History and Utopia

E. M. Cioran, Richard Howard

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628724660
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia moderna

"Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are, " writes E. M. Cioran, the Romanian-born philosopher who has rightly been compared to Samuel Beckett.In History and Utopia, Cioran the monster writes of politics in its broadest sense, of history, and of the utopian dream. His views are, to say the least, provocative. In one essay he casts a scathing look at democracy, that "festival of mediocrity"; in another he turns his uncompromising gaze on Russia, its history, its evolution, and what he calls "the virtues of liberty." In the dark shadow of Stalin and Hitler, he writes of tyrants and tyranny with rare lucidity and convincing logic. In "Odyssey of Rancor, " he examines the deep-rooted dream in all of us to "hate our neighbors, " to take immediate and irremediable revenge. And, in the final essay, he analyzes the notion of the "golden age, " the biblical Eden, the utopia of so many poets and thinkers.

Odyssey of Rancor

We spend the prime of our sleepless nights in mentally mangling our enemies, rending their entrails, wringing their veins, trampling each organ to mush, and charitably leaving them the skeleton to enjoy. Whereupon we forbear, overcome by fatigue, and drop off to sleep. A well-earned rest after so much scruple, so much zeal. Moreover we must recover our strength in order to begin all over again the next night—resuming a labor that would discourage the most Herculean butcher. No doubt about it: having enemies is no sinecure.

The program of our nights would be less crowded if by day we could give our resentment free rein. To achieve not even happiness, merely equilibrium, we need to liquidate a good number of our kind, to inflict a regular hecatomb in the fashion of our remote and relaxed ancestors. Not so relaxed, it will be objected—the caveman’s demographic poverty denying him any continuous opportunity for slaughter. So be it! But he had compensations, he was better provided for than we are: rushing off to hunt at all hours, falling upon wild beasts, it was still his own species he was destroying. Blood-baptized, he could readily indulge his frenzy; no need for him to disguise and defer his sanguinary intentions, whereas we are doomed to review and repress our lust for rapine till it shrivels within us—reduced to curbing, to postponing, even to renouncing our revenge.

To forswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to founder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within. . . . Spared, our enemy obsesses and aggrieves us, especially when we have resolved to abhor him no longer. Indeed we truly forgive him only if we have promoted or witnessed his fall, if he affords us the spectacle of an ignominious end or—supreme reconciliation!—if we contemplate his corpse. Such happiness, in truth, is rare and not to be relied on. For our enemy is never felled: always erect, always triumphant, it is his nature to loom up before us, flouting our timid gibes by his full-blown scorn.

Nothing is more deleterious to happiness than the “duty” to resist our primal depths, to turn a deaf ear to the call of the wild. The result? Those torments of a civilized man reduced to smiling, harnessed to calumny, and disconsolate at having to kill without making a move—by the mere power of the Word, that invisible dagger. Various are the ways of cruelty. Supplanting the jungle, conversation permits our bestiality to function without immediate damage to our kind. If, by the whim of some malefic power, we should lose the use of speech, no one would survive unscathed. The need to kill, inscribed in every cell, we have managed to transfer to our thoughts: only this feat accounts for the possibility, and the permanence, of society. May we conclude that we have won out over our native corruption, our homicidal talents? That would be to miscalculate the Word’s capacities and to exaggerate its powers. The cruelty which we have inherited, which we wield, is not to be so readily ruled; as long as we do not capitulate to it altogether, as long as we have not used it up, we preserve it in our secret self—we are never released from it. Your real murderer premeditates his deed, plans it out, performs it, and by doing so frees himself, for a time, from his impulses; on the other hand, the man who does not kill because he cannot, though he endures the craving to do so—the unrealized assassin, let us say, the elegiac trifler of carnage—mentally commits countless crimes, and suffers far worse for them, since he drags with him the regret for all the abominations he cannot perpetrate. In the same way, the man who shrinks from revenge poisons his days, curses both his scruples and that act against nature, pardon. Doubtless, revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated, we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the major intuition of ancient mythology.

Those who, whether from impotence, lack of opportunity, or grandstand generosity, have not reacted to their enemies’ wiles, bear upon their faces the stigmata of repressed rage, the traces of affront and opprobrium, the dishonor of having forgiven. The blows they have not dealt are turned against themselves and collaborate, within their features, to illustrate their cowardice. Bewildered and obsessed, cornered by shame, saturated with bitterness, refractory to others as to themselves, as stifled as they are ready to explode, they seem to be making a superhuman effort to ward off a risk of convulsion. The greater their impatience, the more they must disguise it, and when they cannot, they give way at last, but to no purpose, stupidly, for it is in absurdity that they founder, like those who, having accumulated too much bile and too much silence, at the crucial moment lose all their powers before their enemies, of whom they show themselves to be unworthy. Their failure will further enhance their spite, and each experience, however trifling, will signify for them a further dose of gall.

We become good-natured, we become good only by destroying the best of our nature, only by submitting our body to the discipline of anemia and our mind to that of oblivion. As long as we preserve even a trace of memory, forgiveness comes down to a struggle with our instincts, an aggression against our own ego. It is our flagrancies that keep us in tune with ourselves, ensure our continuity, link us to our past, stimulate our powers of evocation; in the same way, our imaginations function only in hope of others’ misfortune, in the raptures of disgust, in that disposition which impels us if not to commit infamies, at least to contemplate them. How could it be otherwise on a planet where flesh propagates with the shamelessness of a scourge? Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire. Once, when space was less crowded, less infested by mankind, certain sects, indubitably inspired by a beneficent power, advocated and practiced castration; by an infernal paradox, they have been suppressed just when their doctrine would have been more opportune and more salutary than ever before. Maniacs of procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other. And it is only on a half-deserted earth, peopled at most by a few thousand inhabitants, that our physiognomies might recover their ancient glamour. The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. Which does not keep our thoughts from being contaminated by the presence of the human, from stinking of the human, and from being unable to cleanse themselves of it. Of what truths are we capable, to what revelation can we rise, when this pestilence asphyxiates the mind and disqualifies it from considering anything but the pernicious and fetid animal whose emanations it endures? He who is too weak to declare war on mankind must never forget, in his moments of fervor, to pray for a second Flood, more radical than the first.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our own secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. When we have no further illusions about ourselves, we retain none about others; the unspeakable that we discover by introspection we extend, by a legitimate generalization, to other mortals; depraved in their essence, we rightly endow them with all the vices which, oddly enough, most of us turn out to be unfit for or averse to ferreting out, to observing in ourselves or in others. How easy it is to do evil: everyone manages; but to assume it explicitly, to acknowledge its inexorable reality, is an unwonted feat. In practice, anyone can compete with the devil; in theory, this is not the case. To commit horrors and to conceive horror are two irreducible actions: no common ground between the experience of cynicism and cynicism in the abstract. Let us beware of those who subscribe to a reassuring philosophy, who believe in the Good and willingly erect it into an idol; they could not have done so if, honestly peering into themselves, they had sounded their depths or their miasmas; but those—rare, it is true—who have been indiscreet or unfortunate enough to plunge all the way down to the bottom of their beings, they know how to judge man: they can no longer love him, for they no longer love themselves, though remaining—and this will be their punishment—nailed even faster to themselves than before. . . .

In order to keep the faith, our own and others’, in order to lose sight of the illusory character, the nullity of all action, nature has made us opaque to ourselves, subject to a blindness which generates and rules the world. Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence. The incompatibility between action and self-knowledge seems to have escaped Socrates; otherwise, in his capacity as pedagogue, as man’s ally, would he have dared adopt the oracle’s motto, with all the abysses of renunciation it implies?

As long as we possess a will of our own, and as long as we are bound to it (this is what Lucifer has been blamed for), revenge is an imperative, an organic necessity which defines the universe of diversity, of the “self,” and which can have no meaning in the universe of identity. If it were true that “we breathe in the One” (Plotinus), on whom would we take revenge where every difference is blurred, where we commune in the indiscernible and lose our contours there? As a matter of fact, we breathe in the multiple; our kingdom is that of the “I,” and through the “I” there is no salvation. To exist is to condescend to sensation, hence to self-affirmation; whence not-knowing (with its direct consequence: revenge), the principle of phantasmagoria, source of our peregrination on earth. The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it. Try as we will to explode it, just when we suppose we have succeeded, there it is, apparently more self-assured than ever; whatever we do to destroy it merely augments its strength and solidity, and such is its vigor and its perversity that it nourishes still more in affliction than in joy. As with the ego, so a fortiori with actions. When we imagine ourselves liberated from them, we are anchored in them more fixedly than ever: even when corrupted into simulacra, actions prevail over us, subject us to themselves. Whether an enterprise is undertaken reluctantly or by persuasion, we always end by adhering to it, becoming its slaves or its dupes. No man stirs without allying himself to the multiple, to appearances, to the “I.” To act is to forfeit the absolute.

Action’s sovereignty comes, let us admit it straight off, from our vices, which master a greater contingent of existence than our virtues possess. If we espouse the cause of life and more particularly that of history, they seem useful to the supreme degree: is it not thanks to our vices that we cling to things, and that we cut something of a figure here on earth? Inseparable from our condition, vices are ubiquitous: only the puppet is without them. To try to boycott them is to conspire against ourselves, to lay down our arms in the midst of battle, to discredit ourselves in our neighbor’s eyes or to remain forever void. The miser deserves to be envied not for his money but precisely for his avarice, his real treasure. By attaching the individual to a sector of reality, implanting him there, vices, which do nothing lightly, occupy him, intensify him, justify his alienation from the vague. The practical value of manias, of derangements and aberrations, is irrefutable: insofar as we limit ourselves to this world, to the here and now where our desires confront one another, where competitiveness is rampant, even a minor vice is more effective than a major virtue. The political dimension of beings (taking the political as the fulfillment of the biological) safeguards the realm of actions, the realm of dynamic abjection. To know ourselves is to identify the sordid motive of our gestures, the inadmissible that is inscribed within our substance, the totality of patent or clandestine miseries on which our welfare depends. Whatever emanates from the inferior zones of our nature is invested with strength, whatever comes from below stimulates: we invariably produce and perform better out of jealousy and greed than out of nobility and disinterestedness. Sterility awaits those who do not deign to encourage or divulge their flaws. Whatever the domain to which we owe allegiance, in order to excel there we must cultivate the insatiable aspect of our character, must urge our inclinations to fanaticism, to intolerance, to vindictiveness. Nothing is more suspect than fruitfulness. If purity is what you seek, if you aspire to some inner transparency, make haste to abdicate your talents, abandon the realm of actions, exile yourself from the human, renounce—to use the pious jargon—the “conversation of creatures.”

Great gifts, far from excluding great defects, actually stipulate and reinforce them. When the saints accuse themselves of this or that sin, we must take them at their word. The very interest they take in others’ suffering testifies against them. Their pity, pity in general—what is pity but the vice of kindness? Deriving its effectiveness from the wicked principle it conceals, pity delights in others’ ordeals, postulates hell as a promised land it cannot do without, and if it is not destructive in and of itself, nonetheless profits by all that destroys. Extreme aberration of kindness, pity ends up as its own negation, in the saints even more than among ourselves. To be convinced of this, merely frequent their lives and contemplate the voracity with which they fling themselves upon our sins, their nostalgia for illustrious disgrace or interminable remorse, their exasperation before the mediocrity of our misdeeds and their regret at not having to torment themselves more deeply for our redemption.

High as one mounts, one remains a captive of one’s nature, of one’s original debacle. Men of great ambitions, or simply of talents, are monsters, superb and hideous monsters who seem to be plotting some terrible crime; and in truth, they are preparing their work . . . creating it in secret, like criminals: must they not crush all those who would take the same path as themselves? A man strives and creates only to crush beings or Being, rivals or the Rival. At every level, minds war upon each other, delight and wallow in defiance: the saints themselves envy and exclude one another—like the gods, moreover: witness those perpetual scuffles which are the scourge of every Olympus. Anyone approaching the same domain or the same problem as ourselves jeopardizes our originality, our privileges, the integrity of our existence, strips us of our chimeras and our chances. The task of casting him down, of defeating or at least disparaging him assumes the form of a mission, even of a fatality. We are satisfied only by someone who abstains, who in no way manifests himself, yet he must also not accede to the rank of model. the acknowledged sage excites and legitimates our envy. Even an idler, if he distinguishes himself in his sloth, if he shines there, risks being reviled: he attracts too much attention to himself. . . . The ideal would be a well-proportioned effacement. No one has managed that.

We acquire glory only to the detriment of others, of those who seek it too, and there is no reputation that is not won at the cost of countless abuses. The man who has emerged from anonymity, or who merely strives to do so, proves that he has eliminated every scruple from his life, that he has triumphed over his conscience, if by some chance he ever had such a thing. To renounce one’s name is to be doomed to inactivity; to cling to it is to degrade oneself. Must we either pray or write prayers? exist or express ourselves? One thing is sure: the principle of expansion, immanent in our nature, makes us regard others’ merits as an encroachment upon our own, a continual provocation. If glory is forbidden, or inaccessible, we blame those who have attained it: they could have done so, we believe, only by keeping us from it; it was ours by right, belonged to us, and without the machinations of these usurpers, it would have been ours. “Much more than property, it is glory which is theft”—motto of the embittered and, to a degree, of us all. The delights of being unknown or misunderstood are rare; yet upon consideration, are they not equivalent to the pride of having triumphed over honors and vanities? to the desire for an unwonted renown, for fame without a public? Which is certainly the supreme form, the summum of the appetite for glory.

Nor is the word too strong: it is indeed an appetite which thrusts its roots into our senses and which answers to a physiological necessity, to a cry of our vitals. In order to forsake it, in order to conquer it, we should have to meditate upon our insignificance, assent to it fully yet derive no pleasure from doing so, for our certainty of being nothing leads, if we are not careful, to complacency and pride: we do not perceive our own nothingness, or linger over it for long, without clinging to it . . . sensually. A certain happiness enters into our lust to denounce the fragility of happiness; and in the same way, when we profess to scorn glory we are far from being unfamiliar with the thirst for it, we sacrifice to glory just when we proclaim its inanity. A loathsome desire, certainly, but inherent in our organization; in order to extirpate it, we must condemn flesh and spirit alike to petrifaction, must compete with the mineral kingdom in unconcern, then forget the others, evacuate them from our consciousness, for the mere fact of their presence, radiant and fulfilled, wakens our evil genius who commands us to sweep them away and to forsake our obscurity in order to eclipse their brilliance.

We resent everyone who has “chosen” to live in the same epoch as ourselves, those who run at our side, who hamper our stride or leave us behind. In clearer terms: all contemporaries are odious. We resign ourselves to the superiority of a dead man, never to that of the living, whose very existence constitutes a reproach and a censure, an invitation to the intoxications of modesty. That so many of our kind surpass us is as obvious as it is intolerable, and to be evaded by arrogating to ourselves the advantage of being unique. We gasp for breath among our competitors or our models: what a comfort to be among their tombs! The disciple himself breathes freely and enjoys his freedom only upon the master’s death. All of us, insofar as we exist, pray for the downfall of those who eclipse us by their gifts, their labors, or their feats, and with greed, feverish greed, we await their last moments. Suppose this one climbs, in our own realm, above us; reason enough for us to want to be rid of him: how to forgive him the admiration he inspires, the secret and vexatious worship we shower upon him? Let him be gone, let him fade away, let him be done with, in fact, be dead, if we are to revere him without laceration, without acrimony, if our martyrdom is to cease!

With any brains at all, instead of thanking us for our propensity, he would hold it against us, would tax us with imposture, reject us with disgust or commiseration. Too full of himself, with no experience of the calvary of admiration, or of the contradictory impulses it provokes in us, he never suspects that by putting him on a pedestal we have consented to demean ourselves, and that this humiliation will have to be paid for—by him: could we ever forget what a blow—unwittingly, we grant him that—he has dealt to the sweet illusion of our singularity and our value? Having committed the imprudence, or the abuse, of letting himself be adored too long, now he must suffer the consequences: by the decree of our lassitude, he turns from a real god to a false one, reduced to a regret that he took up so much of our time. Perhaps we venerated him only in hopes of someday taking our revenge. If we love to prostrate ourselves, we love still more to deny those before whom we have groveled. Every undermining labor exalts, confers energy; whence the urgency, whence the practical infallibility of vile sentiments. Envy, which makes a fool into a daredevil, a worm into a tiger, whips up our nerves, ignites our blood, communicates to the body a shudder that keeps it from going soft, lends the most anodyne countenance an expression of concentrated ardor; without envy, there would be no events, nor even a world; indeed it is envy that has made man possible, permitted him to gain a name for himself, to accede to greatness by the fall, by that rebellion against the anonymous glory of paradise, to which—any more than the Fallen Angel, his inspiration and his model—he could not adapt himself. Everything that breathes and moves testifies to the initial taint. Forever associated with the effervescences of Satan (patron of Time, scarcely distinct from God, being merely His visible countenance), we are victims of this genius of sedition who persuades us to perform our task as living men by rousing us against one another in a deplorable combat, no doubt, but a forti...