71 ideas
| 19608 | Wisdom is just the last gasp of a dying civilization [Cioran] |
| 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? |
| 19624 | Intelligence only fully flourishes at the end of a historical period [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19599 | Ideas are neutral, but people fill them with passion and weakness [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19631 | The history of ideas (and deeds) occurs in a meaningless environment [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19645 | Some thinkers would have been just as dynamic, no matter when they had lived [Cioran] |
| 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! |
| 19629 | A nation gives expression to its sum of values, and is then exhausted [Cioran] |
| 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! |
| 19618 | I abandoned philosophy because it didn't acknowledge melancholy and human weakness [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19621 | Originality in philosophy is just the invention of terms [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19607 | The mind is superficial, only concerned with the arrangement of events, not their significance [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19638 | Metaphysics is a universalisation of physical anguish [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19620 | Great systems of philosophy are just brilliant tautologies [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 6420 | Only by analysing is progress possible in philosophy [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible, …for example, by analysing physics and perception, the problem of mind and matter can be completely solved. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I don't share his confidence in the second part of this, but I subscribe to the maxim that 'analsis is the path to wisdom'. It is a very western view, and lots of people (mostly of a mystical disposition) hate it, but I see no better path. |
| 6432 | Analysis gives new knowledge, without destroying what we already have [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me evident that, as in the case of impure water, analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: I agree. On the whole, opponents of analysis are sentimental mystics who are reluctant to think carefully about life. I'm not sure what careful and concentrated thought is capable of, apart from analysis. |
| 19630 | No great idea ever emerged from a dialogue [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 6437 | The theory of types makes 'Socrates and killing are two' illegitimate [Russell] |
| Full Idea: 'Socrates and killing are two' would be an illegitimate sentence according to the doctrine of types. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This nicely shows how Ryle's notion of a 'category mistake', although it is a commonsense observation of bogus reasoning, arises out of Russell's logical analysis of sets. Of course, the theory of types has its critics. |
| 6442 | Truth belongs to beliefs, not to propositions and sentences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Truth and falsehood both belong primarily to beliefs, and only derivatively to propositions and sentences. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure why a proposition which is date/place stamped ('it is raining, here and now') could not be considered a truth, even if no one believed it. Is not the proposition 'squares have four sides' true? |
| 19636 | Truth is just an error insufficiently experienced [Cioran] |
| 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?' |
| 19642 | Eventually every 'truth' is guaranteed by the police [Cioran] |
| 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') |
| 6436 | I gradually replaced classes with properties, and they ended as a symbolic convenience [Russell] |
| Full Idea: My original use of classes was gradually more and more replaced by properties, and in the end disappeared except as a symbolic convenience. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: I wish I knew what properties are. On the whole, though, I agree with this, because it is more naturalistic. We may place things in classes because of their properties, and this means there are natural classes, but classes can't have a life of their own. |
| 7528 | Leibniz bases everything on subject/predicate and substance/property propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The metaphysics of Leibniz was explicitly based upon the doctrine that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every fact consists of a substance having a property. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: I think it is realised now that although predicates tend to attribute properties to things, they are far from being the same thing. See Idea 4587, for example. Russell gives us an interesting foot in the door of Leibniz's complex system. |
| 6439 | Names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Unlike descriptions, names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This interests Russell because of its ontological implications. If we reduce language to names, we can have a pure ontology of 'objects'. We need a system for saying whether a description names something - which is his theory of definite descriptions. |
| 19632 | An axiom has no more authority than a frenzy [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 6423 | We tried to define all of pure maths using logical premisses and concepts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The primary aim of our 'Principia Mathematica' was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts definable in logical terms. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This spells out the main programme of logicism, by its great hero, Russell. The big question now is whether Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems have succeeded in disproving logicism. |
| 6424 | Formalists say maths is merely conventional marks on paper, like the arbitrary rules of chess [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The Formalists, led by Hilbert, maintain that arithmetic symbols are merely marks on paper, devoid of meaning, and that arithmetic consists of certain arbitrary rules, like the rules of chess, by which these marks can be manipulated. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe that maths is arbitrary, and this view pushes me into the arms of the empiricists, who say maths is far more likely to arise from experience than from arbitrary convention. The key to maths is patterns. |
| 6425 | Formalism can't apply numbers to reality, so it is an evasion [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Formalism is perfectly adequate for doing sums, but not for the application of number, such as the simple statement 'there are three men in this room', so it must be regarded as an unsatisfactory evasion. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me a powerful and simple objection. The foundation of arithmetic is that there are three men in the room, not that one plus two is three. Three men and three ties make a pattern, which we call 'three'. |
| 6426 | Intuitionism says propositions are only true or false if there is a method of showing it [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The nerve of the Intuitionist theory, led by Brouwer, is the denial of the law of excluded middle; it holds that a proposition can only be accounted true or false when there is some method of ascertaining which of these it is. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: He cites 'there are three successive sevens in the expansion of pi' as a case in point. This seems to me an example of the verificationism and anti-realism which is typical of that period. It strikes me as nonsense, but Russell takes it seriously. |
| 6419 | In 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In the years 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is interesting (about Russell) because he only labelled it as 'logical atomism' in about 1912, and only wrote about it as such in 1918. It is helpful to understand that the theory of definite descriptions was part of his logical atomism. |
| 6438 | Complex things can be known, but not simple things [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I have come to think that, although many things can be known to be complex, nothing can be known to be simple. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be a rejection of his logical atomism. It goes with a general rebellion against foundationalist epistemology, because the empiricists foundations (e.g. Hume's impressions) seem devoid of all content. |
| 6434 | Facts are everything, except simples; they are either relations or qualities [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Facts, as I am using the word, consist always of relations between parts of a whole or qualities of single things; facts, in a word, are whatever there is except what (if anything) is completely simple. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is the view that goes with Russell's 'logical atomism', where the 'completely simple' is used to build up the 'facts'. If World War One was a fact, was it a 'relation' or a 'quality'. Must events then be defined in terms of those two? |
| 6440 | Universals can't just be words, because words themselves are universals [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Those who dislike universals have thought that they could be merely words; the trouble with this view is that a word itself is a universal. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: Russell gradually lost his faith in most things, but never in universals. I find it unconvincing that we might dismiss nominalism so easily. I'm not sure why the application of the word 'cat' could not just be conventional. |
| 6430 | In epistemology we should emphasis the continuity between animal and human minds [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me desirable in the theory of knowledge to emphasise the continuity between animal and human minds. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: I strongly agree with this, mainly because it avoids overemphasis on language in epistemology. It doesn't follow that animals know a lot, and there is a good case for saying that they don't actually 'know' anything, despite having true beliefs. |
| 6441 | Pragmatism judges by effects, but I judge truth by causes [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism holds that a belief is to be judged if it has certain effects, whereas I hold that an empirical belief is to be judged true if it has certain kinds of causes. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: I'm with Russell here, and this seems to me a convincing objection to pragmatism. The simple problem is that falsehoods can occasionally have very beneficial effects. Beliefs are made true by the facts, not by their consequences. |
| 6431 | Empiricists seem unclear what they mean by 'experience' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When I began to think about theory of knowledge, I found that none of the philosophers who emphasise 'experience' tells us what they mean by the word. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: A very significant comment about empiricism. Hume does not seem very clear about what an 'impression' is. Russell's problem has been dealt with intensively by modern empiricists, who discuss 'the given', and conceptualised perception. |
| 6444 | True belief about the time is not knowledge if I luckily observe a stopped clock at the right moment [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Not all true beliefs are knowledge; the stock example to the contrary is that of a clock which has stopped by which I believe to be going and which I happen to look at when, by chance, it shows the right time. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: [in his 1948:112] Russell had spotted Gettier-type problems long before Gettier. The problem of lucky true beliefs dates back to Plato (Idea 2140). This example is also a problem for reliabilism, if the clock is usually working fine. |
| 19626 | Our instincts had to be blunted and diminished, to make way for consciousness! [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 6433 | Behaviourists struggle to explain memory and imagination, because they won't admit images [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists refuse to admit images because they cannot be observed from without, but this causes them difficulties when they attempt to explain either memory or imagination. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking objection to behaviourism, and it is rarely mentioned in modern discussions of the topic. They might try denying the existence of private 'images', but that wouldn't be very plausible. |
| 6443 | Surprise is a criterion of error [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Surprise is a criterion of error. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: Russell is not too precise about this, but it is a nice point. Surprise is thwarted expectation, which implies prior misjudgement. |
| 22186 | Mental modules are specialised, automatic, and isolated [Fodor, by Okasha] |
| Full Idea: Fodor argues that mental modules have three important featuresL 1) they are domain-specific, 2) their operation is mandatory, 3) they are informationally encapsulated. | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (The Modularity of Mind [1983]) by Samir Okasha - Philosophy of Science: Very Short Intro (2nd ed) 6 | |
| A reaction: Mandatory is interesting. When I hear an English sentence I can't decide not to process it. Modules cannot be too isolated or they couldn't participate in the team. Each one needs a comms manager. |
| 19633 | We use concepts to master our fears; saying 'death' releases us from confronting it [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 6427 | Unverifiable propositions about the remote past are still either true or false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: There is no conceivable method by which we can discover whether the proposition 'It snowed on Manhattan Island on the 1st January in the year 1 A.D.' is true or false, but it seems preposterous to maintain that it is neither. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I love this example, which seems so simple and so clear-cut. It criticises verificationism, and gives strong intuitive support for realism, and supports the law of excluded middle. |
| 6435 | You can believe the meaning of a sentence without thinking of the words [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If you have just heard a loud clap of thunder, you believe what is expressed by 'there has just been a loud clap of thunder' even if no words come into your mind. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me important, and accurate. We should not be too mesmerised by language. Animals have beliefs, and this is a nice example of an undeniable non-linguistic human belief. |
| 19615 | I want to suppress in myself the normal reasons people have for action [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19628 | At a civilisation's peak values are all that matters, and people unconsciously live by them [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19646 | Values don't accumulate; they are ruthlessly replaced [Cioran] |
| 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! |
| 19614 | Lovers are hateful, apart from their hovering awareness of death [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19634 | Man is never himself; he always aims at less than life, or more than life [Cioran] |
| 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]. |
| 19619 | To live authentically, we must see that philosophy is totally useless [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19622 | The pointlessness of our motives and irrelevance of our gestures reveals our vacuity [Cioran] |
| 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? |
| 19617 | Evidence suggests that humans do not have a purpose [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19612 | The universe is dirty and fragile, as if a scandal in nothingness had produced its matter [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19604 | Unlike other creatures, mankind seems lost in nature [Cioran] |
| 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? |
| 19606 | We can only live because our imagination and memory are poor [Cioran] |
| 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! |
| 19601 | Life is now more dreaded than death [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19640 | No one is brave enough to say they don't want to do anything; we despise such a view [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19602 | You are stuck in the past if you don't know boredom [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19644 | History is the bloody rejection of boredom [Cioran] |
| 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? |
| 19641 | If you lack beliefs, boredom is your martyrdom [Cioran] |
| 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') |
| 19613 | It is pointless to refuse or accept the social order; we must endure it like the weather [Cioran] |
| 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') |
| 19627 | Opportunists can save a nation, and heroes can ruin it [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19625 | The ideal is to impose a religion by force, and then live in doubt about its beliefs [Cioran] |
| 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.... |
| 19605 | Despite endless suggestions, no one has found a goal for history [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19637 | History is wonderfully devoid of meaning [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19610 | Religions see suicide as insubordination [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19611 | No one has ever found a good argument against suicide [Cioran] |
| 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? |
| 19609 | If you have not contemplated suicide, you are a miserable worm [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19639 | We all need sexual secrets! [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Woe to those who have no sexual secrets! | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Wonders') |
| 19603 | Why is God so boring, and why does God resemble humanity so little? [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19616 | As the perfect wisdom of detachment, philosophy offers no rivals to Taoism [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19600 | When man abandons religion, he then follows new fake gods and mythologies [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19643 | A religion needs to motivate killings, and cannot tolerate rivals [Cioran] |
| 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. |
| 19623 | Circles of hell are ridiculous; all that matters is to be there [Cioran] |
| 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') |