The Problem of Europe in Emil Cioran

(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).