Emil Cioran And The Trouble With Being Born
The Inconvenience of Being Born is first of all a personal feeling. Emil Cioran admits in De l’inconvénient d’être né that he has lived in deep perplexity since his youth, when his chronic anxiety and repeated metaphysical insomnia worried his mother. Evolving now “without motives”, in a “metaphysical exile”, he defends the controversial idea that birth is an accident.
One discovers the disadvantage of being born through introspection. Insomniac since high school, Emil Cioran reflects on the meaning of existence when everyone else is asleep, to the point that he considers a “true” night to be a sleepless night. He then rediscovers the sensation of flow that he has intensely experienced since his childhood — the dream is an “incredible nocturnal mess”. He comes to question his birth at the time of certain vigils: “Three hours of the morning. I perceive this second, and then this other, I make the balance of each minute. Why all that? — Because I was born” (On the inconvenience of being born). By dint of watching, Emil Cioran spends his life verifying what he had already understood at twenty. He thus considers that he has wasted a prodigious amount of time searching for the meaning of life, whereas the development of the inner life is not natural. It is more particularly the reflection on death that makes one conscious, in the sense that one becomes a clear-sighted spectator of the banality of one’s own existence. Under this prism, thinking is “an exercise in anti-utopia”. One certainly becomes more pessimistic with age, but it is a sign of lucidity. The “disillusioned” man is disappointed even before acting, which has the effect of a deliverance. However, Emil Cioran compares his feeling upon waking up to that of a beast that receives a blow in the legs to advance to the slaughterhouse.
The inconvenience of being born stems from the vanity of existence. While meditating on the unreality of the world, Emil Cioran realized that his youthful intuitions were the right ones. He has the feeling that his self is not real: it is finally only the sum of evaporated sensations. What is called being is in reality the absence of being, and man is condemned to anxiety as long as he does not realize it. The individual metaphysical uneasiness expresses in the last instance the vanity of existence, the consciousness of the unreality of everything, including instincts and vitality. To the conscious man, every act seems worthless in that it belongs immediately to the past. “The haunting of birth, Cioran posits, by transporting us before our past, makes us lose the taste of the future, of the present and of the past itself” (On the inconvenience of being born). For the philosopher, to live is to have hope and to be fooled; it is to start the same scene over and over again in spite of disillusionment — whereas dying would be enough to solve all problems. Work well done, writing or self-knowledge are useless; progress and the meaning of life are necessary fictions, since everything is only a game. It is better to remain passive in consciousness than to act in unconsciousness. But it is abstention and failure that give rise to metaphysical consciousness. If he still gives in to the common illusion, Cioran immediately regrets it.
The inconvenience of being born leads to the refusal of birth. Emil Cioran recognizes that it is difficult to see the evil in birth since it is universally celebrated by all people. Everyone spontaneously considers it a momentous event, even though it is a chance event with no effect on the course of the world. To think about it is to reverse the natural course of thoughts, which are turned towards the future. However, we are interested in birth once we have finished meditating on death. Cioran therefore believes that the fear of death is only the projection of a fear that goes back to the first moment. In his eyes, the frightening and unbearable character of birth is the key to understanding life. “All is explained wonderfully, writes the philosopher, if one admits that the birth is a harmful event or at least inopportune; but if one is of another opinion, one must resign oneself to the unintelligible, or then to cheat as all the world” (On the inconvenience to be born). One understands then that “the man is the cancer of the earth”; that the body is a burden and that the least sensation is a misery — stoicism is not enough to support the existence. Metaphysical maturity therefore consists in refusing birth and projecting oneself, through thought, into “the time before time”. Cioran affirms that only the state before birth conceals true freedom and happiness.
