Ideas from 'A Short History of Decay' by E.M. Cioran [1949], by Theme Structure

[found in 'A Short History of Decay' by Cioran,E.M. (ed/tr Howard,Richard) [Penguin 2010,978-0-141-19272-7]].

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1. Philosophy / A. Wisdom / 3. Wisdom Deflated
Wisdom is just the last gasp of a dying civilization
                        Full Idea: Wisdom is the last word of an expiring civilization, the nimbus of historic twilights, fatigue transfigured into a vision of the world, the last tolerance before the advent of newer gods, and of barbarism. A vain attempt at melody among the death rattles.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Twilight')
                        A reaction: I didn't quite get what he said there, but I picked up the tone all right. But I thought wisdom was something sought in the early stages of western civilization, and now relegated to the wings as an idle dream?
1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 1. History of Ideas
Intelligence only fully flourishes at the end of a historical period
                        Full Idea: Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither. ...Every period's ending is the mind's paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Felicity')
                        A reaction: I wouldn't have thought that the facts of history supported this very well. The golden ages of philosophy are the Age of Pericles, the Aristotelian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the early twentieth century.
The history of ideas (and deeds) occurs in a meaningless environment
                        Full Idea: The history of ideas, like that of deeds, unfolds in a meaningless climate.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: This is the 'Tory' view of the history of ideas (as opposed to the 'Whig' view of directedness - a distinction made by historians). I would say there are periods where a certain inevitable sequence is worked out, but then there are dislocations.
Ideas are neutral, but people fill them with passion and weakness
                        Full Idea: In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Genealogy')
                        A reaction: If it isn't neutral (if, say, it expresses love or hatred) then presumably it doesn't qualify as an 'idea'. Are ideas as neutral as mathematical theorems. It's a nice remark, and a good epigraph for a book on the history of ideas.
A nation gives expression to its sum of values, and is then exhausted
                        Full Idea: A nation cannot create indefinitely. It is called upon to give expression and meaning to a sum of values which are exhausted with the soul which has begotten them.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: This phenomenon is obvious. Is it the people who run out of steam, or the ideas and values to which their nation is giving expression? Is this a reason to break up nations every few centuries, and re-form them differently? Break up the UK!
Some thinkers would have been just as dynamic, no matter when they had lived
                        Full Idea: A Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, had they appeared in the most anodyne age, would have had no less tremulous, no less incendiary an inspiration.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Truths')
                        A reaction: He is saying that some (only some) thinkers are independent of the age and culture in which they live. Personally I think of those two as distinctive products of a romantic age. Diogenes of Sinope seems a bit of a misfit!
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 7. Despair over Philosophy
Originality in philosophy is just the invention of terms
                        Full Idea: The philosopher's originality comes down to inventing terms.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell')
                        A reaction: Analytic philosophers are just as obsessed with inventing terms as their continental rivals. Kit Fine, for example. It can't be wrong to invent terms. Scientists do it too.
I abandoned philosophy because it didn't acknowledge melancholy and human weakness
                        Full Idea: I turned away from philosophy when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy; in Kant and in all the philosophers.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell')
                        A reaction: An interesting challenge, but if I set out to develop a philosophy based on human weakness I'm not sure where I would start, once I had settled the 'akrasia' [weakness of will] problem.
The mind is superficial, only concerned with the arrangement of events, not their significance
                        Full Idea: The mind in itself can be only superficial, its nature being uniquely concerned with the arrangement of conceptual events, and not with their implications in the spheres the signify.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 'The Abstract')
                        A reaction: This may be excessively pessimistic, and any decent philosopher must partially concede the point. Thoughts about the significance of historical events just recede into the mist.
1. Philosophy / E. Nature of Metaphysics / 1. Nature of Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a universalisation of physical anguish
                        Full Idea: Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Underside')
                        A reaction: Not sure if I understand this, but anyone who registers the physical aspect of abstract thought gets a nod of approval from me.
1. Philosophy / E. Nature of Metaphysics / 3. Metaphysical Systems
Great systems of philosophy are just brilliant tautologies
                        Full Idea: The great philosophical systems are no more than brilliant tautologies.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell')
                        A reaction: This makes them sound pointless, but the terms used in the system all have some kind of reference, so the systems are in some way about the world, and not mere private games. At the very least, they are a wonderful branch of poetry.
2. Reason / C. Styles of Reason / 1. Dialectic
No great idea ever emerged from a dialogue
                        Full Idea: Nothing monumental has ever emerged from dialogue, nothing explosive, nothing 'great'.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: This may be an argument in favour of dialogue! It smacks of the creepier side of Nietzsche's thinking. I suspect individuals have had many great ideas during dialogues, though not as part of them. Greek schools were all dialogue.
3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 9. Rejecting Truth
Truth is just an error insufficiently experienced
                        Full Idea: What we call truth is an error insufficiently experienced.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 5)
                        A reaction: I'm not sure how to go about refuting that claim! Turn the tables, I suppose. 'Tell me, Cioran, are you claiming that this idea is true?'
Eventually every 'truth' is guaranteed by the police
                        Full Idea: Once a belief is established the police will guarantee its 'truth' sooner or later.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views')
5. Theory of Logic / K. Features of Logics / 1. Axiomatisation
An axiom has no more authority than a frenzy
                        Full Idea: This earth is a place where can confirm anything with an equal likelihood: here axioms and frenzies are interchangeable.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: A perceptive and poetic expression of the modern anti-Euclidean and anti-Fregean view of axioms, as purely formal features of a model or system.
15. Nature of Minds / B. Features of Minds / 1. Consciousness / a. Consciousness
Our instincts had to be blunted and diminished, to make way for consciousness!
                        Full Idea: How much our instincts must have had to be blunted and their functioning slackened before consciousness extended its control over the sum of our actions and our thoughts!
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Coming')
                        A reaction: Modern wisdom, founded in neuroscience, seems to tell us that the role of consciousness even now is far less than Cioran believed. Once you digest that wisdom, I believe introspection supports it. Still, instinct in animals is much stronger than ours.
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / a. Origin of concepts
We use concepts to master our fears; saying 'death' releases us from confronting it
                        Full Idea: It is the use of concepts which makes us master of our fears. We say: Death - and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptising events and things, we elude the inexplicable.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: I like this idea. I'm struck by how weird our lives would become if people no longer had names. They are so deeply embedded in our experience that we don't notice them. Imagine if it were taboo to ever name death.
20. Action / C. Motives for Action / 3. Acting on Reason / c. Reasons as causes
I want to suppress in myself the normal reasons people have for action
                        Full Idea: I want to suppress in myself the reasons men invoke in order to exist, in order to act.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Gamut')
                        A reaction: So much of our inner and moral life concerns not what we think or feel, but what we want to think or feel. The theory of action (if there can be such a thing) must account for these metareasons, which hover over us while we act.
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 1. Nature of Ethics / c. Purpose of ethics
At a civilisation's peak values are all that matters, and people unconsciously live by them
                        Full Idea: Epochs of apogee cultivate values for their own sake: life is only a means of realising them; the individual is not aware of living - he lives.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
                        A reaction: This is a very Nietzschean thought. Mind you, a crazed and dangerous crowd exhibits the same absorption in simple values.
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 1. Nature of Value / a. Nature of value
Values don't accumulate; they are ruthlessly replaced
                        Full Idea: Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'We')
                        A reaction: That may seem true for a Frenchman or a Romanian, but it doesn't feel true of British culture, which seems to me to have accumulated values over the last five hundred years. Before 1500 it seems to me to be a foreign country. We may be near the end!
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 2. Values / g. Love
Lovers are hateful, apart from their hovering awareness of death
                        Full Idea: As for lovers, they would be hateful if among their grimaces the presentiment of death did not hover.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Gamut')
                        A reaction: A nice existential corrective, if you were planning to build an ethical system around a rather sentimental idea of love! If you are not gripped by a latent fear that your beloved may die, I doubt whether you are in love.
23. Ethics / F. Existentialism / 1. Existentialism
To live authentically, we must see that philosophy is totally useless
                        Full Idea: We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell')
                        A reaction: The existentialist dream of trying to find an 'authentic' way of life. That idea means nothing to me. You would need to be utterly immersed in the life of a community with which you identified to live authentically, and that life has almost vanished.
Man is never himself; he always aims at less than life, or more than life
                        Full Idea: Able to live only beyond and short of life, man is a prey to two temptation: imbecility and sanctity: sub-man and superman, never himself.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 4 'Threat')
                        A reaction: To me, Taoism embodies imbecility, and spiritual religions embody the superman idea. [This is not Nietzsche's übermensch].
23. Ethics / F. Existentialism / 2. Nihilism
The pointlessness of our motives and irrelevance of our gestures reveals our vacuity
                        Full Idea: When we realise that no human motive is compatible with infinity, and that no gesture is worth the trouble of making it, our heart, by its very beating, can no longer conceal its vacuity.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Disintoxication')
                        A reaction: An interesting choice of reasons. Nihilism in comparison with infinity, and in comparison with the vastness of society? If you were immortal, and there were only fifty other humans, would that help?
Evidence suggests that humans do not have a purpose
                        Full Idea: By all evidence, we are in the world to do nothing.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Militant')
                        A reaction: I'm not clear what evidence there could be. Other animals are all enmeshed in a particular environment. As soon as homo sapiens left Africa, it became a baffling phenonomen. I'm not sure what an alligator is in the world for, either.
The universe is dirty and fragile, as if a scandal in nothingness had produced its matter
                        Full Idea: Everything which is done and undone in the universe bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Reactionary')
                        A reaction: A gloriously imagined idea, worthy of Shakespeare. By 'scandal' I suppose he implies that the universe is the bastard child of a horrible relationship. A prize exhibit for my 'Nihilism' collection. True nihilists, of course, don't write books.
23. Ethics / F. Existentialism / 3. Angst
Unlike other creatures, mankind seems lost in nature
                        Full Idea: Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Indirect5')
                        A reaction: Nice challenge to the Aristotelian idea that we can identify the nature and function of man, and derive an ethics from it. This idea seems to state the essence of existentialism, perhaps better than anything in Sartre. We should have stayed in Africa?
We can only live because our imagination and memory are poor
                        Full Idea: Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Key')
                        A reaction: Does this mean that we should actually aspire to limit our imaginations and memories? Or are we mercifully intrinsically limited, so that massive intellectual ambition will do no harm? We should be told these things, Cioran!
Life is now more dreaded than death
                        Full Idea: By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death; it is life which is the Great Unknown.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Variations')
                        A reaction: This is the sort of remark we pay continental philosophers to make.
23. Ethics / F. Existentialism / 4. Boredom
No one is brave enough to say they don't want to do anything; we despise such a view
                        Full Idea: No one has the audacity to exclaim: 'I don't want to do anything!' - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'The Architect')
                        A reaction: Perhaps this should be the anti-epigraph for this website. I've slogged away at this project for nineteen years, probably for no other reason than that inactivity appears to be wicked. If I abandoned it, I would invent another project. Sad.
History is the bloody rejection of boredom
                        Full Idea: History is the bloody product of the rejection of boredom.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views')
                        A reaction: How many absurd and horrible things have been done by people who could not stand being bored? But also, almost everything wonderful has the same source. How did Bach and Shakespeare and Rembrandt feel about boredom?
You are stuck in the past if you don't know boredom
                        Full Idea: The man who knows nothing of ennui is still in the world's childhood.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Dislocation')
                        A reaction: Boredom well may be the central experience of existentialism, rather than angst, or nihilism, or the temptations of suicide.
If you lack beliefs, boredom is your martyrdom
                        Full Idea: Ennui is the martyrdom of those who live and die for no belief.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Obsequies')
24. Political Theory / B. Nature of a State / 2. State Legitimacy / b. Natural authority
It is pointless to refuse or accept the social order; we must endure it like the weather
                        Full Idea: It is equally futile to refuse or to accept the social order: we must endure its changes for the better or the worse with a despairing conformism, as we endure birth, love, the weather, and death.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Reactionary')
24. Political Theory / C. Ruling a State / 2. Leaders / a. Autocracy
Opportunists can save a nation, and heroes can ruin it
                        Full Idea: Opportunists have saved nations; heroes have ruined them.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Defense')
                        A reaction: Siegfried smashes the staff of Wotan. Napoleon looks like a hero, but he increasingly looks like the single most disastrous figure ever to have emerged in Europe. It took the Germans till 1940 to avenge what he did.
25. Social Practice / E. Policies / 2. Religion in Society
The ideal is to impose a religion by force, and then live in doubt about its beliefs
                        Full Idea: To belong to a church uncertain of its god - after once imposing that god by fire and sword - should be the ideal of every detached mind.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Felicity')
                        A reaction: I'm trying hard to think of an adequate response to this. I'll get back to you....
25. Social Practice / E. Policies / 5. Education / d. Study of history
Despite endless suggestions, no one has found a goal for history
                        Full Idea: No one has found a valid goal for history; but everyone has proposed one.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Indirect')
                        A reaction: This seems to be an attack on the Hegelian idea of destiny that suffused both marxism and fascism in the 1930s.
History is wonderfully devoid of meaning
                        Full Idea: That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 5)
                        A reaction: I have just read a history of the Wars of the Roses, and I wholeheartedly endorse Cioran's view.
25. Social Practice / F. Life Issues / 4. Suicide
No one has ever found a good argument against suicide
                        Full Idea: No church, no civil institution has as yet invented a single argument valid against suicide.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Resources')
                        A reaction: Suicide in young people usually looks like an error of judgement (in quiet moments of history). You need more inductive evidence that life is going to be irremediably awful. But if life is fine but they choose suicide anyway, what can you say?
Religions see suicide as insubordination
                        Full Idea: If the religions have forbidden us to die by our own hand, it is because they saw that such practices set an example of insubordination which humiliated temples and gods alike.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Resources')
                        A reaction: Has anyone ever committed suicide in a cathedral (even during a service)? How many bishops, cardinals, rabbis etc have committed suicide? It is not uncommon among priests in the lower echelons.
If you have not contemplated suicide, you are a miserable worm
                        Full Idea: The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison, or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1'Resources')
                        A reaction: I guess by this date everyone in Paris had read Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus', so suicide was the main topic in the cafés. I sort of agree with it. The possibility of suicide is part of the examined life.
25. Social Practice / F. Life Issues / 5. Sexual Morality
We all need sexual secrets!
                        Full Idea: Woe to those who have no sexual secrets!
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Wonders')
28. God / C. Attitudes to God / 4. God Reflects Humanity
Why is God so boring, and why does God resemble humanity so little?
                        Full Idea: Why is God so dull, so feeble, so inadequately picturesque? Why does He lack interest, vigor, actuality and resemble us so little? Is there any image less anthropomorphic and more gratuitously remote?
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Devil')
                        A reaction: This seems to be directed at those like Feuerbach who said that we had merely created God as a glorified image of humanity.
29. Religion / C. Spiritual Disciplines / 2. Taoism
As the perfect wisdom of detachment, philosophy offers no rivals to Taoism
                        Full Idea: China alone long since arrived at a refined wisdom superior to philosophy: Taoism surpasses all the mind has conceived by way of detachment.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Militant')
                        A reaction: Personally I dislike Taoism, which seems to advocate a sort of suicide within life. But given Cioran's evident state of mind, I can see its attractions. If this country deteriorates any further [I write on 4th July 2016], I may turn to Taoism.
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 1. Religious Commitment / a. Religious Belief
When man abandons religion, he then follows new fake gods and mythologies
                        Full Idea: Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Genealogy')
                        A reaction: Cioran had just lived through the high water mark of communism and fascism. I don't think modern atheists fit this description very well.
A religion needs to motivate killings, and cannot tolerate rivals
                        Full Idea: A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views')
                        A reaction: I fear that in our time we have people who are killing in the name of their religion as a last resort to try to convince themselves that their religion is not dying. It is startlingly how religion can now be publicly mocked. Unthinkable 50 years ago.
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / e. Hell
Circles of hell are ridiculous; all that matters is to be there
                        Full Idea: What a preposterous notion, to draw circles in hell, to make the intensity of the flames vary in its compartments, to hierarchise its torments! The important thing is to be there.
                        From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], '1 'La Perduta')