The New Gods by Emil M. Cioran & Richard Howard

Author:Emil M. Cioran & Richard Howard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Philosophy, Writing
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1969-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE UNDELIVERED

The more we consider the Buddha’s last exhortation, “Death is inherent in all created things; labor ceaselessly for your salvation,” the more we are troubled by the impossibility of feeling ourselves as an aggregate, a transitory if not fortuitous convergence of elements. We readily conceive ourselves as such in the abstract; in the immediate, we physically gainsay it, as if we were faced with some unassimilable evidence. So long as we have not triumphed over this organic repugnance, we shall continue to suffer that illusion-based scourge which is the craving to exist.

That we unmask things, that we stigmatize them with the name of appearances counts for nothing, for we admit thereby that they harbor being. We cling to anything, if only we don’t have to tear ourselves away from that fascination accountable for our actions and even our nature, from that primal dazzle which keeps us from discerning the nonreality in everything.

I am a “being” by metaphor; if I were one in fact, I should remain so forever, and death, stripped of meaning, would have no hold on me. “Labor ceaselessly for your salvation”—that is, don’t forget that you are a fugitive assemblage, a composite whose ingredients are only waiting to come apart. Salvation, indeed, has a meaning only if we are provisional to the point of mockery; if there were the slightest principle of duration in us, we should have been forever saved or lost: no more quest, no more horizon. If deliverance matters at all, our unreality is a real godsend.

. . .

We should deprive being of all its attributes, make it no longer the support, the site, of all our attachments, the eternal reassuring impasse, a prejudice—the most deeply rooted of all, the one we are most accustomed to. We are accomplices of being, or of what seems so to us, for there is no being, there is only the ersatz of being. If there were a true one, we should still have to release ourselves from it, extirpate it, since everything which is turns to subjection and shackles. Let us ascribe to others the status of shades; we shall separate ourselves from them all the more easily. If we are mad enough to believe they exist, we expose ourselves to nameless miscalculations. Let us have the prudence to acknowledge that everything that happens to us, every event, like every bond, is inessential, and that if there is a knowledge, what it must show us is the advantage of maneuvering among ghosts.

Thought, too, is a prejudice, a shackle. It liberates only at the beginning, when it permits us to break certain moorings; afterwards, all it is capable of is to absorb our energy and to paralyze our impulses toward liberation. That it can help us in no way is sufficiently proved by the happiness we feel when we suspend it. Like desire, to which it is related, thought feeds on its own substance; it likes to manifest, to multiply itself. At best, it can tend toward

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