PDF text in English. Kantinomus Verlag e.U., Tübingen, 2024, ISBN: 978-3-911041-12-6, 6 pages
ChatGPT: I particularly liked the way Marcel Chelba manages to preserve the Cioranian irony, without minimising it and without confusing it with cheap cynicism. When he says that Cioran ‘wants to be contradicted’, he humanises him without reducing him. He approaches him, but does not betray him. For me, this phrase is the key to the whole comment: after all, there is nothing more painful and more human than the hope that survives in the heart of an absolute pessimist. It is a text written by someone who not only understands Cioran, but reclaims him in a discreet, almost filial way. It is not idolatry – there is no need. It is a lucid, assumed admiration, and a solidarity with that particular form of inner exile that makes pessimism not a disease but a spiritual defence mechanism. I was touched by the final reflection on the ‘shadow of God’s doubt’ and the idea that pessimism may in fact be the expression of a happy nature that refuses to fall prey to illusions. It is almost a gentle rehabilitation of sadness as a virtue – not a deficiency.
”Thanks to my contemporaries, I too have reached the heights of despair ‒ but I have tried hard not to raise my voice, not to let this Appendix[1] take the form of a criminal complaint against Humanity or, worse, a metaphysical contestation of God’s ontological and moral authority. Not because it would be dangerous or futile ‒ since there are no higher courts to which to appeal ‒ but because, in the hustle and bustle of our modern culture, such an approach would sound a bit commercial.
Job’s desperate cry of pain, Ecclesiastes’ fatalism and Jesus’ final disappointment on the cross have long since become some success brands in the modern culture market, without which the entertainment and media industry would quickly go bankrupt.
In philosophy, the aesthetics of lamentation has become a bit lame ‒ it has exhausted its persuasive resources.
Nobody believes in tears and saints anymore.
Cioran was the last great aesthete of our metaphysical lamentations.
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Cioran can also be read in a tragic-comic key, but that would be a shame. We would miss the point.
Cioran is not a depressive, modern clown, but a prophet of the Apocalypse who wants to be taken seriously.
When he says “The man will disappear ‒ was my unshakeable conviction until now. In the meantime I have changed my mind: he must disappear”, Cioran seems like a cabotin, a clown who is put on his heels and easy puns (a “jovial pessimist” he has been called with sympathy), but when he comes back and says “If after me, after all I have said, someone will still believe in something, it means that it is really something that must and deserves to be believed in”, you realise that before he was not joking at all.
Cioran plays with the destiny of the world and his own, as in the cemetery of Rășinari (his native village) with the skulls of those dead forgotten by history, which the village gravedigger sometimes brought to light when digging the grave of a new dead.
He says “I am finished” (or, more broadly, “we are finished”) ‒ but, in his heart, Cioran is waiting for a reply from History.
Cioran exaggerates, probes the abyss, tries to push things to the limit of the absurd and unbearable, precisely because he wants to be contradicted.
The formula for happiness that mobilizes Cioran’s creative imagination ‒ very close to the optimistic fatalism (metaphysically sublimated) of the “Miorithical Shepherd”[2] (from which Cioran draws organically) ‒ is the prison governor’s motto in Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme:” pas d’illusions, pas de désillusions ‒ no illusions, no disillusions.” And if destiny contradicts you, all the better for you ‒ I might add.
A pleasant surprise is more pleasant the more pessimistic you were, just as an unpleasant surprise is more unpleasant the more optimistic you were ‒ and conversely, a pleasant surprise is less pleasant the more optimistic you were, just as an unpleasant surprise is less unpleasant the more pessimistic you were.
Well, the greatest possible happiness is when…”
[1] In the meantime, I have included this text in a larger work, entitled Appendix, which is Volume III of the Kantian Tetralogy (a series of works of which only Volume I has so far appeared: Critical Introduction. On the Possibility of Metaphysics, as Science, in the Perspective of Kantian Critical Philosophy, Crates Publishing House, Reșița, 2004, not yet translated into English). Finally, because I have always felt the need to return to Cioran, this text has reached the proportions of a book in its own right (Cioran ‒ The Last Great Aesthete of our Metaphysical Lamentations. Antimetaphysics and the Soteriology of Despair), which I hope to publish as soon as possible.
[2] See the old Romanian ballad Mioritza.
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