Author Topic: Trouble with Being Cioran  (Read 1638594 times)

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Holden

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Trouble with Being Cioran
« on: January 04, 2016, 05:22:28 pm »
I have not read all the books by Cioran(just one),though I intend to read them all. I feel that while he is a good thinker,unlike Schopenhauer,his philosophy lacks metaphysical foundation.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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TaRaX

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Cioran in Small Doses
« Reply #1 on: January 04, 2016, 09:04:55 pm »
I have a bunch of Cioran's books, and yet when I reread them, I usually just pull one off the shelf and read a few random pages.   I re-read a few paragraphs.  It's kind of like a heavy drug.  I take small doses.

Cioran, like Nietzsche, was anti-systematic.  He chose the essay form.  Thinking becomes confessional.  Philosophy becomes tortured thinking. 

“The only sin I have never committed was being a father”.

Quote from: Susan Santag
Impossible states of being, unthinkable thoughts are Cioran’s material for speculation. (Thinking against oneself, etc.) But he comes after Nietzsche, who set down almost the whole of Cioran’s position a century ago. An interesting question: why does a subtle, powerful mind consent to say what has, for the most part, already been said? In order to make those ideas genuinely his own? Because, while they were true when originally set down, they have since become more true?

Whatever the answer, the “fact” of Nietzsche has undeniable consequences for Cioran. He must tighten the screws, make the argument denser. More excruciating. More rhetorical.

Characteristically, Cioran begins an essay where another writer would end it. Beginning with the conclusion, he goes on from there.

His kind of writing is meant for readers who in a sense already know what he says; they have traversed these vertiginous thoughts for themselves. Cioran doesn’t make any of the usual efforts to “persuade,” with his oddly lyrical chains of ideas, his merciless irony, his gracefully delivered allusions to nothing less than the whole of European thought since the Greeks. An argument is to be “recognized,” and without too much help. Coed taste demands that the thinker furnish only pithy glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment. Hence, Cioran’s tone—one of immense dignity, dogged, sometimes playful, often haughty. But despite all that may appear as arrogance, there is nothing complacent in Cioran, unless it be his very sense of futility and his uncompromisingly elitist attitude toward the life of the mind.

...

Cioran is another recruit to the melancholy parade of European intellectuals in revolt against the intellect ...

And what could be more relevant than the thesis, reworked by Cioran, that the free use of the mind is ultimately anti-social, detrimental to the health of the community?

In terms of action, it means the acceptance of futility. Futility must be seen not as a frustration of one’s hopes and aspirations, but as a prized and defended vantage point for the athletic leap of consciousness into its own complexity. It is of this desirable state that Cioran is speaking when he says: “Futility is the most difficult thing in the world.” It requires that we “must sever our roots, must become metaphysically foreigners.”

I consider Cioran the poetical philosopher.  I appreciate that he does not attempt to build any systems.  I think, while he was profound and serious, that he was also being sardonic in a very subtle way ... you know, where were one to get his humor, the laughter would be tainted with the despair of a madman. 

He seems to enjoy blasphemy ... He wrote that Jesus and the Buddha were Masters of Illusion, and that the time has come for Diogenes the Cynic to challenge the Son of God.  Cioran was a recluse who lived out his days eating food off of the tables of the leftovers at university cafeterias.  He existed in a rotting garret in Paris, stating that the only thing worth believing in is “breathing”.


From my notes:

2004.04.19

The awareness of existential futility represents the sole weapon against theological and ideological deliriums. Cioran said that both Christ and the Buddha are masters of illusion for their doctrines protect the ruling class from the wrath of the underclass.

A social worker inquired about how I was coping with the loneliness and isolation way out here in the Flame Motel, stranded with no funds. I said that I experience the pain but that I break through the pain into a state of mind very liberating: Mental Freedom. I am rereading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in decades. I laughed aloud while reading the first lines:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.


lord of this world


2004.04.27

I witness first hand the process by which one becomes unemployable. By now I have an attitude of defiance and rebelliousness. Were I to secretly look for work, I might be able to escape my current predicament: we call it economic house arrest. At this point I consider just how much of an outsider I have become. How will I make a living in a society I am so at odds with?

Maybe I will become something of a misanthropic founder of a new religion where we beg for change so as to catch a booze buzz. We could call the religion Alcoholism.

A classic statement by The Aborigine of Gort Busters, 2004, twenty years after I sat in [the classroom] Myths, Dreams, and Cultures:

“A few of the princes live well, while most, of course, labor away in the Taker prison, as the Taker prison continues to crumble. Let’s not even talk about the genocide, desertification, starvation, lack of medical aid, pollution, the now-confirmed melting ice caps, or even the oncoming Great Depression of the 21st Century, wherein even the princes are losing their retirement nest eggs. Let’s start with the half-million children in Iraq who died over the last decade so that the princes could get more energy for their blow-dryers and their SUVs.’

“Yea, we’re doing great. I can’t wait to go live in your world. Maybe if I’m lucky, they’ll let me live in New Jersey. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have the opportunity to mandatorily corral large groups of disaffected, disgruntled teenagers into cinder block cubes where they’ll be force-fed pronouns, pre-packaged history lessons and Pythagora’s theory so that they can forget all of it in a year or two as they get flushed into the work-a-day world, where they will submit 30% to 50% of their tax money to finance a WAR ECONOMY DEDICATED TO STUFFING MOST OF THE GORTS INTO SNEAKER FACTORIES AND UNEMPLOYMENT LINES SO THAT THE PRINCES CAN ‘DO PRETTY GOOD’.”

 :P  :-\

« Last Edit: January 04, 2016, 11:02:36 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #2 on: January 31, 2016, 02:39:38 pm »
I found some of Akizur's spoken rhetoric in English ... just a curiosity.

Quote from: ruzickaw
In Buddhism it is completly clear: the three caracteristics of existence: anicca = nothing is permanent, anatta = no permanent entity, and dukkha= because of these two there is no permanent satisfaction. I never found any soul in me.

Too much distraction ... I only listen for a little while.  Don't let Youtube distract you too much.  It is interesting though ... sometimes. 

I agree with much of what he says, but I have other things I want to do.  There is too much talk in this world.  There are so many distractions.  It's a shame to say, but one really has to limit what one takes in just in order to focus.   

no soul

Akizur

« Last Edit: January 31, 2016, 02:55:46 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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TaRaX

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Exercise of Insubmission
« Reply #3 on: February 21, 2016, 08:02:54 pm »
Exercise of Insubmission

by E.M. Cioran

“How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your Kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets. You are the damper of our flames and our rebellions, the fire hose of our fevers, the superintendent of our senilities. Even before relegating You to a formula, I trampled Your arcana, scorned Your tricks and all those artifices which produce Your toilette of the Inexplicable. You have generously endowed me with the gall Your pity spared Your slaves. Since there is no rest but in the shadow of Your nullity, the brute finds salvation by just handing himself over to You or Your counterfeits. I don’t know which is more pitiable. Your acolytes or myself: we all derive straight from Your incompetence: pitch, patch, hodgepodge—syllables of the Creation, of Your blundering…”

“Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? Wherever something breathes there is one more infirmity: no palpitation which fails to confirm the disadvantage of being; the flesh horrifies me: these men, these women, offal that moans by the grace of certain spasms; no more relationship with the planet: each moment is merely a vote in the urn of my despair.

What does it matter, whether Your works leave off or continue! Your subalterns cannot complete what You ventured without genius. From the blindness into which You plunged them, they will emerge nonetheless, but will they have the strength to take revenge, and will You to defend yourself? This race is rusty, and You even rustier. Turning toward Your Enemy, I await the day when he will pilfer Your sun to hang it in another universe.”

-E.M. Cioran. From A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard.

-
« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 03:03:26 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2016, 09:39:41 pm »
I have been doing some research to try to place Cioran's attack against "Instant India" into context.   I am fairly certain he was referring to the commercialization of "pop-philosophy" marketing ...

Here I found something of interest:
Quote
Cioran was an unconventional thinker, averse to academic philosophy like the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he venerated as his master.  Cioran was of the view that “the university has extirpated philosophy. In my opinion philosophy is not a subject matter of study. It should be lived and experienced. One should be able to philosophise on the streets. …An official philosophy? A career as philosopher? No, please.”

After studying philosophy at the University of Bucharest Cioran went to Berlin as a Humboldt Scholar and studied Husserl and Heidegger. During his stay he became an admirer of Hitler. Like Heidegger, he later distanced himself from Hitler’s movement and attributed the initial fascination to the hastiness of youth.

Indian Philosophy

“Fortunately, I am engrossed in Hindu and Chinese philosophy”, he writes. “What peace! The truth lies there, if it is allowed, to use such a term”. Cioran’s engagement with Buddhism, which as a religion came closer to his world view, is well known. Very few know, however, that Hinduism also played a crucial role in his thinking and that he often turned to Hindu spiritual texts. In his rare interviews, he repeatedly expressed his thoughts on Hinduism and its seminal meaning for his world of ideas: “I consider Hinduism to be the profoundest of all the religions … The great systems are Hindu philosophy, then the Greek philosophy and the German philosophy. The basic advantage of the Hindu philosophy is: In India the philosopher is compelled to practise his philosophy.” It is not just an intellectual exercise. The philosophers of the East are certainly not intellectual charlatans and professors: “Philosophy is not a profession. It is inextricably intertwined with their life.”

Through his intense engagement with the Vedas, Upanishads and Mahayana sutras Cioran’s idea of the delusion of existence stood vindicated. In the true Far-eastern tradition, Cioran does not attach any significance to history: “The negation of history is in conclusion the Hindu philosophy: The action is considered meaningless and futile. Only the cessation of time counts. When one really ponders upon this, one should cease to act and function. One should throw oneself on the floor and weep.”

Cioran, unlike many other European thinkers of the 20th century, tries to explore Western and Eastern philosophies in a unified fashion. He searches and discovers links and parallels between Hinduism and the Catholic mystics like Saint Teresa of Avila or the German, Meister Eckhart, who according to Cioran was the profoundest thinker of the Occident, as his search for truth went beyond the conception of God and culminated in a total void: “Meister Eckhart is actually a thinker who could very well have been born in India, too”.

Cioran is right from the beginning quite unequivocal that thinking in its real sense cannot be and should not be abstract, as thinking, philosophy and religion cannot be separated from real life. Moments of despair and ecstasy teach us the fundamental meaning of life and they are to be aspired to. Cioran termed this the philosophy of unique moments. In the depths of disillusionment lie sublime realisation, and the meaning of life is attained in the ecstasy of imperfection, he once observed. These kinds of observations characterise Cioran’s writing.

The most common accusation against Cioran is of contempt for human beings. He was also termed a misanthrope of the worst sort by some as he maintained that the best thing that could happen to humanity would be its downfall and disappearance. He was relentless in his search for indicators and evidence to corroborate his view that the apocalypse is imminent: the disquietude all round is an augury of doom. In ostensible progress, he saw nothing but a quest for collapse.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2016, 09:43:24 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #5 on: February 23, 2016, 12:22:35 pm »
999 posts! I am very grateful for every one of them.When I think of my own personal history, I think of the earliest twitchings of human life.A world of rudimentary law but one intriguingly advanced in visceral practices.Of lands whose chief feature was a kind of brutality and an air of exile-coarse & tortuous terrains,deliriums of earth and sky.These include desolate fog-bound islands in polar seas,countries of barren peaks lacerated by unceasing winds,wastelands that consumed all sense of reality in their vast spaces,shadowed realms littered with dead cities,and sweltering hells of jungle, where light itself was tinged with a blue slime.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #6 on: February 24, 2016, 10:38:01 am »
miserabilism := the quality of seeming to enjoy being depressed

This may be a key paradox in our existential situation.   This word you (or Ligotti) have introduced me to.  I have known this condition my entire life.  In fact, in one of my favorite novels, one I had to read when I was 13 or 14 years old, was Ira Levin's THIS PERFECT DAY, and I remember the part about where Chip wants to stop taking his medication because he enjoyed a "happy kind of sadness," a "sad kind of happiness."

I seem to enjoy stretching my mind to understand concepts slightly beyond the limits of my comprehension, and yet there is also a difficult to describe "depressing" feeling that comes with facing how much I will never understand. 

In a letter to a friend, Carl Friedrich Gauss once wrote, "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment."

And yet, here we have a world, 'miserabilism,' in which delight and misery are contained in one concept.

Maybe there is some kind of morbid pleasure one derives from facing the boundaries ...

Wasn't Kant's accomplishment negative in nature?   The limits of reason ...

But I am not talking about something so general and universal or hard-wired into our human apparatus (being three-dimensional organisms).  I am saying that learning is not an altogether enjoyable process, and that just maybe a miserabilistic tendency might actually be what makes the learning process more enjoyable.   I know this is a paradox, which is why it sounds like utter nonsense.

Was it Confucius who counselled us to "rest in confusion" ?

This approach does not have to be limited to studying mathematics, but might be applied to "religious questions" as well.

In honor of Cioran, I will be as blunt and honest as possible even if this exposes my lack of spiritual sophistication as a creature:  smoking tobacco is my "meditation" ...

There are two things Cioran was proud of, one being not having fathered any children, and the other being having quit smoking tobacco.  I have no desire to quit smoking tobacco.   This is as close to meditation as I get.

I want to be spontaneous, but I am afraid that, without a concentrated effort to "control the mind" (you mention this as the great psychological value of ancient Indian religious/philosophical traditions), I would be flooded with the chaos of the mind and never be able to focus on the task at hand.

Oh ... I spontaneously attempted to squeeze out miserabilistic tendencies in to this message board's main title.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #7 on: June 13, 2016, 09:12:44 pm »
In the middle of the night last night, the following two readings from The Trouble With Being Born struck me.  I felt compelled to boot up the computer and connect before they slip my mind.

1.


La verdad reside en el drama individual. Si realmen te sufro, sufro más que un individuo, sobrepaso la esfera de mi yo y me acerco a la  esencia de los otros. La única manera de encaminarn os hacia lo universal es ocuparnos únicamente de lo que nos atañe.

Truth abides in the individual drama.  If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns ourselves.

This reminds me of what Schopenhauer wrote ... something about the way to know others better is to look deep into ourselves.  Deep down within ourselves, the drama of life unfolds ... in there we are the same being living out the individual drama.  The way to know others better is to know ourselves better.

2

"Aquel que tiene inclinaciones hacia la lujuria es compasivo y misericordioso; los que tienen inclinación hacia la pureza no lo son."  (San Juan Clímaco.) 

Para denunciar con tal claridad y vigor, no las mentiras, sino la esencia misma de la moral cristiana, y de cualquier  moral, era menester un santo, ni más ni menos.

"He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so." ( Saint John Climacus)

It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.

That one really made me think!
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #8 on: August 01, 2016, 01:29:29 pm »
Quote from: Holden
I feel that while he is a good thinker,unlike Schopenhauer,his philosophy lacks metaphysical foundation.

Of all religions, Buddhism is the one that soothes Cioran the most, but an irrepressible (and covertly relished) capacity for doubt stops him from subscribing to any system.

The Book of Delusions

« Last Edit: August 01, 2016, 01:44:01 pm by {∅} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #9 on: August 16, 2016, 02:47:50 pm »
Have you read any biography of Cioran? Every second feels like a lifetime. I will try to not take the pain personally.

https://youtu.be/a958VuleRwM
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #10 on: August 16, 2016, 10:33:00 pm »
I did not burn all the old diaries.  I saved a handful of "special ones" like #74 from the summer of 2003.  I just flipped it open to where I had transcribed Tomislav Sunic's great essay, Cioran and the Culture of Death.  Notes of this start on page 8 of diary #74, the digitized version.  It was a small notebook, so you might have to rotate it as it was copied sideways.  Or just use the above link and choose no adds ... then save it on your drive.


When I was out West drinking myself into oblivion ... and just as miserable as I ever was "bask east", I read An Infamous Past which kind of judged the younger version of Cioran harshly.

I try not to take anything personally, especially when it is not even about me, but only about a thinker who has gotten me through suicidal phases ...

There is more about it here.

It gets rough, I know.

I am now collecting blank notebooks ... unruled, no lines ... using mostly pencil ... keeping many notebooks at once ...

Maybe I am replacing the burnt diaries with something more coherent ...

I just like filling up pages, I guess.  At least if I stick to exercises in math books, I won't be filling the notebooks up with more pigshiit.  I've already written plenty of that.

I did a quick search.  I'll "cut and paste" from here:


Quote from: alina_stefanescu.typepad.com
12 interesting bits of information about Emil Cioran.

I am reluctant to just cut and paste a good biography of Emil Cioran on this website (though I have certainly discovered one or two) because something about Cioran's character does not lend itself well to linear models. If I had the time or the talent, I would write 20 aphorisms about Cioran to paint the most accurate picture possible of this tremendous human being, but time is more expensive than clothing and talent is not for sale. So I am settling with this list of twelve bits of information about Cioran that I have gleaned from my readings.

1. In one sense, Cioran was saved, for he maintained that "..the certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation".

2. Cioran was the son of a Transylvanian Orthodox priest.

3. Cioran suffered from insomnia. The insomnia made him sombre and withdrawn-- just sombre and withdrawn enough to curl up into his shell and publish his first book in Romanian, On the Heights of Despair.

4. Original sin haunted Cioran's work. He believed that man first sinned by deeming himself more important or on par with God. Since man cannot live with the possibility that life has no meaning and individual existence is insignificant, a rotten seed lies in the core of man-- a seed which germinates from the desire to imagine himself the centre of the world. Because life must have meaning, man starts creating ideas. But neutral ideas do not comfort man-- they are too sterile-- so man attaches his own passions to these ideas. Thus man lights the pyre.

5. If he were not able to write, Cioran believed he would have committed suicide. Writing was not a possibility-- it was a dictum. He once said:

"If you detest someone, just take a piece of paper and write 10, 20, 30 times: X is an a-s-s-h-o-l-e. And after a few minutes, you will feel relieved. You detest them less."

6.  Cioran did not believe there would ever be an end to utopias; he would have shrugged his shoulders at Frank Fukuyama's "end of history". But he did hope that all the discussion and efforts spent seeking utopia might one day be replaced by "a focus on mankind himself".

7. Cioran held politicians and politics in contempt.

8. Among his ghosts, Cioran's flirtation with fascism haunted his later life. He confessed that if [he] had liked something about Hitler, it was "the cult of the irrational, the exultation of pure vitality, the virile expression of strength, without any critical spirit, restraint, or control".

9.  There is a pregnant and unlabored tension between Cioran's philosophical skepticism and his admiration of Oswald Spengler, a committed Hegelian. This tension continues to disturb the beetles around Cioran's grave.

10. Cioran believed that the only national minorities which represented a substantial threat to the creation and consolidation of the Romanian nation were the Jews.

11. Cioran praised Antonescu's dictatorship based on his assumption that people preferred submission to freedom.

12. Though he never married, Cioran's better half was discovered in Simone Roue. They were together from the 1950's until his death.


My sources for this list include "Cioran: Comedian or Martyr?"; Philo Agora's post on Cioran; Emil Cioran on Samuel Beckett; the wikipedia entry for Cioran; "Tristele lui Cioran" by George Georgescu; An Infamous Past: EM Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania by Marta Petreu.

Comedian or Martyr

Do you suffer from insomnia?   That would make reporting to the salt mine job very problematic, like a real horror.   Have you been sneaking in a small notebook?

What I used to do is carry around a small notepad or even some loose sheets of paper ... write down some ideas ... when you have a chance (like when you are up at night), you can expound upon those scribbled lines in a larger, more permanent notebook.

Just the act of writing might bring some relief.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2016, 11:21:57 pm by {∅} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #11 on: September 06, 2016, 06:29:10 pm »
A good essay on Cioran at hyperboreans.

Cioran suggests that insomnia is an induction to a secret society of thinkers.
« Last Edit: September 06, 2016, 06:33:34 pm by {∅} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #12 on: January 26, 2017, 06:08:54 pm »
I read that Cioran's mother once said that if she had known he would grow up to be so depressed she would have aborted him. He suffered chronic insomnia and rode his bicycle relentlessly through the countryside at night to try and weary himself enough to sleep.

Quote from: Cioran
A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth… Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching, each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples — officialdom, with its rules — a metaphysics designed for monkeys… Everyone trying to remedy everyoneʼs life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society — an inferno of saviors! (from “Genealogy of Fanaticism” in A Short History of Decay)

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. he has a voice: that is enough.

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. (from “The Anti-Prophet” in A Short History of Decay)

Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age. Calvinism, Quakerism, Port-Royal, The Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc… what a series of absurdities… which had to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site.



Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we hate and kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice.

Abstraction has insinuated itself into life — and into death; the “complexes” seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathology — there you have all of human history. (from “Faces of Decadence” in A Short History of Decay)


“What is truth?” is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to “How to endure life?” And even this one pales beside the next: “How to endure oneself?” – That is the crucial question to which no one is in a position to give us an answer. (Drawn and Quartered)


He who hates himself is not humble.


Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.



Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place. This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
(Book of Delusions)



In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision. (The Trouble with Being Born)
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #13 on: January 27, 2017, 09:14:25 pm »
With due respect to Cioran-description of existence as Will-to-Live ,as continual striving with no direction ,aimed at all directions at once,did ring a bell for me.
Without this we would back to Kant ,to absolute illusionism.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

TaRaX

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Re: Trouble with Being Cioran
« Reply #14 on: March 14, 2017, 09:42:28 am »
"You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength."

"My strength?  I've wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself ... and now I'll be unemployed forever!"

[Cioran - All Gall is Divided]

We only need to remember the corpse preparing itself within us.  Sooner than we think we shall be food for worms.   This is the good news.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~