Thoughts on this quote?
It stopped me in my tracks.
Should I just give up? Jk.
@Bertrand @Shackleton @wasp @kalinoche @leckysupport
"The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis."
The Temptation to Exist
E.M. Cioran
Lol looking more into this guy and apparently talking about how everything is futile is kind of his thing anyway.
major insomniac
I would think of replacing unmask with deny since unmasking reduces them in a social sense, not in a personal sense. Also I think acknowledging your fictions is necessary even though you don't like it because it can get quite circular and absurd if you don't every once in a while.
The last part of that is a question I've been thinking about lately but I think it's highly subjective, both in the sense that it may not be true for most people, and that it may be self-fulfilling.
That quote sounds like a riddle. If I'm not mistaken, he seems to be saying that to remain sane, you have to be somewhat deluded(or in a state of self-delusion).
"deny" sounds kind of passive and thoughtless to me and I feel like "unmask" is closer (if not perfect) to describing the active process involved. Idk, maybe something to do with unveiling to yourself the psychological structures or false beliefs supporting them.Originally Posted by ouronis
Thank u, good thinks.
insanity and genius go hand in hand sounds like
he used to run himself to exhaustion at night to cure his insomnia.
it sounds like Ni over Ne and declaring Ne to be futile and/or scary or incoherent
in a certain sense he's right though, you have to center yourself with something and if you don't maintain control over it you may well just end up letting others control it for you; socionics has a rosier take on it with its system of dyads etc, saying that center is multipolar and each contributes their own in helping equilibrate the other, Fi/Ni Ti/Ni in the the Ni creative pairs, etc
really at its most charitable its making a fair point about the need to pay attention to one's own introverted functions and allow oneself to be master of them, ultimately, because if not you just become a mouthpiece for something else, which is what extroverts (or anyone) in general can become if they're not careful... that's my take on it anyway
It's not about wording, they're two different processes. Denial is to reject, unmask is to reveal/show. Revealing your fictions doesn't renounce your personal resources, that would be like equating your fantasies to what you can actually do. On the other hand, unmasking them is kind of like sobering up from a drunken state. If you didn't know your fictions in the first place, and they were deeply contradictory, I guess it could work. Though then you get into center of an onion type shit.
Last edited by ouronis; 02-06-2018 at 11:01 PM.
I would say sobering up is a good way to put it. I can't conceive of someone possessing fictions that they know are fictions except maybe seeing through illusions they've built but still continuing to live as though theyre real so not truly denying them. Idk we seem to be on different pages.
I just think unmasking them causes a compensatory action, either denying their existence or trying to find a better one (and being able to use your new experience to form it). So equating this to inability to act doesn't work for me.
Makes sense.
You pick something you want to be. If you are something else, its not something you wanted to be. So you're life sucks.
Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.
Click here for the entire passage.
Fictions means "organic fictions of a civilization."
He is critiquing the Age of Enlightenment.
Cioran is not a fan of rationalism. He equates it to decadence.
Last edited by Kill4Me; 02-07-2018 at 01:37 AM.
This is awesome, thank you
Within the context of the full passage, he seems to be saying that giving in to the urge to be overly skeptical is to borrow trouble; you inherit the full burden of all the flaws in your reasoning at once, rendering yourself inactive and useless. The reason that's important is that any time that people pull themselves out of the conversation en masse they create a vacuum of power that will be filled by the most confident person in the room, and once you've ceded that power you'll have to live with the consequences. Hence, it's better to put your skin in the game and give in to the possibility of being wrong as the problems come up rather than sinking your own ship.
Too much "junk" in dude's head, not enough experience. If anything tells me to die, I live ten times stronger as an additional "fuck you" @ the messenge/r. I never care about identity. I know I'm alive and I'm me because I'm the one writing this at this specific moment.
Human perception is off -- it's finite, for one, so build stronger electron microscopes, better infrared equipment, listen to what the animals in the area say, and just mash the pile together and chuck the aggravating incoherences somewhere outta sight, it'll all work out close enough. I have reasons to live because I am in the vicinity of an awesome girlfriend, a cat, really good pizzas I just made, and a deep red wine, and I like them all. Hopping into a freeway would be stupid, selfish, painful, and vandalous -- so I don't.
If I want to be something that I'm not atm, then I get that done or come close enough. Dude is talking mumbo jumbo imo.
p . . . a . . . n . . . d . . . o . . . r . . . a
trad metalz | (more coming)
I thought this quote was interesting:
cioran was known for semi-ironically expressing aphorisms in poetic form, but not even cioran himself was fully committed to his own beliefs because his beliefs were in a constant state of revision, as he accumulated more experience and knowledge (i.e he considered himself a fascist in his youth before renouncing his association to the Iron Guard years later) and he rarely delved deep enough into those beliefs to fully actualize them, like from what I've read, I don't think he ever cared about amassing critical acclaim, let alone cult-like followings (which he did, but if he were still alive when it happened, then he'd probably think they were idiots) which sets him apart from most philosophers because his life's work was more like the journal of someone who wrote well enough to gain traction by sheer virtue of being knowledgeable, insightful, even lyrical, instead of an established philosopher arguing in favor of/against any school of thought. I remember reading from several sources that some people even consider him to be the anti-philosophical philosopher.Cioran often contradicts himself, but that’s the least of his worries. With him, self-contradiction is not even a weakness, but the sign a mind is alive. For writing, he believed, is not about being consistent, nor about persuasion or keeping a readership entertained; writing is not even about literature. For Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a distinctive performative function: you write not to produce some body of text, but to act upon yourself; to bring yourself together after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend. You write not to go mad, not to kill yourself or others. In a conversation with Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, Cioran says at one point: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin.” Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. “A book,” said Cioran, “is a suicide postponed.”
but I think the fact that he incorporates aphorisms into his writing makes his quotes automatically relatable, like he's not challenging anything by pointing out general truths. most of us seem to be in agreement with the idea that we should be skeptical of incoming information by using our own crystallized framework as a metric for veracity, but it took on a slightly different meaning to me after shackleton reviewed the context surrounding the quote. that's a slightly more controversial idea but essentially it's better to express our own views, as incomplete or misguided as they may be, instead of relinquishing control of the situation to someone whose views we know for certain we disagree with, out of fear, because then we're stuck living with the consequences of someone else's actions, potentially even their mistakes, instead of our own actions, alternatively our own mistakes, so yeah life would probably suck.
it vaguely reminds me of invictus by william ernest henley in the sense that I think they're both about self-control within reason in different circumstances
@ashlesha what are your thoughts on the quote?
Last edited by wasp; 02-11-2018 at 06:46 AM.
"Death is the way to find truth; no being is greater than the universe."
honestly I don't really have anything intelligent or fleshed out to say about it, which is why I asked for help contextualizing it (I have this internet-age tendency to get really excited about quotes, authors, artists, etc. that I come across on social media and so I know a little bit about them and I like whatever resonates with me but I rarely actually delve into them and explore them further to find out the context in which things were done or said, like was done here....i think it makes me seem more intellectually inclined or philosophical than i am and then i feel busted when people think i'll know things...)
the quote struck me because it felt pertinent to me personally, since I've been in a phase of reevaluating a lot of things i believe. I sometimes run into this space where I'm cramped between what can be proven to be true and what I feel to be true, and I've been trying to, you know, be objective. and i know that what i feel isn't always true. But i don't think it's good to ignore my instincts. but it's odd when the cells of your body know something all the way through and most people tell you it's a lie. I don't know if it's possible to compromise. At what point are you just buying into someone else's narrative by doing so? I dunno, putting it into words makes it sound simpler than it feels to me, but anyway, the quote kind of touched on this thing going on with me right now so i made the thread to turn up the heat on it.
Sounds like SX?
Striking resemblance to Slobodan Milosevich
Currently leaning towards ILI-Ni 6w7 so/sp for Cioran. In the passage, Cioran's main idea is that the Age of Enlightenment turned Europeans into wusses (to put it frankly). Europe was better off with its old prejudices. Tolerance and individualism are just pretensions which only corrupted and weakened europe, in his view. The politics has a reactive, fascist flavor. I could see Milosevich (LSI-Ti 6w7 so/sp) coming to that same conclusion:
During the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution, Milošević urged Serbians and Montenegrins to "take to the streets" and utilized the slogan "Strong Serbia, Strong Yugoslavia" that drew support from Serbs and Montenegrins but alienated the other Yugoslav nations
Slovenia accused Serbia of persecuting Kosovo Albanians and declared its solidarity with the Kosovo Albanian people while Milošević in turn, accused Slovenia of being a "lackey" of Western Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milošević
Plus all the existential angst/despair, pessimism and tendency towards contradiction sounds rather six-like.
edit: more perspective on Cioran's views:
"Clearly, Cioran’s thought rests largely on a Romantic opposition of instinct to intellect, on a preference for instinct over intellect. “Whatever emanates from the inferior zones of our nature,” he writes, “is invested with strength, whatever comes from below stimulates: we invariably produce and perform better out of jealousy and greed than out of nobility and disinterestedness.” Hence his suspicion of reason as “the rust of our vitality,” and his claim that “we are born to exist, not to know; to be, not to assert ourselves. Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin .... [K]nowledge taints the economy of a human being.”
"In essays like “Russia and the Virus of Liberty” and “Learning from the Tyrants” (both of which, with “Odyssey of Rancor,” appear in History and Utopia), Cioran elevates the themes of violence and hatred from the individual to the social and political level. Democratic liberalism appears not as a social and political achievement of the first order but as a concession to weakness and decay. “Freedoms prosper only in a sick body politic: tolerance and impotence are synonyms.” Since he believes that “the passion to reduce others to the status of objects” is the key to understanding politics, he has profound respect for political tyrants. Reflecting on the Russian tradition from the time of the tsars down through Lenin and Stalin, for example, he tells us that “they were, as are these recent tyrants who have replaced them, closer to a geological vitality than to human anemia, despots perpetuating in our time the primordial sap, the primordial spoilage, and triumphing over us all by their inexhaustible reserves of chaos.”
Though he assures us that he “abominates tyrants,” Cioran also admits that he “harbors a weakness for tyrants”—largely, one suspects, because he thinks that “a world without tyrants would be as boring as a zoo without hyenas.”"
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/...s-of-em-cioran
Last edited by Kill4Me; 02-08-2018 at 07:42 AM.
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