On the Heights of Despair
by E. M. Cioran ,
Emil M. Cioran (1911-1995) is the author of numerous works, including
The Fall into Time, A Short History of Decay, and Tears and Saints..
Eternity and Morality
Even today nobody can tell what is right or what is wrong. It will be the same in the future. The relativity of such expressions means little; not to be able to dispense with their use is more significant. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong, and yet I divide actions into good and bad. If anyone asked me why I do so, I couldn’t give an answer. I use moral criteria instinctively; later, when I reconsider, I do not find any justifications for having done so. Morality has become so complex and contradictory because its values no longer constitute themselves in the order of life but have crystallized in a transcendental region only feebly connected to life’s vital and irrational forces. How does one go about founding a morality? I’m so sick of the word "good"; it is so stale and vapid! Morality tells you to work for the triumph of goodness! And how? Through the fulfillment of one’s duties, respect, sacrifice. These are just empty words: in front of naked reality, moral principles are void, so much so that one wonders whether life without them would not be preferable. I would love a world free of forms and principles, a world of absolute indeterminacy. I like to imagine a world of fantasy and dream, where talk of right and wrong would no longer make sense. Since reality is essentially irrational, why set rules, why distinguish the right from the wrong? Morality cannot be saved; it’s a mistake to believe otherwise. Yet there are those who maintain that in this world pleasure and sin are minor satisfactions which enjoy only a brief triumph and that only good deeds partake of eternity. They pretend that at the end of this world’s misery, goodness and virtue will win but they have failed to see that, if eternity obliterates superficial pleasures, it does the same with virtue, good deeds, and moral actions. Eternity does not lead to the triumph of either good or evil; it ravages all. It is silly to condemn the Epicureans in the name of eternity. How is suffering rather than pleasure going to make me immortal? From a purely objective point of view, is there any significant difference between one man’s agony and another’s pleasure? Whether you suffer or not, nothingness will swallow you forever. There is no objective road to eternity, only a subjective feeling experienced at irregular moments in time. Nothing created by man will endure. Why this intoxication with moral illusions when there are other illusions even more beautiful? Those who speak of moral salvation in the face of eternity refer to the moral action’s indefinite echo in time, its unlimited resonance. Nothing could be less true, since so-called virtuous men are actually cowards who will disappear from the world’s consciousness faster than those who have wallowed in pleasure. And even so, supposing the opposite were true, would a dozen or more years really count? Any unsatisfied pleasure is a loss of life. I shall not be the one to preach against pleasure, orgy, and excess in the name of suffering. Let the mediocre speak of the consequences of pleasure: are not those of suffering even greater? Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities!
Moment and Eternity
Eternity can be understood only as subjective experience. It cannot be conceived objectively, because man’s temporal finitude prevents him from grasping the concept of infinity as an unlimited process in time. The experience of eternity therefore depends on intensity of subjective feeling, and the way to eternity is to transcend the temporal. One must fight hard against time so that -once the mirage of the succession of moments is overcome -one can live fully the instant one is launched into eternity. How does the instant become a gate to eternity? A sense of becoming results from the moment’s insufficiency and relativity: those with a keen consciousness of temporality live every moment thinking of the next one. Eternity can be attained only if there are no connections, if one lives the instant totally and absolutely. Every experience of eternity presupposes a leap and a transfiguration, and few and far between are those capable of the tension necessary to arrive at the blissful contemplation of the eternal. It is not the length but the intensity of contemplation that matters. The return to normal will not impair the richness of this fertile experience. On the other hand, the frequency with which such contemplations occur matters greatly: only through frequent repetition can one experience the intoxication of eternity, the delights of its luminous, extraterrestrial transcendence. By isolating the moment from its successions, you confer upon it, subjectively, an absolute value. From the point of view of eternity, time with its long train of individual moments is, if not unreal, irrelevant.
There are no hopes or regrets in eternity. To live each moment in itself is to escape the relativity of taste and category, to break free from the immanence in which time has imprisoned us. Immanent living is impossible without simultaneous living in time: without temporality, life loses its dramatic character. The more intense the life, the more revealing its time. Moreover, life consists of a great number of directions, of goals and intentions which can only be achieved in time. When speaking of life, you say moments; of eternity, moment. The experience of eternity is void of life, a conquest of time, a victory over the moments of life. Those with an inborn contemplative sense of eternity, uncontaminated as we are by temporality, as for example in certain Oriental cultures, know nothing of our dramatic struggle to conquer time. Still, the contemplation of eternity is for us a source of conquering visions and strange delights. One cannot love eternity the way one loves a woman, one’s destiny, or one’s despair, for there is in the love of eternity the attraction of the peace of sidereal light.
History and Eternity
Why should I live in history, or worry about the social and cultural problems of the age? I am weary of culture and history; I can no longer bring myself to embrace its torments and its aspirations. We must outstrip history, and we can do so only when past, present, and future cease to be important, when where and when we live becomes a matter of indifference. Am I much better off because I live today rather than four thousand years ago in Ancient Egypt? It is silly to pity those who lived in times we don’t like, who did not know Christianity or the discoveries of modern science. Since there is no hierarchy of life-styles, everybody and nobody is right all at the same time. Each historical epoch is a world in itself, closed off and certain of its principles, until the dialectic movement of historical life creates a new, equally limited and deficient form. I am surprised that some people study the past when the whole of history strikes me as null and void. Of what interest are the ideals and beliefs of our ancestors? Mankind’s achievements could very well be great, but I do not care to know them. I take greater comfort in the contemplation of eternity. In this world not worth so much as a breath, the only valid relation is that between man and eternity, not between man and history. No one negates history out of a passing whim, but only under the impact of harrowing and unsuspected tragedies. Such negations spring from great sadness, not from merely abstract meditations on history. Now that I no longer want to take part in history and I negate the past of humanity, a deadly sadness, painful beyond imagination, preys upon me. Has it been long dormant and just now awakened by these thoughts? There is in me the bitter taste
of death, and nothingness is burning within me like a strong poison. How could I still speak of beauty, and make esthetic remarks, when I am so sad, sad unto death?
I do not want to know anything more. By outstripping history, one acquires super consciousness, an important ingredient of eternity. It takes you into the realm where contradictions and doubts lose their meaning, where you forget about life and death. It is the fear of death that launches men on their quest for eternity: its only advantage is forgetfulness. But what about the return from eternity?
Light and Darkness
The falsity of all philosophical and historical systems is best illustrated by the erroneous interpretation of the dualism of light and darkness in Oriental and mystical religions. Thus some have claimed that men, having noticed the regular alternation of day and night, equated the former with life and the latter with mystery and death, raised light and darkness to the rank of metaphysical principles. This interpretation is natural but, like all external explications, insufficient. The question of light and darkness is linked to the question of ecstasy. Their dualism acquires an explanatory value only for one who, successively enslaved by the forces of light and darkness, has known both obsession and captivity. Ecstasy mingles shadows and sparks in a weird dance; it weaves a dramatic vision of fugitive glimmers in mysterious obscurity, playing with all the nuances of light through total darkness. Nevertheless, this gorgeous display is not as important as the mere fact that it holds and fascinates you. The height of ecstasy is the final sensation, in which you feel you are dying because of all this light and darkness. Especially weird is the fact that ecstasy wipes out surrounding objects, familiar forms of the world, until ail that is left is a monumental projection of shadow and light. It is hard to explain how this selection and purification takes place, why these immaterial shadows hold such sway over us. Demonism is inherent in any ecstatic exaltation. How can we help attributing an absolute character to light and darkness when they are all that is left of the world’s ecstasy? The frequency with which ecstasy occurs in Oriental religions, as well as in other forms of mysticism at all times, proves the rightness of our hypothesis. The absolute is inside oneself, not outside, and ecstasy, this paroxysm of interiority, reveals only inner shadows and glimmers of light. Next to them, the charm of light and day fades quickly. Ecstasy partakes of essence to such an extent that it gives an impression of metaphysical hallucination. Pure essences, grasped through ecstasy, are immaterial, but their immateriality causes vertigo and obsession from which you cannot free yourself except by converting them into metaphysical principles.
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