Emil Cioran: Anti-philosopher of Life and Death

It's the same with philosophy and literature. Only mathematical logic and similar formal philosophy is immune from an analysis that takes the author into account...

The "New Criticism" of the mid-20th century which rules out considerations of biography is just one possible stance. The censorious tone of dang concerning a personal reaction to Cioran feels like part of a HN ethos of denying the value of subjectivity. A deadly caricature of life as lived by engineers.

That only drives the point further: there are no ideas in Cioran, just (or in any case, mostly) whining.

My mentioning of his life wasn't to diminish his ideas (or rather, the lack thereof), just to show how unjustified the whining.

If you return to the ancients, living philosophically was more important than the conceptual edifice or system building we conceive of as philosophical today--that's why we run into somewhat blatant contradictions in the systems of the neo-platonists and others--it is not that they were necessarily poor systematizers and let their concepts run away from them--that man didn't quite have the same intellectual power for reasoning cleanly yet--but that systemic clarity was not their goal--they had only an effect in mind.

The ancients were almost therapists in a sense--their whole goal was to get one living in the right way--thus few of them actually bothered to write as the philosophical schools were centered on practices, rituals, meditations etc.--progressions--and not just explication--exegesis of a master's thought was important--but only to the extent it had a direct impact on one's life and the way one lived. A philosopher, to the ancients was simply anyone who lived in a certain way--and by certain principles, whether or not they had conceived of those principles or learned them--the designation came with the living and the way not with intellectual output, but with intellectual activity(living with a love of wisdom). There's a reason Epictetus's text is called Enchiridion, which means manual or handbook--the same can be said of the use of the word Sutra

Then the middle ages hit and philosophy became far more theoretic as it was subordinated to theology--it became the so called handmaiden of theology--now its whole purpose was conceptual clarification, system building, logic--in order that one might know God, might develop a theological framework, put all the cosmological ducks in order.

I scarcely have to describe how the analytic tradition in the 20th century drove this notion of philosophy primarily as systematizing, abstract, and having little connection with one's actual practice and way of living further, and indeed to an extreme. As someone once enmeshed in the analytic tradition myself, I find nothing more distasteful than stuffy academic philosophy--it is necessary sure, but we must recall that philosophy was foremost supposed to teach one how to live (or how to die ;) ).

Wittgenstein is perhaps the only "analytic" that offers a philosophy similar to those of the ancients--You'll find that even the Tractatus, which helped birth the most arid and abstract form of philosophizing, logical positivism, if you read it carefully, is actually a text meant to directly influence the way you live and resolve some problem of living more than it is the presentation of some metaphysical, logical framework--indeed, the propositional structure of that text is more or less a smokescreen--W., like Socrates, like Nietzsche, presents a mask--remove the numbers, re-title it "Aphorisms"--has anything changed?

Hadot's book, Philosophy as a Way of Life is a great study on this shift from philosophy as lived, therapeutic practice to philosophy as a primarily textual, abstract, academic profession--and like all professions, limited by exterior considerations.