Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran Read Free Book Online

they. De Maistre never offers a hypothesis without immediately treating it with all the considerations due to certainty; how could he doubt the existence of an immemorial knowledge when without it he could not “explain” to us the very first of all our catastrophes? The punishments being proportional to the guilty party’s knowledge, the Flood, he assures us, presupposes “unheard-of crimes,” and these crimes presuppose in their turn “knowledge infinitely superior to that which we possess.” A lovely and improbable theory, comparable to the one about savages, of which these are the terms: “A leader of a people having diluted the moral principle among them by a number of those prevarications which, to all appearances, are no longer possible in the present state of affairs because we fortunately no longer know enough to become guilty to this degree — this leader, then, transmitted the anathema to his posterity; and any constant force being by its nature accelerative, since it continually adds to itself, such degradation weighing continually upon the descendants has ultimately made them into what we call savages.”
    No clue as to the nature of this prevarication. We shall know little more about it when we are told that it is imputable to an Original Sin of the second order. Is it not too convenient, in order to whitewash Providence, to ascribe to the creature alone the anomalies which abound on earth? If man is degraded in principle, his degradation, like that of the savage, cannot have begun with a sin committed at a given moment — by a prevarication invented, by and large, to consolidate a system and sustain a cause, both highly dubious.
    The doctrine of the Fall makes a powerful appeal to reactionaries of whatever stripe; the most hardened and the most lucid among them know, moreover, what recourse it offers against the glamour of revolutionary optimism: does it not postulate the invariability of human nature, irremediably doomed to corruption and collapse? Consequently there is no way out, no solution to the conflicts that desolate societies nor any possibility of a radical change that might modify their structure: history, identical time, context for the monotonous process of our degradation! Invariably the reactionary, that conservative who has dropped the mask, will borrow the worst of traditional wisdom, and the most profound: the conception of the irreparable, the static vision of the world. All wisdom and a fortiori all metaphysics are reactionary, as becomes any form of thought that, seeking constants, emancipates itself from the superstition of the diverse and the possible. Contradiction in terms: a revolutionary sage, or a revolutionary metaphysician. At a certain degree of attachment and clear-sightedness, history has no further value, man himself ceases to count: to break with appearances is to vanquish action and the illusions deriving from it. When you stress the essential misery of beings, you do not stop at the one that results from social inequalities, nor do you strive to remedy them. (Can we imagine a revolution drawing its slogans from Pascal?)

    Often the reactionary is merely a cunning, an interested sage who, politically exploiting the great metaphysical truths, examines without weakness or pity the underside of the human phenomenon in order to broadcast its horror — a profiteer of the terrible whose thought, paralyzed by calculation or by an excess of lucidity, minimizes or calumniates time. More generous (being more naive), revolutionary thought, on the other hand, associating the erosion of Becoming with the notion of substantiality, discerns in succession a principle of enrichment a fruitful dislocation of identity and monotony, and a sort of continuous perfectibility. A challenge hurled at the notion of Original Sin: such is the ultimate meaning of revolutions. Before liquidating the established order, they seek to release man from the worship of origins to which religion condemns