(Notes towards an essay. Concerning Cioran's pessimism and its place in world history, with a tenuous but promising connection to Spengler, and all coming down to Nietzsche and the problem of Europe. Comments would be very helpful.)
It is closing-time in the gardens of the West and from now
on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the
quality of his despair [Cyril Connolly].
And how to believe that history—a procession of delusions—can
drag on much longer? Soon it will be closing-time in the gardens of everywhere
[Emil Cioran].
Two Truths and the
Tragic View of History
In “The Two Truths” (Drawn
and Quartered, transl. Richard Howard [2012], pp. 3–15), Cioran offers a
tragic view of history. He begins with “[t]he theory of a double truth” (p. 4).
There is “ordinary truth or samrviti,
‘veiled truth’ or more exactly ‘truth of error,’ privilege or curse of the
nonliberated”, and “real truth or paramartha,
attribute of the delivered” (ibid.).
Liberation or deliverance is “
sarvakarmaphalatyāga”, a “spellbinding word” meaning “detachment
from the fruit of action” (p. 5; cf.
Bhagavad Gītā,
12:11). This is the “real truth that annihilates all the others,”
that is, ordinary truths of error, “and exposes their emptiness” (Cioran,
loc. cit.). For the liberated and
disillusioned it’s “[i]mpossible to concede that the tragic is the individual’s
lot, and not that of history” (p. 12).
But a man or culture that achieves this liberation “excludes
itself,” in so doing, “from becoming” (p. 9): because attachment to ordinary
truths of error, to action and its fruit, is “that motor, no, that cause of history” (ibid.). The delivered withdraw from history, “can no longer endure
the burden” of attachment (p. 6); but for as long as some remain nonliberated,
history will continue.
The liberated and excluded “cut a wretched figure in history”
(p. 5); and Europe, in awaking from history—becoming disillusioned, no longer
believing her own motive truths of error—“[h]aving governed two hemispheres […]
is now becoming their laughingstock” (p. 9).
The “delirium” (p. 7) of participation in history, this “galloping
obnubilation” (pp. 4–5), wears a culture out. It awakens. Disillusioned, it’s “the
ex-fanatic par excellence” (p. 6); it
becomes as the primitive societies were that “wallowed for millennia in magnificent
sclerosis […] before contact with the
West” (p. 7; emphasis added).
Which is the nub of the issue. Sclerotic, “liberated” former
powers are sitting ducks. Delirium is necessary for life. “The prerequisites of
Buddhism,” says Nietzsche, acidly, “are a mild climate, great gentleness and
liberality in the customs of the people and
no
militarism” (
Antichrist, 21). The
exemplum of a healthy delirium is Judaism “in the period of the
kings,” when “Israel’s attitude to all things was the right one—that is to say,
the natural one” (
25). Its
god was “the expression of its consciousness of power, of its joy over itself”
(
ibid.).
Connolly perceives Europe’s decline, a decline which makes
the art of old—founded on truths of error, but positive and self-affirmatory—impossible,
leaving to the modern European artist only “the resonance of his solitude or
the quality of his despair.” Cioran realises it and embodies it; and thus
losing the particularity of his vision, the self-regard of a healthy “good
European”, universalises the diagnosis—dwells on the generality of moribundity.
The tragic view of history, the “real truth”, is an expression
of European decline. Justly the
Washington
Post dubs
Cioran the “final philosopher of the Western world.”
The Problem of Europe
How is Europe become a laughingstock? “How is she become as
a widow?” (
Lamentations, 1:1).
“[L]ittle by little, individuals insinuate themselves among
the ‘natives,’ too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a ‘territory’”
(Cioran, p. 8). Of whom do these natives remind us with their “distinction” but
Nietzsche’s slave, “the inevitability of [whose] being made to wait” he
transforms, through the jaundiced magic of
ressentiment
become creative, into “patience” (
On the Genealogy of
Morals, 14).
Manners, civility: the sign of civilisation. But civilisation
for Spengler is only “the inevitable destiny of the Culture” (Decline of the West, vol. 1, transl. C.
F. Atkinson [1926], p. 31), and a sorry one. “Civilizations are the most
external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable.
They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming…” (ibid.). (Consider Cioran on the
liberated: “it excludes itself from becoming” [p. 9].)
Furthermore, millennia of delirium, “long rivalries”, have
exhausted European cultures, “weakening one another” (Cioran, p. 8). This is
the kleine Politik (petty politics) embodied
in Bismarck that Nietzsche despises, the wasteful expenditure of European
vitality quarrelling with itself along old nation-state divides.
Nietzsche’s vision of
grosse
Politik (great politics) involves the forging of a new “virilised” Europe. Europe
must “[get] the upper hand of the merchant and the Philistine”, overcome “Christianity
and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth century” and the “modern ideas” of
1789, in order to “unearth a whole block of the ancient character, the decisive block
perhaps, the block of granite,” thereby to establish “one Europe, which [is] to
be mistress of the world” (
Gay Science, 362).
