Freedom, I was saying, demands, in order to manifest itself, a vacuum; it requires a void-and succumbs to it. The condition that determines it is the very one that annihilates it. It lacks foundations; the more complete it is, the more it overhangs an abyss, for everything threatens it, down to the principle from which it derives. Man is so little made to endure or deserve it, that the very benefits he receives from it crush him, and freedom ultimately burdens him to the point where he prefers, to its excesses, those of a terror. To these disadvantages are added others: a liberal society, eliminating mystery, the absolute, order, and possessing a true metaphysic no more than a true police, casts the individual back upon himself, while diving him from what he is, from his own depths. If such a society lacks roots, it is essentially superficial, this is because freedom, fragile in itself, has no means of maintaining itself, or surviving the dangers which threaten it from without and from within; it appears, moreover, only in the twilight of a regime, only at the moment when a class is declining, dissolving: it was the collapse of aristocracy that allowed the eighteenth century to divagate so magnificently; it is the collapse of the bourgeoisie that allows us today to cultivate our fantasies. Freedoms prosper only in sick body politic: tolerance and impotence are synonyms. This is patent in politics as everywhere else. When I first glimpsed this truth, earth gave way under my feet. Even now, though I tell myself: You belong to a society of free men, the pride take in the fact is still accompanied by a sense of dread and insanity, the result of my terrible certitude. In the course of history, freedom occupies no more instants than ecstasy in the life of a mystic. It escapes us at the very moment we try to grasp and formulate it: no one can enjoy freedom without trembling. Desperately mortal, once it is established it postulates its lack of a future and labors on, with all its undermined forces, to its own negation, its own agony. Is there not a certain perversion in our love for it? And is it not horrifying to worship that neither can nor cares last? For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything; for us who do, it is merely an illusion, because we know that we shall lose it and that, in any case, it is made to be lost. Hence, at the heart of our void, we cast our glances in all directions, without thereby neglecting the possibilities of salvation that reside in ourselves. There is, morever, no such thing as a perfect vacuum in history. That unheard-of absence to which we are reduced, and which I have the pleasure and the misfortune to reveal to you, you would be mistaken to imagine merely a blank, uninscribed; for in it I discern - presentiment or hallucination? - a kind of expectation of other gods. Which ones? No one can say. All I know, and it is what everyone knows, is that a situation like ours cannot be endured indefinitely. Deep within our consciousness, one hope crucifies us, one apprehension exalts us. Unless they assent to death, the old nations, however rotten, cannot dispense with new idols. Whether or not the West is irremediably corrupt, it must rethink all the ideas stolen from it and applied (by counterfeiting them) elsewhere: I mean that is incumbent upon the West, if it seeks to make itself illustrious once more by a throb or a vestige of honor, to take back the utopias that, in its need for comfort, it has abandoned to the others, thereby dispossessing itself of its genius and its mission. Whereas it was the Wests duty to put communism into practice, to adjust it to its traditions, to humanize, liberalize and thereafter propose it to the world, it has left to the East the privilege of realizing the unrealizable, of deriving power and prestige of our finest modern illusions. -Emil Cioran, History and Utopia
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 00:30:57 +0000
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