Emil Cioran : The Décor of Knowledge

Emil Cioran

A Short History of Decay

THE DECOR OF KNOWLEDGE

Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves “advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge — if it is profound — never changes: only its decor varies. Love continues without Venus, war without Mars, and if the gods no longer intervene in events, those events are neither more explicable nor less disconcerting: the paraphernalia of formulas merely replaces the pomp of the old legends, without the constants of human life being thereby modified, science apprehending them no more intimately than poetic narratives.

Modern complacency is limitless: we suppose ourselves more enlightened, more profound than all the centuries behind us, forgetting that the teaching of a Buddha confronted thousands of beings with the problem of nothingness, a problem we imagine we have discovered because we have changed its terms and introduced a touch of erudition into it. But what Western thinker would survive a comparison with a Buddhist monk? We lose ourselves in texts and terminologies: meditation is a datum unknown to modern philosophy. If we want to keep some intellectual decency, enthusiasm for civilization must be banished from our mind, as well as the superstition of History.

As for the great problems, we have no advantage over our ancestors or our more recent predecessors: men have always known everything, at least in what concerns the Essential; modern philosophy adds nothing to Chinese, Hindu, or Greek philosophy. Moreover, there cannot be a new problem, despite our naïvete or our infatuation which would like to persuade us to the contrary. In the play of ideas, who ever equaled a Chinese or a Greek sophist, who was ever bolder in abstraction? All the extremities of thought were reached from the first — and in all civilizations. Seduced by the demon of the Unpublished, we forget too quickly that we are the epigones of the first pithecanthropus who bothered to reflect.

Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses ? Becoming excludes an absolute fulfillment, a goal: the temporal adventure unfolds without an aim external to itself, and will end when its possibilities of movement are exhausted. The degree of consciousness varies with the ages, such consciousness not being aggrandized by their succession. We are not more conscious than the Greco- Roman world, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century; each period is perfect in itself — and perishable. There are privileged moments when consciousness is exasperated, but there was never an eclipse of lucidity such that man was incapable of confronting the essential problems, history being no more than a perpetual crisis, even a breakdown of naïvete. Negative states—precisely those which exasperate consciousness—are variously distributed; nonetheless they are present in every historical period; balanced and “happy,” they know Ennui — the natural name for happiness; unbalanced and tumultuous, they suffer Despair and the religious crises which derive from it. The idea of an Earthly Paradise was composed of all the elements incompatible with History, with the space in which the negative states flourish.

All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs — modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable — and fragile. The absolute and decrepitude characterize the work ripened for years and the poem dashed off in a moment. Is there more truth in The Phenomenology of Mind than in Epipsychidion ? Lightninglike inspiration, as well as laborious investigation, offers us definitive results — and ridiculous ones. Today I prefer this writer to that one; tomorrow will come the turn of a work I detested quite recently. The creations of the mind — and the principles which preside over them — follow the fate of our moods, of our age, of our fevers, and our disappointments. We call into question everything we once loved, and are always right and always wrong; for everything is valid — and nothing has any importance.

I smile: a world is born; I frown: it vanishes, and another appears. No opinion, no system, no belief fails to be correct and at the same time absurd, depending on whether we adhere to it or detach ourselves from it. We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments. What we call truth is an error insufficiently experienced, not yet drained, but which will soon age, a new error, and which waits to compromise its novelty. Knowledge blooms and withers along with our feelings. And if we are in a position to scrutinize all truths, it is because we have been exhausted together — and because there is no more sap in us than in them. History is inconceivable outside of what disappoints. Which accounts for the desire to submit ourselves to melancholy, and to die of it . . . .

True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper ? Is your sleep sound ? Are your dreams sweet ? You swell the anonymous crowd. Daylight is hostile to thoughts, the sun blocks them out; they flourish only in the middle of the night. . . . Conclusion of nocturnal knowledge: every man who arrives at a reassuring conclusion about anything at all gives evidence of imbecility or false charity. Who ever found a single joyous truth which was valid ? Who saved the honor of the intellect with daylight utterances ? Happy the man who can say to himself : “Knowledge turned sour on me.”

History is irony on the move, the Mind’s jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates

in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices.

Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age, Calvinism, Quietism, Port-Royal, the Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc. . . . what a series of absurdities . . . which/tai to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site. . . .

It is no less unreasonable to grant more interest to the arguments around democracy and its forms than to those which took place, in the Middle Ages, around nominalism and realism: each period is intoxicated by an absolute, minor and tiresome, but in appearance unique; we cannot avoid being contemporaries of a faith, of a system, of an ideology, cannot avoid being, in short, of our time. In order to be emancipated from that, we would require the coldness of a god of scorn. . . .

That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters ? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities. The universe begins and ends with each individual, whether he be Shakespeare or Hodge; for each individual experiences his merit or his nullity in the absolute. . . .

By what artifice did what seems to be escape the control of what is not ? A moment of inattention, of weakness at the heart of Nothingness: the grabs took advantage of it; a gap in its vigilance: and here we are. And just as life supplanted nothingness, life in its turn was supplanted by history: existence thereby committed itself to a cycle of heresies which sapped the orthodoxy of the void.

* * *