E. M. Cioran

I have finally gotten around to giving E. M. Cioran a go, our Rumanian pessimist, one of the Sartre-de Beauvoir circle. Not only is God dead, but soon the world will be too! As the Washington Post blurbs him, “A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning.”

Remember, I first came across him through that great quotation about how he should have buried all his tears in the seashore for all their utility, but his tears turned into thoughts, and his thoughts are as bitter as tears. I figured there might be a lot more where that came from. I went with his “The Temptation to Exist”. It is a late work, if not his last work. I culled a few gems, and he is interesting to read, but it is not the mother lode that I hoped for. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising, since he apparently looked upon Hitler as more of the redeeming type of leader the world has needed. I might be a pessimist myself, but we dream differently.

This excerpt comes from the introductory remarks of Susan Sontag for this edition. She is explaining the humbled state of modern philosophy, from which springs the perspective of Cioran.

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And this quest for the eternal - once so glamorous and inevitable a gesture of consciousness - now stood exposed, as the root of philosophical thinking, in all its pathos and childishness. Philosophy dwindled into an outmoded fantasy of the mind, part of the provincialism of the spirit, the childhood of man.

-- Susan Sontag

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Now all there is is decadence and death, and Cioran offers to be one of its philosopher-poets.

[Source: E. M. Cioran, “The Temptation to Exist”]