Post by stardustpilgrim on Jul 19, 2015 11:36:12 GMT -5
To doubt and yet to live--this is a paradox, though not a tragic one, since doubt is less intense, less consuming than despair. Abstract doubt, in which one participates only partially, is more frequent, whereas in despair one participates totally and organically. Not even the most organic and serious forms of doubt ever reach the intensity of despair. In comparison with despair, skepticism is characterized by a certain amount of dilettantism and superficiality. I can doubt everything (except death), I may very well smile contemptuously at the world, but this will not prevent me from eating, from sleeping peacefully, and from marrying. In despair, whose depth one can fathom only by experiencing it, such actions are possible only with great effort. On the heights of despair, nobody has the right to sleep. Thus a genuinely desperate man cannot forget his own tragedy: his consciousness preserves the painful actuality of his subjective torment. Doubt is anxiety about problems and things, and has its origins in the unsolvable nature of all big questions. If such questions could be solved, the skeptic would revert to more normal states. The condition of the more desperate man in this respect is utterly different: if all problems were solved, he would not be any less anxious, since his anxiety arises out of his own subjective existence. Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from "problems", but from his own inner torment and fire.
EM Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, originally 1934, English translation 1992
EM Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, originally 1934, English translation 1992