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

0:12 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 377, part 2. We've been discussing Emil Cioran's 1949 book, a short History of Decay. We were sort of getting down to brass tacks of what is this awfulness that is the thing that we keep trying to escape from, the thing that we keep throwing ourselves in Kierkegaardian fashion, in various strategies into work, into ideals, into pretend salvation. Yeah. Wes, did you want to recap what you were just saying when we stopped there?

0:43 Wes: Well, I was emphasizing this idea that we. That there's something ineffable inside us, something mysterious that can't be communicated to others, so that inevitably we are in solitude. And I think he might say, I don't know that he explicitly says it, but a lot of what we're doing with these absolutes or these flying into religion or science or philosophy, anything like that, in a way, we're trying to deny this essential solitude and essential incommunicability. Right. So he's not a fan of words, for instance, except maybe in poetry. But. Yeah, yeah.

1:29 Dylan: And this notion of nothingness, or there being sort of an ineffable source that we're naming, but is always the source that is closer to the real world. Right. I immediately think of Hegel. Right. And Hegel. I guess in the end, it's this iterative process that you're trying to ultimately get to comprehend it. Right. But there's still always a source. And I guess we could pick any number of other philosophers in which there is this fundamental nothingness because it hasn't been named yet that ends up being

2:04 Wes: the source is the concrete. Right. It is reminiscent of Hegel in the graveyard of definitions on page seven. It's very reminiscent of the Hegel in the sense that the inadequacy of definitions to concrete things, they always. So he'll say the idle, empty mind which Joins the world only by the grace of sleep can practice only by extending the name of things by emptying them and substituting formulas for them. Then it maneuvers over their debris. No more sensations, nothing but memories. So we get away from the real, from this world of, you know, immediate sensation by using words and by using concepts.

This idea that we join the world only in sleep is really interesting, right? Because we normally think that sleep is a retreat into a lack of contact with the world and we hallucinate during sleep. But in this case, it's a way of being closer to the world and closer to what is mysterious and ineffable. And one might also say, right, closer to the instinctual sources within ourselves. If Freud is right, sleeping away Dreams reveal a lot about our motivations, even if we don't consciously know what they are.

3:18 Dylan: In this section, he's like a grumpy romantic. The romantic.

3:23 Seth: Is there any other kind, Dylan?

3:25 Dylan: There are, right? There's the frivolous romantic, the effervescent nihilist. Right.

3:34 Wes: The fabulous, fabulous nihilist.

3:37 Seth: There's the Byron.

3:38 Dylan: Well, and he's also moralistic, right. Cioran, right. If you're drug seeking, sex fiend, nihilist, then you are somehow debauching yourself even in your nihilism. Which is a funny thing for a nihilist to say. There would be such standards.

3:54 Wes: But he starts off with the genealogy of fanaticism. That's a section I thought we'd all be kind of on board with. But again, this is the one I thought was reminiscent of Beauvoir and the Serious Men. Right? So it's because we have these ideals, it's because we have these values and these religions that we kill each other for them. Because we have these absolutes. So there's a lot to be said for skepticism, for admitting that we don't know, and also just for idleness, right? Idle men don't go out and murder people. But it's people who are really active. You're leading an active life. Yeah, I'm on a crusade. I'm leading, you know, I'm killing a lot of people. It's active. So why not be an artist? Why not be idle? You're not going to hurt anyone that way.

4:38 Mark: But you can't take this as a uniformly a moral condemnation of people who get too many ideas. Because once one loses his faculty of indifference, he becomes a potential murderer. So it's. You have to remain. This sounds very Taoist, sort of outside of preference that I'm just describing. Yes. Having ideas Makes you want to murder. Is that a bad thing? Don't ask me. In fact, there's sort of a true individual can judge only himself, he says somewhere, really later. So there just cannot be throughout his corpus like a definite gradation of value. It's not a revaluation of values according to a new standard. It really is. Well, is nihilism something that can be a philosophy that doesn't immediately refute itself, I guess is a question that we have to deal with in reading him. Can he really be a nihilist or is he just always.

5:27 Wes: He's rejecting everything a positive value in the end.

5:32 Mark: But you were saying, Dylan, that he's a nihilist, like in the way that Beauvoir describes. The nihilist in the Ethics of Ambiguity is a frustrated idealist. So it is somebody who still retains wanting to have ideals like, oh, I wish I could have faith, sort of, but I just don't happen to have that. So even that I dream that I had an ideal. I dream that something was possible that is enough maybe to give this an ethical orientation.

5:59 Wes: And there's also the question of why not stop with skepticism? Why not stop with agnosticism? Why do you have to go farther?

6:06 Dylan: It's the way in which a strident atheist is really a frustrated believer.

6:11 Wes: So he could. Right. We could admit much of what he's saying about mystery and ineffability and say, well, that points us to having a certain amount of skepticism and the level of art, having what Keats called negative capability, being able to sort of stand at an ironic distance from our values, whatever they are. That would be a more straightforward embrace of the aesthetic and ironic point of view, I think, which he doesn't. You know, despite all the positive things he says about art, he's not doing that in a full throated way. So the question for me is always, well, why do we have to go over into nihilism? According to him, isn't it enough just to say, well, we don't really know?

6:58 Mark: Yeah. So he has that civilization and frivolity section which does. That's where he talks about irony and scorn as the pertinence is the only thing that makes weighty matters bearable. Right. How could we bear the weight and sheer depth of works and masterpieces if to their texture certain impertinent and delicious minds and not out of the fringes of subtle scorn and ready ironies? So, yeah, this, this something like Nietzsche's gay science. You know, the gayness, the frivolity. There is room for that in here.

7:29 Wes: And this is true, I think, you know, if you. When you pick up great novels. I don't know how many great novels take themselves completely seriously, but my experience is always the thing that really grabs me and makes me stay with it and makes me think, oh, this isn't just a page turner, but this is something. Wow. Is that element of irony. He references Don Quixote at one point in this, and that had me pick up Don Quixote again and start reading it. And of course, I did not appreciate it in St. John's when I was just a teenager, like, wow. But I think this is a really good point here about irony lending a kind of flavor to the futility of life. And he's thinking here specifically about ancient Greece and then France, French civilization.

8:16 Seth: He likes the French.

8:17 Dylan: Well, he apparently labored long and hard to learn French so that he could write in French.

8:23 Wes: Oh, really?

8:23 Dylan: Well, this book is written in French, which wasn't his native language. And he. I mean, just reading about him, he considered learning French, like, the hardest thing he had ever done.

8:33 Seth: He was a Romanian, right?

8:35 Dylan: He was Romanian.

8:36 Mark: We should have said that at the very beginning. Romania's most famous philosopher. That's.

8:39 Seth: I've always heard that Romanians are great linguists because the Romanian language, whatever it is, makes it easier for them.

8:46 Wes: It's actually not Slavic. It's romantic because of its Roman soldiers, I think, were posted there in such numbers that, yeah, the local Slavic culture basically got linguistically. Got overwhelmed by Latin, essentially. And then. So Romanian is another descendant of Latin, I imagine there's a lot of, like, Slavic influence there. It's probably like, you know, English, the way English is essentially Germanic, but has so much. Borrow so much from romantic languages.

9:15 Mark: One of the. When Dylan was talking before about the atheists and the theists, sort of being one of a piece. And of course, Nietzsche gives that that you try to reject asceticism of one kind or another, and you end up just being another kind of ascetic. There's in this section, Twilight Thinkers, page 37. To betray one's age or to be its fervent adept, expresses in an apparent contradiction one in the same act of participation. He calls these being a contemporary so that you're all engaged in the same unavoidable, at least at that cultural moment, futile pursuit.

9:54 Wes: Yeah. So he compares contemporary philosophy, the ancient philosophy, when you get this degradation from these great systems, these theoretical systems, into something ethical. And I think in the case of the ancients, he's pointing to the trajectory From Plato to the Stoics and to Epicurus. Right. So Epicurean atomism ultimately being the basis of the modern point of view, this Epicureanism was suppressed by the ascendancy of Christianity for a long, long time before it came back into vogue in the Renaissance. But this Epicurean worldview is more scientific and more materialistic.

And obviously there's also an ethical component to it with hedonism, if that's what you want to call it. But anyway, the focus becomes on happiness and what he calls remedies. It's like self help. You can read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and say, okay, yeah, there's some practical upshot to this. It's not just, oh, I'm reading about Plato's forms again, and then he wants to draw parallels. The same sort of thing has happened post Kant and Hegel. And if I had to guess what he's talking about there, I would say he's talking about critical theory, right?

Where the focus is on praxis, where the focus is on what is the practical upshot of the theoretical. How do we do some consciousness raising here to help people overcome ideology? And it seems to think in both cases, that's right, that's a kind of degradation.

11:25 Mark: So why does he think then that it's not simply, let's reject this fad of the current age. Let's do something rigorous, something that really tries to express the inexpressible. Something. No, to betray one's age. You're still actually doing the same, playing the same game. You can't get out of this mindset even by being inspired by the ancients or whatnot.

11:47 Wes: Seemingly it's about salvation. Save me. Save me. Save me. You can't get away from that frame of mind.

11:54 Dylan: But he doesn't fall into the notion of becoming another. He recognizes that almost any real solution to that ends up being another kind of dogmatism. And he rejects that idea. And that way he's consistent.

12:10 Wes: Right.

12:10 Dylan: And maybe that's why he also is pointing to art is a non dogmatic way to express this inexpressible as being the only possible path that doesn't leave you in this trap that he puts philosophy and politics and religion into.

12:28 Wes: Yeah, no, if we wanted to compare him to Nietzsche, there's a similar rejection of moralism. But Nietzsche has a very specific critique of ascetic or Christian morality or, yeah, morality in general, slave morality, which he thinks is what morality has become in Western civilization. There's an ideological element to that because it's just a cloak for will to power. At bottom, it really is just about power. It represents itself as being about the good, but you know, about what is good or right. But it's really about power. And that's not the critique here. And as Mark pointed out, right. Nietzsche has. There's a very clear reevaluation of values. There's a new kind of standard of value that he wants to put in place and use that to critique the old system of values. And that's not really. I don't think we get. We know what that really is in this case. Or do we?

13:21 Dylan: The set of values that substitutes for the critique of values.

13:25 Wes: Yeah, why reject. If we asked him, what's your problem with moralism? What standard of value are you using to reject them? We know that what it is with Nietzsche, it's like, well, it's ressentiment. You're. You're hypocrites, you're full of shit and you really just hate people and want to kill them and you're pretending you want to be nice to them and love them, all of that stuff. And it makes you sick. It's diseased, all that. What could Cioran say if we asked that question of him?

13:50 Dylan: Well, there is a similar confusion with Nietzsche, right, because he believes in greatness and nobility and he's advocating for something like the robust. You know, if anything, Christian moralism is depressing the true vitality capable of a robustly living human being and that they become constrained and less than themselves in their full health and in their full robustness. So he has that notion of. And I think we've talked about it in other Nietzsche podcasts, there's a. Something very underlying. It's not exactly virtue ethics, but it is a notion of excellence, if not being the true end of human beings is a possible one for the right examples of them.

And I don't see that kind of language in Cioran. It's much more about the romantic. If there is a positive thing, it's the romantic point of view. Except in the handful of. We quoted it earlier. You know, there's a section where he's talking about like the vices of rum and masturbation and drug taking and in those kinds of things, those kinds of judgments, that all smacks of moralism. It's not aimed at health. He's not saying those sections aren't criticizing, saying, oh, you're degrading yourself, you're becoming a slave, allowing you're enabling yourself to become a slave to those pleasures or to those substances and you're becoming less than you could be, yada, yada, yada, which would be a more Nietzschean kind of thing.

I don't remember what page those are on, but.

15:33 Wes: So there is an implied value. Right. In the very first section. These ideals lead to violence. Presumably we're supposed to reject violence and say, okay, yeah, that's a good reason. And then throughout this, he's talking about self deception and this concept of lucidity. So you do get the sense that part of the problem is we're lying to ourselves. But on the other hand, is ennui the solution? We haven't really talked about ennui yet. Let's do this.

16:03 Mark: Sloth and ennui. So right in that first section, doubt and sloth are vices nobler than all its virtues. And he mentions the sloth as a saintly. The sanctity of sloth. Right. Because you're. And you're doing neither good nor evil. And maybe that's the best we could do because we're always going to be torn some direction or other. Right. We might have some idea of hope. That is one of our ultimate guides. That is really undeniable, no matter how cynical you are. But we're going to turn some way or the other and do horrible things. And so there's something that is power like he does, you know, we feel the sense of power.

I think he's maybe just ethically ambivalent about a lot of this stuff that, you know, any you talk about, anybody could become a murderer. And there's something like realizing your power. It's like also realizing that, you know, you could commit suicide. And the fact that you're not doing that, you're choosing not to do that. It's not the suicide that gives you the strength, it's the having the power. So there is something similar to what Nietzsche says. Yeah. So I'm not sure how that goes with it. Seems like that's one way that things are kind of better than horrible.

But then sloth and ultimately ennui is real resignation. This is the other way. So I feel like these are both options that are not on balance good, but they have things to say for them.

17:26 Seth: Right.

17:26 Mark: They're vices that are noble.

17:28 Wes: So I think it's at the end of this first section here on page six that he says we need a provincial ennui of the. On the scale of the universe Revolted by the sublime and by carnage the mind dreams of a provincial ennui on the scale of the universe. This is the way of him not. Right. Directly embracing something again. Right. We just get these. The mind dreams of it. Of a history whose stagnation would be so great that doubt would take on the lineaments of an event and hope a calamity. So yeah. So how is ennui supposed to help us other than by keeping us from slaughtering each other? I mean, if we're all just depressed. I don't know, should I. Should we be identifying it with depression? Yeah, we can't. We're not going to go out and kill each other if we're all just depressed and hopeless. But he talks about ennui, I think in the dislocation.

18:19 Mark: Yeah, that's what I was seeing next.

18:21 Seth: There I was in the same section. The creator of values. Man as the delirious creature par excellence, victim of the belief that something exists. Whereas he need merely stirs suppress his winds. The world turns to ashes. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone. And ennui. Ennui is like a sickness we have survived but one which has absorbed our possibilities. So he mentions.

18:48 Wes: Can I just read one more line here?

18:50 Seth: Yeah, yeah, go ahead on.

18:51 Wes: We shows us an eternity which is not the transcendence of time, but its wreck. It is the infinity of souls that have rooted for lack of superstitions, have rotted. Sorry, Rotted. Yeah, what that meant. Okay. A banal absolute where nothing any longer keeps things from turning in circles in search of their own fall. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone. And ennui.

19:15 Mark: It seems like neither of those is good. So it's. You could make a parallel to you got your master morality. Stupid, reckless, cruel. We wouldn't want it slave morality, horrible, self defeating. But there's no ubermensch. Maybe the mind dreams of an ubermensch, but you know, so likewise like this is the. The human life cycle. We go from one form of folly to another, from folly to destiny.

19:43 Wes: Ennui shows us, right, that absolutes are not what they seem to be. They're not these transcendent things. They're not worth embracing. They're actually banal. And that's what he associates delirium with. Right. Delirium is about being connected to those absolutes and being motivated by them. That's kind of a manic position. So. But ennui, yet. Right. There's a void there that's left once you recognize that. And it seems like he's saying in the end that it makes us recognize the banality of the absolutes. But it doesn't fill the void. It just Leaves us empty.

20:15 Seth: So in the section on the apotheosis of the vague, he talks about nostalgia, Sehnsucht, and saudade.

20:25 Mark: Yeah, I didn't get any of that. You'd have to explain that section to me.

20:28 Seth: Okay, so those are just three different words for. He's connecting it to their national versions of ennui. Right. So the French have ennui, we talk about nostalgia. The Germans have Sehnsucht, then the Portuguese, maybe the Brazilians too, have. I can't even pronounce it. Anyway, it's all like a look to the past. And you remember in that section he says, you know, when we live in expectation and what is not yet is to accept the stimulating disequilibrium implied by the very notion of future. Every nostalgia is a transcendence of the present. So ennui, nostalgia, this backward looking thing, is an attempt to transcend or leave the present.

And it's the equivalent in some way of trying to reach or manifest an absolute in the sense that it's a reach to the past. And you remember, there's a section we could go talk about where he talks about past, present, future. And he says, even in the form of regret. He's talking here, right, about nostalgia. It assumes a dynamic character. We want to force the past, we want to act retroactively, protest against the irreversible. And he says life has a content only in the violation of time. So if we think about enwi as a function, it's a transcendence of the present which tries to do something.

It's essentially impossible, which is it wants to change something that has already happened or reverse something that's irreversible.

22:08 Wes: Yeah. To say that life is by nature a violation of time is just to say we regret and we hope we're always out of the moment. We want to change something in the past or we have something that we want to happen in the future. So life, the default is life is not in the moment. It's fraught with desire or longing or regret or something like that. And I think he's kind of saying French are in the moment in a particular way. And then the Germans are. Have a kind of longing where they're conflicted between invading people and staying at home because they love the fatherland. They don't know which is.

22:46 Seth: They have a long. Yeah, the longing for the imperial great. Imperial greatness, yeah.

22:52 Wes: But the way it ends, I think there's a. So there's a positive account of nostalgia here because it is something that keeps us from Resting in the absolute. You know, even when we find these absolutes, these ideals, they don't fully satisfy us because what we really want to do is we want to do an ET Phone home.

23:11 Dylan: Right.

23:11 Wes: We want to go home. We want to reintegrate into our roots. And the roots. That's where the ineffable is. That's where the. You know, he associates with the earthly and the maternal.

23:22 Mark: We want to re. Enter the womb.

23:24 Wes: Yeah. It says this is a sentimental theology in which the absolute is constructed from desire. So here we have a different kind of absolute. Not the rational absolutes of religion and philosophy, if you. You could call it that. But it's something which is more connected to the instinctual. So this sounds like a. Yeah, bit of a positive vision from him.

23:47 Mark: Seth was referring to these other places where he talks about time. I was looking at page 54, turning a cold shoulder to time where he mentions the idle man sumptuously settled in the inconsistent. So there you go. That. I feel like this is his positive vision, which is. It's like. Like Camus facing the absurd. Don't be reconciled. If you take a reconcile is an escape, is a way out. We're always going to try this, but like to just sit face to face with it. That's what staring into the void is. But you don't have to stare. You could just be sumptuously settled and whom every moment torments.

Past, present and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease. Identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation, and monotonous in its persistence. And this disease is coextensive with being. It is being so really being authentic, grasping it's. Don't lose yourself in looking for tomorrow or remembering the past. It is seeing that really it's all the same. And yeah, that's what being is. I feel like that is the most concise expression of the whole reading here.

24:58 Dylan: So totally disagrees with Fleetwood Mac. You should definitely not think about tomorrow. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. That's not the way to be.

25:11 Mark: You could think of it, but as long as you recognize it's the same crap.

25:19 Wes: Isn't he right that hope is a bunch of.

25:22 Mark: Well, let's look up that section on hope.

25:24 Seth: We know that hope is not a strategy because he wants to know what

25:28 Wes: you guys think about that he had

25:29 Mark: something nice about hope. This about being the sun. Maybe it's just that it's unavoidable. Oh, yeah. From saint to cynic. This is page 51. Sun and hope as the two elements of life that are immune to democracy.

25:43 Wes: Yeah. So true cynicism would mean that you. Right, so we can, as cynics, we can apply our cynicism to everything under the sun or to, you know, every particular hope, but we never gonna. We can't extirpate the sources of those things. We can't extirpate hope itself or the. The sun itself, their conditions of life, everything living kind of happens within that paradigm. So true cynicism would. You'd have to be able to get rid of the sun and get rid of hope, which he's just told us is basically impossible. They're conditions of existence. So the whole project fails, Right? We're doomed to hope. Doomed. Is hope a good thing? Yes or no?

26:30 Mark: I mean, it's just there. Eh. What are you gonna do?

26:35 Wes: Have you. Have you found your hopes helpful?

26:37 Seth: No. Well, you know, there's. As we kind of circle back to this and we talk about hope and ennui and all this. There's a tone at times in what we read that he's saying. This is not. He's not trying to be proscriptive or, you know, it's like, this is the human condition. You know, the human condition is X, the human condition is Y. This is the way we're built. And it's. He wants to point out that all of the things that we do, like religion, like whatever, philosophy, all this stuff, we're trying to remedy or address or respond to our existence, our experience, our existence, and there's a sense in which we feel the need to do that because there's something wrong or something. Guys, I'm not sure even what I'm trying to say.

27:39 Mark: Is it the inexpressible that's coming up? Seth, you're so deep.

27:43 Seth: You're really sorry. No, Jesus.

27:45 Wes: I. Seth put his beret on everyone. And then he was at a loss for words immediately. He's been smoking the whole time with

27:51 Dylan: his beard and, you know, I'd be

27:54 Seth: better off if I had a cigar right now. But it's like pointing to the problem itself, like saying, why do human beings do what they do? Why do we have religion? Why do we worship gods? Why are we fascinated with the absolute? Why do we have a history of philosophy? Why do we undertake all these strategies which he is able to kind of classify and bring down into. He says, what? There's about four different absolutes and four ways. About that many ways to die. But, you know, take a step back and ask yourself, okay, so what are we trying to address? What are we trying to solve here? What is it about? Why are human beings the way they are? We're different than other animals. Other animals don't do this. Right. Like so suicide's a good example. Right.

28:36 Wes: Or murder.

28:37 Seth: Animals kill. They don't murder. Two different words.

28:40 Wes: Well, chimps don't murder.

28:42 Seth: Yeah, but anyway, you get my point. Animals don't have religion. How about that? Pick me. Pick something. Well, Jesus Christ. Animals don't have language. Animals don't have consciousness. Animals don't have opposable thumbs. How are we going to get down that?

28:55 Wes: Listen, animals don't have iPhones. And I'll stand by that.

28:58 Seth: If you see the history of human civilization and culture and intellectuals as an attempt to address or respond to this, to the human condition, this thing in the human condition. And what he's saying is, what if we don't? We keep trying and we keep failing. It's just the same thing over and over and over. Every generation thinks it's invented sin, right? But it's the same thing over and over and over again. Human beings are the same. They have the same experiences. Technology changes, whatever. The temperature of the earth changes, nutrition changes.

All these things change. But human beings, basically, to be a human being is. Is what it is and it's going to be that way. And we keep trying to find ways to quote, unquote, solve it. And he's like, what if we don't? What if we just accept it? The problem is, I don't know what that, you know, he's like, well, you just live out your life kind of not doing anything right. Don't be hopeful, don't be nostalgic. Maybe be slothful. Certainly don't do philosophy.

30:00 Wes: I wish we could see his face when he found out he was getting his first book published.

30:05 Dylan: Yeah, I remember reading a little bit about him that said that he was given literary awards that he just wouldn't show up for. Right. So he was in this category of French intellectual that you know, is like grumpy about the notoriety.

30:20 Wes: I spit on your adulation.

30:23 Dylan: Exactly.

30:24 Mark: I feel like he is too cool for school.

30:27 Dylan: Yes. Yeah.

30:29 Mark: Well, can we turn to the model traitor, I think to sort of wrap up here. It was at the end of our reading selection, Right. First essay in this book is like 93 pages. And it really started to me getting pretty redundant. Like, I feel like there's a limited number of themes, as he says himself, a limited number of ways to deal with this fundamental problem of existence. It's just he'll bring in some new angles, some new let's. Oh, we haven't talked about free will like just the things other people talk about. Let me bring those in as a. And see how those relate.

But this seems to sum up. Yeah, so we didn't read the whole 90 pages. West did, but. So you could sell if it's. If anything really fundamentally different happens after this. But the model traitor life can be fulfilled only within individuation, that last bastion of solitude. Each being is necessarily, is necessary alone by the fact that he is an individual. Yet some individuals are more individual than others. So he talks about like Judas, somebody that like betrayed not just an individual, but God, betrayed all of existence. And this is where that thing that we're mentioning, Buddha before, that he's somebody who is a, you know, rejected salvation itself.

The top of page. Yeah.

31:39 Wes: So actually I think there's a contrast here between betraying a specific person or thing, you know, so betraying Jesus, so betraying one's country, and then betraying existence itself. That's actually a contrast, betraying being, betraying one's own formative forces or foundation. Because in the former case, your guilt is clear, what you've done is clear and your punishment is clear. But the betrayal of existence itself, the suffering that it leads to, is very ill defined. This is almost like his version of bad conscience or something. And it seemed to me like we are all traitors to existence on his. On his account. Or maybe he's just saying, maybe that's what the Buddha. Maybe there's an idealized person who can actually properly betray existence, like the Buddha. He calls them metaphysical traitors, people who actually reject salvation.

32:32 Mark: But yet these are the most harmful of all malefactors. They do not attack the fruit, but the very SAP of the universe. So from the point of view of life, they are the great rejectors of life. But again, like, well, maybe that's what you're supposed to do.

32:49 Dylan: It's hard for me not to read him. And maybe this is the way in which it's sort of common to read a lot of existentialists in the wake of World War I and World War II. A kind of Hobbesian reaction of, look, we just got to keep people from trying to do so much shit. The most dangerous kind of thing in the world are people who want to do anything. So we're going to glorify slothfulness and we're going to glorify not being perturbed enough and point out, you know, and if we don't that's because everything that is wrought by people who want to do stuff is pain and discomfort for everybody else.

And because we're going to start from the point of. Because the bottom line of the world is that it's painful and dangerous. And that's the backdrop. It's not one of activity and that an opportunity that comes with fate. It's a different kind of reaction to fate, which seems to be born out of the tragedy of so much bad outcomes of fate.

34:01 Seth: As Dylan was speaking, it reminded me of that a quote from the beginning that kind of bookends this. But it is enough for me to hear somebody, someone talk sincerely about ideals and about the future, about philosophy. To hear him say we in quotes, with a certain flexion of assurance. To hear him invoke others also in quotes, and regard himself as their interpreter. For me to consider him my enemy. And Cioran was, you know, he read Schopenhauer, Heidegger. He's, you know, he knew Eliade, Mircea, Mircea Eliade and you know, Schopenhauer and Heidegger and I'm sure Nietzsche too.

But they were all. Were aware of and had ideas about the Buddha. There's a thing, there's a saying, right? If you see the Buddha on the road, if you're walking along and you come across the Buddha on the road, you should you kill him. The idea that Buddhism offers a kind of response to the same existential panic that we all feel, that's different somehow than our Western ideologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, so on and so forth. So in that last section, when you say, like you want to be most scared to some extent of the people who reject salvation.

But to reject salvation is really to say, I'm rejecting people who offer me salvation, which is to say people who are using ideas and saying we and speaking for others and all that, because truly the experience, the Buddhist response is wholly theoretically, I guess, I don't know, I'm speaking out of my ass here. But wholly individual. So it's not an appeal to an absolute. It's instead a psychology and a way of behaving a way of kind of like standing where you are and looking at things differently as opposed to trying to transcend the present.

It's actually a call back to the present. So there may be some sense in which we can read in that last section on the traitor, something positive in that.

36:10 Mark: Yeah, this whole. I don't think we really made explicit. There's another point where he diverges from existentialism. Is this. This insistent on speaking only for yourself? So like Sartre and Kant both thought. And maybe this, this inherent in the idea of creation of values, is that when I do something, I assert through my very action that that thing is worth doing, that that thing is good. I create a value for all humanity. And he just straight up rejects that. Says, like, that's phony baloney.

36:40 Seth: You're, You're.

36:40 Mark: You should not do that. Maybe people do tend to do that. They love to speak of we, but that's not authentic. So I guess if we were asking, is he an existentialist? Was Stirner an existentialist? Because he also seemed to somebody who is just absolutely focused on only the dictates of yourself. I guess I don't know how that translated into whether you can reject your own desires, which he clearly seems to want to do, as well as if those desires are somehow external or suffering, causing or. All right, closings. Where are we at here?

37:16 Seth: I'll start. I should have absolutely loved this because theoretically, this is who I am and what I believe. There are many, many wonderful turns of phrase, at least in this translation. I don't know what French, the original French, what it's like, but I imagine I found it really hard to read. I've had a really stressful and difficult week, so maybe my focus wasn't there, but I just found. I mean, I averaged about 10 pages an hour because I think part of it is it's an aphoristic style, but it feels really disjointed. And so I kept grasping, trying to find the hook and figure out what was.

And it just. I would have to reread. And I had a really tough time with it because I was all amped up to read the whole book, you know, or at least kind of plow through it. And if I'm going to do that, I just, like, I need more time and energy because it was really, really. It was really, really hard. It seems like the kind of thing that I'll be able to employ in support of my views, as opposed to something I would rely on to, like. I wouldn't say, like, oh, this isn't the theorist that I'm sitting with. It's more like, this is the quote that I start this book chapter with from this guy.

Sure, right. Because. So that's kind of where I'm at.

38:42 Mark: I had a similar experience with the pace. Yeah, about 10 pages an hour. That sounds right. Like, I wanted to just like, read one of the meditations and kind of just dwell with that because once I would just read those. That one page or two pages, I'd be ready to get up and do something else for a while.

38:57 Wes: I, you know, just. It's the inverse of what it was for Seth. I should have not liked it, but I have no idea. I just actually was able to read it for pleasure, which is odd. And, you know, just keep reading of my own free will. Not even just because I had to do it. You know, I had the same sort of feelings, as well as. As Dylan, about the pretentiousness and all that. It's just all the. I. My interest in it just sort of overweighed that factor. And I kind of like, there's a kind of humorousness to it, or there's an amusing quality to it, which I really like.

And then I think the challenge of trying to decipher what he was saying also. So this is like a book that rewards like the Wes approach, which is to reread it and then re. Summarize everything in your own words. And for me, it's almost like. This is almost like a crossword puzzle. Like, all right, how am I going to fill in this? Is this. What is he saying here? And that's just like, a challenge I enjoy. So when it's the same thing with Hegel, you know, or any. Anything else. Right. Like, on first blush, it's hard to comprehend for me. I just like the challenge of deciphering it, regardless of ultimately whether I think it's any good.

40:12 Mark: When I was about halfway done with our reading, I was like, okay, I'm going to make a bullet list of the themes. And then I thought there would just be, like, a handful of themes because it does seem very repetitious. But I got my bullet list to 20, 20 bullets, and then I just, like, stopped, because there are enough variations. Like, I was kind of filling out the story. But, yeah, I agree with you, Wes, that once you've made it the difficult way through the first time, probably looking at it and looking for the thematic continuity, I just think this discussion was very unusually, like, well, this reminds me of what happened 50 pages later. Oh, this reminds me of that. Like, because everything echoes everything else.

40:51 Seth: Well, we were.

40:52 Wes: Yeah, I think I felt like we were following themes.

40:54 Mark: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

40:55 Wes: Just kind of organically, but, yeah.

40:57 Mark: Dylan, any final words? You feel better? Worse about this?

41:02 Dylan: I feel the same. I started out enjoying it, and I could see and admire Wes's ability to read it for enjoyment, and I could see why that would happen. There's a certain amount of Grumpy pessimism that is wry and self knowing that I find both funny and enjoyable and insightful. And in this case, I just. It got tedious and tiresome for me. And a big part of that in the end is going to be that I'm fundamentally not a pessimist. For me, I come at it from the standpoint of the opportunity and the activity, of naming things. And then, yes, we have the suffering, yes, we have the unexpected, yes, we have fate coming down upon us, yes, we have the things we have to endure or we have to accommodate and we have to adjust to and the flexibility involved with that.

So in the end, I'm a pragmatist. Pragmatists aren't pessimists. Pragmatists are navigating their way through the obstacles. And that's not a point of view of pessimism, that's recognizing the obstacles, recognizing the obstacles that you never knew were going to be there. But it's fundamentally that activity and it's not slothful in that way. I just became so convinced that that's what he was advocating for. And I can recognize how that's why I said my comments at the end, my last comments is I can imagine it as a reaction to the overactivity of an entire world of people are just trying to kill each other and do terrible things to one another and you just want them to just stop doing shit, just stop, just, you know, go home and just chill out.

Motherfuckers. That's. I can totally see that reaction. And I might have that reaction to myself in the same situation, but that's not how I look at the combination of the positive possibilities of activity and neg in life as human beings mixed with the vagaries and uncertainties and mysteries. His take on it, I think, is fundamentally deadening and soulless. And so I find myself just reacting negatively to it.

43:20 Mark: It says something about our charitable way of reading that we did not immediately just go and point out the individual things that he says that just seem counterintuitive or just wrong. Oh, you don't. You wake up more tired than when you went to sleep because dreams are so exhausting. No, I don't feel right at all. Like you just are having some problems. All right, let's wrap this. We've gone on long enough. Thanks. Thanks, everybody for listening. Next time we're going to talk about some Thomas Aquinas, we're going to have two episodes we'll try to post on the Discord, maybe on Twitter, exactly what we're reading from him for the next two ones, please reach out to us.

Pl Partially Examined Life X or make a comment on the blog post associated with this@partially life.com to suggest things to let us know what you thought of this. If you think we did criminal to this this wonderful figure who's the center of your philosophical world, we would love to hear your point of view and perhaps express it on a Nightcap or something else. Good night everybody.