Episode #155 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is on the very interesting and dark Emil Cioran. I hope you love the show today.

So, I wanted to begin today by giving a bit of a disclaimer about the thinker we’re about to cover. Emil Cioran—born in Romania, 1911, most of the time categorized as one of the great existentialists of the 20th century. And as an existentialist, not a surprise he’s not going to spend a lot of his time talking about things like metaphysics, building elaborate systems, talking about epistemology, aesthetics. No, in fact, even more so than other existentialists out there, he actually thought all these things were mostly a waste of time. What Cioran wants to talk about is existence, the human condition, more specifically, the dark, inconveniently ugly aspects of existence that society often tells us to sweep under the rug, but nonetheless you find yourself sitting there on the couch after work on a Tuesday in your front room and at some level you know that those things are still there, under the rug hidden, but always still present.

Because of this, we have to talk about some pretty dark stuff this episode. Not a surprise, but his fascination with this protected class of dark topics is going to cause a lot of people to label him a pessimist. And he no doubt was in some respects. But the point of this disclaimer at the top of the show is to let you know that, yes, 95% of you are going to disagree with the way he thinks about the human condition. But just know that my ambition as someone trying to present his ideas is that by the end of this, hopefully what I can get across is that despite what might seem on the surface like a very dark, pessimistic outlook, beneath the surface, Emil Cioran might be one of the most optimistic thinkers I’ve ever had the pleasure of studying.

I guess the best thing I can say to prime us for talking about Cioran’s work is that it’s far from depressing. You know, sometimes when you have a problem in life, you want somebody to come in and give you advice and fix the problem, so it’ll go away. You want a philosopher like Plato to come in and give you an answer for how to live with more wisdom. But sometimes when you face problems that you just have to endure and deal with, problems that clearly aren’t going away anytime soon, sometimes you don’t want someone to fix it. Sometimes you just want someone to listen, someone who’s been there before that can relate to you. That is, in my reading, the essence of Cioran’s work. He makes you feel a little less alone in these inevitable darker aspects of the human condition, and he makes you feel if only for a minute that you don’t have to hide them for the sake of being polite.

Maybe the best way to give some perspective as to how unique of a thinker he is is to talk about a group that to history became known as the Gnostics. The basic idea is this: the world is flawed in a lot of different ways. In a religious context, this might be described in terms of the world certainly not being heaven or paradise, right? In philosophy, the world is but an earthly shadow of the world of forms. Tons of examples. You get what I mean. So, if the world being flawed is a common concept within human thought, different groups throughout history have tried to come up with theories as to why this would be the case. The Gnostics believed that the world is messed up in a lot of ways because it was created in a messed-up way.

God, however you want to envision it, could have created the world however it wanted to. It chose to create a world where we have to, for example, consume life to live. It created a world where there are blizzards and volcanoes and hurricanes and everything else that causes hardship. It created a world where suffering is a crucial part of the process. It created a world with clamshell packaging. That’s just—only a malicious God would ever create clamshell packaging. And to the Gnostics, only a malicious God would create a world where we could recognize and be aware of the suffering required of existence all the time.

Now, it’s because of this suffering that the Gnostics would arrive at a position which is much more commonly thought of in today’s language as anti-natalism, which in one pronounced form is practiced by refusing to have children or even practice making them out of an extreme aversion to knowingly bringing any more unnecessary suffering into this world. Now, enter Emil Ciaron for a second. He once said that we all flee the tragedy of our birth, the reality of being cast into an absurd, meaningless world against our will. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, on top of all that, we are consciously aware of that reality. He said, “Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

But here’s the thing. Ciaron would ultimately even reject the Gnostics and the anti-natalists for many reasons, but one of the more telling ones is the simple fact that they even tried to systematize their conclusions. He rejected previous attempts by philosophers to try to neatly package things together like that. He actually rejected a lot of ways people have been doing things. He even rejected traditional formats in literature. He wrote in fragments in his work in this aphoristic style that’s impossible to nail down. To put it bluntly, I guess, as he often did, you don’t have to have some codified, official description of reality to realize that we are failed projects as people. Humanity itself is a failed project. Pray to whatever God you want, but to Emil Ciaron, whoever or whatever that God is, one thing’s for certain, it kind of messed up on this particular project.

Now, from here, not going to be a shocker to many of you, but Ciaron arrives at the conclusion that maybe, ultimately, everything is meaningless. And starting our discussion from this place, here’s the point he might make here to start. It’s that when you consider the utter meaninglessness of life, the sheer absurdity of existence, the suffering endured on massive scales daily simply for the sake of subsistence, how can anyone say that this is a beautiful creation? Now, you could make the argument, oh, well, it’s beautiful in its own flawed way. How can we pigeon-hole the definition of beauty like that? But his point is this, what omniscient, omnipotent deity makes this as an art project? I mean, to Ciaron, this is the equivalent of when a preschooler glues a macaroni smiley face to construction paper. And of course, he’s not actually considering the possibility of there being a God responsible for all this. He’s just laughing at the absurdity of it from that specific perspective, which he did a lot in his work, by the way.

See, Ciaron thought that—let’s say you do believe in some creative force behind the universe. If you really were dedicated to whatever God you think is up there planning all this, you sometimes have to be prepared to live without all the promises and safeguards that your God has to offer you. And he says that when you take a second and just listen, when you take a second to stop groveling at God’s feet asking for security, when you stop asking for answers, what you hear is what he calls the one true only reality: silence. What do we hear when we “let ideas be declared void; beliefs, trifles; art a lie; and philosophy, a joke?” When we stop trying to rationalize and make sense of the world around us with religions or philosophy or any other method, we instantly come into contact with the reality of the universe: silence.

He said, “For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.” Now, to 95% of you out there, so far this may just sound like the ramblings of an angry dude that just doesn’t have the depth of character to have found a way to connect with the universe or people yet. But the thing that makes Cioran so interesting is the direction he’s going to take all this.

Let me start here. Look, there are very real, tragic, painful elements of human existence that we all experience at some point in our lives. That is to say that there are things about life that just plain suck sometimes. Practically everyone listening to this at some point has experienced some level of despair, depression, melancholy, failure. We’ve all made missteps in life that have cost us big opportunities. We’ve all had our hearts broken. You name it. And yet, how interesting, Cioran would say, that all of these and many more fall into this sort of privileged class that we have of dark topics, a set of real experiences that we all seem to be having that we’re not supposed to really talk about.

For most, life consists of constantly curating an image where you aren’t feeling any of these things. We’re supposed to be smiling in every picture. We’re supposed to be happy about exactly where we are in life and excited about our future. But this image many of us project is not the reality of our internal experience. There’s a sense in which we’re just supposed to keep certain feelings inside and not talk about them. Because when a friend comes up to us and they tell us that they’re feeling depressed about the meaninglessness of life or when they say they’re feeling despair about the lack of control they ultimately have over things, how interesting, Cioran would say, that we often meet that person with a look of concern. That’s the default. We may try to fix them as though they’re broken or something, broken for acknowledging reality on reality’s terms.

But Cioran would say, why does it have to be this way? His point isn’t that we shouldn’t try to help our friends if they’re feeling bad. I mean, of course you should, if that’s what you want to do. His point is more that these negative internal experiences are a part of the human condition sometimes. Shouldn’t we be able to talk about reality? And why is it something that makes us so uncomfortable when people do? I mean, take any other aspect of reality. 1+1 = 2. When your first-grade teacher talked about that aspect of reality, were you sad? Were you concerned? Was that the forbidden equation or something? No, of course not. So, why these parts of experience in particular? Why the taboo?

To Cioran, the answer is simply because talking about them makes us feel uncomfortable. This point that he makes reminds me a bit of Heidegger’s point in his concept of being unto death. Heidegger makes the point that many people spend their lives doing anything they can to not consider the absolute, total reality that one day they’re going to have to die. We even structure our societies around the denial of that reality. We hide death and disease and illness away in these cordoned-off, distant facilities so that we never have to really look at it: cemeteries, hospitals, retirement homes. And no matter how uncomfortable it may make us to acknowledge this reality every day, ultimately, if we lived with a constant awareness of death, our lives would be lived in a much higher resolution. Well, so too with Cioran. These darker moments of our experience make us extremely uncomfortable. And by not vocalizing the way we feel and by making people feel damaged or broken when they do, it helps us in our quest to do what most people do in this life in his eyes, to live in a constant state of denial.

Now, although there are more, three primary strategies people use to try to get rid of these bad feelings. The first one is that through various methods they try to just reason these feelings away. This is probably the most common method that has been used historically. This could be a religion. This could be a philosopher and their ideas. This could be a self-help book. This could be one of those weekend motivational seminars where everyone suddenly thinks it’s a good idea to jump around, wave their arms like one of those two people outside the carwash. I mean, to Cioran, it doesn’t matter what it is. This is anything where we come up with some sort of narrative that aims to get away from these feelings.

By the way, this is one of the things that makes Cioran such an interesting philosopher. He doesn’t even like philosophy. And he saw all of these attempts by thinkers to create these rationalizations for these feelings as a waste of time. This, no doubt, won’t be a surprise to many of you. Knowing that he’s doing his work in the early to mid-20th century, coming out of the Enlightenment, reason is not exactly everyone’s go-to when it comes to solving the problems we face as people. I mean, conclusions about biology and psychology are being highly scrutinized as are many of the other sciences. Language and its instability is under attack. Relativism, nihilism, historicism—these are becoming the primary ways we direct our morality, not something some dude happened to reason to in his basement one day.

Cioran’s point is that when you try to reason away these feelings of dread and melancholy about existence, all you are really doing is being intellectually dishonest. You don’t like how uncomfortable these feelings are, so you try to find some rationalization about life that allows you to feel more optimistic. But what you are simultaneously doing there, he says, is chaining yourself to a doctrine of false hope about higher things. Now, again, at surface level, this may sound like he’s trying to be a downer. And someone might come away from that point with an attitude like, “Well, then, what’s the point in doing anything?” But at a deeper level, what Cioran is saying here is just think of how many possibilities are made impossible to you by chaining yourself to some optimism cult.

When you don’t have any chains and you accept the aimlessness of things, the flipside of that is that now you can go anywhere. When you accept the dangers of the Savanna, for example, you don’t have to stay crammed inside of that armored car on the road watching things from a distance. But just like any great attraction that’s worth seeing, it comes with a cost. And the cost of this type of existence is melancholy, dread, and all the rest of the feelings that come with intellectual honesty.

The second way Cioran thinks we try to get rid of the feelings is to distract ourselves away from them. This is a really common one in today’s day and age because we have so many tools that help us do it so effectively. Netflix, social media, video games, things that get you intoxicated, fantasy novels—there’s no shortage of things to distract you away from these feelings if that’s what you choose to do. But Cioran would say that if you choose to ignore these feelings, you do so at your own peril. Because here’s the thing, you can’t be on a constant IV drip of Netflix your entire life. These feelings of dread and melancholy—they’re coming.

And it doesn’t matter how comfortable you’ve been or how long it’s been since you’ve experienced failure or tragedy, life will eventually throw something your way. And when it does, do you want to be comfortable dealing with those feelings? Or do you want those muscles atrophied? Do you want to face something that’s going to be a trying time, but you know you’re going to get through it? Or do you want potential catastrophe? Yes, just like reasoning things away, distraction may work in the short term, but it doesn’t solve the problem and, ultimately, just serves to rob you at some other point with an experience.

The third common way people get rid of these is to just accept them as reality. We see this in things like stoicism, obviously in many eastern traditions. The idea is that if we can just learn to accept that things are ultimately out of our control and be fine with it, then all those things, no matter how uncomfortable they are, will no longer have any power over us. Now, that sounds great in theory. But Cioran was pretty skeptical about this hypothetical person and how much they really accepted these things or whether this was just yet another way of creating a rationalization for the sake of disarming the power these feelings have over us.

You know, he has a quote that man accepts death but not the hour of his death. I think part of what he’s getting at there is, look, we can accept the fact that one day in the future a meteor the size of Canada is going to unexpectedly slam into earth and end life as we know it. We can go about our lives caring about all kinds of things, never worrying about that potential meteor because, honestly, if it comes, what could we have done anyway? And if it doesn’t, then, hey, don’t I look wise for never having worried about it? But good luck when you actually see a rock the size of Canada raining fire on everything you’ve ever known and loved. Good luck having a look on your face like you’re waiting in line for a sandwich.

But let’s set that aside for a second. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that these people have learned to completely accept everything that is out of their control. Cioran would say, mere acceptance is not enough to be a functioning human being. In a universe that is meaningless and filled with absurdity, to have reasons to get off the couch and do anything beyond eating and sleeping, you necessarily need to evoke, as he says, moral, aesthetic, religious, social, and many more reasons for doing it. No doubt, even those who have acquired this level of acceptance have made what Cioran would see as intellectually dishonest leaps in other areas, educated by the moral, aesthetic, religious, and social.

And here's where he’s coming from. The main premise of Cioran’s work is nothingness. He says, “When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”

Here’s what he means. Consider this for a second. Like we said before, reason can certainly pacify you. Reason can give you temporary relief from feelings of dread and melancholy. But another way of looking at that is to say that in doing so, you chain yourself to a doctrine and limit the possibilities you have in life. That’s an alternative way of looking at the merits of reason. Well, couldn’t we also say that a person that doesn’t have a pacifier of reason or distraction or acceptance disarming these uncomfortable feelings—couldn’t we say that a person filled with this feeling of despair is in some way full of life in a way all the other ones aren’t? I mean, if despair and melancholy are parts of life at times, then couldn’t we say running from them seems to be a denial or a negation of life in some way?

You know, it’s from this place that I want to look at this claim that Cioran is a pessimist a little bit closer. From his perspective, he is faced with the same reality as everyone else—the tragedy of our birth against our will into a universe that we quickly realize is meaningless and absurd. Now, most people at this point run in the other direction. Once again, they pacify—reason, distraction, acceptance—but from his perspective, none of these have actually solved the problem. The universe is still absurd, and no rationalization or distraction has changed that fact. So, from the perspective of most that use one of these tactics, yes, Cioran is going to look like an ultimate pessimist because he’s being negative about their optimistic outlook. But from his perspective, he’s not being pessimistic; he’s just calling it how he sees it. And he certainly doesn’t advocate sitting around, lamenting the fact that everything is meaningless and the world is absurd all the time.

What makes him an interesting thinker is that his tactic is to steer into the absurdity, to run into the burning building that everyone else wants to run away from, to learn to love the world, which is pure absurdity, simply for the sake of itself and not for the sake of what meaning it can give to us—to be able to connect with pure uselessness. Remember, as he said, to be able to love something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. By steering into the absurdity and embracing it, we affirm life. By running from it in all sorts of creative ways, we negate it. Can we say that this embrace of the human condition—both the dark and the light sides of it—can we say that this is a type of optimism?

But make no mistake, if you wanted to embark on a journey like this, it certainly isn’t going to be easy. This is a lifestyle that without question will require you to accept these feelings of melancholy, dread, failure, loneliness, and all the rest. But by embracing the true absurdity of the world and the reality of the emotional variance of the human condition, your reward will be to have access to the limitless possibilities that lay before you.

And we’ll talk about it more on next episode, but Emil Cioran would go on to say that he’s never had a friend who didn’t get real and steer into the absurdity of things without a pacifier. And you can kind of see where he’s coming from. When picking your friends or when trying to understand yourself, when trying to get to know anyone, do you want a super distracted person talking to you? No, how do you even get to know them? Do you want someone just parroting some book they read or rambling about what Nietzsche said on a topic? No, I’d rather just hang out with Nietzsche, personally. Do you relate to someone who masquerades around as someone who has transcended all of us other feeble human beings and our feelings of sadness? See, it’s only by contending with the true possibilities available to us that we have access to ourselves and to others.

Cioran has a quote in his book On the Heights of Despair where he asks a question. He asks, “Who is more unhappy? He who feels his own loneliness or he who feels the loneliness of the world?” He’s saying a few things in this quote, but one of them I think is a perfect way of thinking of what many see as a paradox that lies at the foundations of his work. See, on one hand, he’s the thinker that’s going to go there. He’s the thinker that is dark enough to bring up the cosmic level of loneliness of the human species, a loneliness that everyone feels. But just by bringing it up, talking about it, unpacking it, making fun of it at times, agonizing over it, and ultimately not accepting it to somehow diffuse it of how it makes us uncomfortable, but by embracing it, steering into it—when we do all these things, we feel less alone after reading his work because we feel not only that someone else is feeling the way we do sometimes on our worst days, but also that everyone is feeling this way sometimes. And that makes you feel like you’re at least a part of something.

Now, he does this with every one of these feelings that we talked about today. He steers into them. He’s fascinated by the most dark and taboo things to talk about in so-called polite conversation. Two of his favorites, though, that he spent a lifetime absolutely fascinated with were the concepts of failure and suicide. His thoughts on failure are as interesting as they are hilarious. His favorite people in life were complete failures. He would revel in his own failures in life and thought they should be embraced. We’ll talk about it way more next episode.

Suicide, on the other hand, was a bit more of a complicated issue. I want next episode to be exciting, so I don’t want to give too much away here. But what I will say is that Cioran did not think suicide was an answer to uncomfortable feelings. He himself did not commit suicide. In fact, it might be tempting to picture Cioran as some emo-looking dude at the corner of the bar—“Craft beer is meaningless!” No, on the contrary, remember, his whole message is to embrace life, which to him is necessarily to embrace melancholy, dread, failure, etc. There are several people that write about meeting Cioran, and they make it very clear that he may have been one of the most jovial people they’d ever met.

To leave you something to think about and to foreshadow what we’ll be making a case for next episode, I leave you today with this. “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, it’s the only one.”

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.