Why Suffering is Beautiful | Emil Cioran’s Dark Philosophy
Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran observed that we live in a society that’s too afraid to confront the dark sides of existence. For example, we prefer to hide illness behind the thick walls of hospitals, and we avoid discussing death, as we see it as something horrible, something we tend to erase all traces of in our daily lives. However, Cioran’s writings do not shy away from the uncomfortable realities we don’t want to see.
On the contrary, for Cioran, things like misery, pain, and suffering became the main focus of his writings. Funnily enough, his immersion in life’s despair became his salvation: “suicide postponed,” as he called his prolific writing activity. I planned this video as an opportunity to delve into Cioran’s work, starting with his earliest work, On the Heights of Despair. Comprehending his work was challenging.
I’ve read the book several times, along with The Trouble of Being Born, which I enjoyed more. Maybe I struggled to read the aphoristic and poetic style, or maybe the depth of his works goes way beyond my understanding and intellectual capacity. On top of that, the book talks about many different themes, and the lack of cohesiveness I found hard to follow. I guess, in a way, my attempt to create a video that represents Cioran’s book well failed.
But before you click away, my failure might be the exact reason to watch this video. Aside from the fact that it expands on some of Cioran’s ideas, such as why the pursuit of happiness is futile and why despair is profound, the Romanian philosopher saw failure as something beautiful. If you want to help keep this channel going, become a Patreon supporter. You’ll get access to ALL Einzelgänger videos ad-free.
Even though his book On the Heights of Despair is a philosophical work, Cioran was also an avid critic of philosophy, as he believed that the actual value of living doesn’t lie in the intellectual or the rational but in the confrontation with existence in its true, raw form. He wrote: “Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?” End quote.
We could call Emil Cioran an anti-philosopher, although he probably wouldn’t have been too happy with that label. For him, existence shouldn’t be categorized; it should be experienced purely, in its full liquidity, as he calls it at the beginning of the book. Emil Cioran was still in his early twenties when he wrote On the Heights of Despair, his first book, and later admitted that writing it saved his life. For him, writing was the ultimate way to deal with life’s suffering.
When reading his work, one would imagine a depressed, sad figure. But in public, he was exceptionally cheerful, which puzzled some of his readers. How could someone who writes such dark, pessimistic words be so happy? Well, perhaps the fact that he didn’t shy away from life’s darkest aspects was the very reason for his apparent deep appreciation for life. His writings were a cathartic experience for him, as if he processed his deep despair by doing so, as opposed to running from it or acting as if it didn’t exist, which many others do.
“Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death,” he stated. To Cioran, despair isn’t something we should run away from. And experiencing suffering certainly doesn’t mean we’re living the wrong way. Despair is a part of life, perhaps even the very nature of being human. Cioran observed the immense profundity of despair, which goes so deep that any form of happiness and joy are just superficial, fleeting elements.
He addresses this profundity in his own quirky ways. He didn’t care much about cohesion in his writings or conforming to a certain writing style and contradicted himself. It didn’t matter to him. What mattered to him was the source of his writings: the heights of his suffering, the elevated moments of his consciousness that made him “lyrical,” as he called it. For him, that made his writings pure and profound, as they reflect the depths of his experience, as opposed to writings composed out of a place of intellectualism and rationality.
Cioran argued that we become lyrical when we cannot express our inner world by usual means, for example, when we become prisoners of love. I quote: “The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resources of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infinity; inner lyricism finds adequate objectification only through fluid, irrational material.”
It seems that most people want to be happy. Hence, we try to achieve things in life as we seek to experience the buzz we get from accomplishments, or we go to the movies, visit restaurants and cafes, go on vacations, or go shopping. Many (if not all) of our efforts carry this underlying objective of attaining happiness, regardless of the fact that such enjoyment is always fleeting, meaning that shortly after we get our fix, we’re off to the next.
For Cioran, this pursuit of happiness is pointless, not just because of the transient nature of happiness but also because we’re denying the inescapable darker aspects of life. Yet, humanity has built large and complex structures to avoid the pain of life, and as a means to cope with the copious amounts of despair and misfortune we encounter from womb to grave. Cioran clarifies in his book that he doesn’t like these structures, such as religion, moral and ethical systems, and, yes, even philosophy.
All they do is avoid what’s an intricate part of life or, in some cases, attribute meaning to our suffering to make it more bearable, for example, by saying that “God has meant it to be this way” or “Everything happens for a reason.” Another method is using rationality and ethics to mitigate our emotions so we don’t experience the extremes of life or “live at life’s normal temperature,” as he calls it. Take Stoicism, for example.
Although Cioran doesn’t write about Stoicism directly in his book, he does vocalize his disdain for rationality and systems that try to curb life’s painful sides. Stoics attempt to reduce and eliminate the passions that prevent them from experiencing the eudaimonic state. But these passions, such as anger, anxiety, and pleasure, are part of life. These intense emotional experiences, the moments in which we’re ‘lyrical,’ make life worth living. And by trying to curb or eliminate them, we settle for something not akin to life in its fullness.
According to Cioran, happiness is mainly fleeting. Compared to our deep despair when we contemplate our meaningless existence and the idea that our lives don’t amount to anything, happiness is superficial; it’s almost like a veil we use to cover the ugly aspects of life we refuse to look at. But as these veils are thin and only cover the ugly briefly, we quickly have to find other ways to cover it. And so we put ourselves on a hamster wheel, running from the inescapable reality of suffering.
Happiness, therefore, becomes a distraction, not a realistic goal. And our pursuit of it shows we’re not at peace with life as it is. Now, this misery, this despair, the darker sides of life, or whatever you want to call it, is something Cioran expands upon in great detail in his book. Let’s explore this a bit, starting with one of the primary sources of human suffering: the absurd.
Cioran believed that life has no meaning. It can never have one; thus, any effort toward finding meaning is futile. He wrote: “For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find any answers.” But for Cioran, this realization that life is meaningless isn’t a reason to die; it’s a reason to live, moreover, “the only one.”
Cioran’s belief that life is meaningless resembles Albert Camus’ Absurdism. They both observed that even though life is inherently useless, humans have this seemingly inborn tendency to seek meaning, a discrepancy regarded as ‘absurd.’ Instead of just living life without thinking about why we do it, what it means to be alive, where living beings originate from, and if there’s life after death, we ask all these questions.
The pain-relieving structures we just discussed almost all concern themselves with the meaning of life. They provide answers. In Christianity, for example, the meaning of life is to follow God. Stoicism presents the idea that life is about virtue. In Buddhism, one aims to escape the cycle of suffering by following the Eightfold Path. So, these structures serve as a solution for existential pain, providing meaning-seeking humans with answers.
There’s one problem, though, according to both Cioran and Camus (but also Nietzsche and Schopenhauer): these claims of an intrinsic meaning of life might be questionable. They might be a human fabrication to answer questions on which the universe will be forever silent. This silence Cioran considered the only truth; it’s the reality that there are no answers to our questions regarding the meaning of life. Life is meaningless. We’re a cosmic coincidence. Our lives amount to nothing.
Thus, it doesn’t matter what we do, and trying to answer all these existential questions regarding the meaning of life is useless. He wrote: “No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.” End quote.
This worldview makes Cioran undoubtedly a nihilist. But a nihilist who promoted experiencing life raw and unfiltered. Usually, nihilism and despair go hand in hand. The idea that we’re here for nothing and our lives are meaningless can be depressing. We experience existential angst, hopelessness, loneliness, and sometimes even a desire to end our lives. Cioran repeatedly delved into these feelings, evoked by the pointlessness of it all.
When reading his work, his focus on the dark sides of life becomes apparent, as if he purposefully wallows in misery. He doesn’t shy away from despair. He doesn’t follow specific systems to escape despair. He embraces it. He wants to experience the pain of existence to the fullest. It’s not that he enjoys pain in a masochistic sense, but he does seem to attribute great value to experiencing agony.
Suffering is profound. It tells a lot about the human condition and about things we all go through. If we genuinely dare to look at suffering, we more likely see life for what it truly is. If we engage with our suffering, we also learn a lot about ourselves, which, in turn, teaches us about others, especially what many people spend their whole lives hiding, because we may deny suffering, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It is, and deep inside, we know it.
I particularly liked this passage of the book, and I quote: “What would happen if a man’s face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony would be objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn’t we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves would be fully expressed in the lines of our face. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears.” End quote.
When reading Cioran and his apparent fascination for despair and how he described the profundity of life’s painful moments (and at least trying to comprehend his handsomely crafted aphorisms), I couldn’t stop thinking about specific periods of deep suffering and loneliness. I can easily recount the days spent alone on the couch, time flying by, sometimes watching the world go by from the window, and, in other instances, just imagining people living their lives outside, in whatever ways, while I’m just hanging on in quiet desperation, feeling misunderstood and disconnected.
Such moments, and I had a few, indeed felt like tumbling into something, and this fall creates a distance between you and the rest of the world. Without denying the emotional pain felt in these moments, there was also clarity. Away from the noisy masses, it granted me time for introspection and understanding. Moments like these forced me to think and feel my pain. Looking back at these periods, I can see their beauty and acknowledge their role in shaping me who I am now.
In some cases, falling into the heights of despair has been mesmerizing. Maybe my inability to comprehend many of his words wasn’t such a big problem after all, as on many occasions, I seemed to feel the pain he wanted to conceive. For many things he wrote in his book, I think I’ve lived them. Maybe not exactly what he described, but the cradle that gave birth to it indeed is a place I’m familiar with, and I’d guess I’m not the only one.
I, too, have “fallen” into the heights of despair and often wondered if I was a masochist for, weirdly, longing back for moments in which I would have preferred to end my capacity for longing altogether. But as it turns out, it’s not the pleasure of these moments but the profound depth, the intensity of the heightened experience of deep despair, that left such a mark in my memory. Without these moments, would my life have been happier? Maybe. I wouldn’t know.
I think it depends on one’s relationship with suffering and happiness, which, I suspect, remains different for everyone. Thank you for watching.