Ep. 377: Emil Cioran’s Pessimism (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys where at one point is that on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 376 is something like what is the human condition? And we read parts of the first essay From Emil Cioran's 1949 book, a short History of Decay. For more information about the text of the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, habituated to a discipline of horror in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin having killed the prophet and me and having no place among men in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey decomposing in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Mark: So I don't remember who suggested this to us. Definitely multiple people.

0:58 Wes: This is my favorite self help book.

1:01 Mark: There's definitely multiple people over the years. I think that's kind of how I take a lot of the. I don't want to discourage people from sending us suggestions, but a lot of the way that I do it if I just haven't heard of the person is I wait until somebody else mentions the person. So I don't know sort of how respected in the canon or whatever, whether he's more of a popular figure. He's definitely a good literary figure. But like do the same people that like Baudrillard or whatever, like Cioran, I'm not really sure, you know, he's not overtly Marxist or anything. He's a pessimist. He's basically Schopenhauer.

1:36 Wes: Well, he's Schopenhauer without all the willing and metaphysical baggage. Yeah, there's a.

1:46 Dylan: He's not Schopenhauer. He's a nihilist straight up.

1:50 Wes: There you go.

1:50 Dylan: He's straight up a nihilist with the faintest possible glimmers on a good day. Like, he's the person who doesn't make cracks about how bad life is, when once in a while he's the one for which maybe takes a drag on a cigarette and says, oh, the trees look nice out today. And that's what you get.

2:08 Wes: This is like if you send Eeyore to grad school, that's even better philosophy. And put a little beret on him and gave you a super rabbit.

2:17 Mark: Camus, having read more Buddhism and Taoism. How about that? I saw very similar.

2:22 Wes: I don't think so. I think Camus is a far better. Well, I don't want to evaluate. I think there's literary talent here as I told you guys so. I wouldn't not acknowledge that literary talent. But Camus is a much different literary talent. And I don't see existentialism as a form of pessimism.

2:40 Mark: I liked this in the same way that I liked when we read the essays by Schopenhauer. His later essays, like On Wanting, I just wish Everybody be quiet. That was the kind of stuff in the late Schopenhauer, his grumpiness, that was endearing. And I found this very similar. It is sort of written like Nietzsche, at least aphorisms. They're mostly a little longer, like often two pages or, you know, they're not. They're not one line. They're not aphorisms like that. They're a good couple of paragraphs, typically. But they are sort of, you know, he says right up, like, there are only about four ways of dealing with the human condition, with, you know, the horribleness of life.

And so what is a philosopher going to do? He kind of rips on philosophers as they. They come up with new words. That's really all they do. There really are no fundamental. So if this sounds like Camus or it sounds like. I mean, he mentions Buddha and Taoism and things a few times. If it sounds like these things, it's because he's doing the same phenomenology of human existence that he thinks is open to everyone. And he does use very flowery language. I don't know if that comment about philosophy is a comment on what he's doing, because he also says a lot of things that make you think that art is better than philosophy.

Art is. Okay, stopping at the unexpressible. That's where, you know, true depth and true. Dealing with the. The universe as it is. Once you put things into language, you have made them simpler. You have falsified them, you've put them. He doesn't use the they. But I was reading that Heideggerian thing all over this, that it's so easy to become distracted. There's a lot of Kierkegaard in it, too. Yeah, I mean, he's. He's an existentialist that it's so easy to become distracted from sort of the fundamental human condition and just get thrown into some cause or other.

And it's not necessarily the case. I feel, you know, in Nietzsche, you know, where he stands. I felt like Cioran is such a pessimist that, yes, there's something inauthentic and, you know, you're running away from the substance of life or something about getting hypnotized. Self hypnotized. But the alternative, just staring into the abyss also sucks. He does have a couple nice things to say about, like the Idler, you know, somebody who has a sanctimonious sloth. But I still feel like these are different ways that you could approach the universe.

They're sort of all bad. The life is fundamentally a self contradiction. And so there's no sense of like, like Sartre and existentialism of like, oh, there is this thing that you should aspire to, this. There is this existential gauntlet you should get through. At least that's. That was my take on that. He's a existential pessimist. Right? You're saying existential is not pessimism. I feel like he combines them.

5:19 Wes: Well, I mean, he's reminiscent of Beauvoir in his rejection of the serious man. We could say that. So there's a lot of things in this that are evocative of that idea. The rejection of absolutes, one of which manifests. So one way of embracing absolutes is to be philosophical. The other way is to be religious. And he often draws parallels between those two things and rejects them. But there are other ways as well, like. Right, so retreat into vice, for instance, or art, which, Mark, as you pointed out, there's a bit of ambiguity about where that stands because art is suitably acknowledging of the inexpressible and the ineffable in a way that philosophy and religion are not, according to him.

And then there's his brand of nihilism, which in various places. And again, just to repeat your point, Mark, he makes it sound as if it's. Well, it's not even really possible. You could try to do it. You can try to stare into the abyss and try to be free of all illusions. Right? And the big illusion is that there's any point to doing anything. You could try to free yourself of that illusion, but that also is probably doomed to failure. So this is why it's my favorite self help book, because you don't have to do anything. And even if you do, you're going to succeed by failing.

6:51 Seth: Yeah, I'm very encouraged by Wes's embracing of this and connecting it. There are numerous points, of course, Dylan, where I also highlighted the existentialism kind of connection. But imagine this thought process, if you will, dear listener. You buy into the Buddhist premise that life is suffering, or you buy into, you know, the premise that, you know, it's a veil of tears. Pick your favorite metaphor, and then the question becomes, okay, how do I deal with this? And as Wes just pointed out, right, there's religion, there's philosophy, there's whatever.

You know, you can live a life of excess, you know, whatever. None of which actually change or address the issue. And the best that you can hope for, right, is to just be in denial, be in a lie and live the lie that you adopt, but it doesn't change the thing. And he's like, but his kind of role here is to say, like, look, they're all lies. That any appeal to an absolute or transcendent is a way to kind of overcome the human condition is ultimately a fabrication, right? You have to accept the reality of your lived, embodied, suffering, physical existence, which for him was misery.

Not everybody probably feels as desperate about that as he does. So you know, what would happen then if you really, really believe that? If you really were like, okay, yep, there's no way to escape. This is the reality of the situation. And then it very much takes you into kind of the existential thought process, right, of, well, should we commit suicide? And is that even an escape? Right. You know, I think that's one of the questions. But he says, you know, really, if you were just to realize that this was the way things were and realize that everything was a lie or a fabrication to try to make you feel better about your existence and to see through it and just accept it and understand it and continue life, that would be the best, most sort of, like, honorable, noble thing to do.

But it sucks. And, yeah, so this is. I feel like he's kind of just doing a descriptive. It's like, this is the reality of the situation. It's a sucky thing. And so I'm going to make poetry out of it, right?

9:14 Wes: Or this is art or something. This is why I'm reluctant to call him an existentialist, because I don't really see much of a place for freedom. And the existentialist rejects suicide, and for him, the freedom to commit suicide, in a way, that's our greatest freedom. We're unfree in the sense that we're attracted to values. We're attracted to certitude. We're attracted to these absolutes, and we sort of get crushed underneath them. We're attracted to thinking there's a point to doing things. We're attracted to all of life's optimistic illusions, the things that get us out of bed in the morning.

But those are slavery. Those are servitude. And there's no freedom within the domain of being in action. For him, like there would be for an existentialist, the only freedom is to step across the line into non being. And he understands how paradoxical that is. So we have the freedom to kill ourselves and that's our one great power. But we can't really employ it because of course we wouldn't get any actual freedom out of it if we did it.

10:23 Mark: The place that seemed most existential to me is this section, Two Faced Freedom. So it's page 56 where he says, you know, the idea of freedom as a philosophical problem is insoluble, that you can just keep arguing around it. But he says a privileged intuition puts us at the very heart of freedom, despite all arguments invented against it. So it's sort of like, you know, yeah, you could explain causal determinism to somebody, but you ultimately cannot help but feel free. And then he says, you know, that we're overwhelmed by our power, by our possibility. There's an alarming seduction of the arbitrary, like I could just do anything. So I feel like that is the place where we have this Sartrean sort of vertigo, that part of the taking up the work, running into faith, running into activity, is his flight from freedom. Right. So that's just straight up Sartre.

11:19 Wes: So he calls this the ethical principle of demonic essence, which is.

11:24 Mark: Right.

11:24 Wes: It's a really interesting way to put it because it's, you know, a demonic essence can't really be a principle, this intuition which holds only from the inside in a way, but doesn't work from the outside, from the perspective of determinism. But it doesn't even work internally for him because he says, well, it's just going to lead us to one extreme or another. It's going to lead us to sanctity, to write, to trying to save ourselves with some sort of absolute, or it would just destroy us. And the real world lies in between those two extremes, the real, real world where we have to live.

So as far as I can tell, this feeling of freedom, it doesn't really translate into anything in the real world unless there's some. In some of these sections we might think, well, maybe there's some kind of meditative state where we can stare into the abyss and be his version of a wise sage. But it's very ill defined if there is.

12:21 Mark: Yeah, it's always just so clear as Nietzsche, like as this is, and as clearly he read Nietzsche. The reason I said is Schopenhauer is because the way that I was taught, the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is that they both basically agreed on the fundamental Buddhist sort of character of existence that Existence is struggle. You're going to have these desires. These desires are going to lead you to action, but then they're going to be ultimately unfulfilling, or you just have to fulfill them again, you know, so there's something futile about it.

And yet Nietzsche says yes to all that, that he's basically a romantic in that way. And Schopenhauer looked at exactly the same data and said no. Well, Cioran also looks at basically the same data. Of course he doesn't have Schopenhauer's metaphysical system. Of course he doesn't have Schopert, Schopenhauer's ideas of ethics, of compassion and these kind of things. But he still is looking at all that and saying no. And so that. That is the fundamental starting point. So is he just a Buddhist, I guess, with. With a more European fancy learning?

13:25 Wes: Well, he mentions Buddha and an immunity to renunciation starting on page 47. And the basic idea is everything is futility, but we don't live that way. Everything is vanity, but we pretend that it's not. And we do that by waiting and hoping that something is going to change. And I think he associates the Buddha with someone who doesn't do that. So Buddha sees the cripple. Right. And does change. Does change. His life does say that. Right. I'm no longer going to be a prince and live that way. I'm going to. I'm going to do what I'm gonna. What does Buddha do exactly?

14:06 Mark: I mean, he's a. He's a metaphysical traitor who rejects salvation. That's the other mention.

14:14 Wes: Right. So that's. Yeah, that's in this section, I think, right?

14:17 Mark: No, this was. Yeah, page 47 versus page 59.

14:21 Wes: Yep, yep. But I don't think that Buddha. I mean, it didn't sound like Buddha fulfills his particular vision. Buddha is a rejecter of salvation. In that section that starts in 59, he's one of these traitors to being, to life, to existence.

14:38 Dylan: Did you feel like there's a solution to him? Like he's saying he's Buddha or he's pointing to Buddha? He's implying that, either explicitly for Cioran or by implication, interpretation, that there is a unified manifestation that solves the problems in disposition or in attitude to the world, something that he would say yes to and even just in a way of understanding.

15:15 Wes: I mean, to Mark's point, he does seem to be advocating detachment as a solution. I mean, I don't think ultimately he is, but he's closest to Buddhism and seeming to suggest solitude and Detachment are solutions to our suffering. I wouldn't say that he is a Buddhist, but I would say that that sounds closest to where he is. But then he somehow is going one step further by saying it's not possible. And maybe you have to come to terms with the fact that it's not possible. I don't know.

15:43 Seth: Yeah, there's that whole section on solitude where he says, you know, the solitary. We should probably read some of this stuff just because it's exegesis of failure. 17. I think there's another reference later, but it says each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself. And he says, basically, we get corrupted by the world and the world's infested our solitude. But he says solitude isn't somewhere else. He says solitude isn't being alone amongst men or amongst human beings. That's not true solitude.

16:30 Mark: I thought he said that was what the true solitude is.

16:32 Wes: Well, I don't know if he says it's true solitude. There's a greater solitude in that, in a way.

16:39 Seth: Yes. That's what I was. Sorry.

16:41 Wes: And the greater solitude is just in the fact that we're phonies and we're just. By using words and communicating in that way, it's a betrayal of the mystery, of our inner mystery. So it seems to be a bad kind of solitude.

16:55 Seth: Yeah. It's hard to keep all this stuff straight because of the way it's not organized. But this is in Concern for decency, page 42. The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by man, but the man who suffers in their midst. Of all the bonds which link us to things, there's not one which fails to slacken and dissolve under the influence of suffering, which frees us from everything except the obsession to ourselves and the sensation of being irrevocably individual. Suffering is solitude hypostatized as essence. So there's a. This solitude that he's pointing to is not the solitude of loneliness, I guess.

So if it was as simple as just separation from human beings, then, you know, anybody who was lonely or alone would be solitary. And he's saying, no, solitary is suffering. And it's the kind of suffering, a kind of, you know, existential suffering that brings you back to your individuality. It makes you aware of the fact that you maybe this. You could think of it. It makes you aware of this radical quote, unquote freedom, radical responsibility, radical isolation in the universe. Right. And I put a little note there. It made me think of Wittgenstein, right, When Wittgenstein says, yeah, but can you feel this pain, right, that.

I don't know if that's mythical or if it's true, but the idea that there's a kind of something that's deeply and uniquely our own and solitude is coming face to face with that, with your ownness, your individuality and your kind of like radical separation from everything else.

18:38 Wes: Yeah, I thought of Kant on friendship here actually, because of the way he ends this section. He seems to suggest that, right, so being with other people should help us with our solitude, theoretically. But we're in that paradox of friendship is what I would call it too much self disclosure. You know, we need other people to see us in order to be with them. Right. That's what contact, that's what leaving one solitude means to, to see and be seen, to confide. But we can't do it too much because if we do it too much, we're just going to alienate them or we're going to feel ashamed and want to get away from them.

So we're in a real predicament. It's really interesting because the, the, the way he starts the section, he gives this account of the way, you know, matter gets kind of woken up by suffering and suffering just is solitude. So you get. Once you have beings who are conscious like us, you have this new capacity for solitude and you have real individuals, right. So the suffering in a way is individuating. It's part of being a being of the kind that we are. And you would think, well, but we're doing that together. There's a bunch of us, there's a bunch of subjectivities and there's redemption in this.

Yes, we are isolated in a sense. No one is ever going to have my thoughts and have my feelings, but I can share them, can I? And then the question is, well, but can you? And he gives various reasons to say can you? At various points in this, in this essay. And the reason that comes up in this part is just to say, well, other people don't want to hear your crap.

20:12 Dylan: In Buddhism, suffering is a version of just stuff happens to us, where we are creatures for which things happen to them. It doesn't necessarily come with the baggage or implication of bad things happen to me, though. The way we typically use the word suffer, we mean bad things happen to us, though sometimes we imply, oh, just stuff is happening to me. And I'm not clear for Cioran, which he means in annihilation to deliverance. At the end of it, he says we exist only insofar as we suffer.

20:47 Mark: Yeah. We exist as individuals. Yeah.

20:50 Dylan: And he also seems to be understanding that we are in a kind of. For me, it's just a kind of Christian way that we're fallen beings. In his exegesis to failure that Seth was reading at the beginning, ours is not a kind of fatality, but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats. We wallow, craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence in the unanimous mud. And that sense of just being fallen again makes me feel like he's lamenting a lack of certitude, a lack of clarity in what we ought to do because of stuff that happens to us.

A kind of disenchantment that's born out of our fallenness that makes him feel like a kind of disgruntled believer, that he's a brokenhearted, disenchanted believer. And this is his grumpy, disenchanted complaint about the universe that he expects ought to point to a kind of perfection. And maybe certain religions point to the possibility of that perfection, but he sees that that's not possible, but he pines for it. He thinks that that's what it ought to be. And therefore the universe has failed and failed our existence because it doesn't manifest that perfection.

And so in his whining and bitching about it, he just reveals the fact that he actually doesn't even hold on to the thing that he is actually trying to point to. And so I'm just revealing. I got very tired of it very quickly, and I found him to be. Be whining and bitching and just completely tiresome and have a handful of observations that do point to some kind of reflection on the kind of ambiguousness in the way in which we suffer against the world. But then it just ended there.

22:52 Wes: Yeah. And so he is over to the top and pretentious and it's all negative. And it's funny to me. It's quite amusing. It's also irritating in a way. In this, you can kind of just push that irritation down and enjoy the literary quality of it. And even the literary quality is a bit over the top in various ways. But, yeah, somehow I enjoyed it anyway. But in this, I think. What is he lamenting in this, I think a lot of it is about the failure. What we were just Talking about in the other section, it comes up here again in Exegesis of failure on 17.

It's about the impossibility of contact with other people. I think that's what he's yearning for and saying is impossible. And he has different reasons for saying it's impossible. We looked at some of them with that later section. In this section he wants to say that so if there's something incommunicable about us, there's something incommunicable that is the essence of the human. So are we going to be able to share our humanity with other people? Well, not fully, because the thing that we would share is incommunicable. In this section he says, well, the, the person.

And he says this many times. You know, basically the person who comes closest to doing it is the artist person who comes, you know, especially the poet. As long as they're Shakespeare, not Shelley. Right. As long as you're not like trying to put a message into your art. This is the person who comes closest to communicating the incommunicable. But I don't, you know, from the context of the whole essay, I don't think he thinks art fully gets there, although it's a little bit unclear. Certainly philosophy doesn't get there. And that's the way he ends this section is flagging off philosophy and saying it's the, the pinnacle of non authenticity.

Right. The lie of the abstract mind and all the rest of it. And people who want slogans and people who want to have movements and say, rah, rah, rah, let's reform the world, or let's be good, let's do virtue ethics. This, that's all definitely way out for him.

24:55 Dylan: It's not just the inability for us to know other people, it's the inability for us to know ourselves. You know, in the middle of exegesis is a failure. He says, if with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign. We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us. Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves. We exhibit our heart. Executioner of the unspeakable. Each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries beginning with our own. So that's also pointing to artists being able to express the unspeakable without words and manage to maintain the mysteries while speaking of them.

25:40 Wes: Yeah, ordinary speaking is a kind of self betrayal.

25:43 Dylan: Yes.

25:44 Wes: And it, it doesn't honor the mystery at our core. And then the poet does better. But yeah, does he Fully get there. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

25:52 Dylan: And just the end, as you pointed out, is basically lumping in all philosophical and religious and political activity into one group and saying definition is the lie of the abstract mind inspired formula, the lie of the militant one. A definition is always the cornerstone of a temple. A formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin.

26:17 Wes: How then fail to turn to poetry? It has like life the excuse of proving nothing. Yeah. So poetry fares better. And I, you know, and what is he doing? Is it philosophy, is it poetry? It's a little bit unclear. Is it? Maybe it's both.

26:33 Dylan: I mean what he's doing is something

26:36 Wes: informed tone poems, something like that.

26:39 Dylan: Yeah.

26:41 Mark: I was a little confused with this notion of mystery that you mentioned that in the variations on death, which is a pretty lengthy three part section, he ends it by saying, this is page 13. The ancient mysteries of so called revelations, the ultimate secrets have bequeathed us nothing by way of knowledge. And right before that he talks about the. Just the lack of depth, the, the layers of existence lack density. The man who explores them, the archaeologist of the heart of being, finds himself at the end of his researches confronting empty depths.

So whereas some Buddhists slash daoists are very into depth over plentitude. Right. That it's there what is most profound. And I think he does use the word Cioran uses the word profound a few times in a positive way that it's possible to be profound. But maybe it's just that being profound is a matter of what's right in front of you and actually being able to see it and not be distracted by all these different things. So that his ripping at mysteries, his ripping at dense depth here are about the explorers and their, their fruitless searches for something more.

27:55 Wes: So he's talking specifically here about the Eleusinian Mysteries. Right. The ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, initiations for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. So very, very secretive religious rites from ancient Greece. And the idea is that. Right, so that kind of rite, that kind of, you know, it's not discursive, I guess it's religious, but maybe it's more primitive in a sense than what we have by the time we get to Christianity. But even that I think he's saying fails. Right. There's the rites, but they're not really getting at the mysteries, they're not really getting at the secret.

28:37 Seth: Yeah, like that same section. So there's two pieces here. There's kind of like lived experience, the attempt to articulate lived experience or Whether. And that can be normal lived experience, or it could be prophetic, like in this case, lived experience. Right. Any attempt to put into words what is experienced inside during the ritual. Right. Will fail. That's the thing. So words lie in the sense that they come up short. So none of the ancient philosophies or, you know, Kant or Plato or whoever is able to articulate human experience or articulate this deep chasm of being.

Right. There's a lot of echoes of Heidegger in this right, of course, which comes in the section of death. He says, you know, that against the obsession with death, both subterfuges of hope and the arguments of reason lay down their arms. Their insignificance merely whets the appetite to die. In order to triumph over this appetite, there is but one method to live it to the end and to submit to all its pleasures, its pangs, and to do nothing to elude it. So the idea of trying to transcend or overcome experience, which begins with the articulation of something that's supposed to be other than it, other and transcendent of it, will fail because we're trying to run away from being our own being, being and ultimately the end of our being.

So it's kind of on multiple levels.

30:09 Wes: The problem with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in particular, at the end of the section, it's just. Is that they're still connected to the gods. Right. And he'll say the only initiation is to nothingness and to the mockery of being alive. And he wants a lucid mystery, which is something. Lucidity is something he associates with seeing through all of these illusions, Gods or any truth or any of the rest of it. Lucidity is sort of like staring into the abyss. So if you want a legitimate initiation into a mystery, you have to relate yourself not to the gods, but to nothingness.

30:46 Mark: And his phrasing there seems typical when he seems to say anything positive. I dream of an Eleusis of disabused hearts, of a lucid mystery. Like, I don't know that this is actually possible. Probably not actually possible, but this is sort of where the telos points. Yeah, So I was confused what his relation to health. Exactly. And he does mention that here, that. Right. For Nietzsche, it's pretty clear that health is good, whereas for here, health preserves life in a sterile identity.

31:17 Wes: Page 12, right.

31:19 Mark: Yes, yes, that which prefigures death as a novelty to life. So this is almost like a romantic sort of thing. I mean, maybe this is again, using. It's still Nietzsche, but it's Nietzsche criticizing the last man and using the word health, as Nietzsche would not do to describe that, that, you know, part of what the last man does is this sort of cheery comfort and you could see people going to the gym and being all living their healthy lifestyle that he thinks is just very shallow. Whereas he says disease is an activity, the most intense, the richest expenditure of energy without gesture.

So there's something. I was comparing that to what we were saying before about pain. That pain is individuated, it draws you. But here disease, like it gives you something as an individual you're self obsessed to do to make you self obsessed in an energetic way. Being diseased and focused on your disease is admirably ascetic in a way that, you know, merely being healthy is not being healthy would be being part of the they.

32:23 Wes: Yeah, I think he thinks existence is a disease. So, so he's. He says nothing can change our life but the gradual insinuation within us of the forces which annihilated. All right, so this is like a kind of claim that's very familiar to, to us because from the ancients onward, becoming is a mixture of being and nothing. And there is no principle of change without nothingness. So you want to change your life, you know, self help book style, you got to get a little bit more nothing into your life because nothing is the principle that will give you, allow you to go from stasis to get you to becoming to get you to actually change.

So this is a clever little ironic twist here on what do we favor, health or life? The traditional account is that health is also a form of becoming. Right, sir Aristotle here the organism is being at work, being itself and becoming serves being. From the Aristotelian point of view, preserving the form is preserved by activity. And there's of course nothing is right there, any activity. But we would call that health. If everything is going right, we would call that health. I think he's, you know, using a little bit of wordplay here to suggest that we think of this in terms of disease just because there's change.

And if we think about, for example, St. Augustine, the whole principle of. And this is going to come up again elsewhere in this essay. How do you explain why there's evil in a world with an all powerful good God? Well, one of the arguments is just that existence, the sort that we know is becoming. And becoming involves nothing and necessarily just in the same way that there can be growth, there can be decay. And the evil is when things are on the downslope and nothing insinuates itself to the point where there's such a thing as decay. But it's not something positive.

It's not like there's entity, evil, that's in the world, because that would be bad, because then God would have had to have put that there. Evil is sort of in the interstices of things. It's in the little gaps, it's in the nothing. So in this case, I think when he says the richest expenditure of energy without gesture, that sounds kind of like Aristotle's being at work, being oneself. So the rich expenditure of energy allows something to simply be still, to be what it is. Right. To not decay and get absorbed back into its environment. But in this case it's.

Yeah. So I don't know how. Except in this clever, ironic way, how disease replaces that. Exactly.

34:56 Mark: So there's a related section, resignation on page 25, where he's talking about. He's talking to. I'm in a clinic waiting room. This is one of the only times where he, like, occasionally he'll like, I'm out in the morning or something. But he doesn't do a lot of. For something that seems so much like. Obviously like a guy's journal. He doesn't describe his situation almost ever. But here he's in a clinic waiting room, an old woman is telling him about her diseases. And you know, she just is completely self obsessed at first. This excess of self concern on the part of a decrepit crone left me torn between dread and disgusting.

Then I left the clinic before it was my turn, determined to renounce my discomforts forever. So at first he thinks this, but then he reflected that. He walks the streets 59 seconds out of each of my minute were dedicated to suffering or to the idea of suffering. If only I had a stone's vocation, a heart, an origin of every torment. I aspire to the object, to the blessing of matter and opacity. Which sounds like what Sartre says you can't do, right?

35:57 Dylan: Yeah.

35:57 Wes: Where opacity is just lack of subjectivity. The subject has an epiphanous quality to it.

36:03 Dylan: Yeah. And this is back to him feeling that pining for certainty and a clear object that has no uncertainty to it. Right. It's exactly the thing that he's saying exists and he's pining for. He's the way the world is. And then he's pining for it to be different than the world.

36:21 Mark: But what is the world saying?

36:23 Wes: We have to give up desire, we're going to have to give up Hope, Yeah.

36:26 Dylan: And we have to give up being that has no aspect of non being in it.

36:31 Wes: Right.

36:32 Mark: It is a sin to get outside yourself. This is the same section. By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. So that's what we're. Right. So he's literally a nihilist that discovering the individual, focusing on your own. So I don't. This is one of my question whether focusing on your own pain is a way of being the individual. Because it does. Right. We said it's what gives you solitude. It gets what separates you from everybody else. It was elsewhere he says that your sufferings are what sort of make you what you are, what you build up.

And he, even though clearly he recommends and practices being an artist, he says like, well, that's a steam valve. Like the truly sort of. I don't know if admirable is the right word, but the most truly human are those that just let it all build up until they end in tragedy. Right. Philosophers are not capable of ending in tragedy. They sort of rationalize everything. Anybody that has a talent, this is a later section I'm bringing in. Is able to somehow dissipate this buildup of energy. But you know what is most human is just letting that nothingness that is constantly coming at us just build up and build up and just become your whole individual being.

And so this is what like does. Is he recommending that? He can't recommend that, but he says it's like the most deep and honest way of being compared to the other alternatives. So maybe I was wrong that you know, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, they both see the same sort of situation. Nietzsche says yes, Schopenhauer says no. And Cioran says, eh, there's nothing you could do.

38:05 Wes: So let's go to that section because I didn't read it that way. The.

38:08 Mark: Sure, if you want to jump.

38:10 Wes: So let's see, each section isn't subterfuges 53. Is that what you're thinking?

38:15 Mark: I think so, yeah.

38:16 Wes: So he's contrasting, right, the artist who. Right. So the artists have talent. They take these instinctual desires and they sublimate them into something else. But insofar as they're doing that, they weaken that. He's contrasting that the people who keep it under pressure. That's what leads to the absolute of some sort or another. Sanctity, Right. Religiousness. That's one form of the absolute resulting from this pressure cooker. Vice, including masturbation, I think he calls out specifically rage, self destruction, Suicide. Yeah. So I thought art came Out.

Well, so I see it as a bit more ambiguous. Right, so you have tragic, Tragic heroes are one example of these kind of pressure cooker people who are going to do something really great but self destructive. And the poet, someone like Shakespeare, that's their subject matter, that's who they. When they sublimate all of this, they represent people like them. Instead of going out and doing it and being Hamlet and killing and getting killed, you get some satisfaction out of representing that which I think most of us would think is preferable. So which one is he recommending here?

Should we be the tragic hero or should we be able to get what we need out of art, out of the representation of the tragic hero? I think maybe. Is it just my bias that I thought art came out a little bit better here?

39:43 Seth: Yes, I read the section the same way. Because ultimately the heroes are heroes for an ideal. Right. Chivalry, God, whatever. So you know, it's just the equivalent of a denial or an avoidance. And so the section where he talks about art. So Mark, he said something. You alluded to it a minute ago, but I had the quote about the

40:09 Mark: lack of talent that's in this section.

40:10 Seth: The subterfuge? No, no, it's about artistic, about creativity, about creating art versus like you know, taking it all inside and doing nothing. Right. I'm sorry, I can't find.

40:21 Mark: I thought it was in this section. The man who accumulates energies, lives under pressure, a slave to his own excesses. Nothing keeps him from foundering in the absolute. There are only a few sections actually about art in here.

40:31 Seth: There's no section. He, he makes a reference. He says that artistic creativity is like redirects what is impressing upon the inside, to the outside.

40:41 Mark: Yes.

40:42 Seth: And so there's something about artistic creativity. It's the place where he says something like words, colors and shapes or something like that, and that it's a mechanism that doesn't use language or at least. Well, that's not entirely true. So that's a difficult one for me, but.

40:58 Mark: Sorry, yeah. This is actually the first line of subterfuges that we were just looking at. Only those who live outside of art draw the ultimate consequences. Suicide, sanctity, vice. So many forms of lack of talent, direct or disguised confession by word, sound or color halts the agglomeration of inner forces and weakens them by projecting them back toward the world outside.

41:18 Seth: It is a salutary diminution which makes every act of creation into a coefficient of escape. Right, but that doesn't suggest that it's Emancipatory, Right. Or somehow the solution. And heroism is not an act of creativity. Right. Like philosophy is not an act of creativity, which could be argued, but religion certainly isn't and all these things. In any case, the point is. I agree with Wes.

41:43 Wes: Well, if we wanted to lend support to Mark's initial reading, it does seem to say so the cowardices of expression would have made him retreat before the Supreme Right. So if the hero, if the tragic hero had any actual talent, right. If. If they could be Shakespeare instead of being a Shakespeare character, then, yeah, they're going to retreat before these. These absolutes. And instead of actually doing great things in action in. In the real world, they would just expel it all, express it all in representation. So. But it's a bit ambiguous, right, because these absolutes don't come off well in general in this essay, whether it's religion or philosophy or something else.

Masturbation, drugs. There's a whole list here of other things, but it still is interesting. Right? So art, you know, the implication seems to be that art is better. But also he uses this word cowardice and seems to acknowledge that there is a kind of greatness in these heroes that we can't aspire to if we just supplement it into art.

42:44 Dylan: There's a little flavor of this in the Farewell to Philosophy section, which is probably on like page 49 of.

42:50 Wes: Oh, yeah, it's 49.

42:51 Dylan: And in the middle there he's saying the philosophical exercise is not fruitful, it's merely honorable. We're always philosophers with impunity, a metier without fate which pours voluminous thoughts into our neutral and vacant hours, the hours refractory to the Old Testament, to Bach and to Shakespeare. And have these thoughts materialized into a single page that is equivalent to one of Job's exclamations or Macbeth's terrors, or the altitude of. one of Bach's cantatas, we do not argue the universe, we express it and philosophy does not express it. So I took that as being another pass. That art is doing is rendering the inexpressible or doing the rendering of the truth of the world by expressing it and in a way that is always annihilating, that happens with words and the way in which philosophy uses words.

43:47 Wes: Yeah, I like this idea of philosophy kind of abandoning us where the real problems begin. It sort of leads us up to the edge of the cliff and says, okay, goodbye. Because the real problems begin right where this unknown in which all our moments are rooted, as he puts it, this whatever this ineffable thing, this mystery and side of us, which, again, it does seem to suggest it can be expressed to some extent in poetry.

44:12 Dylan: Yeah, I did find. And maybe this is one of the. I'm obviously a little bit cranky about reading, but part of it comes out of things. Like at the end of this essay, he has a section that's all in one big set of parenthetical sort of his David Foster Wallace footnoting. And he points out that the great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. And in the second paragraph, he says, we define only out of despair. We must have a formula. We must even have many, if only to give justification to the mind and a facade to the void. And I found that really curious because it's either that he's sort of wrong about that or he's interpreting the act that is an act of despair that we wouldn't call despair.

So I would have said. And I think frequently we would accuse philosophers or scientists or poets, even anybody who's giving a definition. And the kind of defining that he is pointing out is only kind of crashes on the rocks of reality and ends in despair as futile acts of hope. That the act of defining would be an act of hopefulness, an act of trying to wrangle the world into something that we can actually understand ourselves. And that the despair would come from understanding and realizing that that's not true, that those definitions and those attempts to hold become mere tautologies or fail.

But that the act of defining was an act of despair, in fact, even felt like contradictory to the way in which he was describing the world. So I found it kind of confusing, besides being wrong.

46:09 Mark: I was just reading this. I was defining despair in a sort of Kierkegaardian sense, that it is an ontological condition of our being and something that we constantly try to escape from, you know, depending on which part of Kierkegaard you're reading. Ultimately, he thinks that you can through faith or something that. But you have to go through the motions of despair before you can get there. And. But clearly, if you cut that off, then it's. It's like Kierkegaard in his aesthetic character. I saw a lot of that in here, you know, that this is sort of a more sophisticated, I think, better, more poetic version of what we were seeing there.

So that all these. These escapes, you know, that's why I was reading the philosopher. Oh, you know, the. The. Or the artist coming up with this is an escape. These subterfuges that. These are bad, like the Good thing is to be authentic. Authentic and remain focused on the void. Remain. You don't try to escape. But it seems like he again and again says, you have that realization, but you can't do it. You inevitably escape. You inevitably. So despair is just an unavoidable condition. And it's just what are the strategies we have for dealing with that?

And probably, you know, like you'd expect, like from Nietzsche, like from Freud. Sublimation. So the artist is the most healthy way probably to not live a total lie, but you still are able to live.

47:28 Dylan: So you're reading we define only out of despair, whereas out of despair is our condition. And that the act of defining is an act of trying to escape our despair. So it's an act of hopefulness that comes out of the fact that we are in a state of despair. And that's what defining means. As opposed to the way I was reading it.

47:50 Wes: Yeah.

47:51 Dylan: Is that we define only out of despair. Is that it's in despairing that we actually act out defining. And you're saying to read it.

48:01 Wes: Yeah, I think Mark is out of despair. Yeah.

48:04 Seth: Okay.

48:04 Wes: I think we've. I'm not sure defining is a way of getting. Is a way of getting out of despair. It's, you know, it's the way we get at these absolutes and it's the way we. It's what we do when we're philosophical.

48:15 Mark: And okay, if you can't successfully got to get. Get out of despair. I'm not sure I see the difference actually, Dylan. But because you could say I'm throwing a tantrum out of despair. Like, well, that doesn't get you out of despair, but you're doing it because of despair is a strategy. It's just a stupid strategy.

48:31 Wes: So let's try to say what the despair is about. Right. So he starts by saying what is loathes the verbal embrace. And our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged, an inexpressible moment. So there's something inside us that's inexpressible. So this again goes to my point about communication and what cannot be communicated and certain divides that can't be crossed between ourselves in the world and between ourselves and other human beings. And that's part of the despair. And his conclusion. So the first conclusion from that being is only a potential to nothingness.

Being itself is only potential and nothingness. So that the interpretation here is that there's a kind of nothingness about what's inexpressible inside of us. And then we. Out of the Despair of the incommunicability of all that we create these definitions and we create an illusion of a mind, independent reality and a God and values and this and that. All this sort of superstructure or infrastructure arises out of that desperation to try and make meaning of something that just can't be made actually made sense of.

49:42 Dylan: Yep.

49:43 Mark: Well, I think that's a good summing up of what we have so far. We really need to take our break so folks can come back for part two next week or become a partially examined life supporter. Partiallyexaminedlife.com support if you want to get it in your feed much sooner.

49:56 Seth: Thanks, thanks. Thanks.