{"id":5657,"date":"2017-03-26T14:21:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-26T14:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/03\/26\/e-m-cioran-and-skepticism\/"},"modified":"2017-03-26T14:21:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-26T14:21:58","slug":"e-m-cioran-and-skepticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/03\/26\/e-m-cioran-and-skepticism\/","title":{"rendered":"E. M. Cioran and Skepticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cioran<\/a>I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post<\/a> to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7<\/a>) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding<\/em> — and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this could be a peace worth wanting.<\/span><\/p>\n

I ended my Pyrrhonian post with the quip: "To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated."  My point, in contemporary jargon, is that really fruitful living requires frequent and extended forays from one's 'comfort zone' into regions of stress and challenge and doxastic risk. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Comfort<\/a>Kai Frederik Lorentzen comments:<\/span><\/p>\n

I think you do Cioran wrong insofar as he seems to be ambivalent about Skepticism. In Histoire et Utopie<\/em> (1960), he writes: <\/span>"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."<\/span><\/p>\n

Cioran's spiritual yearning appears real to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have read quite a bit of Cioran but not enough to venture a definitive judgment. So I don't know whether his spiritual yearning is genuine or just a literary posture. My impression is that he is a mere litterateur. But even if he is sincere, his scepticism seems distinct from Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Acolytes of the latter try not to dogmatize whereas it is not clear to me that Cioran avoids or tries to avoid a dogmatic scepticism\/nihilism.  A bit of (inconclusive) evidence:<\/span><\/p>\n

X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain\u2019s career. <\/strong>(E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered <\/em>(New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard, p.153) <\/span><\/p>\n

A statement of Cioran\u2019s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted and dognatic since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from \u201can unverifiable certitude\u201d is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito<\/em>. In the cogito<\/em> situation, a self\u2019s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim \u2013 according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing \u2013 to be itself a vain and empty posturing? <\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran\u2019s two statements of nihilism cited above? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be \u201can unverifiable certitude\u201d anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault. <\/span><\/p>\n

Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is simply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything\u2019s being true. <\/span><\/p>\n

My interim judgment, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran\u2019s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it.   The writing, though, is brilliant.<\/span><\/p>\n

The above commentary on the bolded passage is excerpted from a much longer entry, Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>A Peace Worth Wanting? Problems with Pyrrhonian <i>Ataraxia<\/i>: Passivity and Porcinity<\/a><\/div>\n
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<\/a>The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding — and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this … Continue reading “E. M. Cioran and Skepticism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,40,315],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-skepticism","category-literary-matters","category-nihilism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}