Emile Cioran or The King of Disenchantment

There are authors that once you know them, they will be with you for as long as you might be alive. They become a constant presence that critique and review every possible field of your daily actions. A permanent conscious that you cannot get rid of, a window through which you have to see the world; it is as if you have gotten a new way to look at the world. But this new way to look at the world is not with the eyes, not with the physical eyes, but with the eyes of the soul. It is as if you by reading the books of this authors, had open your soul to make them staying with you, around you, or perhaps staying although you.
One of these authors is Emile Cioran, One of the heaviest presences in philosophy. But his presence in philosophy is not a traditional one. He is not there to build systems through which you can see the world. He is there to turn down the principal systems that have taken place in the field of philosophy, to give a new reason of being to the word philosophy. For you can agree or disagree with what he says. However you cannot avoid his words, for they are arrows with a specific force, intension and direction. In fact his words are not intended to make your life lighter, or smoother, on the contrary, they are meant to make you feel all the weight of life, with its pretensions, suppositions and illusions.
But the pretension behind Cioran’s words is to make us feel the world as real as possible. What he is trying to do is telling us with every one of his words that there is a tragedy that every one of us has to live. But even with that tragedy, with the permanent imminence of the death, there is a space for hope. There is a reason to believe that if we find the appropriate path, if you recognize our limitations and work with them, certain kind of spirits will be able to get rid of the mirrors with which our life has been built.
To know Cioran is to know the force of thought. It is to recognize that the words have a weight, a purpose and a reason. It is to see how page by page all the tradition of philosophy is turning down, with all its mirrors and illusions. After this falling down we are left with the immediacy of the reality, with its crudeness, with the sensation that almost all that was before us, were only myths and fables and now we are left with our nakedness, with our sole soul to self-discover us, but nobody is going to be able to guide us, for we, by ourselves, have to find our path, with the only knowledge that what had been done before us, is not knowledge, but stories created to mislead, to take us away from what should be most relevant to us : our humanity.
However, the hope that Cioran is trying to give us is far way from what has been traditionally understood as hope. For it is not a hope in the religious sense. It is a hope in the tragic sense, a hope that invites us to feel ourselves, to be and believe in the immediacy of death.


HOLLMAN LOZANO
hollman.lozano@yahoo.ca