Émile Cioran. Thinker of the European twilight, faithful to the glow of doubt
When Émile Cioran died on June 20, 1995, he left behind a trail of doubt no less widespread than the number of his admirers. Was he truly a gloomy man? Was his work the fruit of a hot-tempered and hostile spirit? Was the pessimism attributed to him genuine or merely a sham, as George Steiner suggested? Was he haughty, conceited? Was Cioran cynical?
Some say he was a friend to his friends and often had a humorous streak. Simone Boué, his partner for more than three decades, recalled that Henri Michaux and Samuel Beckett held him in particular esteem. Gabriel Marcel, the Catholic philosopher, "adored him," according to Boué, although "he was horrified by what he wrote."
Boué also recounts that Cioran was fond of home improvements: “He loved doing crafts. He used to say that when he used his hands, he existed with greater intensity.”
Roberto Juarroz, who used to visit him, gave me a warm description of him. They usually met in the apartment on Rue de l'Odéon where the essayist and his wife always lived. Roger Callois had translated much of Juarroz's Vertical Poetry into French, but Cioran preferred to hear it read by its author in Spanish. "He loved our language," Juarroz recalled.
Patrice Ballon, in his Cioran l'hérétique , of which I do not know a Spanish version, states: “This master of contemporary pessimism, as dictionaries define him without much discernment, not only skillfully handled humor and irony in his writings but was also in daily life one of the funniest people one could meet.”
II. Cioran was a man of extremes. In his youth, he celebrated National Socialism. In Adolf Hitler's Berlin, he admired German discipline and drive. He demonstrated this identification in some of his early writings. In *Transfiguration of Romania *, published when he was 25, in 1936, he declared that only Nazism would awaken his country from the lethargy in which it vegetated.
Patrice Ballon is the one who best explored that Romanian period. He had been in France for many years when he authorized the Bucharest reissue of Transfiguration of Romania . But that edition no longer includes the dark pages of 1936. Cioran never openly retracted having written them. It can be said that, in fact, and over time, while condemning all extremism, he also tacitly repudiated it. His later French work repeatedly challenges fanaticism and constantly critiques ideologies. But nothing was enough to prevent that intransigent silence from deafening the ears of those who, at the same time, established him as one of the most original thinkers of his time.
III. It must be said that even in his most thoughtful work, Cioran's thought never lost its attachment to polarizations. From the totalitarian exaltation of his early life, he moved to the radicalized skepticism of his later years. He himself admits: "I have alternately adored and execrated numerous peoples." Admitting this freed him from that pressing and frustrating tendency toward idealization. But not from intransigence.
Cioran was more reluctant to embrace anything, in this sense, even after having idolized it, than philosophy. He devoted his university career to it and distanced himself from it as a writer. “I distanced myself from philosophy from the moment I found it impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any trace of true sadness; neither in Kant nor in any of the other philosophers. Compared to music, mysticism, and poetry, philosophical activity springs from a diminished sap and a suspicious depth that retains privileges only for the timid and the lukewarm. On the other hand, philosophy—impersonal restlessness, refuge of anemic ideas—is the recourse of those who avoid the corrupting exuberance of life.” This condemnation can hardly be applied to Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. But it is also true that neither of them were, for Cioran, philosophers in the classical sense of the term.
The author of History and Utopia detests the exuberance of explanatory discourse, the attempt to stifle the irreducible nature of doubt. In his opinion, anyone who insists on finding a sufficient reason for everything ignores the limits of demonstrative thought and, above all, the imperatives of passion. Passion is always resolutely personal and indifferent to any aspiration to universality. It speaks of a subject in its singularity. And it is this, for Cioran, that must govern its pronouncements. Life, he asserts, demands only love or hate, adoration or fear, and complete surrender to its turbulences, its light and its darkness. It consists of nothing but "that alternation of happiness and horror that expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bitter or joyful vehemences." Emotional anemia is, then, in his opinion, the pathological feature of philosophical discourse: a discourse belonging to no one that proposes itself as the spokesperson for all. What a distance between Cioran and Fichte who, at the beginning of the 19th century, wrote: “A man’s philosophy is the reflection of his temperament”!
IV. Comparing art with metaphysics, Cioran places it at the antipodes of the disrepute to which Plato condemns it, although for him the author of the Phaedo is the only classical philosopher worthy of admiration, surely because in his prose the poet was more powerful than the reasoner.
Cioran insists: philosophy is “a profession without a destination that fills the neutral and vacant hours with voluminous thoughts, the refractory zones of the Old Testament, Bach, and Shakespeare. Have these thoughts materialized in a single page equivalent to an exclamation from Job, a terror from Macbeth, or a cantata? The universe is not discussed; it is expressed. And philosophy does not express it.”
Cioran's aesthetic assessments are, however, ontological. They refer to the greater or lesser density with which existence is captured in art. In music, in his view, this inscription achieves its greatest depth and most substantive transparency. In terms of intensity, he considers it even more fundamental than poetry. Bach, according to him, goes further than Shakespeare; not in the expression of the intelligible but in the manifestation of the indiscernible. "Sound emotions spring from uncontrollable affections, from the most luxuriant, distant, and profound within man," he notes. And after stating this, he radicalizes his approach: music, in the modern world, “is a phenomenon without parallel in any tradition. Where else can we find the equivalent of a Monteverdi, a Bach, a Mozart? Thanks to it, the West reveals its physiognomy and achieves its depth. While it has not created a wisdom or a metaphysics that were absolutely its own, nor even a poetry that can be said to be incomparable, it has projected, as a counterpart in its musical productions, all its original force, its subtlety, its mystery, and its capacity for the ineffable. It has been able to love reason to the point of perversity; its true genius, however, is an affective genius.”
Cioran not only highlights this "affective genius." He aspires to the force of its inspiration to permeate his writing. He will admit that he is a thinker, never a philosopher. Precisely because in philosophy he sees the extreme manifestation of the abuses of reason. More than that: Cioran wants to be an artist before he is a thinker. His primary concern: style, the tonality of expression. He aspires to find beauty in conciseness. Forcefulness in brevity. He will see in the aphorism the perfect resource for infusing his ideas with the tension and the sinuosities he strives for when writing. He wants to make the primordial silence where the inspired word culminates heard; that ultimate imponderability that preserves reality for those who dare to reach it. His ideas, rather than ideas that inspire agreement or dissent, are ideas imbued with emotion. His, therefore, could have been that verse that Fernando Pessoa put in the mouth of his heteronym Ricardo Reis: “What feels in me is thinking.”
V. Europe excites him. The present, in which, in his opinion, it is straying, and the veneration its past awakens in him, vie for his feelings. This contrast tears him apart. When portraying the Old World, Cioran appears torn between exaltation and discouragement. Romania no longer seems solely agonizing to him. He senses that the entire continent is heading, in spiritual terms, toward a dark future. Europe endures, says Cioran, but it no longer lives. It has lost its centrality. He is convinced: its reconstruction after the Second World War may be dazzling, but it conceals a substantial fragility. Europe languishes and fades, bogged down in the inertia of an anemic, lifeless thought. In terms of global impact, it no longer means anything. Others are the protagonists of the hour.
Transformed into a vast museum, at the mercy of the incessant flood of tourists, Europe relies on the evocation of its past and turns its lost grandeur into a commercial offering. But this fails to disguise its current irrelevance, the failures of its present. Its rhetoric, the sugarcoated publicity of its history, even its growing economic well-being, do not mask, in Cioran's eyes, the fragility of its political project, its cracks, the tragedy of having outlived itself.
“Not all is lost,” he writes visionarily and ironically. “The barbarians remain. From where will they emerge? It doesn't matter. For the moment, let it suffice to know that their onslaught will not be long in coming, that while they prepare to celebrate our ruin, they meditate on the means to put an end to our reasoning. (…) Withered, lifeless, we cannot react against fate: the dying do not unionize or mutiny. How, then, can we count on the awakening, on the wrath of Europe? Its fate and even its rebellions are decreed elsewhere. Tired of enduring, of dialoguing with itself, it is a void toward which the steppes will soon mobilize… Another void, a new void.”
Cioran, a nihilist? A soul corroded by despair? A young writer once saddled him with those titles. “You have often reproached me for what you call my 'appetite for destruction.' You should know that I don't destroy anything; I note down, I note down the imminent, the thirst for a world that is being annulled and that, over the ruin of its evidence, races toward the unusual and the immeasurable.”
George Steiner had little, if any, sympathy for Cioran's work. But it is undeniable that he shares two of his basic convictions. One, about music as the supreme manifestation of Western genius; the other, about the decadence of Europe consummated in the 20th century. In that era, Steiner asserts, Europe committed suicide in two world wars. “Two world wars that were in reality two European civil wars. […] Western Europe and western Russia became the house of death, the scene of unprecedented brutality, whether at Auschwitz or the Gulag. (…) It is estimated that one hundred million men, women, and children perished from war, famine, deportation, and ethnic cleansing. (…) In the light—shouldn't we say “in the darkness”?—of these facts, belief in the end of the idea of Europe is almost a moral obligation. By what right would we survive our suicidal inhumanity?”
VI. From the collapse of metaphysics and the ruin of the ideologies that followed it emerges "another response to the hecatomb, consisting of a new kind of philosophical endeavor: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic." Such was the opinion of Susan Sontag in the middle of the last century. And for her, Cioran is her most inspired voice.
What's the point now? It's about imposing a long and well-deserved silence on rationalism. "What counts are our sensations and their virtues."
Let us reiterate: Cioran denounces the suffocation suffered by personal emotion at the hands of the despotism of the abstract and the commandments of the syllogism; a hypertrophy of subjectivity, in his view, unleashed by Aristotle. The devastation of European sensibility, Cioran understands, was not consummated thanks to the refuge it found in music and, secondarily, in poetry. Furthermore, Europe, in the twentieth century, is shipwrecked in a discursive ocean devoid of existential substance. Reducing the problem of truth to the proposals of scientific understanding, exalting the positivist ideal through devotion to the Principle of Non-Contradiction, is equivalent to confusing the contributions of reading and an analytical procedure with the domestication of the intangible and a narrow understanding of spiritual life. For the essayist, this is nothing more than a surrender to the inexhaustible, the eminent feature of reality.
VII. Cioran cares—and only cares—for the man who, knowing himself to be one for once, consecrates his word to the wonder and torment of his finitude. The unspeakable, he asserts, is not contemplated by devotees of abstraction. In the attachment to generalizations, the most intimate profile of the European man has evaporated.
Of course, there are exceptions. The essential survives in a few. When someone truly makes themselves known, they project themselves into what they say, inhabited by the imponderable, by that ultimate insinuation of being that surpasses all language, that can be perceived but not captured in words. In short, the man Cioran cares about is capable of conveying into his words the effect that this imponderability imprints on his conscience, transforming him into a stranger who recognizes himself as such.
To retreat, to avoid verbal overflow, to react with the utmost conciseness to the discursive avalanche in which the West has buried its original philosophical perplexity. This and nothing else, in Cioran's opinion, is the responsibility of the writer of our time. Moreover, the primordial source from which Cioran draws the strength of this conviction is—it has been said—music; a sense freed from all meaning, as Augustine of Hippo knew. Music, and only music, and above all that of Bach. Cioran, Steiner understands, "experiences in his oratorios and cantatas, in his chamber music, a call to resistance, a kind of resurrection."
This resistance palpitates in his writings. Cioran infuses the French essay with an innovative eloquence and temperamental force. The intensity with which he expresses himself, the artisanal patience (we know this from what is written in his Notebooks ) with which he constructs his texts, always elude the traps of verbal ostentation and prove the decisive point: that the forcefulness of his literary vocation was stronger for him than any of his arguments in favor of the call to silence. Or better yet: that nothing strengthened his appreciation of silence as much as the expressive talent with which he knew how to approach it.
Cioran was a foreigner everywhere. Needless to say, in his native Romania. He found refuge only in the French language. It was his home, his asylum, his solace. The chisel with which he shaped his desolation and his contentment. Cioran, a thinker of the European twilight, a true heir to Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Pascal, speaks thus about the times in which he lived: “In the heyday, values are procreated; in the twilight, worn out and undone, they are abolished. The fascination of decadence, ages in which truths no longer have life, in which they pile up like skeletons in the pensive and dry soul, in the charnel house of dreams […]. Remember Flaubert's phrase: 'I am a mystic and I believe in nothing.' I see in it the adage of our time, a time infinitely intense and without substance.”
He who knows well, knows better, warns Thomas Aquinas. Cioran directed the scope of this proposition toward impotence: "True knowledge is reduced to vigil in darkness." What is usually called truth "is an error insufficiently lived."
To be right, to silence doubt, to stifle confusion. Such are the imperatives of ordinary life. “Human minds need a simple truth, an answer that frees them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb.” It is, in essence, about finding shelter from the onslaught of the irreducible enigma that surrounds the very fact of existence. “Being surpasses understanding, being is frightening,” writes Cioran.
Cioran, the Cioran who matters, is the one who, after his Romanian period, becomes an exile from the unequivocal. Fed up with redemptive promises, with dogmatic blindness, faced with the reductionism that ideologies incur, he turns on himself like a believer finally weary of the successive disenchantments imposed by his stubborn attachment to faith. He is then won over to his cause by the inexhaustible glow of doubt. The accent of his words becomes that of an agnostic. He mocks the consistency arrogated by prejudices, by unanimity, by beliefs that demand subordination. Like a shipwrecked man to his piece of wood, Cioran clings to his disbelief. “This man who believes in nothing,” Fernando Savater recalls, “has a passion for writing.” True. His verbal imagination is inexhaustible. It shapes and nourishes him. As a stylist, Cioran belongs to the family of poets of thought. In Cioran, certainty has been left without a future. The methods employed in his prose dramatize the torment of a sensibility that has only found sustenance in creation. Nietzsche escapes despair by fostering an ideal: that of the superman. In Cioran, there are no ideals. Yes, an infinite consolation: the music of Bach.
lanacion
