Cioran - Thinking against oneself

ALMOST all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us—it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. 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. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role, it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

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.

Instead of letting it erode us gradually, we decided to go time one better, to add to its moments our own. This new time grafted onto the old one, this time elaborated and projected, soon revealed its virulence: objectivized, it became history, a monster we have called up against ourselves, a fatality we cannot escape, even by recourse to the formulas of passivity, the recipes of wisdom.

Try as we will to take the “cure” of ineffectuality; to meditate on the Taoist fathers’ doctrine of submission, of withdrawal, of a sovereign absence; to follow, like them, the course of consciousness once it ceases to be at grips with the world and weds the form of things as water does, their favorite element—we shall never succeed. They scorn both our curiosity and our thirst for suffering; in which they differ from the mystics, and especially from the medieval ones, so apt to recommend the virtues of the hair shirt, the scourge, insomnia, inanition, and lament.

“A life of intensity is_contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves. Is religion declining? We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equaling that of the monasteries in their heyday. If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair.

The mind, as well as the body, pays for “a life of intensity.” Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being. And what for the great Chinaman was a symbol of failure, a proof of imperfection, constitutes for us the sole mode of possessing, of making contact with ourselves.

“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse). A maxim as profound as it is invalid. The apogee of indifference—how attain it, when our very apathy is tension, conflict, aggression? No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue.

According to our Chinese again, only the detached mind penetrates the essence of the Tao; the man of passion perceives only its effects: the descent to the depths demands silence, the suspension of our vibrations, indeed of our faculties. But is it not revealing that our aspiration to the absolute is expressed in terms of activity, of combat, that a Kierkegaard calls himself a “knight of Faith” and that a Pascal is nothing but a pamphleteer? We attack and we struggle; therefore we know only the effects of the Tao. Further, the failure of Quietism, that European equivalent of Taoism, tells the story of our possibilities, our prospects.

The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom’s first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything—the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?

There are certain forms of wisdom and deliverance which we can neither grasp from within nor transform into our daily substance, nor even frame in a theory. Deliverance, if we insist upon it, must proceed from ourselves: no use seeking it elsewhere, in a ready-made system or in some Oriental doctrine. Yet this is often what happens in many a mind avid, as we say, for an absolute. But such wisdom is fraudulent, such deliverance merely dupery. I am indicting not only theosophy and its adepts, but all those who adopt truths incompatible with their nature. More than one such man has an Instant India and supposes he has plumbed its secrets, when nothing—neither his character nor his training nor his anxieties—prepares him for any such thing. What a swarm of the pseudo-”delivered” stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear—do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. They aim, further, so high that any conventional religion seems to them a family prejudice by which their “metaphysical mind” cannot be satisfied. To convert to India, doubtless that is more satisfying. But they forget that India postulates the agreement of idea and act, the identity of salvation and renunciation. When one possesses a “metaphysical mind,” such trifles are scarcely worth one’s concern.

After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion. If he depends on them, he takes his revenge by studying them, a specialist in the underbelly of “noble” sentiments. His sloth, of a very rare quality, truly “delivers” him from a world of fools and dupes. About renunciation he knows more than many of your esoteric works. To be convinced of this, you need only walk out into the street… But you prefer the texts that teach mendicancy. Since no practical consequence accompanies your meditations, it will not be surprising that the merest bum is worth more than you … Can we conceive a Buddha faithful to his truths and to his palace? One is not “delivered-alive” and still a landowner. I reject the generalization of the lie, I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called “salvation” and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

*

When at every turn you confront us with “the absolute,” you affect a profound, inaccessible little ogle, as if you were at grips with a remote world, in a light, a darkness all your own, masters of a realm to which nothing outside of yourselves can gain access. You grant us other mortals a few scraps of the great discoveries you have just made, a few vestiges of your prospecting. But all your labors result in no more than this: you murmur one poor word, the fruit of your reading, of your learned frivolity, of your bookish void, your borrowed anguish.

The Absolute—all our efforts come down to undermining the sensibility which leads to the absolute. Our wisdom (or rather our unwisdom) repudiates it; relativists, we look for our equilibrium not in eternity but in time. The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes. Anyone who supposes he can avoid it is either boasting or blind. Stuck with appearances, we keep espousing an incomplete wisdom, half-fantasy and half-foolishness. If India, to quote Hegel again, represents “the dream of the infinite Spirit,” the turn of our intellect, as of our sensibility, obliges us to conceive of a Spirit incarnate, limited to historical processes, embracing not the world but the world’s moments, a faceted time which we escape only by fits and starts, and only when we betray our appearances.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality’s detriment. The degree of our liberation is measured by the quantity of undertakings from which we are emancipated, as by our capacity to convert any object into a non-object. But it is meaningless to speak of liberation apropos of a hurried humanity which has forgotten that we cannot reconquer life nor revel in it without having first abolished it.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonie verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes.

Gorged on sensations and on their corollary—becoming, we are “undelivered” by inclination and by principle, sentenced by choice, stricken by the fever of the visible, rummaging in surface enigmas of a piece with our bewilderment and our trepidation.

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.

To resist happiness—the majority manages that; suffering is much more insidious. Have you ever tasted it? You will never be sated once you have, you will pursue it greedily and preferably where it does not exist, you will project it there since without it everything seems futile to you, drab. Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous. The savor and solution of things, accident and obsession, caprice and necessity—suffering will make you love appearance in whatever is most powerful, most lasting, and truest, and will tie you to itself forever, for “intense” by nature, it is, like any “intensity,” a servitude, a subjection. The soul unfettered, the soul indifferent and void— how in the world achieve that? How conquer absence, the freedom of absence? Such freedom will never figure among our mores, any more than “the dream of the infinite Spirit.”

To identify oneself with an alien doctrine, one must adopt it without restrictions: what is the use of acknowledging the truths of Buddhism and of rejecting transmigration, the very basis of the idea of renunciation? Of assenting to the Vedanta, of accepting the unreality of appearances and then behaving as if appearances existed? An inconsistency inevitable for any mind raised in the cult of phenomena. For it must be admitted: we have the phenomenon in our blood. We may scorn it, abhor it, it is nonetheless our patrimony, our capital of contortions, the symbol of our hysteria here on earth. A race of convulsionaries, at the center of a cosmic farce, we have imprinted on the universe the stigmata of our history and shall never be capable of that illumination which lets us die in peace. It is by our works, not by our silences, that we have chosen to disappear: our future may be read in our features, in the grimaces of agonized and busy prophets. The smile of the Buddha, that smile which overhangs the world, does not elucidate our faces. At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one’s sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire’s Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife”—that is our absolute, our eternity.

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. To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone’s grasp; daylight strips us of the night’s gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved ail our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts.

Even as we ransack our own diseases, those of other people regard us no less. In an age of biographies, no one bandages his wounds without our attempting to lay them bare, to expose them to broad daylight; if we fail, we turn away, disappointed. And even he who ended on the cross— it is not because he suffered for us that he still counts for something in our eyes, but because he suffered and uttered several lamentations as profound as they were gratuitous. For what we venerate in our gods are our own defeats en beau.

*

Doomed to corrupted forms of wisdom, invalids of duration, victims of time, that weakness which appalls as much as it appeals to us, we are constituted of elements that all unite to make us rebels divided between a mystic summons which has no link with history and a bloodthirsty dream which is history’s symbol and nimbus. If we had a world all our own, it would matter little whether it was a world of piety or derision! We shall never have it, our position in existence lying at the intersection of our supplications and our sarcasms, a zone of impurity where sighs and provocations combine. The man too lucid to worship will also be too lucid to wreck, or will wreck only his … rebellions; for what is the use of rebelling only to discover, afterwards, a universe intact? A paltry monologue. We revolt against justice and injustice, against peace and war, against men and against the gods. Then we come around to thinking the worst old dotard may be wiser than Prometheus. Yet we do not manage to smother a scream of insurrection and continue fuming over everything and nothing: a pathetic automatism which explains why we are all statistical Lucifers.

Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something. What could be more contrary to the passive consideration of the world? But such is our fate: to be incurables who protest, pamphleteers on a pallet.

Our knowledge, like our experience, should paralyze us and make us indulgent to tyranny itself, once it represents a constant. We are sufficiently clear-sighted to be tempted to lay down our arms; yet the reflex of rebellion triumphs over our doubts; and though we might have made accompushed Stoics, the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations.

“We shall never accept history”: that, it seems to me, is the adage of our incapacity to be true sages, true madmen. Are we then no more than the ham-actors of wisdom and of madness? Whatever we do, with regard to our acts we are subject to a profound insincerity.

From all evidence, a believer identifies himself up to a certain point with what he does and with what he believes; there is no significant gap between his lucidity, on the one hand, and his thoughts and actions, on the other. This gap widens excessively in the false believer, the man who parades convictions without adhering to them. The object of his faith is a succedaneum. Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. But I cannot not subscribe to it. We can never ponder enough Kirilov’s description of Stavrogin: “When he believes, he doesn’t believe he believes; and when he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe.”

*

Even more than the style, the very rhythm of our life is based on the good standing of rebellion. Loath to admit a universal identity, we posit individuation, heterogeneity as a primordial phenomenon. Now, to revolt is to postulate this heterogeneity, to conceive it as somehow anterior to the advent of beings and objects. If I oppose the sole truth of Unity by a necessarily deceptive Multiplicity—if, in other words, I identify the other with a phantom—my rebellion is meaningless, since to exist it must start from the irreducibility of individuals, from their condition as monads, circumscribed essences. Every act institutes and rehabilitates plurality, and, conferring reality and autonomy upon the person, implicitly recognizes the degradation, the parceling-out of the absolute. And it is from the act, and from the cult attached to it, that the tension of our’mind proceeds, the need to explode and to destroy ourselves at the heart of duration. Modern philosophy, by establishing the superstition of the Ego, has made it the mainspring of our dramas and the pivot of our anxieties. To regret the repose of indistinction, the neutral dream of an existence without qualities, is pointless; we have chosen to be subjects, and every subject is a break with the quietude of Unity. Whoever takes it upon himself to attenuate our solitude or our lacerations acts against our interests, against our vocation. We measure an individual’s value by the sum of his disagreements with things, by his incapacity to be indifferent, by his refusal as a subject to tend toward the object. Whence the obsolescence of the idea of Good; whence the vogue of the Devil.

As long as we lived amid elegant terrors, we accommodated ourselves quite well to God. When others—more sordid because more profound—took us in charge, we required another system of references, another boss. The Devil was the ideal figure. Everything in him agrees with the nature of the events of which he is the agent, the regulating principle: his attributes coincide with those of time. Let us pray to him, then, since far from being a product of our subjectivity, a creation of our need for blasphemy or solitude, he is the master of our questionings and of our panics, the instigator of our deviations. His protests, his violences have their own ambiguity: this “Great Melancholic” is a rebel who doubts. If he were simple, all of a piece, he would not touch us at all; but his paradoxes, his contradictions are our own: he is the sum of our impossibilities, serves as a model for our rebellions against ourselves, our self-hatred. The recipe for hell? It is in this form of revolt and hatred that it must be sought, in the torment of inverted pride, in this sensation of being a terrible negligible quantity, in the pangs of the “I,” that “I” by which our end begins …

Of all fictions, that of the golden age confounds us most: How could it have grazed our imaginations? It is in order to expose it, to denounce it, that history, mans aggression against himself, has taken its flight and form; so that to dedicate oneself to history is to learn to rebel, to imitate the Devil. We never imitate him so well as when, at the expense of our being, we emit time, project it outside ourselves and allow it to be converted into events. “Henceforth, time will no longer exist,” announces that impromptu metaphysician who is the Angel of the Apocalypse, and thereby announces the end of the Devil, the end of history. Thus the mystics are right to seek God in themselves, or elsewhere, anywhere but in this world of which they make a tabula rasa, without for all that stooping to rebellion. They leap outside the age: a madness to which the rest of us, captives of duration, are rarely susceptible. If only we were as worthy of the Devil as they are of God!

*

To be convinced that rebellion enjoys an undue privilege among us, we need merely reflect on the manner in which we describe minds unfit for it. We call them insipid. It is virtually certain that we are closed to any form of wisdom because we see in it a transfigured insipidity. However unjust such a reaction may be, I cannot help suffering it— to Taoism itself. Even knowing that it recommends efface-ment and abandonment in the name of the absolute, not of cowardice, I reject it at the very moment I suppose I have adopted it; and if I acknowledge Lao Tse’s victory a thousand times over, I still understand a murderer better. Between serenity and blood, it is toward blood one finds it natural to incline. Murder supposes and crowns revolt: the man who is ignorant of the desire to kill may profess all the subversive opinions he likes, he will never be anything but a conformist.

Wisdom and Revolt: two poisons. Unfit to assimilate them naively, we find neither one a formula for salvation. The fact remains that in the Satanic adventure we have acquired a mastery we shall never possess in wisdom. For us, even perception is an upheaval, the beginning of a trance or an apoplexy. A loss of energy, a will to erode our available assets. Perpetual revolt involves an irreverence toward ourselves, toward our powers. How can we find in it the wherewithal for contemplation, that static expenditure, that concentration in immobility? To leave things as they are, to regard without trying to regulate the world, to perceive essences—nothing is more hostile to the conduct of our thought; we aspire, rather, to manipulate things, to torture them, to attribute to them our own rages. It must be so: idolators of the gesture, of the wager and of delirium, we love the daredevil, the stake-all, the desperado, as much in poetry as in philosophy. The Tao Te Ching goes further than Une Saison En Enfer or Ecce Homo. But Lao Tse has no delirium to propose, whereas Rimbaud and Nietzsche, acrobats straining at the extreme limits of themselves, engage us in their dangers. The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

No way out for a man who both transcends time and is bogged down in it, who accedes by fits and starts to his last solitude and nonetheless sinks into appearances. Wavering, agonized, he will drag out his days as an invalid of duration, exposed at once to the lure of becoming and of eternity. If, according to Meister Eckhart, there is an “odor” of time, there must with all the more reason be an odor of history. How can we remain insensitive to it? On a more immediate level, I distinguish the illusion, the nullity, the rottenness of “civilization”; yet I feel I belong to this rottenness: I am the lover of carrion. I cannot forgive our age for having subjugated us to the point of haunting us even when we detach ourselves from it. Nothing viable can emerge from à meditation on circumstances, from a reflection on the event. In other, happier times, the mind could unreason freely, as if it belonged to no age, emancipated as it was from the terror of chronology, engulfed in a moment of the world which it identified with the world itself. Without concern for the relativity of its work, the mind dedicated itself to that work entirely. Inspired stupidity, gone forever! Fruitful exaltation, never compromised by a consciousness drawn and quartered! Still to divine the timeless and to know nonetheless that we are time, that we produce time, to conceive the notion of eternity and to cherish our nothingness; an absurdity responsible for both our rebellions and the doubts we entertain about them.

To seek out suffering in order to avoid redemption, to follow in reverse the path of deliverance, such is our contribution in the matter of religion: bilious illuminati, Buddhas and Christs hostile to salvation, preaching to the wretched the charm of their distress. A superficial race, if you like. The fact still remains 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. Meanwhile, down to our nerve cells, everything in us resists paradise. To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction. It was ever thus, and will be, as long as a cure-by-eternity has not disintoxicated us from becoming, from duration, as long as we have not approached that state in which, according to a Chinese Buddhist, “a single moment is worth ten thousand years.”

Then since the Absolute corresponds to a meaning we have not been able to cultivate, let us surrender to all re bellions: they will end by turning against themselves, against us … Perhaps then we shall regain our supremacy over time; unless, the other way round, struggling to escape the calamity of consciousness, we rejoin animals, plants, things, return to that primordial stupidity of which, through the fault of history, we have lost even the memory.

From: The Temptation to Exist