Of E. M. Cioran
We have another excerpt from Susan Sontag’s introduction to Cioran’s book, regarding his pessimistic perspective on life and its philosophy - sort of a self-loathing philosopher, a dour priest of the Church of Our Despair.
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[This conception of philosophy] demands the sacrifice of health, of mundane happiness, often of participation in family life and other community institutions, perhaps even of sanity. The philosopher’s taste for martyrdom is almost part of his good manners, in this tradition of philosophizing since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. And one of its commonest expressions - indicating his good manners or his good taste as a philosopher - is an avowed contempt or distaste for philosophy. Thus: Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is something like a disease and the job of the philosopher is to study philosophy as the physician studies malaria, not to pass it on but rather to cure people of it.
-- Susan Sontag, Introduction to E. M. Cioran’s “The Temptation to Exist”
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The problem, of course, is that it is life itself that is too much like a disease, so that if you make it your business to seek out the truth, what can you hope to discover? Philosophy is merely the messenger.
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[This conception of philosophy] demands the sacrifice of health, of mundane happiness, often of participation in family life and other community institutions, perhaps even of sanity. The philosopher’s taste for martyrdom is almost part of his good manners, in this tradition of philosophizing since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. And one of its commonest expressions - indicating his good manners or his good taste as a philosopher - is an avowed contempt or distaste for philosophy. Thus: Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is something like a disease and the job of the philosopher is to study philosophy as the physician studies malaria, not to pass it on but rather to cure people of it.
-- Susan Sontag, Introduction to E. M. Cioran’s “The Temptation to Exist”
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The problem, of course, is that it is life itself that is too much like a disease, so that if you make it your business to seek out the truth, what can you hope to discover? Philosophy is merely the messenger.