History and Utopia

[xylokopos]

PART A

In this astonishing book, a compilation of a letter and five essays, Cioran creates a strange hybrid that is part deconstruction of leadership and civic principles and part rumination on the necessity and folly of utopian thinking.

Man, for Cioran, is political without choice; the political, he assures us, is the teleology of the biological. We are bound by our deepest nature to enter into conversation with other men and consequently, with history. But the way we relate to our history is by reducing reality to ideas and ideas to ideology; thus, we see no paradox in trying to save our societies by murdering half our fellow citizens. Acting in a political manner, within the context of history, we give in to evil. Our mere existence, says Cioran, involves a minimum of villainy. Political action is always to the detriment of the other. Society is an arena where a zero sum game is played out between the individual and the collective, as well as between the ruler and his subjects.

Cioran opens his letter to his political prisoner friend, the philosopher Noica, by recounting in a heartfelt manner the pains he suffered to master the French language in order to exile himself within it. He continues with his thoughts on Hungary as an enemy of the Romanian people and using his sentiments that have shifted from enmity to indifference as a springboard, he expands on two ideas that dominate this book and reveal, at least in part, his indebtedness to Nietzsche: a) the importance of having enemies, both for men and for nations and b) moderation as a result of depleted vitality. Of course, Cioran’s admiration for the virility of totalitarianism and the aesthetics of cruelty can be offensive and of little comfort to Noica, imprisoned at the time by the communist regime in Romania. Thus, Cioran hastens to assure his friend that his own present condition in France is not to be envied. Societies and individuals yearn for freedom and it is this pursuance that constitutes liberty’s virtue; for once attained, liberty can hardly be maintained or defended. A society that has arrived at a stagnated moderation and a comfortable mediocrity is a society that aspires to nothing, one that no longer engages with history, one that cannot become anything else. Suspended in an untenable present, refusing to accept a sense of mission or destiny, it voids itself.

The opposite of such a society is modern Russia and Cioran devotes the next essay in explaining how Russia emerged from sitting out most of history to dominating it. In a counter-intuitive way, centuries of unimportance, of domination by the Khanate, of ignorance and political impotence, prepared Russia as a nation and as an empire. By not engaging, by slipping by unnoticed, squeezed between the Tartar and Byzantium, Russia safeguarded her vital reserves so that she emerged, full of strength, to further expand and subjugate others. Since it is obsession and not ideology that characterizes national physiognomy, Russia did not gain prominence because of communism, but through it. Russia slavified communism, adapted it to her deepest strengths and vices. And here Cioran falters: being an average prognosticator at best, carried away by the mental image of a massive landmass that aspires to more power and more territory precisely because of her gigantism, he sees potential for Russia to dominate Europe entirely and to even destroy the Church. Russia, the ascendant barbarian, comes as a savior to the civilized, one time barbarians, who gape in awe at a frenzy of becoming that once was theirs.

Still, tyranny and absolutism are highly instructive affairs as Cioran aptly demonstrates in his next essay, “Learning from Tyrants”. The tyrant is the colophon of the politician, the perfect manifestation of the man of action. By virtue of his extreme individuality and through the exploitation not of his virtues, but of his vices, the tyrant is exemplary of what man must become if he is to be anyone, to do anything. This short treatment of political power appears to be a photographic negative to most treatises on government. For instance, and according to Cioran, cruelty almost never leads to the fall of tyranny, unless it is mistimed. A ruler needs to fear his friends more than his enemies. Those subjected to the whim of absolute power mostly accept it willingly and derive pleasure from this very subjugation, their own abnegation, not just out of cowardice, but in full recognition of their own depletion, their own desire for moderation and their incapacity to propel history forward. In the tyrant they see themselves as they have been or as they should have been if they had made that first step into becoming individuals, if they had undertaken that first evil and violent act of segregation and affirmation of the ego. The citizen, here, appears abulic and compliant, secretly harboring no other desire than to sidestep history, to avoid engagement at all costs. The philosopher, disabused of any notion of useful action and justified doctrine, admires the positively healthy attitude of the tyrant, yet also desires to drop out of history, to stop participating in this absurd carnival that is politics. Politics, after all, revolves entirely around man and the uselessness of man in the existential sense is magnified tenfold in man as political creature. Cioran sees himself as a ghost, hovering between the beast and the corpse.

[xylokopos]

PART B

Whereas man pays obeisance to his ruler – out of cowardice or the masochistic pleasure of the vanquished, it makes little difference – the relationship between men of relatively equal standing is one characterized by rancor. In Cioran, this term acquires a specificity and a depth that makes it descriptive of man’s quintessence. Similar to the way Nietzsche considered ressentiment as emblematic of the bad conscience of an entire class of people, Cioran’s metaphysical conception of bitterness underlies the strained rapport between humans. As a consequence of the suppressed enmity we necessarily owe one another, rancor is the glue that binds us together, in history and inside the polis.

In his “Odyssey of Rancor” Cioran considers what being deprived of the capacity to do violence to our enemy does to us. We hate, but we are unequal to our hatred. We are unable to rise to the occasion and while we boil in bile, we sublimate our impotence, our inability to measure up both to our enemy and to our capacity for enmity, and we rename this failure of ours, this renunciation of healthy hatred, this incapacity to avenge ourselves: we call it forgiveness.

In a sense, forgiveness is indicative of an exhausted organism the way democracy is suggestive of an exhausted nation. Moderation is a virtue for the tired and the middle-aged and forgiveness is nothing but moderation, abandonment of intensity and purpose. Cioran is a very dubious moralist in general, yet appears earnest in his effort to reintroduce vengeance as a moral action, in this Christian era of ours.

The notion has, of course, a long and established pedigree. Aristotle defended the idea of addressing wrongs in the context of his Ethics; from a certain perspective, leaving an insult unanswered or an offense unaddressed is as morally reprehensible as indulging in insulting and offensive behavior. Forgiveness seems to carry a note of approbation towards our malefactors: a wrong unanswered is a wrong applauded.

In the end, those transgressions against us that we have forgiven, return and haunt us. We cannot help but hate. And we suffer, submerged in this hostility without outlet, this mania that will know no happy ending. At this point, man is forced to become theologian and political theorist.

How would a capable God account for this terrible miscreation? Where is His wisdom and benevolence in this universe that hurts and offends us at every turn? What kind of omniscience allowed for the emergence of the “I”, of consciousness, of the very thing that tears us apart from each other and sets us at each other’s throats? And if God’s universe abounds in suffering and is inundated by injustice, should we not endeavor to improve it? Should we not try to create a world where justice for all is a granted? And so, in an effort to revise Creation and turning a blind eye to all historical precedent and everything within man, we devote ourselves to the unavoidable madness of constructing Utopia.

Quote Originally Posted by xylokopos

And so, in an effort to revise Creation and turning a blind eye to all historical precedent and everything within man, we devote ourselves to the unavoidable madness of constructing Utopia.

That's interesting, I mean the parallel with the Voegelin idea of a continued historical gnosticism in "immanentizing the eschaton".

I don't really see there's some insurmountable (theological at least) problem in the notion of a morally neutral cosmos. It's not a watertight argument against orthodox monotheism. Unless, that is, one's already predisposed towards misotheism (gnosticism), of course.

Mark S.

[xylokopos]

PART C

It is astounding that men, barely able to harness their appetite for destruction and ever suffering the pangs of rancor that come as a result of not indulging that very appetite, have managed to conceive the possibility of a completely different world. In his “Mechanism of Utopia”, Cioran begins dismantling the assumptions underlying the tragic and doomed enterprise of utopian thinking by first commenting on the classics of the genre.

In the modern context of political theorizing, the progenitors of utopianism are our near-moderns, men like More and Campanella, who visualized just and peaceful societies, strenuously recognizable as human creations, yet set somewhere in the future or the dislocated present. Utopia, after all, means no place, so that its very appellation is ironic and self-defeating. It is no accident, as Cioran perceives, that it is a semi-dystopic utopia from that first crop of books, Gulliver’s Travels, that undeceives the entire genre of the idiocy of an ideal society, by introducing both stupidity and a kind of hopelessness.

Then comes a next generation of utopianists, men like Cabet, Condorcet and Saint-Simon with his socialists, all of them theorists with a compulsive focus on both justice and production. Avoidance of pain and sublimation of labor had been characteristics of all previous utopian dreams as well, but now the construction of utopia rests solely on a foundation comprised both of being and producing. Cioran is too clever not to notice the obvious paradox: a state of imagined rest, an aspiration to motionlessness, a hope for an immobilized Present, runs counter to the demands of a future that is dragged closer to us by exhortations to act, to work, to produce, in a word, to engage with the world that is to come. To arrive at utopia is to sacrifice the very condition that makes it so.

In this way, Utopia is entered and tainted by Apocalypse. The violence of becoming ravages our petrified and idealized present. One can sense that Cioran is ultimately more sympathetic to the vision of St. John in his cave at Patmos than he is to the benevolent nightmare enlightened social thinkers have in store for us. For utopia to happen, for justice to triumph in that sense, all human freedom, will and individuality would have to be abolished. There is an extraordinary clarity in Cioran, in that he recognized the quest for Justice to be the most futile and unrealizable of all human pipe dreams. The mere fact of having a consciousness, of being an individual, of having an identity, makes absolute Justice impossible in all possible or imagined worlds.

Of course, Cioran is not an apologist for any ancien régime. In a concession to objectivity that is rare in thinkers of all time, Cioran examines the positive aspects of utopianism, as embodied in both Soviet Communism and, to a lesser extent, Anarchism. Utopias are necessarily constructed on the shattered ruins of our ossified political edifices. Our traditional values disgust us after a while and we invite others to do violence upon them with glee. Of all revolting notions we hold on to, none is worse that the idea of property and to see it ravaged, is to take a positive step, historically speaking. Communism and Anarchism negate the old and in the way of all utopias, negation and negative values seduce us more than the positive ones.

Sadly, or perhaps, thankfully, there does not seem to be an end-game in the process of attempting to realize the ideal. All true revolutionaries and utopianists think they will be the last ones, but of course are supplanted, followed, substituted by others. Utopia propels us to the future, obliges us to be historical, drags us out of stagnation and into a relationship with everything that is not us. Yet the nobility of the effort does not cancel out its pointlessness. How is one to respond, how does one applaud when one is unable to summon enthusiasm? Cioran’s answer: we clap in full realization of the advent of horror; he cling onto a hopeless faith; we expedite the arrival of a Hell we have been waiting for in fear; we come to terms with the necessary futility of this apocalyptic utopia.

[xylokopos]

PART D

But it is not only toward an unrealizable future that our hope for utopia turns; we also experience nostalgic yearnings for a forsaken past. Is there an idea more ancient and powerful than this one, that we once had Heaven and lost it? In “The Golden Age”, the last essay in History and Utopia, Cioran examines the utopian pull that the notion of the Fall exerts upon us.

Hesiod and the Author of Genesis are in agreement: man is exiled in his present circumstance, removed from his original homeland of bliss. For the Greek poet, the current age is a lessened and degraded version of the Age of Gold, the true zenith of the world. For Jew and Christian alike, our life of toil and pain is the result of expulsion from Paradise. But what does it mean to identify ideality with this pre-temporal existence? To consider justice and happiness as possible only at the antipodes of what mankind has become? Does it not indicate that within history, within becoming, the bet is lost?

A story that illustrates the point that Cioran is trying to make with some clarity, is the myth of Prometheus. For the vast majority of commentators, Prometheus bestowed a gift upon man and his punishment by Zeus was cruel, perhaps even unfair. The gift made society and progress possible, it made human history possible. But for Cioran this is precisely the reason Prometheus should be punished [Cioran’s sympathies clearly lie with the eagle]: he introduced the future, he extracted us from mere being. He is the father of our Present and the guarantor of our ever-disappointing Future. He ruined our utopia by making us more than we were, so that we will forever want to become more than we are, that is, we will forever dream of utopias.

At this stage then, as we stand bereft of illusions regarding the future, is there still a type of utopian thinking we can indulge in? Cioran turns to Dostoyevsky, that great and greatly disappointed utopianist, and in him discovers a strangely hopeful disillusionment, which consists of this: we can still want what makes us unhappy, we can still desire our downfall in order to underline our freedom to will it. Instead of persisting in a futile affirmation of future utopias that fail to manifest, we embrace the apocalyptic in an act of self-negation. In this emptiness without action, hope or memory, we discover pleasures. In this void, he discover plenitude.