People You've Probably Never Heard Of: The Dark World of Emil Cioran

"Tell me, do you just like and do different things just for the sake of being different?"

A neighbor of mine asked me that recently, baffled by the fact that I disagreed with just about everything they said and believed and said things they had never even heard of before. I don't know what it is, other that that it is. There might be some element of truth to it though, since I do like to search out anything obscure and unique. It's not that I think it will make fashionable or trendy, or that I'm indie-than-thou, there's just something refreshing I find about anyone forged their own path, whether or not I agree with them. So, it seems only appropriate to start a new series on this blog, entitled People You've Probably Never Heard Of.

"Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it."

In this first installment of People You've Probably Never Heard Of, I present the curious figure of Emil Cioran. If pessimism had a patron saint, Cioran would be it. The Romanian-turned-Frenchman philosopher lived a long life, living into his 80's and dying in the 1990's, while churning out a kind of poetic philosophy that made Schopenhauer look like a sunflower.

"A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime..."

Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Răşinari, Romania, a small town in the Transylvanian region. His parents were Emilian and Elvira. Emilian Cioran was a Romanian Orthodox priest, as had been many men in the Cioran line. The family later moved to Sibiu, where Emil began to learn the German language and develop the love of language that he would have later on in life.

Even as a kid, and later on as a teen, Cioran seemed to have a very morbid personality. When he was a child in Răşinari, he would entertain himself by playing with skulls in the cemetery, and when he was a teenager, he began to obsess over the morbid aspects of the religious life he had been brought up in. It was around that time that he lost his faith, though he never stopped obsessing over the idea of faith Christianity.

Cioran attended University of Bucharest, where he became close and lifelong friends with the lesser-known Mircea Eliade and the more widely-known Eugene Ionesco. In his more youthful days, Cioran had some sympathies with the ultra-nationalist Iron Guard, though those sympathies appear to have been short-lived. After he graduated from Bucharest, he began to study philosophy in Berlin. It was during this time though that Cioran became incredibly disillusioned with the world and with academic philosophy. His outlook began to become so bleak that his mother told him that if she knew he would be that unhappy, she would have just aborted him.

After a little bit of teaching, Cioran moved to Paris and eked out a living from translating and reading, as well as the charity of other Romanian expatriates living in the city. He also wrote and published several books of his pessimistic philosophy, often wrote in the form of aphorisms, which had become a favorite of Cioran's (and his way of merging the philosopher and the poet).

"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."

What does one make of Emil Cioran? It's hard to say. I've read some of his works, and it's almost breathtaking in the bleakness of how he sees the world. He has boiled down everything that was wrong with the 20th century and created a personal philosophy that not only destroyed taboos, but was almost Lovecraftian in its negative scope of living and humanity. Cioran wasn't simply in existential despair, since to despair implies that it's supposed to be another way when it isn't, because he saw the world in terms of not only was it dark and brutal, but it was destined and made to be that way.

His works aren't the kind you're likely to walk into the bookstore and find, so he remains mostly relegated as an intellectual curiosity for those who don't exactly walk on the sunny side of the street.

For further reading:

Little Blue Light
Wikipedia
Spike Magazine