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quill_notes_destiny's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.75
finnley's review
5.0
criminally underrated. hard to come by in the physical form- if you can get your hands on this, do so expeditiously.
clmassey24's review against another edition
5.0
Cioran never fails to dazzle. His ruminations on humankind's hopeless condition take the shape of frenetic essays here, rather than his usual aphoristic style. It is a shame that this book has failed to be republished since its original printing. Physical copies of this work are scarce – I myself was gifted it, for which I am grateful, but it came at a cost of $90.
This work does contain an at-times frustrating mystery, which the reader must decipher as to what exactly Cioran is getting at. While this sometimes occurs with his work, it feels rather odd and rambling. My rating was somewhere between four and five but given my love for Emil and for the extravagance this book often wields, I've rounded up.
This work does contain an at-times frustrating mystery, which the reader must decipher as to what exactly Cioran is getting at. While this sometimes occurs with his work, it feels rather odd and rambling. My rating was somewhere between four and five but given my love for Emil and for the extravagance this book often wields, I've rounded up.
schmidtmark56's review against another edition
5.0
After many abortive attempts, I’ve finally finished this book.
I was interested to see that the writer of the introduction (which was phenomenal as far as introductions go) used an Artaud quote to start and conclude the intro. Artaud not only pales in comparison to Cioran, but is a much more limited thinker and much more annoyingly postmodern/reactionary, whereas Cioran is much wittier and more nuanced (and, as a result, more original) than any other postmodern I’ve read.
And I would say Cioran is more of a postmodern than a modern, since he, in the tradition of Nietzsche, largely focuses on the loss of God and the ramifications that has caused. While Nietzsche claimed the absence of God required something to fill the void (like the will to power or the Ubermensch), Cioran seems to imply that nothing can; the veil has been torn, the wizard behind the curtain is a small man talking into a microphone, and we can never unsee this. This is not gloating in any way, and it’s not technically pessimistic; it’s something else. There isn’t the rapid heartbeats and wide-eyed hairpulling of nihilism here, there’s something else entirely. Something which, although resigned to floating adrift on the ocean, decides to recline in the dingy and sing to the starry sky, because Cioran is an insomniac anyway.
Cioran rightly points out how humans, who have so ardently divorced themselves from the animal kingdom and from nature itself (both of which were the goal and basis of premodernity) are now lost. It used to be that, for examplem in a Christian context, being “not of the world” was a good thing, because it implied another world which you would be able to relate to (We Are but Pilgrims Here, etc.). With the disenchantment of modernism which is completed in postmodernity (whose parents are WWI and WWII), there is no way to regain that enchantment. If the Fall into Sin was falling into a battle with God Himself, the Fall of Disenchantment was a fall into the hell of Sartre, where hell is other people, even, as Cioran would say (going one step further), hell is ourselves divorced from the old ways, and divorced from true communion with others. I’m impressed by Cioran’s knowledge of theology and his surprisingly respectful approach to Christianity and religion. He acknowledges its goodness, in other words how it kept us sane, but he doesn’t gloat over its fading nor does he lament it, per se. He laments the more general fall into madness that religion’s absence causes. But even lament isn’t the right word.
The second essay starts with a witty denunciation of “civilizing” and how “enlightening” the “primitive” (or proselytizing to the heathen) is actually just infecting them with the same disease that you have, it’s being jealous of their untainted reality and forcing them to suffer the same way as you. You see their lack of medical care and you assume that mortgages and suicide and depression are better, when in reality they might not be.
“Was it really to "save time" that these engines were invented? More deprived, more disinherited
than the troglodyte, civilized man has not one moment to himself; his very leisure is feverish,”
"In cultivated periods, men make it a kind of religion to admire what was admired in primitive times," notes Voltaire
“All things considered, the century of the end will not be the most refined or even the most complicated, but the most hurried, the century in which, its Being dissolved in movement, civilization, in a supreme impulse toward the worst, will fall to pieces in the whirlwind it has raised.”
The third essay starts talking about the changing of the gods (instead of the changing of the guard), and that we’re at such a junction as the romans were when Christianity burst onto the scene, but ends talking about the nature of doubt and its differences with negation. Whereas negation is simply the other side of the same coin as acceptance, doubt is throwing the coin away. It’s an option outside of the other two, instead of a third side of the coin (the rim, perhaps) nor is it a tangent off of negation; it’s its own beast.
“A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt”
“To deny, granted, is to affirm in reverse.”
“Because negation is an aggressive, impure doubt, an inverted dogmatism, it rarely denies itself, rarely frees itself from its frenzies. Doubt, on the other hand, frequently, even inevitably, calls itself in question, prefers to abolish itself rather than see its perplexities degenerate into articles of faith.”
He ties that idea of doubt back to the start of the essay with the following:
“A religion is nothing by itself; its fate depends on those who adopt it. The new gods demand new men, capable, in any circumstance, of decision, of choice, of saying firmly yes or no, instead of floundering in quibbles or becoming anemic by abuse of nuance. Since the virtues of barbarians consist precisely in the power of taking sides, of affirming or denying, they will always be celebrated by declining periods. The nostalgia for barbarism is the last word of a civilization; and thereby of skepticism.”
The next essay fleshes out the negation/affirmation & doubt (skepticism) paradigm, especially about how doubt is a much more dogmatic and more entrenched stance than the vacillation between negation and acceptance. In essence, at least those latter two are human, whereas doubt is paralyzing and stultifying:
“Affirmation and negation being no different qualitatively, the transition from one to the other is natural and easy. But once we have espoused doubt, it is neither easy nor natural to return to the certitudes they represent”
“If certitude were established on earth, if it suppressed all trace of curiosity and anxiety from men's minds, nothing would be changed for the predestined skeptic. Even when his arguments are demolished one by one, he is not shaken from his positions. To dislodge him, to disturb him deeply, he must be attacked on his greed for vacillations, his thirst for perplexities: what he seeks is not truth, it is endless insecurity, endless interrogation. Hesitation, which is his passion, his risk, his discount martyrdom, will dominate all his thoughts and all his undertakings. And though he vacillates as much by method as by necessity, he will nonetheless react like a fanatic: he cannot leave off his obsessions or, a fortiori, himself. Infinite doubt will make him, paradoxically, the prisoner of a closed world. Since he will not be conscious of this, he will persist in believing that his course collides with no barrier and that it is neither inflected nor altered by the slightest weakness. His exasperated need of uncertainty will become a disease for which he will seek no remedy
“But you will keep one illusion nonetheless: the tenacious, ineradicable one of believing you have none.”
There are a few more essays of varying quality, but the initial fire which burned in the first three or so essays kept to a glow of embers until the last essay. Time, perhaps the most pregnant of all topics, comprised that last essay, which was an absolute tour de force which was almost solid underlining for me.
“In an explained universe, nothing would still have a meaning, except madness itself.”
“To know we are mortal is really to die twice over-no, is to die each time we know we must die.”
Overall I was positively surprised by Cioran; he’s often portrayed as some nihilistic curmudgeon who is some fatalistic prophet of doom, while in reality I found him very engaging, very nuanced and easy to follow despite his massive vocabulary, and a frankly pleasant read. He understood Christianity and religion in general very well, didn’t disparage is unfairly, and was thoroughly against certain dead ideologies like scientism and other drivel. A philosopher everyone should be familiar with, and a great introduction to him and his work.
I was interested to see that the writer of the introduction (which was phenomenal as far as introductions go) used an Artaud quote to start and conclude the intro. Artaud not only pales in comparison to Cioran, but is a much more limited thinker and much more annoyingly postmodern/reactionary, whereas Cioran is much wittier and more nuanced (and, as a result, more original) than any other postmodern I’ve read.
And I would say Cioran is more of a postmodern than a modern, since he, in the tradition of Nietzsche, largely focuses on the loss of God and the ramifications that has caused. While Nietzsche claimed the absence of God required something to fill the void (like the will to power or the Ubermensch), Cioran seems to imply that nothing can; the veil has been torn, the wizard behind the curtain is a small man talking into a microphone, and we can never unsee this. This is not gloating in any way, and it’s not technically pessimistic; it’s something else. There isn’t the rapid heartbeats and wide-eyed hairpulling of nihilism here, there’s something else entirely. Something which, although resigned to floating adrift on the ocean, decides to recline in the dingy and sing to the starry sky, because Cioran is an insomniac anyway.
Cioran rightly points out how humans, who have so ardently divorced themselves from the animal kingdom and from nature itself (both of which were the goal and basis of premodernity) are now lost. It used to be that, for examplem in a Christian context, being “not of the world” was a good thing, because it implied another world which you would be able to relate to (We Are but Pilgrims Here, etc.). With the disenchantment of modernism which is completed in postmodernity (whose parents are WWI and WWII), there is no way to regain that enchantment. If the Fall into Sin was falling into a battle with God Himself, the Fall of Disenchantment was a fall into the hell of Sartre, where hell is other people, even, as Cioran would say (going one step further), hell is ourselves divorced from the old ways, and divorced from true communion with others. I’m impressed by Cioran’s knowledge of theology and his surprisingly respectful approach to Christianity and religion. He acknowledges its goodness, in other words how it kept us sane, but he doesn’t gloat over its fading nor does he lament it, per se. He laments the more general fall into madness that religion’s absence causes. But even lament isn’t the right word.
The second essay starts with a witty denunciation of “civilizing” and how “enlightening” the “primitive” (or proselytizing to the heathen) is actually just infecting them with the same disease that you have, it’s being jealous of their untainted reality and forcing them to suffer the same way as you. You see their lack of medical care and you assume that mortgages and suicide and depression are better, when in reality they might not be.
“Was it really to "save time" that these engines were invented? More deprived, more disinherited
than the troglodyte, civilized man has not one moment to himself; his very leisure is feverish,”
"In cultivated periods, men make it a kind of religion to admire what was admired in primitive times," notes Voltaire
“All things considered, the century of the end will not be the most refined or even the most complicated, but the most hurried, the century in which, its Being dissolved in movement, civilization, in a supreme impulse toward the worst, will fall to pieces in the whirlwind it has raised.”
The third essay starts talking about the changing of the gods (instead of the changing of the guard), and that we’re at such a junction as the romans were when Christianity burst onto the scene, but ends talking about the nature of doubt and its differences with negation. Whereas negation is simply the other side of the same coin as acceptance, doubt is throwing the coin away. It’s an option outside of the other two, instead of a third side of the coin (the rim, perhaps) nor is it a tangent off of negation; it’s its own beast.
“A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt”
“To deny, granted, is to affirm in reverse.”
“Because negation is an aggressive, impure doubt, an inverted dogmatism, it rarely denies itself, rarely frees itself from its frenzies. Doubt, on the other hand, frequently, even inevitably, calls itself in question, prefers to abolish itself rather than see its perplexities degenerate into articles of faith.”
He ties that idea of doubt back to the start of the essay with the following:
“A religion is nothing by itself; its fate depends on those who adopt it. The new gods demand new men, capable, in any circumstance, of decision, of choice, of saying firmly yes or no, instead of floundering in quibbles or becoming anemic by abuse of nuance. Since the virtues of barbarians consist precisely in the power of taking sides, of affirming or denying, they will always be celebrated by declining periods. The nostalgia for barbarism is the last word of a civilization; and thereby of skepticism.”
The next essay fleshes out the negation/affirmation & doubt (skepticism) paradigm, especially about how doubt is a much more dogmatic and more entrenched stance than the vacillation between negation and acceptance. In essence, at least those latter two are human, whereas doubt is paralyzing and stultifying:
“Affirmation and negation being no different qualitatively, the transition from one to the other is natural and easy. But once we have espoused doubt, it is neither easy nor natural to return to the certitudes they represent”
“If certitude were established on earth, if it suppressed all trace of curiosity and anxiety from men's minds, nothing would be changed for the predestined skeptic. Even when his arguments are demolished one by one, he is not shaken from his positions. To dislodge him, to disturb him deeply, he must be attacked on his greed for vacillations, his thirst for perplexities: what he seeks is not truth, it is endless insecurity, endless interrogation. Hesitation, which is his passion, his risk, his discount martyrdom, will dominate all his thoughts and all his undertakings. And though he vacillates as much by method as by necessity, he will nonetheless react like a fanatic: he cannot leave off his obsessions or, a fortiori, himself. Infinite doubt will make him, paradoxically, the prisoner of a closed world. Since he will not be conscious of this, he will persist in believing that his course collides with no barrier and that it is neither inflected nor altered by the slightest weakness. His exasperated need of uncertainty will become a disease for which he will seek no remedy
“But you will keep one illusion nonetheless: the tenacious, ineradicable one of believing you have none.”
There are a few more essays of varying quality, but the initial fire which burned in the first three or so essays kept to a glow of embers until the last essay. Time, perhaps the most pregnant of all topics, comprised that last essay, which was an absolute tour de force which was almost solid underlining for me.
“In an explained universe, nothing would still have a meaning, except madness itself.”
“To know we are mortal is really to die twice over-no, is to die each time we know we must die.”
Overall I was positively surprised by Cioran; he’s often portrayed as some nihilistic curmudgeon who is some fatalistic prophet of doom, while in reality I found him very engaging, very nuanced and easy to follow despite his massive vocabulary, and a frankly pleasant read. He understood Christianity and religion in general very well, didn’t disparage is unfairly, and was thoroughly against certain dead ideologies like scientism and other drivel. A philosopher everyone should be familiar with, and a great introduction to him and his work.
epictetsocrate's review against another edition
4.0
Nu-i bine pentru om să-şi amintească în fiecare clipă că este om. E rău fie şi numai să se aplece asupră-şi; dar e şi mai rău să se aplece asupra speciei cu zelul unui obsedat, dând astfel mizeriilor arbitrare ale introspecţiei un fundament obiectiv şi o justificare filosofică. Atâta vreme cât îţi macini propriul eu, poţi crede că cedezi unui capriciu; dar de îndată ce toate eurile devin centrul unei interminabile ruminaţii, regăseşti pe o cale ocolită neajunsurile generalizate ale propriei condiţii, propriul accident înălţat la rangul de normă, de caz universal.
Percepem mai întâi anomalia faptului brut de a exista şi abia după aceea pe cea a situaţiei noastre specifice: uimirea de a fi precede uimirea de a fi om. Totuşi, caracterul insolit al acestei stări ar trebui să constituie datul primordial al perplexităţilor noastre: e mai puţin firesc să fii om decât să fii pur şi simplu. Simţim asta instinctiv; de unde şi voluptatea ce ne cuprinde de fiecare dată când ne întoarcem faţa de la noi înşine pentru a ne cufunda în somnul preafericit al obiectelor. Nu suntem cu adevărat noi înşine decât atunci când, faţă în faţă cu sinele, nu coincidem cu nimic, nici măcar cu singularitatea noastră.
Blestemul ce ne copleşeşte apăsa şi asupra primului nostru strămoş, cu mult înainte ca acesta să fi privit către copacul cunoaşterii. Nemulţumit de sine, el era încă şi mai nemulţumit de Dumnezeu, pe care-l invidia în mod inconştient; a devenit conştient de asta datorită bunelor oficii ale ispititorului, auxiliar mai curând decât autor al ruinei sale. Înainte trăia cu presimţirea cunoaşterii, cu o ştiinţă ce se ignora pe sine, într-o falsă inocenţă, propice înfloririi geloziei, viciu zămislit de frecventarea unuia mai norocos decât sine; or, strămoşul nostru îl avea în preajmă pe Dumnezeu, pândindu-l şi fiind pândit de el. Asta nu putea duce la nimic bun.
„Din toţi pomii din rai poţi să mănânci, iar din pomul cunoştinţei binelui şi răului să nu mănânci, căci în ziua în care vei mânca din el, vei muri negreşit”.
Percepem mai întâi anomalia faptului brut de a exista şi abia după aceea pe cea a situaţiei noastre specifice: uimirea de a fi precede uimirea de a fi om. Totuşi, caracterul insolit al acestei stări ar trebui să constituie datul primordial al perplexităţilor noastre: e mai puţin firesc să fii om decât să fii pur şi simplu. Simţim asta instinctiv; de unde şi voluptatea ce ne cuprinde de fiecare dată când ne întoarcem faţa de la noi înşine pentru a ne cufunda în somnul preafericit al obiectelor. Nu suntem cu adevărat noi înşine decât atunci când, faţă în faţă cu sinele, nu coincidem cu nimic, nici măcar cu singularitatea noastră.
Blestemul ce ne copleşeşte apăsa şi asupra primului nostru strămoş, cu mult înainte ca acesta să fi privit către copacul cunoaşterii. Nemulţumit de sine, el era încă şi mai nemulţumit de Dumnezeu, pe care-l invidia în mod inconştient; a devenit conştient de asta datorită bunelor oficii ale ispititorului, auxiliar mai curând decât autor al ruinei sale. Înainte trăia cu presimţirea cunoaşterii, cu o ştiinţă ce se ignora pe sine, într-o falsă inocenţă, propice înfloririi geloziei, viciu zămislit de frecventarea unuia mai norocos decât sine; or, strămoşul nostru îl avea în preajmă pe Dumnezeu, pândindu-l şi fiind pândit de el. Asta nu putea duce la nimic bun.
„Din toţi pomii din rai poţi să mănânci, iar din pomul cunoştinţei binelui şi răului să nu mănânci, căci în ziua în care vei mânca din el, vei muri negreşit”.
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