E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition by Karl White: A Review

E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition by Karl White. Bloomsbury, 2025

Before I read this book, I knew nothing about E.M. Cioran. I still haven't read anything by Cioran, except the (plentiful) excerpts that I've encountered in this book. It served as an excellent introduction to a thinker who is certainly intriguing and is relatively uknown in this part of the world. (I've had a lifelong layman's interest in philosophy, and especially in conservative thought, but I'd never even heard of him.)

Cioran was a pessimist, which presents a certain challenge to me. As I've mentioned before, I have a melancholic temperament but my allegiance, as it were, is with the cosmic optimists. G.K. Chesterton is my great literary and philosophical hero, and his view of existence was not only optimistic but even ecstatic: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Given my affirmation of this credo, what interest could there be for me-- or for anyone of a Chestertonian mindest-- in a pessimistic thinker?

Well, plenty, I think. Pessimism is a permanent and necessary part of the human condition. We live in a physical universe governed by entropy and every life ends in death. The Bible gives ample voice to pessimism, from Job (Chesterton's favourite book of the Bible) and Ecclesiastes (a particular favourite of my own), to Christ's harrowing cry from the Cross.

Not only that, but I personally have a taste for the bleakest pessimism as a kind of ice bath. For instance, these lines from Yeats (drawn from Sophocles):

Never to have lived is best, ancient sages say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

This is a quotation that is highly relevant to Cioran, who wrote a book titled The Trouble With Being Born. In the second paragraph of E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition, White addresses the centrality of birth to Cioran's philosophy: "If there is one linking theme or overall message to Cioran's work it is, I believe, the following: being born is a kind of disaster, and all of the efforts we make to alleviate and ameliorate the human condition are due to partial and often total failure."

What room for manouvre does such a radical stance leave to a thinker? If the picture is pitch black, what is the point of detail, or how is it even possible? This is what I've always wondered about writers and thinkers commonly described as "nihilistic".

And yet (as this book makes clear), it's not quite accurate to call Cioran a nihilist. He did seem to believe that there was at least better and worse in many regards-- for instance, he valued the role of the Catholic Church in civilisation, and regretted its comprise with modernity (as he saw it). He was also an admirer of Luther, as if to prove what a contradictory creature he was.

The most obvious comparison for Cioran is Friedrich Nietzsche. Both thinkers held a gloomy view of modern civilization, both embraced the use of the aphorism, and both-- although I'm less sure of Cioran than Nietzsche here-- had an essentially aesthetic view of life. The biggest difference seems to be that Nietzsche, while holding a tragic view of human existence, saw its tragedy as something to be overcome, sublimated, or even gloried in. Cioran, it seems, looked towards no such apotheosis.

Indeed, one can find close matches between many of Cioran's aphorisms and those of Nietzsche:

"Thought which liberates itself from all prejudice disintegrates, imitating the scattered incoherence of the very things it would apprehend." (Cioran.)
"Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion." (Nietzsche.)

"What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts." (Cioran.)

"That for which we find words is something that is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." (Nietzsche.)

"Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man". (Cioran.)

"Man is something to be surpassed". (Nietzsche.)

"I have no system; and as for a method, I have only one: the trial by agony". (Cioran.)
"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is lack of integrity." (Nietzsche.)

"Determined to be happy, [man] has become so. And his happiness, exempt from plenitude, from risk, from any tragic suggestion, has become that enveloping mediocrity in which he will be content forever." (Cioran.)

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest."(Nietzsche.)

Cioran's attitude to religion is interesting, and typical of many (perhaps an increasing number) of thinkers on the right. It's fascinating that, while many people believe in God but repudiate organized religion, Cioran seems to have been quite the opposite: he wasn't at all sure about God, but he was nostalgic for Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church. Indeed, he resented the liberalization of Catholicism, despite not being a believer.

As White puts it: "Although he personally lacks faith, Cioran discusses God with an urgency of a man with a serious investment in belief, or at least the need to believe. God is an object of thought that is interrogated relentlessly, with a mixture of wonder, horror, reverence, disdain, and respect."

Cioran also seems to have had a conflicted view of the "end of history", at one time looking forward to a post-historical state where (as White puts it) "books and knowledge are banned...The perennial present shall be enforced as a mode of being and a form of ethical perfection." He quotes Cioran's own words: "Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so".

However, Cioran was also pulled towards the idea of history beginning again, even if it meant catastrophe: "Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror".

In his Conclusion, White writes: "Cioran is more than merely another nihilistic continental philosopher who trades in pity but ephemeral aphorisms... His value is as a philosophical gadfly, one who operates on the margins of thought with a license to roam and criticize as he sees fit, unfettered from normal philosophical or institutional obligations... He is more a therapist than a sage." (One is tempted to quip: "The kind of therapist who talks his patient onto the window-ledge"...except that Cioran did not advocate suicide, seeing it as pointless!) The book ends with an especially interesting survey of the secondary literature on Cioran.

This is a fascinating book, especially recommended for those interested in straying from the well-worn paths of twentieth century philosophy, and in the history of right-wing thought.