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

him; they do so only by undermining the gods, by weakening their power over men’s minds. For it is the gods who, by binding us to a world before history, make us scorn Becoming, that fetish of all innovator from the simple grumbler to the anarchist.
    Our political conceptions are dictated to us by our sentiment, or our vision, of time. If eternity haunts us, what do we care about the changes taking place in the life of institutions or of peoples? To be interested in them, we must believe, with the revolutionary spirit, that time contains the potential answer to all questions and the remedy to all evils, that its unfolding involves the elucidation of mystery and the reduction of our perplexities, that time is the agent of a total metamorphosis. But here is the most curious thing of all: the revolutionary idolizes Becoming only up to the instauration of the order for which he fought; subsequently , for him, appears the ideal conclusion of time, the Forever of Utopias, an extratemporal, unique, and infinite moment, provoked by the advent of a new age, entirely different from the others, an eternity here on earth that closes and crowns the historical process. The notion of a golden age, the notion of paradise pursues believers and unbelievers alike. However, between the primordial paradise of religions and the ultimate one of utopias, there is the interval separating regret from hope, remorse from illusion, perfection achieved from perfection unrealized. On which side effectiveness and dynamism may be found, we realize readily enough: the more specifically a moment is marked by the Utopian spirit (which can very well assume a “scientific” disguise), the more chances it has of triumphing and of lasting. As the fortune of Marxism testifies, one always wins, on the level of action by placing the absolute within the possible, not at the beginning but at the end of time. Like all reactionaries, de Maistre situated it in the past. The adjective satanic , which he applied to the French Revolution he might just as well have extended to all events: his hatred of any innovation is equivalent to a hatred of movement as such. What he wants is to nail men to tradition, to deflect them from their need to question the value and the legitimacy of dogmas and institutions. “If He has placed certain objects beyond the limits of our vision, it is doubtless because it would be dangerous for us to perceive them clearly”; “I daresay what we should not know is more important than what we should know.”
    Positing that without the inviolability of mystery, order collapses, de Maistre counters the indiscretions of the critical spirit with the bans of orthodoxy, the multiplication of heresies, the rigor of a unique truth. But he goes too far, he begins raving, when he seeks to convince us that “any metaphysical proposition that does notself-evidently emerge from a Christian dogma is and can only be a culpable extravagance.” A fanatic of obedience, he accuses the Revolution of having laid bare the basis of authority and of having revealed its secret to the uninitiated, to the mob. “If you give a child one of those toys which perform movements, inexplicable to him, by means of an internal mechanism, after having played with it for a moment, he will break it to see what’s inside. It is thus that the French have treated their government. They have wanted to see inside; they have laid bare the political principles, they have opened the mob’s eyes to objects that it had never occurred to them to examine, without realizing that there are things that are destroyed by being shown.”
    Remarks of an insolent, an aggressive lucidity, which might be made by the representative of any regime, of any party. Yet no liberal (nor any “man of the left”) would ever dare to adopt them. Must authority, to maintain itself, rest upon some mystery, some irrational foundation? The “right” says as much; the “left” denies it. A purely ideological