Emil Cioran was a writer and philosopher born in 1911 in what is present day Rasinari,
Romania. He is renowned for his penetratingly dark, nihilistic, yet beautiful writing style,
considered by many to be one of the great writers of despair, building his philosophical arguments
off the somber, emotional rhythm of his prose, often expressing shocking thoughts and dark humor,
nearly every sentence and passage hung down from the very heights of despair.
Born into a socially and spiritually volatile time of western history, somewhere in the middle of the
increasing disintegration of traditional religious ideology and the newly emerging philosophical
movements of existentialism, idealism, and other pessimistic schools of thought,
Cioran would find himself positioned on the face of a mountain that humanity was desperately trying
to get over. And from his view, he saw nothing. A deathly climb to another valley of nowhere.
At a fairly young age, Cioran would become a heavy reader, going on to study
literature and philosophy at the University of Bucharest, a public university in Romania.
Here he would study and read the works of philosophers like Immanuel Kant,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Lev Shestov, Hegel, and many others. At twenty-three,
he would publish his first book titled On the Heights of Despair, which would soon go on to
receive controversial, but mostly positive critical acclaim, achieving him two notable
awards, and setting him on the path to soon become an internationally recognized writer and thinker.
In this first work, not only did Cioran reveal his promising, young intellectual mind, but also
what would go on to become the reoccurring, lifelong themes and obsessions of his work;
themes like despair, suffering, social isolation, absurdity, futility, failure, decay, and death.
Written out of a spell of horrible insomnia, this first book would provide a foretelling
of what awaited Cioran: a lifelong exploration of the underbelly of the human condition fueled
by a depression infused insomniac lifestyle. “I’ve never been able to write otherwise than
in the midst of the depression brought about by my nights of insomnia.” Cioran writes.
“For seven years I could barely sleep. I need this depression, and even today before I sit
down to write I play a disk of Gypsy music from Hungary.” Like many great writers and artists,
Cioran felt as though he had to write. It was not as if he made his work sad,
but that his sadness made his work. In the moments of depression, writing was, according to him,
his only therapy. His first book, and the twenty plus others of his to come, according to Cioran,
saved him from what might have otherwise seemed like the logical conclusion to much of his work.
If nothing else, this aspect of his work and life reveals a profound insight into the potency
of the creative process. That even in writing about the futility and meaninglessness of life
and its endeavors, the power of the creative process can, in some sense,
save the writer from the very substance and content of their own work, paradoxically making
the futility and meaninglessness that they discuss somewhat less futile and meaningless.
After leaving Romania in 1940, Cioran would end up living the majority of his life in Paris.
He would go on to produce upwards of twenty books, written in both Romanian and French, keeping the
same eloquence, wit, and intensity throughout. His work would increasingly develop and maintain
him a highly respected reputation amongst the prominent French intellectual scene, garnering
the admiration of high-ranking philosophical peers as well as a large following of readers across the
world. Despite this, he would live a very modest, private life, going to great lengths to avoid any
and all accolades and any way of life that would otherwise be considered ordinarily successful.
In 1995, at the age of eighty-four, Cioran died after having developed Alzheimer’s
several years prior. Slowly but surely, one of the most eloquent minds of the 20th century lost all
relationship with words and then experienced the main theme of his life’s work firsthand.
In terms of Cioran’s philosophy, despite his work being unmistakably perceptive and intelligent,
he is somewhat interesting and perhaps debatable in the context of a philosopher. For the most
part, traditional philosophical work is almost always grounded in a particular system of thought,
which is formed or integrated first as a foundation and then logically built on from there.
Cioran’s work, however, does not really start from nor integrate any real system of this form.
Rather, it relies more on his aphoristic, observational writing style, which seems
to almost philosophize and reveal metaphysical ideas through the emotionally tense, subjective,
and chaotic reading experience alone, without much consideration of logical structure or systematic
reasoning. Seeing as how a key part of Cioran’s philosophy was that he disagreed with the premise
of reason and traditional philosophy as a means of resolving life and explaining its reasonlessness,
this approach arguably makes sense. To adequately argue for a philosophy of
absurdity and reasonlessness, what better way is there than to write without priority for structure
or reason? And in this sense, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Cioran is sort of
an antiphilosophy philosopher. Which perhaps nonetheless is, ironically, still a philosophy.
According to what CAN be surmised of Cioran’s views, it is more or less death specifically that
both causes the futility of life and possess the inevitable limit to all reason within it. However,
in his most famous work, The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily
follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and
not death in it of itself. The attempt to reason an understanding or solution to the consciousness
awareness of death stemming from birth is thus both the driving force of philosophy, religion,
and science, and simultaneously their collapsing force. The unbeatable opponent under which all
reason, logic, and human effort crumble. And consequently, any philosophical attempt to do so,
for Cioran, can only be a contemplation on failure. Broadly speaking, this concept would also
become a fundamental tenant of his philosophy, often underpinning his ideas on the notion that
human endeavors are almost always synonymous and fated with failure. What his work also seemed
to parallel alongside this dread and nihilism, though, is the notion of accepting and playing
into the absurdity of it all. Loving the absurd uselessness for what it is, how it is, and using
it against itself, and living anyway. In the words of Cioran, “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.”
It is in this dive into the absurdity that Cioran seems to pose the question: can those who accept
and embrace failure and disaster ever really fail or be struck by either? Pessimism, in this sense,
almost serves as a trump card. The last true failure being the failure of optimism.
From there, we become, as he put it, “invincible victims.”
There is a certain unique and important quality to the irony of Cioran’s work.
As a sort of antiphilosophy philosopher who argued that life cannot be made or reasoned
into any sort of reconciliation or meaningful benefit, he nonetheless did so by philosophizing.
At least in some form. Nihilism, of which he is generally associated, denies the value of all
things. But can a nihilist philosophy be expressed as a philosophy and remain a nihilist philosophy?
In other words, can the premise and conclusion be that life is inherently meaningless,
and that endeavoring and seeking reason is entirely futile, whilst simultaneously making
this meaningful claim through creative action and, albeit subversive, providing reasons for it?
Discussing or creatively expressing the notion that all is meaningless and void of reason
is itself a creation of meaning out of the void motivated by the very void of reason.
The process of forming meaning, it seems, can perhaps not be escaped, even by one the greatest
so-called nihilists. And perhaps then, at bottom, Cioran is never really declaring true nihilism.
There is the more obvious reading of Cioran, and perhaps others like him, that can reasonably come
off as if it was created by someone who outright hates life and lives with a constant bitterness
towards everyone and everything. But there is also another read that seemingly reveals a paradoxical
reverence and embrace of life. Although Cioran might not have explicitly agreed with this,
to speak of life with such candor in the way he did, to think it is worthy to be spoken of at all,
to refuse to lie to it or about it, despite how dark or bleak it might be,
perhaps suggests a certain hidden, but nonetheless deep admiration and
acceptance of it. When asked once why he writes about such dismal topics in the way he does,
Cioran said, “Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.” His work time and time
again demonstrates this, revealing the perhaps vile and horribly unresolvable qualities of life,
while simultaneously reveling the potential for redemption contained inside them. A worthiness of
enduring, of thinking, of writing, of living life. Cursed with the gift of consciousness,
we are all inescapably forced into the beautiful confrontation of the void
and the absurd inevitability of creating meaning and somethingness out of it.
Cioran’s work is likely not for everyone, but for those whom it is, it is likely with a great
degree. As all art and literature arguably should, his work attempts to reflect, with as much brute
earnestness as possible, the things most of us know and feel but are often too scared or unsure
to not only talk about but think about. He was one of the rare explorers willing, or perhaps
forced into traveling through the depths of hell and heights of despair and then tell about it.
Perhaps Cioran’s work can be seen simply as a collection of life-refusing nihilistic thoughts,
or perhaps it can also be seen as an embodiment of the irrational but no less potent force of human
creative consciousness at work; its ability to meaningfully endure even its own horrible
conditions. And in this, in his works’ arguably successful confrontation and embracing of the sad,
hopeless, and absurd parts of life, it serves as an enduring and important connection point
into these often hidden but deeply shared human experiences, reminding us that we aren’t so alone
and reassuring us with the comforting notion that,
“I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?” - Emil Cioran.