77 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. |
| 10468 | A metaphysics has an ontology (objects) and an ideology (expressed ideas about them) [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: A metaphysical theory hs two parts: ontology and ideology. The ontology consists of the entities which the theory says exist; the ideology consists of the ideas which are expressed within the theory using predicates. Ideology sorts into categories. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02.1) | |
| A reaction: Say 'what there is', and 'what we can say about it'. The modern notion remains controversial (see Ladyman and Ross, for example), so it is as well to start crystalising what metaphysics is. I am enthusiastic, but nervous about what is being said. |
| 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. |
| 10471 | Ockham's Razor has more content if it says believe only in what is causal [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One might give Ockham's Razor a bit more content by advising belief in only those entities which are causally efficacious. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §03) | |
| A reaction: He cites Armstrong as taking this line, but I immediately think of Shoemaker's account of properties. It seems to me to be the only account which will separate properties from predicates, and bring them under common sense control. |
| 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. |
| 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') |
| 10749 | Necessary truths seem to all have the same truth-maker [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The definition of truth-makers entails that a truth-maker for a given necessary truth is equally a truth-maker for every other necessary truth. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §24) | |
| A reaction: Maybe we could accept this. Necessary truths concern the way things have to be, so all realities will embody them. Are we to say that nothing makes a necessary truth true? |
| 10750 | Slingshot Argument: seems to prove that all sentences have the same truth-maker [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Slingshot Argument: if truth-makers work for equivalent sentences and co-referring substitute sentences, then if 'the numbers + S1 = the numbers' has a truth-maker, then 'the numbers + S2 = the numbers' will have the same truth-maker. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §24) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Hence every sentence has the same truth-maker! Truth-maker fans must challenge one of the premises. |
| 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. |
| 10747 | Accepting properties by ontological commitment tells you very little about them [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The route to the existence of properties via ontological commitment provides little information about what properties are like. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §22) | |
| A reaction: NIce point, and rather important, I would say. I could hardly be committed to something for the sole reason that I had expressed a statement which contained an ontological commitment. Start from the reason for making the statement. |
| 10748 | Reference is not the only way for a predicate to have ontological commitment [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: For a predicate to have a referential function is one way, but not the only way, to harbour ontological commitment. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §22) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the main idea is that the predicate makes some important contribution to a sentence which is held to be true. Maybe reference is achieved by the whole sentence, rather than by one bit of it. |
| 10719 | There are four conditions defining the relations between particulars and properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Four adequacy conditions for particulars and properties: asymmetry of instantiation; different particulars can have the same property; particulars can have many properties; two properties can be instantiated by the same particulars. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: The distinction between particulars and universals has been challenged (e.g. by Ramsey and MacBride). There are difficulties in the notion of 'instantiation', and in the notion of two properties being 'the same'. |
| 10721 | If properties are sui generis, are they abstract or concrete? [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If properties are sui generis entities, one must decide whether they are abstract or concrete. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: A nice basic question! I take the real properties to be concrete, but we abstract from them, especially from their similarities, and then become deeply confused about the ontology, because our language doesn't mark the distinctions clearly. |
| 10716 | There are just as many properties as the laws require [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One conception of properties says there are only as many properties as are needed to be constituents of laws. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §03) | |
| A reaction: I take this view to the be precise opposite of the real situation. The properties are what lead to the laws. Properties are internal to nature, and laws are imposed from outside, which is ridiculous unless you think there is an active deity. |
| 10720 | We have four options, depending whether particulars and properties are sui generis or constructions [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Both properties and particulars can be taken as either sui generis or as constructions, so we have four options: both sui generis, or both constructions, or one of each. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: I think I favour both being sui generis. God didn't make the objects, then add their properties, or make the properties then create some instantiations. There can't be objects without properties, or objectless properties (except in thought). |
| 10714 | The expressions with properties as their meanings are predicates and abstract singular terms [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The types of expressions which have properties as their meanings may vary, the chief candidates being predicates, such as '...is wise', and abstract singular terms, such as 'wisdom'. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be important, because there is too much emphasis on predicates. If this idea is correct, we need some account of what 'abstract' means, which is notoriously tricky. |
| 10715 | There are five main semantic theories for properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Properties in semantic theory: functions from worlds to extensions ('Californian'), reference, as opposed to sense, of predicates (Frege), reference to universals (Russell), reference to situations (Barwise/Perry), and composition from context (Lewis). | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02 n12) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; 'Californian' refers to Carnap and Montague; the Lewis view is p,67 of Oliver]. Frege misses out singular terms, or tries to paraphrase them away. Barwise and Perry sound promising to me. Situations involve powers. |
| 10738 | Tropes are not properties, since they can't be instantiated twice [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: I rule that tropes are not properties, because it is not true that one and the same trope of redness is instantiated by two books. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, but has very far-reaching implications, because it means there are no properties, and no two things have the same properties, so there can be no generalisations about properties, let alone laws. ..But they have equivalence sets. |
| 10739 | The property of redness is the maximal set of the tropes of exactly similar redness [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Using the predicate '...is exactly similar to...' we can sort tropes into equivalence sets, these sets serving as properties and relations. For example, the property of redness is the maximal set of the tropes of redness. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: You have somehow to get from scarlet and vermilion, which have exact similarity within their sets, to redness, which doesn't. |
| 10740 | The orthodox view does not allow for uninstantiated tropes [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: It is usual to hold an aristotelian conception of tropes, according to which tropes are present in their particular instances, and which does not allow for uninstantiated tropes. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: What are you discussing when you ask what colour the wall should be painted? Presumably we can imagine non-existent tropes. If I vividly imagine my wall looking yellow, have I brought anything into existence? |
| 10741 | Maybe concrete particulars are mereological wholes of abstract particulars [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Some trope theorists give accounts of particulars. Sets of tropes will not do because they are always abstract, but we might say that particulars are (concrete) mereological wholes of the tropes which they instantiate. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: Looks like a non-starter to me. How can abstract entities add up to a mereological whole which is concrete? |
| 10742 | Tropes can overlap, and shouldn't be splittable into parts [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: More than one trope can occupy the same place at the same time, and a trope occupies a place without having parts which occupy parts of the place. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: This is the general question of the size of a spatial trope, or 'how many red tropes in a tin of red paint?' |
| 10472 | 'Structural universals' methane and butane are made of the same universals, carbon and hydrogen [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The 'structural universals' methane and butane are each made up of the same universals, carbon and hydrogen. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §07) | |
| A reaction: He cites Lewis 1986, who is criticising Armstrong. If you insist on having universals, they might (in this case) best be described as 'patterns', which would be useful for structuralism in mathematics. They reduce to relations. |
| 10724 | Located universals are wholly present in many places, and two can be in the same place [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: So-called aristotelian universals have some queer features: one universal can be wholly present at different places at the same time, and two universals can occupy the same place at the same time. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: If you want to make a metaphysical doctrine look ridiculous, stating it in very simple language will often do the job. Belief in fairies is more plausible than the first of these two claims. |
| 7963 | Aristotle's instantiated universals cannot account for properties of abstract objects [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Properties and relations of abstract objects may need to be acknowledged, but they would have no spatio-temporal location, so they cannot instantiate Aristotelian universals, there being nowhere for such universals to be. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11), quoted by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things | |
| A reaction: Maybe. Why can't the second-order properties be in the same location as the first-order ones? If the reply is that they would seem to be in many places at once, that is only restating the original problem of universals at a higher level. |
| 10730 | If universals ground similarities, what about uniquely instantiated universals? [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If universals are to ground similarities, it is hard to see why one should admit universals which only happen to be instantiated once. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: He is criticising Armstrong, who holds that universals must be instantiated. This is a good point about any metaphysics which makes resemblance basic. |
| 10727 | Uninstantiated universals seem to exist if they themselves have properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: We may have to accept uninstantiated universals because the properties and relations of abstract objects may need to be acknowledged. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This is the problem of 'abstract reference'. 'Courage matters more than kindness'; 'Pink is more like red than like yellow'. Not an impressive argument. All you need is second-level abstraction. |
| 7962 | Uninstantiated properties are useful in philosophy [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Uninstantiated properties and relations may do some useful philosophical work. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11), quoted by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things | |
| A reaction: Their value isn't just philosophical; hopes and speculations depend on them. This doesn't make universals mind-independent. I think the secret is a clear understanding of the word 'abstract' (which I don't have). |
| 10722 | Instantiation is set-membership [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One view of instantiation is that it is the set-membership predicate. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §10) | |
| A reaction: This cuts the Gordian knot rather nicely, but I don't like it, if the view of sets is extensional. We need to account for natural properties, and we need to exclude mere 'categorial' properties. |
| 10744 | Nominalism can reject abstractions, or universals, or sets [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: We can say that 'Harvard-nominalism' is the thesis that there are no abstract objects, 'Oz-nominalism' that there are no universals, and Goodman's nominalism rejects entities, such as sets, which fail to obey a certain principle of composition. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §15 n46) | |
| A reaction: Personally I'm a Goodman-Harvard-Oz nominalist. What are you rebelling against? What have you got? We've been mesmerized by the workings of our own minds, which are trying to grapple with a purely physical world. |
| 10726 | Things can't be fusions of universals, because two things could then be one thing [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If a particular thing is a bundle of located universals, we might say it is a mereological fusion of them, but if two universals can be instantiated by more than one particular, then two particulars can have the same universals, and be the same thing. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This and Idea 10725 pretty thoroughly demolish the idea that objects could be just bundles of universals. The problem pushes some philosophers back to the idea of 'substance', or some sort of 'substratum' which has the universals. |
| 10725 | Abstract sets of universals can't be bundled to make concrete things [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If a particular thing is a bundle of located universals, we might say that it is the set of its universals, but this won't work because the thing can be concrete but sets are abstract. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This objection applies just as much to tropes (abstract particulars) as it does to universals. |
| 10745 | Science is modally committed, to disposition, causation and law [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Natural science is up to its ears in modal notions because of its use of the concepts of disposition, causation and law. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §15) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Quine. It might be possible for an auster physicist to dispense with these concepts, by merely describing patterns of observed behaviour. |
| 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. |
| 16383 | Puzzled Pierre has two mental files about the same object [Recanati on Kripke] |
| Full Idea: In Kripke's puzzle about belief, the subject has two distinct mental files about one and the same object. | |
| From: comment on Saul A. Kripke (A Puzzle about Belief [1979]) by François Recanati - Mental Files 17.1 | |
| A reaction: [Pierre distinguishes 'London' from 'Londres'] The Kripkean puzzle is presented as very deep, but I have always felt there was a simple explanation, and I suspect that this is it (though I will leave the reader to think it through, as I'm very busy…). |
| 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. |
| 10746 | Conceptual priority is barely intelligible [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: I find the notion of conceptual priority barely intelligible. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §19 n48) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I agree, though there is a lot of vagueness and intuition involved, and not a lot of hard argument. Can you derive A from B, but not B from A? Is A inconceivable without B, but B conceivable without A? |
| 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') |