Introduction by Susan Sontag E. M. Cioran Temptation to Exist From the Introduction by Susan Sontag: “Cioran is one of the most delicate minds of real power writing today. Nuance, irony, and refine¬ ment are the essence of his thinking. “His is the kind of writing that’s meant for readers who, in a sense, already know what he says; they have traversed these vertiginous thoughts for themselves. Cioran doesn’t make any of the usual efforts to ‘persuade,’ with his oddly lyrical chains of ideas, his merciless irony, his gracefully delivered allusions to nothing less than the whole of European thought since the Greeks. An argument is to be ‘recognized,’ and without too much help. Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only pithy glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment. Hence, Cioran’s tone—one of immense dignity, dogged, sometimes playful, often haughty. But for all of what may appear arrogance, there is nothing complacent in Cioran, unless it be his very sense of futility and his un¬ compromisingly elitist attitude toward the life of the mind. “Cioran’s universe of discourse is preoccupied % with the themes of sickness (individual and so¬ cial) , impasse, suffering, mortality. His fierce, tensely argued speculations sum up brilliantly the decaying urgencies of ‘Western,’ thought, but offer no relief from them beyond the considerable satisfactions of the understanding. Relief, of course, is scarcely Cioran’s intention. His aim is diagnosis.” This is the first collection of M. Cioran’s essays to be published in English. Richard Howard, who' has translated this book from the French, says: “I have translated some hundred and fifty books, and of them all, The Temptation to Exist has af- E. M. Cioran: The Temptation to Exist TRANS LATE D FROM THE FRENCH BY RICHARD HOWARD INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG QUADRANGLE BOOKS CHICAGO 1968 Ü1 U i-V >. « î i>~ i < 11 iix. Copyright © 1956 by Librairie Gallimard. Published originally as La Tentation <T Exister. English translation copyright © 1968 by Quadrangle Books, Inc. Introduction copyright © 1968 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address the publisher at 12 East Delaware Place, Chicago 60611. Manufactured in the United States of America. Illustration on title page: “J°b” by Leonard Baskin. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-10242 INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG 7 Thinking Against Oneself I 33 On a Winded Civilization | 48 A Little Theory of Destiny | 65 Advantages of Exile | 74 A People of Solitaries | 79 Some Blind Alleys: A Letter | 108 Style as Risk | 126 Beyond the Novel j 136 Dealing with the Mystics | 151 Rages and Resignations | 165 The Temptation to Exist I 206 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/temptationtoexisOOcior INTRODUCTION "What is the good of passing from one unten¬ able position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?" — SAMUEL BECKETT "Every now and then it is possible to have absolutely nothing; the possibility of nothing." — john cage Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event gets absorbed by a predatory embrace of conscious¬ ness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient “development” or, on a lower level, belittled as mere “fashion.” The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achieve¬ ments that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth. For over a century, this historicizing perspective has dominated our ability to understand anything at all. Perhaps once a marginal tic of consciousness, it's now a gigantic, uncontrollable gesture—the gesture whereby man indefati- gably patronizes himself. We understand something by locating it in a multi- determined temporal continuum. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mo¬ bile flux of past, present, and future. But even the most relevant events carry within them the form of their obso¬ lescence. Thus, a single work is eventually a contribution to a body of work; the details of a life form part of a life- history; an individual life-history is unintelligible apart from 8 THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST social, economic, and cultural history; and the life of a society is the sum of “preceding conditions/’ Meaning drowns in a stream of becoming: the senseless and over¬ documented rhythm of advent and supercession. The be¬ coming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. Yet there is no outflanking that demon of historical con¬ sciousness by turning the corrosive historicizing eye on it. Just as that succession of exhausted possibilities (unmasked and discredited by thought and history itself) in which man now situates himself seems far from being simply a mental “attitude” and therefore, it might be hoped, capable of being annulled by refocusing the mind. The best of the intellectual and creative speculation carried on in the “West” over the past hundred and fifty years seems incontestably the most energetic, dense, subtle, sheerly interesting, and true in the entire lifetime of man. And yet the equally in¬ contestable result of all this genius is our sense of standing in the ruins of thought, and on the verge of the ruins of history and of man himself. (Cogito ergo boom.) More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious ar¬ chaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse. The time of collective visions may well be over: by now both the brightest and the gloomiest, the most foolish and the wisest, have been set down. But the need for individual spiritual counsel has never seemed more acute. Sauve qui peut. * One way of explaining that commonplace of contempo¬ rary intellectual historians: the collapse, sometime in the early nineteenth century, of the venerable enterprise of philosophical system-building. Since the Greeks, philosophy (whether fused with religion or conceived as an alternative, 9 Introduction secular wisdom) had for the most part been a collective or supra-personal vision. Claiming to give an account of “what is,” in its various epistemological and ontological layers, phi¬ losophy secondarily insinuated an implicitly futuristic stand¬ ard of how things “ought to be”—under the aegis of notions like order, harmony, clarity, intelligibility, consist¬ ency, etc. But the survival of these collective impersonal visions depends on couching philosophical statements in such a way as to admit of multiple interpretations and appli¬ cations, so that their bluff can’t be called by events. Re¬ nouncing the advantages of myth, which had developed a highly sophisticated narrative mode of accounting for change and conceptual paradox, philosophy developed a new rhetori¬ cal mode: abstraction. Upon this abstract, atemporal dis¬ course—with its claim to be able to describe the non-concrete “universals” or stable forms that underpin the mutable world—the authority of philosophy has always rested. More generally, the very possibility of the objective, formalized visions of Being and of human knowledge proposed by tra¬ ditional philosophy depends on a particular relation between permanent structures and change in human experience, in which “nature” is the dominant theme and change is reces¬ sive. But this relation has been upset—permanently?—since the era climaxed by the French Revolution, when “history” finally pulled up alongside “nature” and then took the lead. At the point that “history” usurps “nature” as the deci¬ sive framework for human experience, man begins to think historically about his experience, and the traditional ahistori- cal categories of philosophy become hollowed out. The only thinker to meet this awesome challenge head-on was Hegel, who thought he could salvage the philosophical enterprise from this radical reorientation of human consciousness by presenting philosophy as, in fact, no more and no less than the history of philosophy. Still, Hegel could not refuse to present his own system as true—that is, as beyond history— by virtue of its incorporation of the historical perspective. So ÎO | THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST far as Hegel’s system was true, then, it ended philosophy. Only the last philosophical system was philosophy, truly conceived. So “the eternal” is re-established once more, after all; and history comes (or will come) to an end. But history did not stop. Mere time proved Hegelianism as a system, though not as a method, bankrupt. (As a method, prolif¬ erating into all the sciences of man, it confirmed and gave the largest single intellectual impetus to the consolidation of historical consciousness.) And this quest for the eternal—once so glamorous and inevitable a gesture of consciousness—now stood exposed, as the root of philosophical thinking, in all its pathos and childishness. Philosophy dwindled into an outmoded fan¬ tasy of the mind, part of the provincialism of the spirit, the childhood of man. However firmly philosophical statements might cohere into an argument, there seemed no way of dispelling the radical question that had arisen as to the “value” of the terms composing the statements, no way of restoring a vast loss of confidence in the verbal currency in which philosophical arguments had been transacted. Con¬ founded by the new surge of an increasingly secularized, drastically more competent and efficient human will bent on controlling, manipulating, and modifying “nature,” its ven¬ tures into concrete ethical and political prescription lagging far behind the accelerating “historical” change of the human landscape (among which changes must be counted the sheer accumulation of concrete empirical knowledge stored in printed books and documents)', philosophy’s leading words came to seem excessively overdetermined.