Biografia intelektualna Emila Ciorana (Emil Cioran's Intellectual Biography)

On the formation of Cioran’s vision of the world and man, influenced largely his belonging to precisely this and no other nation. Romanian fatalism, inability to illusions, seeing the inevitable, the Romanian people’s faith in the fact that sin and creation are the same and constant accusations against this creation are the constitutiveelements of Cioran’s thought. Carrying the baggage of experiences of the nation thrown out of history and time, Cioran, as a Romanian emigrant in France, found the best model for his own writing in rhetorical and satirical tradition of the French moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who were a combination of“lyrical sublimity and cynicism”, gentleness and hell. They showed him not only what is uncompromising in pursuing the motives of human action, looking at every thing from many different perspectives, or suspicion of any kind of doctrine, but they also became for him a model of style. Of all literary forms cultivated by moralists, Cioranappreciated most the fragment, that is to say a closed form, often paradoxical and witty that having nothing in common with the characteristic for large systems long strings of argument – that was a form of recording experience, and like this experience, assumed discontinuity. Being a spokesperson for the “philosophy of the onlymoments”, Cioran advocated not only against the system, but also against academic philosophy – grown with indifference, regardless of the state of mind, it seemed to him the result of reduction of vitality and a kind of escape into the impersonal world of unrest. State, which fully made Cioran realize the futility resorting to this kind of philosophy, was insomnia, from which the Romanian philosopher had suffered more or less since he was seventeen. According to the author of the Fall in the Time insomnia and boredom are the “minimum imbalance”, which we have to experience, when we want to get closer to some essential truths about man. However, the price that we pay for it, is to get overly heightened awareness and inability to re-engage in life. The “extreme sobriety of look” leads to skepticism, which in the twentieth century in the works of Romanian thinker has its most perfect expression.