Combating Wisdom
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Combating Wisdom The Fall into Time By E. M. Cioran Translated by Richard Howard Quadrangle. 183 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature"; Author, "The Writer and...
...They do not ask us to act, but merely to question ourselves...
...He is less a metaphysician than an introspective moralist, using the peculiar rhetoric that has become almost mandatory in France for writers of this kind...
...When such eremites, tempered by solitude, appear in the city, we can only listen...
...The nostalgia for barbarism is the last word of a civilization...
...he cries out against civilization, declaring that the "vestiges of humanity are still to be found only among the peoples who, outdistanced by history, are in no hurry to catch up...
...Occasionally he uses it hypnotically, like Malraux, or Camus at his rare worst, and the reader suddenly awakens to find himself carried on a surge of grand abstractions that leave him wondering just where meaning vanished...
...For there is a difference between the true skeptic and the man who can say, "I become aware of myself, indeed I am, only when I deny...
...Where the skeptic triumphs, he suggests, the barbarian will always follow...
...each of his parenthetical clauses adds a nuance of meaning...
...Pascal followed it...
...It is the condition of those who have, as the book's title suggests, "fallen out of time...
...For the earlier representatives of this tradition, there was an escape route--albeit a narrow and perilous one--toward eternity...
...and thereby of skepticism...
...Cioran's prose is much too concise and aphoristic for paraphrase...
...Cioran treats God as a historic figure (though there are times when one suspects him of giving grudging acknowledgment to a living Devil) and recognizes that Paradise is receding with every step of progress...
...France has a long history of philosophers who proceed by self-analysis, psychological explorers who inevitably find, as Cioran remarks, that they "cannot believe we are free when we are always with ourselves, facing ourselves, the same...
...Yet one cannot call him a pessimist, for he tells also of the ways man can defy and evade the despoilment that the loss of eternity and the extremity of wisdom have brought upon him...
...Cioran attacks and probes and criticizes constantly, baring our--or his--shamefulness in its most intimate forms...
...That it is given outside history, outside the context of our time, simply adds to its urgency...
...He is not a systematic philosopher, and the critic who tried to order his thought would be falling into a trap Cioran has thoughtfully prepared...
...Man's "capacity to degenerate," he says, "is limitless...
...In the same essay, entitled "The Dangers of Wisdom," he writes, "We should model ourselves not on the sage but on the child...
...He is still a Rumanian, but he has chosen to write in French, which he has been doing carefully and sparingly since 1947...
...He is the reverse of an optimist...
...If Blake, going one way, decided that the fool who persists in his folly becomes wise, Cioran, going the other way in The Fall into Time--picking his route through the wasteland of knowledge that leads to the Void--decides that the wise man who persists in his wisdom ends as a fool...
...While Cioran carefully avoids drawing the moral in terms of contemporary situations, a reader would have to be insensitive to the issues of the day not to name in his mind the personalities to whom a statement such as this one applies: "Since the virtues of barbarians consist precisely in the power of taking sides, of affirming or denying, they will always be celebrated by declining periods...
...Here Cioran analyzes the way doubt weakens the spirit of cultures as well as the resolve of individuals...
...Possibly the most striking essay in The Fall into Time is "Skeptic and Barbarian," the least personal and most historical piece in the book...
...At times he seems to suggest that hope vanished for humanity with the triumph of literacy...
...Cioran has lived in the Thebaid of the perpetually self-examining moralists...
...Thus his solution is a passionate stoicism, a misanthropy--for who but Man have men a right to despise--whose roots stem from a love that pride is reluctant to lay bare...
...The skeptic who turns himself into "a friend and accomplice of the hordes" is too evidently among us for Cioran's warning to be without point or value...
...so, more stumblingly, did Maine de Biran...
...Man belongs in the realm of Being, and his anger keeps him there...
...He has become as astonishingly well grafted to the French tradition as was Conrad to the English...
...let his anger continue...
...Cioran, a Rumanian whose only other work to appear in English is his Temptation to Exist, reached Paris--the prewar Mecca of his countrymen--in 1937, and has remained there ever since...
...Most often, however, Cioran manages the style with consummate agility, juggling its parentheses and paradoxes with a grace and an irony assisted--in this edition--by a sensitive translator: "And man, the weak and inadaptable animal par excellence, finds his prerogative and his catastrophe in undertaking tasks incommensurable with his powers, falling a victim to will, stigma of his imperfection, the sure means of affirming himself and of coming to nothing...
...It is even hard to maintain the label of skeptic that often seems appropriate to Cioran...
...and, viewing the swelling populations of the world, he asserts that "interchangeable, they justify by their number the aversion they inspire...
...And it is as difficult to classify him as it is to summarize him...
...One welcomes the scourging voice of the minatory prophet, only to perceive the compassion of this despiser of Man--but perhaps not of men--who can write with exemplary subtlety an essay "On Sickness" that analyzes the function of pain as an element giving meaning to existence...
...For the clear light of the Void is really a darkness: "At a certain level of knowledge, nonbeing alone survives...
...Author, "The Writer and Politics" "It is not comfortable, the condition of a man who, having asked wisdom to free him from himself and the world, comes to the point of detesting it, of finding it merely one shackle more," concludes E. M. Cioran...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 6
