Our withdrawal from life is a purely practical matter

„Nothing is better proof of how humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentation”. (TBB 4). At the best we can say that humanity has adjusted itself to its temporal condition and learned to survive it without suicide, but that is not much to show for millennia of conscious existence: „After having botched the true eternity, man has fallen into time, where he has managed if not to flourish at least to live; in any case he has adjusted himself to it. The process of this fall and this adjustment is called History. (FT 180)

In this circumstance, what Cioran can suggest amounts to no more than an adjustment to that „adjustment”. Like Schopenhauer's instructions for the construction of a fire-proof room, he attempts to adapt to situation that is fundamentally hellish. And like Schopenhauer, his suggestions have a tone that is ascetical, to a point, stoic. But whereas Schopenhauer predicated the idea of withdrawal or resignation from life on the claim that time-consciousness was something fundamentally unreal and that, in approaching nirvana, we actually approach true knowledge, Cioran does not comfort himself with the idea of an alternate reality or a compensatory knowledge. Our withdrawal from life is a purely practical matter: „As for happiness, if this word has a meaning, it consists in the aspiration to the minimum and the ineffectual, in the notion of limitation hypothesized. Our sole recourse: to renounce not only the fruit of action, but action itself (FT 65). Cioran technique then, is to radicalize the isolation that our time-consciousness creates, almost to the point of hermitage. Rather then strive after an impossible renunciation, we should rest (not rest content, just rest) within our boundaries. In this way we will minimize our unhappiness, be free from illusion, and do the least harm to others.(...)

Like the earlier pessimists, Cioran associates ends-oriented activity with frustration and suffering. On the daily level, this suggest that we ought to cease our pursuit of objects outside ourselves, whatever their nature: „Civilization instructs us how to take hold of things, wheres it is the art of letting go that it should teach us .. Every new acquisition signifies a new chain” (FT 69). But this behavior if generalized, amounts to an „art of living”, albeit a monastic one – a withdrawal, insofar as humanly possible, from the effects of time. While we cannot leap out of time in ecstatic fashion, we can hunker down, as it were, mark our doors with blood, and let the worst of it pass over us. Thus, to Cioran is the condition that we ought to call freedom: if we were to wrest ourselves from our desires we should thereby wrest ourselves from destiny; … by the sacrifice of our identity we would accede to freedom, inseparable from training in anonymity and abdication. 'I am no one, I have conquered my name' exclaims the man who, reaching the degradation of leaving tracts, tries to conform to Epicurus's commend: „Hide your life'”. (FT 66) While the passage makes the freedom Cioran describes sound entirely negative, elsewhere, as we have seen, he describes the release from destiny as something that should „delight our hearts” on the grounds that it liberates the individual in the most radical way possible (SHD 149).

Epicurus is the figure to whom Cioran recurs on several occasions always as an example of the sort philosopher he would like to emulate, one who has stop thinking and .. begun to search for happiness. (TS 50). While showing no interest in Epicurean metaphysic, Cioran directly identifies with the idea of a search for an „art of living” and with a practical approach to pleasure and pain. But where Epicurus recommended friendship as a core element of personal happiness, Cioran's stringent search for nothingness ends in isolation: „I suppressed word after word from my vocabulary. When that massacre was over, only one had escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric” (TBB 92). To escape our destiny, we must escape from all trappings of social existence, which constantly threaten, as Rousseau argued, to generate new desires and aims for which we will futilely strive. Even more then hiding our lives, Cioran's advice, in effect, is to hide your soul. He replaces ecstasy of transfiguration with the satisfactions of solitude. The atheist mystic has become an atheistic monk.
Joshua Foa Dienstag
from: Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit