The Philosophy of Suffering: According to Emil Cioran
“I own to suffering the best parts of myself, as well as all that I have lost in life.” — Cioran
I find suffering to be, to say the least, an interesting experience. I have explored it myself during sickness and periods of self-doubt, guided by various religious and philosophical texts to attempt to rationalize and resolve it. Reading Nietzsche, the popular German moral philosopher, has helped me immensely in the past. One of his most famous quote is: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”.
Through his writings, Nietzsche expresses the view that suffering is an integral and positive part of our experience. It builds our character and makes us capable. I found this to be an extraordinary antidote at times, providing resilience to, and a sense of justification for, my uncertainties and pains. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.
However, the more I experience suffering from a perspective of self-doubt, I find myself unable to agree with the meaningfulness of suffering.
To provide an more specific example, we can take a look at the high-achieving person. For someone that has high expectations for themselves, they undergo periods of intense doubting and ego breakdown when their expectations are not achieved. When this has been healed through time or reflection, their nature provides themselves again with such high self-expectations. It turns into a vicious internal cycle that repeatedly enflames oneself.
The amount of suffering, self-doubt, and anxiety that we go through sometimes in life is just not proportional to the amount of personal growth derived out of this. If anything, I feel as though it is limiting personal growth, where my mind becomes blocked by fear and my plans become petrified.
Is there any value to this, like Nietzsche postulates? Cioran would disagree.
“Long lasting suffering, though purifying in its first phases, unhinges the reason, dulls the senses, and finally destroys”. — Cioran
I came across Cioran’s work in this September, whom I find answers my personal questions to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Emil Cioran, son of an Orthodox priest, was a Romanian-French writer and philosopher born in a Transylvanian mountain village in Romania. He wrote in Romanian in his early years, and later extensively in French.
Cioran precisely captures an ambiguity in the meaning of suffering and pain. Suffering to Cioran formed both the essential parts of himself and contributed the most to his pains. It could be equated, according to Cioran, that pain is the essence of our subjective experience.
Unlike Nietzsche, however, he does not believe that there is a positive meaning to this. Pain is what makes us human, but it is not intrinsically valuable in any shape or form. We can find many moments in life where suffering arises out of nowhere. For instance, having the flu multiple times in a year, or multiple failed interviews, does not bring about more knowledge and resilience than a single event. Why should we believe that there is a meaning in this at all? That a deity planned all this for our personal growth?
Cioran expresses this feeling in an extraordinarily poetic and lyrical form distinct from other philosophical texts. It is lyrical because it captures the absurdity of this relentless and repeated suffering. For anyone reading his work, I recommend the translation by Zarifopol-Johnston of “On The Heights of Despair” that best captures his essence.
However, Cioran also believes that suffering is an integral part of our being. This is not because of any noble goal for self-improvement, or the birth of greatness, as stated by Nietzsche. Instead, it is simply the most subjective and passionate way that we can live our lives.
This is in direct disagreement with the Stoics, a popular Ancient Greek school of philosophy in our world today. In brief, the stoics believe that we should try to be indifferent to our negative emotions, and that we should achieve happiness through discipline, reason, and wisdom. Ciroan precisely despises this. To him, this prevents the outflow of passion from one’s body and mind. Our subjectivity become extinguished by stoicism.
“I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly and prudent, … So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man’s life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradictions and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative.” — Cioran
Reading Ciroan has dramatically changed how I view suffering. It is alright for us to occasionally learn from suffering, particularly the new experiences. At the same time, we should be cautious to not do it too often, since it’s not necessarily valuable.
Moreover, we should first act to deal with the problems, and to purposely ignore the temptation to interpret our pains and doubts until the act has been finished. We can reflect only when we have concrete results to do so.
I find that this type of suffering to be much more useful than untargeted, blind, and repeated ones. It can avoid losing ourselves to the pitfall of self-improvement through suffering. I think all of us can resonate, when Ciroan writes:
“I own to suffering the best parts of myself, as well as all that I have lost in life”.
