil Cioran. -
Poor Cioran. I often think of him as he was depicted in the introduction to
On the Heights of Despair, a withered old man with a thick sprouting of silver straw flaming from his skull, softly admitting to Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston that he was weary of slandering the universe; in the end, even the great decrier slumped back against the walls of our earthly prison. Imagine being such an acute and acerbic diagnostician of despair, decay, and delusion, and yet fully aware that not only was there no escape from the dimensional consciousness erected by the Western mind, but that our every avenue of thought traversed, every force of will summoned in an effort to pierce its epistemological and ontological glamours and perceive a means of exiting its limitative reality - arising from a well fashioned from the stones of this very confining metastructure, fed by its waters, breezed by its air, and enthused by its fires - was doomed from the beginning, by its very origin and fabric, to dissipate and dissolve within the actuality it was trying to penetrate. The Solar Empire, having been ruptured and divided into Subjects and Objects by the rebellious hordes of the individuating Devil, inflamed by the Outside, cannot again be a unitary domain of the Absolute; and every act of rebellion - violent action brought about by a delusion of free-will, of overthrowing the legal code of Being - consumes itself and its own before sinking back into the stagnant waters from which, in a furious breaching, it hurled itself upwards.
With the first ballpark estimation of the speed of light occurring during the Enlightenment, would Cioran have begun marking our progress along the paths of acute existential suffering, of philosophic systems and scientific analysis erected under History, of the birth pangs of Ideology and the mad lust for rebellion, along a scale aligned to human awareness of the spatial velocity of the Sun's burning caresses? What if we add to the mixture our dawning comprehension that we travel at the exact same rate of speed through the enigmatic tunnel of our great nemesis, Time? How does this knowledge - with its horrifyingly incomprehensible intimations of contingency being subsumed within the necessary even as freedom is quashed by a determinism that has encircled the rosie in a vermicular manner that cannot be empirically understood, or even grasped, within the vast, empty rictus of our temporal reality - link to the fiery vision that Cioran received in those blearily grim, but starkly limned pre-dawn hours when he could not shut down that spinning top of a mind and enter the realm of dreams where he so longed to reside? For it is within Time, the flattening of our rational, systematic, and sterile Western existence under its dominion and the filling of the space thus abandoned with the fear of Death, that Cioran espies the triumph of this great Enemy.
A spiritual man hostile to atheists, the religious and God; widely read whilst despising novels and poems for exposing torments and passions that should radiate (and burn) solely in subcutaneous concealment; a connoisseur of suffering and despair who mocked and dismissed the modern forms of art and psychology as tried to illumine or alleviate such inherently human sentiments; a salvager of the great cultural and mental edifices erected by past civilizations whilst reserving his highest praise for the wanton destruction and savagery of the barbarian, or the guileless and mendicant ways of the beggar; an opponent of any living that was not taken to the furthest margins or extremes who railed against those who dared such reaches if he didn't approve of their proving grounds; a haughty observer and glint-eyed vivisectionist of European malaise who could never distance himself from, nor fully deny, those cultural and societal tropes he ridiculed and abhorred; a firm-jawed surveyor of the nullifying pathways of the eternal void whose greatest dream was to transplant that same abyssal emptiness into the lyrical souls of mankind in order to disintegrate History and expose all hopeless hopes and loveless loves, all pastless pasts and futureless futures to the zero-point inertia of the vacuum; the seesaw contradictions and juxtapositions that abound in The Temptation to Exist only further the potency of his own percolating, prussic genius and the impish tremors that glitter in his diamantine prose.
He was spared the madness of Nietzsche, but perhaps, in the end, was afforded a ruder treatment: sane enough to understand what had happened, aware enough to perceive that all of that passion and emotion and lyricism expended in denunciation was really for naught but the aesthetic beauty of its expression. As Susan Sontag points out in her brilliant introduction, there is little that Cioran could take from his vituperation other than the satisfaction of understanding. Is suffering ameliorated when its cause and its ineradicable necessity are comprehended? When the Romanian exile states that such is the case, it lacks an unwavering conviction. There is perhaps no victory to be claimed by either expounding such a ferocious nihilgnostic doctrine or imbibing it; but there is a definite pleasure gained by the manner in which it is put to the page, and in the stimulation it provides to the boiler rooms of the imagination and thought - and, for many, that is more than reason enough to make Cioran a habit. -
Cioran mi diverte, nel senso più puro e completo del termine. In un'epoca dominata da un pragmatismo acritico ai limiti dell'idiozia, i suoi pensieri sfondano le più elementari barriere concettuali con sfrontatezza. E con profonda, potente e nascosta, ironia. Il suo nihilismo appare pesante, funereo e privo di respiro, solo a chi non riesce mai a liberarsi dal proprio "determinismo necessario"; a chi è incatenato alla propria, militante, monodimensionalità di vedute. Ai finti scettici, ai superbi, ai sinistri stakanovisti della congiunzione avversativa («sì, ma... »); alla debolezza sub-stanziale degli auto-referenti, di ogni livello e grado. Tutti gli altri (pochi, sembra), credenti, non credenti o agnostici, ma allenati e aperti all'agilità delle idee, non possono che divertirsi. E sentirsi positivamente stimolati. Salvo poi, in caso, non condividere; comunque ringraziando.
Questo è un testo fondativo, essenziale, nel quale riconoscere i cardini della speculazione contemporanea sull'essere. Precorre i tempi, anche storici, disegnando implicitamente (già nel 1956) i contorni del degrado inglorioso dell'Uomo, cui assistiamo oggi.
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How can one resist this title - just the title alone! One of the great cynical thinkers in the 20th Century. I recently discovered him, and once I read this book, i had to go out and get every title by this incredible writer. Good volume to have by the bedside, when you have one of those nightmares that wake you up. When he's there, the real nightmare happens!
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Bir başka yazım sırasına göre okuduğum kişi ve kitaplar da Cioran'ın eserleridir.
Eğer bilmediğim başka eser yoksa 2 kitap sonra bitiyor ve tüm eserleri kapsayan genel bir yazı yazmaya çalışacağım. -
"The Temptation to Exist" makes an interesting complement (or foil?) to Paul Tillich's "The Courage To Be." The two map opposite poles of our spiritual life, as well as revealing two different meanings that ultimate lucidity can have. Read on its own, Cioran's perspective seems incomplete, forced. Only in this fertile opposition does it get its full sense for me.
“Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.”
Cioran takes Nietzscheanism to its ultimate, self-undermining conclusion. Ultimate lucidity is to be found in a turning against oneself - a self-unraveling - that at times borders on the morbid,. Any positive stance we take on the question of Being is not just a gamble anymore, but pre-determines its own "exact mode of collapse." The self creates its world ex-nihilo, unsupported by any meaning-producing encounter with the world. Because of this, all positions that the creative self constructs specify a determinate mode of delayed self-annihiliation.
One wonders at times how much of this work is a self-inebriating literary exercise. But then, I'd be lying to myself if I took such a no-nonsense, naturalistic approach and denied that such essential questioning had its place, and that really, we all know life is grand doesn't need questioning. Ultimately, Cioran shows just how little grounding is left for the self that is determined to place its -entire- life into question (and not just select domains within that life, as past philosophers did).
I find Zagajewski's thought about Cioran to be right on the mark:
“Doubt is more intelligent than poetry, insofar as it tells malicious tales about the world, things we’ve long known but struggled to hide from ourselves. But poetry surpasses doubt, pointing to what we cannot know. Doubt is narcissistic; we look at everything critically, including ourselves, and perhaps that comforts us. Poetry, on the other hand, trusts the world, and rips us from the deep-sea diving suits of our “I”; it believes in the possibility of beauty and its tragedy. Poetry’s argument with doubt has nothing in common with the facile quarrel of optimism and pessimism. The twentieth century’s great drama means that we now deal with two kinds of intellect: the resigned and the seeking, the questing. Doubt is poetry for the resigned. Whereas poetry is searching, endless wandering. Doubt is a tunnel, poetry is a spiral. Doubt prefers to shut, while poetry opens. Poetry laughs and cries, doubt ironizes. Doubt is death’s plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow; poetry runs toward an unknown goal. Why does one choose poetry while another chooses doubt? We don’t know and we’ll never find out. We don’t know why one is Cioran and the other is Milosz.”
Or why one is Cioran and the other is Tillich. Reading this, the same question keeps coming back to one: what inner force in the thinker ultimately determines the nature of his/her commitment to being? What determines whether *I* will choose on the side of meaning or on the side of doubt? That primordial decision certainly determines the course of all one's other thoughts.
Cioran is the master of the negative epiphany, of the anti-epiphany. He will specify the precise "mode of collapse" of any of the meanings and revelations that sustain us through life. Eugene O'Neill described these very well in "A Long Day's Journey Into Night":
"...And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.”
These fleeting experiences of meaning reveal a sense of unity, of reconciliation with the rest of being, and bring, temporarily, a great sufficiency. All this Cioran denies and treats as a self-alienating projection onto the inhuman world of meanings that we create. The only genuine meaning to be found is in absolute, vacuous independence and in a "pure" act of self-reflexivity that withdraws from all such projection and psychological outsourcing onto the world. There's something almost Manichean in his rejection of any relation with the non-human background world. Perhaps this is what we get when we philosophize from the presumption that there can be an I without a Thou.
But, of course, nobody actually lives on the bread of negation. He himself is tortured by this self-contradiction: he can never quite fully realize his own stance. Negation is always parasitic. There is thus something either dishonest, or repressed, about a work that seeks to build itself solely on the lucidity of negation. It doesn't express its true motive force. So what is the positive force that drives the negation of a Cioran? Engaging with such questions as this book opens up - sometimes directly, sometimes implicitly, by its very presence - can yield a lot of insight into the human psyche and into the sources of philosophy in our lives. -
I've spent 2-3 hours with this now, spread over a couple of days -- and I'm sorry to say I can't find anything very interesting in it. Maybe it's me... The only essay that grabbed me at all is "on a winded civilization". It has some fine insights on the meta-psychology (I'm just making up a word that doesn't really mean anything here) of cultural decay -- which he dates (Anti-Enlightenment guy that he is) from the end of the 18th cen.
And even that very brief essay mostly bored me. A lot of it is just verbal fluff, I'm afraid.
But then again, maybe it's me...
One problem is, in talking about the decay of Europe, and the vitality of the Huns -- there's a not-so-subtle glorification here of the Nazis -- and this, long AFTER he's supposed to have given up that particular vice.... he predicts (1956), that the triumphant civilization of the coming century would be....
Russia.
How did that turn out, Cioran?
If he were a stock guru -- reading that -- I'd have to cancel my sub.
Anyway... I'll try the next one now (Trouble), which is a collection of aphorisms... maybe he does better with twitter-sized writing. -
Who the fuck would actually want to exist?
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Bu kitabında zaman konusuna eğilmemiş (ben aslında böyle bir beklenti içindeydim) ama eğilmediği de konu kalmamış.
İyi kitaptı. -
"Pătrunzând în infernul literar, îi vei cunoaște minciuna și veninul; rupt de realitate, caricatură a propriei tale ființe, nu vei putea trăi decât experiențe formale, indirecte; vei fi înghițit de cuvânt. În afară de cărți, nici un alt subiect de discuție. Cât despre oamenii de litere, ei nu-ți vor fi de nici un folos. De asta însă ai să devii conștient prea târziu, după ce anii tăi cei mai buni se vor fi irosit într-o lume superficială, lipsită de substanță." Citindu-i întreaga operă cronologic, am ajuns la a treia sa carte din cele scrise în limba franceză. Este, pentru mine, de departe cea mai bună carte a lui Cioran (a scris-o pe când avea 45 de ani). Pasajul preferat din carte poartă titlul: "Scrisoare despre câteva impasuri". Ce mult îmi place acum scriitorul liniștit, lucid, calm, cu tonalitate naturală din care izvorăște spiritul ca un izvor de munte. Ce departe sunt acum de isteriile și lirismul frenetic al tineretilor sale! Și când mă gândesc cât îmi mai ardea sângele la acele urlete pe care acum (cand imi par nesfarsit de ridicole!) abia dacă le mai pot îndura. Am 26 de ani și sunt mai aproape de tonul lui de "bătrân" de 45 de ani decât de frenezia lui țipătoare din "Pe culmile disperării" și celelalte cărți scrise în românește. Semn bun? Sper, deși nu cred. Cel mai probabil, am un suflet prea mic pentru trăiri mari, nu pot simți intens decât pentru o perioadă scurtă, și, în toate cazurile, doar iluzionându-mă; în clipa când nu mai cred în lucruri, ele își pierd savoarea și, odată cu ele, îmi pierd și eu avântul și nebunia. Scepticismul mi-a rumegat pasiunea - singura care avea vreo însemnătate pentru mine. Acum nu mă mai pot oferi în mod absolut decât îndoielii, care nu necesită din parte-mi nicio intensitate - ba dimpotrivă, pentru a-și asigura viitorul, pentru a putrezi liniștită în mine, îndoiala îmi cultivă calmul, paralizându-mă în blândețe și duioșie, dorindu-mă incapabil să mă revolt, condamnându-mă să rămân până în mormânt, un cumpătat prin nehotarâre. Destinul unui mediocru leneș, blazat în indecizie...
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i kept thinking, while reading cioran, of what sheeper said about edward dahlberg: "Read [him] but pay no attention to anything he says. He is so critical and cantankerous, so grum, small, and jealous, that if you took him at all seriously he would drive you as batty as he is. The quotations he burdens his work with are never to the point, and, as he is incapable of placing two sentences in logical order, such a thing as a quiet, scholarly paragraph let alone essay or chapter is outside his reach. But he is the poet of sentence design, and the quirk that shocks you with delight in the half-dozen books he has left behind is not an accident ...but itself is the hand-tended blossom... [H]e is a great pure writer in the sense that he will sacrifice any meaning however important he may have made it out to be for any flourish or conceit, and he would sell his soul to the devil and mine too for the power to write one unalterably beautiful sentence" (
Sheeper p. 123)
but guess i'm just not a western philosophy reader... while i enjoy the cioran aphorism when i come across it there's something that seems untruthful when i read a whole essay (unlike a dahlberg fiction, despite his lies).
i'll admit part of the rub for me was that first essay, which has as its point the justification or rationalization of "western man's" inability to accept the "eastern truth" of taoism and the buddha. there's something car-crash attractive about watching a subtle mind try to speak to that vast and porous and often ineffable difference of the so-called east and the so-called west--but it gets quickly boring to me because invariably the writer draws your attention to the finger-pointer and not the proverbial moon. see jung and roland barthes and pound for some entertaining and not ungreat examples.
anyway, it's probably me not you emil. will try you again sometime down the line... -
Çürümenin Kitabı'ndan sonra kalemine vurulduğum Cioran'dan bir inci daha. Agresif, öfkeli ve umutsuz bir yazar Cioran. Dili ağır ve tumturaklı. Bu kitapta da yine dinleri, din adamlarını, sanatı, romanı, sanatçıyı ve var olmayı sorunsallaştırıyor. İntihara eğilimli olsa da yazarak hayata tutunuyor Cioran. Hem kendine hem de dünyaya kin, öfke ve nefret kusuyor ama yine de dünyayı sevmekten alıkoyamıyor kendini. Depresif, melankolik ve kasvetli yazılar yazmış olsa da Cioran'ın 84 yaşına kadar yaşamış olması da bir parça ironik. Cioran'ın dili beni ne kadar yaralasa da ben de onu okumaktan alıkoyamıyorum kendimi. Yalnız tek seferde sindirilebilecek bir kitap değil bu, tekrar okumak üzere rafa kaldırıyorum. Beyin yakan, zihin açan ve can acıtan bir şeyler okumak istiyorsanız Cioran'ı mutlaka okuyun.
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He lost me during 'Beyond The Novel'.
It's hard for me to see beyond a cynicism, brooding fascism, and a genuine disdain for the human condition. This is my second try, and every time I pick Cioran up I just end up wanting to throw the book across the room.
There's just something about a guy who refers to the construct of the novel as 'The rubbish of Western Civilization...' then goes on to proclaim the need for the return to the Philosophical antiquarians because to attempt to study the character of man through literature is futile, because apparently we already know ourselves to be nothing.
Maybe it's just me.
That being said, the man is clearly educated, and his book is rage/thought provoking in its own right. Read it if only to formulate your own opinion. -
«Siamo tutti in fondo a un inferno, dove ogni attimo è un miracolo.»
Cioran filosofo esistenzialista tendente al pessimismo, seguace di Nietzsche e Heidegger, discreto misantropo, quindi che dire....lo si ama!!!
L'opera è comunque una raccolta di pensieri sui più disparati argomenti, non tutti di mio interesse, ma sicuramente da leggere, quel che tedia me potrebbe esaltare qualcun'altro.
Non c'è opera che non si ritorca contro l'autore: il poema annienterà il poeta, il sistema il filosofo, l'avvenimento l'uomo d'azione.
La liberazione, se realmente ci sta a cuore, deve procedere da noi stessi: a nulla serve cercarla altrove, in un sistema già fatto in qualche dottrina orientale.
Dopo tante frodi e imposture, conforta starsene a guardare un mendicante. Lui almeno non mente, né mente a se stesso: la sua dottrina, se ne ha una, egli la incarna; il lavoro, non lo ama e lo dimostra, poiché non desidera possedere nulla, coltiva la propria spoliazione, condizione della propria libertà. Il suo pensiero si risolve nel suo essere e il suo essere nel suo pensiero. Manca di tutto, egli è se stesso, egli dura: vivere immediatamente l'eternità significa vivere giorno per giorno.
Il giorno ci sottrae i doni che la notte ci dispensa.
.Di un essere che ha sofferto, potete ben enumerare, classificare, spiegare le vicissitudini, ma quel che egli "è", la sua sofferenza reale, è al di là di voi stessi.
Più lo avvicinerete, più vi sembrerà inaccessibile.
Alla vostra età ebbi la fortuna di conoscere delle persone capaci di smaliziarmi, di farmi arrossire delle mie illusioni; mi hanno veramente educato. Senza di loro, avrei avuto il coraggio di affrontare o sopportare gli anni? Imponendomi le loro amarezze, mi avevano preparato alle mie.
Una nazione sulla via del declino s'impoverisce su tutti i piani. «Ogni degradazione individuale o nazionale» osserva Joseph de Maistre «è immediatamente annunciata da una degradazione rigorosamente proporzionale del linguaggio». Le nostre manchevolezze traspaiono nella nostra scrittura; così in una nazione accade che il suo istinto, sempre meno sicuro, la trascini a una equivalente incertezza in tutti i campi.
E' l'individuo che fa l'arte, non è più l'arte che fa l'individuo, come non è più l'opera che conta ma il commento che la precede o la segue. E la cosa migliore che un artista produce sono le sue idee su quello che avrebbe potuto compiere. E' diventato il critico di se stesso, come l'uomo qualunque lo psicologo di se stesso.
Siamo di fronte al fallimento di un'epoca in cui la storia dell'arte si è sostituita all'arte, quella delle religioni alla religione.
Colui che afferma di essere vivo, lo è solo se ha eluso o superato l'idea del proprio cadavere.
Il Nulla era senz'altro più confortevole. Com'è difficile "dissolversi" nell'Essere!
"Esistere" è una inclinazione che non dispero di far mia. Imiterò gli altri, i furbi che ci sono riusciti, i transfughi della lucidità, saccheggerò i loro segreti e perfino le loro speranze, ben felice di aggrapparmi insieme a loro alle indegnità che conducono alla vita. Il no mi esaspera, il sì mi tenta. Esaurite le mie riserve di negazione, e forse la negazione stessa, perché non uscire in strada a gridare a squarciagola che mi trovo sulla soglia di una verità, dell'unica che valga? Ma quale sia, ancora non so; ne conosco solamente la gioia che la precede, la gioia e la follia e la paura. -
He is my fav
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"La tentazione di esistere", E.M. Cioran, 1956.
La tentazione di leggerlo, quella c'è sempre stata.
La consapevolezza di aver letto qualcosa di straordinario, anche.
La certezza di essere stato travolto da uno tsunami di conoscenza.
La bocca aperta ad ogni rigo, alla fine di ogni capitolo.
La felicità assoluta di aver iniziato il mio 2023 letterario come meglio non potevo sperare.
Cioran è un orafo delle parole, uno scultore del pensiero.
Ogni termine usato alla perfezione, ogni periodo potrebbe essere oggetto di studio.
Lo stile degli eletti, di chi ha un rapporto diretto con l'essenza del Verbo.
Attento osservatore di quel "lato notturno" della Storia che avvolge il il mondo, Cioran è fra gli "animali metafisici" più addestrati nel riconoscere l'odore del Tempo.
Questo libro ha riempito quel vuoto che spesso sento intorno a me; illuminato quel buoio ove a volte mi perdo ed inciampo.
Un regalo per tutti.
Buon 2023.
"(...) come esistere senza distruggersi a ogni istante?" -
Cioran is just humorous enough in his pessimism, and acerbic in his irony (though I'm not convinced that a lot of his most outrageous statements were actually as ironic for him as they've been perceived to be by many critics and commentators), and anyone who loves a mental exercise, murky and inside-out as they can be, will enjoy this collection of post-Nietzschean philosophical essays. And the introduction by Susan Sontag is engaging and informative. Now, down to some specifics:
"Thinking Against Oneself": I couldn't agree more with Cioran's statement about it being a mistake for Western minds to expect themselves to be able to live Eastern philosophies, "truths incompatible with their nature." Joseph Campbell said much the same thing: that it was a mistake for people raised in Western culture to seek a guru and try to transform themselves into something totally alien to their history. "No sage among our ancestors," Cioran says, "but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue." "Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming." We're "captives of duration", "invalids of duration". We are less capable than many of us would like to believe of merely being in eternity. Instead, "Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something." If it sounds like Cioran wishes things could be different for us, he admits that "Taoism seems to me wisdom's first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it..."
There's a lot more, but that's a little of what stood out to me.
"On a Winded Civilization": Here's a Eurocentric quotation (from the 1950's) that anyone observing America's meltdown recently might find interesting: "America stands before the world as an impetuous void, a fatality without substance. Nothing prepared her for hegemony; yet she tends toward it... Unlike the other nations which have had to pass through a whole series of humiliations and defeats, she has known till now only the sterility of an uninterrupted good fortune. If, in the future, everything should continue to go as well, her appearance on the scene will have been an accident without influence. Those who preside over her destiny, those who take her interests to heart, should prepare her for bad times; in order to cease being a superficial monster, she requires an ordeal of major scope. Perhaps she is not far from one now. Having lived, hitherto, outside hell, she is preparing to descend into it. If she seeks a destiny for herself, she will find it only on the ruins of all that was her raison d'être." -
duriamo finché durano le nostre finzioni.
-
Fixar o que de importante aqui foi dito:
«Aniquilamento primaveril, consumação mais do que abismo, a morte dá-nos vertigens apenas para melhor nos elevar acima de nós próprios, como faz o amor, com o qual ela se aparenta sob diversos aspectos: uma e outro, forçando o quadro da nossa existência até o fazer explodir, desintegram-nos e fortificam-nos, arruínam-nos pelos atalhos da plenitude. Os seus elementos tão irredutíveis como inseparáveis compõem um equívoco fundamental. Se, até certo ponto, o amor nos perde, através de que sensações de dilatação e orgulho o não faz! E se a morte nos perde por completo, com que frémitos nos arrasta! Sensações e frémitos através dos quais transcendemos o homem que há em nós e os acidentes do eu.»
Em parêntesis: a verdade, esse falso absoluto, é investigação inútil. Prestemos antes os nossos cuidados às evidências que atestam a nossa irredutibilidade. -
Se volete suicidarvi, questo è il libro che fa per voi.
PS: Emil non ci sei riuscito :) -
It’s the destiny of every profound idea to be checkmated by another idea which it implicitly generated
Thought and existence are neither brute facts nor logical givens, but paradoxical, unstable situations
The mind is a voyeur. But not of the world. Of itself
Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is something like a disease and the job of the philosopher is to study philosophy as the physician studies malaria, not to pass it on but rather to cure people of it
Free use of the mind is, ultimately, anti-social, detrimental to the health of the community
ALMOST all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action
Only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes
All our efforts come down to undermining the sensibility which leads to the absolute
I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity
It is by our works, not by our silences, that we have chosen to disappear
I am both wound and knife — that is our absolute, our eternity
What we venerate in our gods are our own defeats
We shall never accept history
We measure an individual’s value by the sum of his disagreements with things
Devil — Melancholic rebel who doubts
His paradoxes, his contradictions are our own: he is the sum of our impossibilities
History — man’s aggression against himself
Between serenity and blood, it is toward blood one finds it natural to incline
Wisdom and Revolt: two poisons
Neither one a formula for salvation
Remedy — debaptizing the universe, by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance
To suffer — to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction
THE MAN who belongs, organically belongs to a civilization cannot identify the nature of the disease which undermines it
A civilization exists and asserts itself only by acts of provocation. Once it begins to calm down, it crumbles
Europe has doubted for a long time
Europe has ceaselessly sapped her idols in the name of tolerance
Even her doubts were merely convictions disguised
To act is one thing — to know one is acting is another
The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself
Bind me with the chains of Illusion
Today minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb
Without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture
Reason — the rust of our vitality
It is the madman in us who forces us into adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost
The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe
CERTAIN peoples are so haunted by themselves that they pose themselves as a unique problem
Spain is a paradox which touches them intimately and which they cannot reduce to a rational formula
Life reveals its essence only to eyes inflamed with blood
To be a man is a drama
To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
Flaubert: I am a mystic and I believe in nothing
Words have the same destiny as empires
France — nation of words
Reason is dying not only in philosophy, but also in art
There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom
Why not write a novel without a subject?
Western civilization — a civilization of the novel
Mystic describes his inner torments, focuses his expectation on an object within which he manages to anchor himself
The novel translates our every face, assumes all our possibilities of expression
Today, Descartes would probably be a novelist. Pascal certainly
Nietzsche’s philosophy — a meditation on his whims
For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer
We ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we?
Life betrays and corrupts Life
Nothingness may well have been more convenient. How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being! -
OH but what I forgot to add in my thing below is the part Sontag writes about Hegel's system representing the end of philosophy, or Hegel's idea of philosophy as the history of philosophy- so that after Hegel there's no philosophizing left, his science encompasses all, and outside of Hegel's science (since Time did indeed keep going on) what takes the place in the absence of systematized philosophy and the absence of religion is then Ideologies, or non-scientific philosophies. Anyway, most of y'all have probably thought all this or known it before, but it was a nice thing to read in coincidence with my reading of that Pinkard book on German idealism...
(this should be before the previous paragraph) Read Sontag's lengthy introduction on two extended metro rides, fantastic writing and placing of Cioran at the end (chronology-wise) of the spectrum of post-history thinking/essaying/philosophizing- and also his relation to Nietzsche. C. being contained in N., N. already having said everything C. goes on to say (again)- but then justifying the importance of saying everything despite that... anyway, I'm not "currently reading" this, so don't "like" this cuz it's not a review, I just wanted to point out that Sontag's intro to this is good. -
Questo libro è un lungo aforisma. Cinico, sagace, ironico, Cioran esplora, con la sua prosa eccelsa, gli argomenti più disparati, dalla letteratura alla teologia, dai commenti biografici all'ontologia, mettendone in risalto i lati paradossali e contraddittori, ridicolizzandoli con intelligenza e, di fatto, facendoli a pezzi, con quel nichilismo ridente o, meglio, sogghignante, che lo contraddistingue.
A metà tra Nietzsche e il Pessoa del Libro dell'inquietudine, Cioran parla a ruota libera, lontano da qualsiasi sistematicità o struttura, passando agilmente dall'imminenza delle sue vicessitudini personali alle questioni più astratte e intellettuali. Ne risulta un libro pesante, che richiede un'attenzione continua e una riflessione ininterrotta: ma i contenuto brillante e la scrittura (non mi stancherò mai di dirlo) sublime saranno un premio valido. -
"Il Nulla era senz'altro più confortevole"
La morte di cui racconta E. M. Cioran, - Questa morte e Quella, "dato immediato" e "stato limite" - non è Perdita di occasioni. E' l'indicibile Occasione. Perduta. Per chi, maldestramente, scientemente, onniscientemente, evita di 'sostenerla' con voluttà.
Sì, avete letto bene. -
Di undici sezioni, ho trovato interessanti e profonde solo tre (rispettivamente Pensare contro se stessi, Rabbie e rassegnazioni e la Tentazione di esistere). Le altre sezioni, a mio parere, erano un po’ ridondanti e ripetitive; anche i contenuti di queste non mi sono piaciuti, specie il tentativo di inquadrare i popoli e l’accanimento contro il romanzo. Cioran non ti ho compreso?
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This book comes as a dissapointment after "A Short History of Decay". Lyricism was abandoned in favour of political radicalism. With this book Cioran falls in my rankings, but then again, wouldn't he be pleased by such a fall?
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I found these essays dull and repetitive. The one on "the Jew" was repellent and strange. Who in the modern world talks about Jewish people as cursed to be separate from all others?
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Ce îmi reproșez cu privire la Cioran e că am început să-l citesc, sau mai precis, să-l devorez, prea devreme. La 17 ani vedeam în el o confirmare a celor mai ascunse şi tragice intuiții ale mele, fără să observ că el deseori mântuieşte credințele pe care tocmai a scuipat, afirmând despre sine: "sunt înțeleptul ce nu voi fi niciodată".
Astfel, printre altele, deşi într-o scrisoare a sa compatimeşte un tânăr care vrea să fie scriitor, atrăgându-i atenția cu privire la imposibilitatea de a scrie ceva nou, la dezgustul scormonirii propriei răni (în proaspătul val al scrierii subiective), la orgoliul cosmic al artistului şi la felul în care el "lungeşte pelteaua", disecându-şi suferințele în mii de rânduri ce ar putea fi reduse la o frază, şi în fond, la nimic, tot el afirmă că "mai ușor se renunță la pâine decat la cuvânt".
Mântuit prin scris, Cioran îl blamează şi îl înălță, la fel raportându-se la roman, la stil, la oameni, la sfinți, şi la Europa. Tot ce condamnă el sfarşeşte prin a ierta printr-un oftat, căci tarele lumii le recunoaște în el însuși. Oricând se pronunță radical cu privire la vreun subiect, folosește aceeaşi putere pentru a se întoarce către propria persoană şi a mărturisi: "revolta mea e o credință pe care o îmbrățișez fără să cred in ea". -
"After having assumed the insomnia of the sap and the blood, the panic which traverses the animate, must we not return to somnolence and to non-knowledge of our earliest solitudes? And while a world anterior to our waking solicits us, we envy the indifference, the perfect apoplexy of the mineral, free of the tribulations that lie in wait for the living, for all condemned souls. Sure of itself, the stone claims nothing, whereas the tree, that mute entreaty, and the animal, an agonizing appeal, torment themselves this side of speech. Ages of silence and of screams wait in vain for us to deliver them, to serve as their interpreters; deserters of the word, we no longer apsire to anything but the reign of the undifferentiated, the darkness and the drunkenness of an epoch before daybreak, the uninterrupted ecstasy at the heart of that original opacity whose traces, now and then, we rediscover deep in ourselves or on the periphery of God."
