This is a slightly edited version of an email I wrote to a friend expressing my feelings around certain ideas of Emil Cioran. Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who engaged with the issues of suffering, suicide, failure and nihilism (among other things).
I was thinking about what you said about suicide and failure. And so I read about Emil Cioran and his work. I have strong feelings around these ideas and would like to express them with more clarity.
I couldn’t relate to what Cioran had to say at all. He seems to have a unique voice and way of saying things, but at the core, it’s the same old nihilistic and anti-natalist rhetoric, just a bit more poetic. I’m not saying we should discard nihilism. It’s a valuable idea. But I don’t see any value in cynicism and anti-natalism. Those ideas are only useful for revealing the depravity of its proponents.
The problem with misanthropes like Cioran is that they project their misery onto reality. It doesn’t occur to them that their mental illnesses (depression and insomnia in Cioran’s case) completely distort the lens with which they see the world. For someone who understood the power of writing as a tool for self-reflection, Cioran’s lack of self-awareness is tragic. But I don’t blame him. You can’t overcome your conditioning through insight.
I tried to reflect a bit on my relationship with the themes of his work. While I propositionally agree that reality is absurd, I rarely feel the absurdity in my life. Beauty, order, and the breathtaking complexity of life seem more salient to me than the absurd aspects. I feel connected more than I feel alienated. (After all, life emerges through order. It’s a fleeting victory over entropy.)
Alan Watts, with his brand of “Optimistic Nihilism”, does a good job of reconciling beauty and absurdity. Cioran, on the other hand, is full of cope. The whole idea of relying on the idea of suicide to live another day is one big cope. Sure, such copes can help some people stay alive. But one wouldn’t need these coping mechanisms to go on with life if they loved being alive, which is the default state if you’re not damaged. It’s important to recognize copes for what they are — strategies to manage the pain originating from psychic wounds. You can use painkillers to temporarily alleviate the suffering, but ideally, the focus should be on healing.
And to your question about “What could possibly add more richness to your life than failure?”, I would say — the art of learning. You might say failure and learning are two sides of the same coin. But listen to someone like Josh Waitzkin talk about learning and then contrast that with Emil Cioran. A life and death difference.
If learning is your object of obsession instead of failure, it’s a completely different way of life. When you are focused on learning, failures are just valuable data points you integrate along your journey. Failure feels painful only when you are pinning for a specific outcome, when your self-worth is dependent on “success”. If you truly love the process, failure is no big deal. You quickly bounce back and get back to doing what you enjoy. You don’t revel in failure.
Instead of romanticizing the pain of failure, should we not focus on “destroying” the concept of failure? How can you “fail” when you’re having fun doing what you want to do?
And learning is not just about honing a craft. It can also be about learning to form deep relationships or learning to live deeply (which is what philosophy is about I guess, given it literally means love of wisdom).
Cioran came close to “getting it” when he noted that “without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure” and that “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure”. But he failed to understand what Bach represents — learning, excellence, transcendence. He failed to understand love.
We all carry the baggage of our conditioning and the ideas/philosophies we are drawn to can tell us a lot about ourselves. Especially if those ideas are a bit cope-y in nature. If we can’t see that life is incredibly beautiful, it points to something deeper within ourselves that needs healing.