Emil Cioran's Criticism of Work (stage setting)

Is work intrinsically bad? Are certain jobs dehumanizing? What type of work are we supposed to do if we are to stay true to ourselves and our human nature?  

In the section "Degradation Through Work" (reproduced below) of his book On the Heights of Despair, Romanian existentialist philosopher Emil Cioran makes the point that work is essentially degrading because it engages man in the external reality and trumps the spiritual impulses pertaining to his genuine interiority. 

In the following I take some preliminary steps toward placing Cioran's remarks in the broader context of philosophical thinking about work, human nature and society.

Picture by Lewis Hine

Karl Marx famously argued that the capitalist economic system leads to alienated or estranged labor. The worker losses his humanity and becomes increasingly contaminated by the mechanical or bureaucratic features of the production system he is part of. To illustrate, consider a Filipino worker preparing sandwiches in her sleep, her eyes moving frantically under her eyelids, her lips repeating the menu. Or the Chinese workers manufacturing shoes for Nike while weighing the pros and cons of suicide. (For those who enjoy horror fiction, I recommend reading Marx's description of alienated labor. It's more terrifying than most zombie novels out there! In fact, most horror fiction nowadays is horrific in precisely this sense: it exemplifies the zombification of the artist's imagination in a capitalist economy.) Following Aristotle and Hegel, Marx conceives of man as a social and rational animal who is naturally inclined toward participating in communal, coordinated work in support of the public good. However, Marx argues, the capitalist system distorts that natural tendency and turns man himself into a commodity. 

In contrast to Marx, Emil Cioran's criticism of work is much broader. Cioran rejects the thesis that man is a rational animal and considers man essentially as a spiritual being, an insomniac animal capable of understanding and reflecting in his consciousness the deep mystery of the world, the inner tensions and contradictions of the universe. Man is capable of transcending time into eternity and transfiguring himself into God — be it a dead God, an undead God, or a bored God tired of its own lucidity and prone to bouts of sadomasochism. Since work, on Cioran's view, signifies an engagement with external reality as opposed to a spiritual exercise, it follows that work leads to the repression of man's essential nature. But, as opposed to Marx, this is true for both capitalism and communism and each and every social and economic system which doesn't appreciate man's spiritual destiny. 

But, someone might object, not all work is concerned with the external world. For instance, writing a novel is work, but it also has the spiritual aspect Cioran talks about. I think there is something to this objection and the scope of Cioran's criticism must be clarified. We need to distinguish between different types of work, the complex ways they are connected to the external world, and what kind of objects they produce. However, in Cioran's defense, it's important to emphasize that the commercialization of fiction and art in general turns interiority itself into a commodity. So, then, in a deep sense, interiority itself becomes external. Based on this insight, it's interesting and worthwhile to work out clearly the way contemporary western culture distorts the notion of soul or inner-self. I think one important criterion to be used in discerning authentic interiority is the artist's own expression of the intention animating their work. For instance, a horror writer might say that he just wants to scare people. In his case, his interiority is filtered through an external grid. A different artist might say that his work is a record of his conversations with God. Or, someone might use art as a way of working through obsessions which haunt them. In this latter cases, interiority appears to be genuine, uncorrupted by the external world. Of course, there is always the problem of self-deception; artists who aim for commercial success but immediately repress this desire into the tunnels of their unconscious. 

This issue aside, a different objection to Cioran is that a society in which everyone is focused on their spiritual life will lead to self-destruction because no one will actually do anything. Who will then produce food, build houses or make cars? After all, man needs to adapt to the world if he is to survive. Given his megalomanic nihilism, Cioran will probably observe humanity's self-destruction with delight and even admiration for its romantic heroism. But, for those of us concerned about the future of our species this is an important objection. However, I think that especially in the western culture people are confused about their needs. And this confusion is a product of capitalism, which works best when it manipulates peoples' desires by creating false needs. We think we need a bunch of stuff in order to survive, but we don't. And the belief that acquiring a lot of stuff  leads to better lives is a product of capitalist indoctrination. 

Moreover, a focus on interiority may give rise to a renewed concern for the world, for our community values and traditions. This is one of the important points Heidegger makes in Being and Time and is further developed by Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity. Simply put, an individual's spiritual development may naturally give rise to a concern in the spiritual development of others. So coordinated communal efforts which lead to meeting the community's members basic needs for food and shelter in order to create the conditions of possibility for their spiritual journeys, are not excluded by Cioran's ideas, but, on some interpretations, naturally flow from them. 

This being said, let's read carefully through young Cioran's short and striking remarks about work. As indicated, this section appears in his first book On the Heights of Despair, a book he published at the tender age of 22, when he was already an 'expert in the problem of death.'

Degradation Through Work

"Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.

Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one."

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

On Masters and Slaves

There are two kinds of slaves: perfect slaves and imperfect ones. The perfect slaves have no consciousness because they were born with no power or lucidity; their birth is like that of a hammer or a screwdriver. Imperfect slaves realize that they live in a world that isn't the creation of their will, they feel deeply alienated and abused, but they don't have the vitality or pathos to do anything about it, to reclaim their world. 

Authentic people or masters are the ones for whom alienation is unbearable, they are the ones who feel the deep violence that lies beneath everything that others take for granted, of everything banal and mundane. As a result, they have to take charge of their lives and create their living space. Fulfilling this obligation lies in their noble nature. This is why there is a difference in kind between being a master and being a slave. Because slaves, both perfect and imperfect ones, find alienation bearable, only mildly uncomfortable. On the other hand, aristocrats can't take being pushed around, can't take the constant rape, because banality violates their essential being, the origin of their meaning. 

Suicide is always on the master's mind, as an authentic possibility. However, he doesn't put it in practice out of an instinct of self-annihilation, like the slave, but, paradoxically, out of an instinct of self-affirmation. The lucid act is a bright flare shot into the dark, illuminating the trajectory of his will, the front line of his war. 

The powerful and the weak react differently to aggression. This reaction denotes how much energy they are willing to put into fighting the aggressor. The powerful man’s immediate response shows his conviction that he can prevail, whereas the weak man’s timidity expresses lack of vitality. The aristocrat's temporary retreat, when it occurs, doesn't signal weakness, but the preparation for total war. 

While perfect slaves are like a sterile woman’s ruined womb, imperfect slaves resemble mobile graves. They carry inside them children who still breathe, but are forced to play dead; kids with their lips sewn together with the threads of idle chatter, only able to utter a zombified, constant moan. Imperfect slaves live while listening to a dying song whose rhythm projects them in the realm of an aborted freedom, a faded memory of a brain devoured by dementia The sound comes from a coffin; it is the call of insects and worms, the cheep of a chick unable to hatch its egg. Thus, for defective slaves, the space of freedom becomes the space of torture and deep, barely repressed, anxiety. This is why, the imperfect slave stuffs earplugs in his ears and tries to imitate his brother, the perfect slave, by covering himself with the multicolored blanket of obedience.  

Interview about "Ich Will"

Here's a recent interview I had the pleasure of giving to Niika Nenn from "Wolf on Water Publishing"

NN:    What inspired you to write Ich Will?

I did my Undergraduate degree in philosophy in Romania, at the University of Bucharest. I didn’t have to pay for school, because post-secondary education was still funded by the government. In addition, my parents supported me throughout. This gave me the opportunity to dedicate almost exclusively to studying and not worry too much about anything else. When I came to Canada in 2004, one of the things that shocked me most was youngsters struggling to pay for school. Many were working sordid jobs like McDonald’s to pay for tuition and housing. This made me think: what if I had studied here, instead of Bucharest? And, what if my parents hadn’t had money to support me? I think in this alternative reality I would have been more hateful of the rich and of society in general. This gave rise to Adrian Norton, the main character of “Ich Will”.

Most people, when faced with adversity, try to adapt. They promptly give up on themselves and do what society expects of them. In the case of post-secondary education, students forget about what really interests them and they get a degree in accounting or business, something which sells in “the real world” and gets them a job. But this is because in present day capitalism, education is no longer a good in itself but an instrument for making profit. Universities are administered as corporations. A degree is a good to be bought on the market, and its value is determined by how much money it makes for you in return.

However, while most youngsters are eager to adapt to a rotten system, Adrian decides to stand his ground and stick to his guns. He is strong willed and stubborn. He knows he’s passionate about books and philosophy and doesn’t want to give it up without a fight. I wanted a character with a lot to lose and a strong desire to win at all cost. Like, if a highly talented beautiful girl gets raped, falls into a spiral of depression, and commits suicide, we feel deeply shaken and sad. But if an old comatose female patient gets raped and dies, we don’t know exactly what to feel. Was her death an event? Was her being alive a fact? That’s why I can’t write about ordinary people.

When faced with looming adversity, we also tend to project ourselves into the future. This defense mechanism is made explicit and ironized by Friedrich Nietzsche. It is pervasive in western culture, especially in the Christian illusion of an afterlife. It also invades the way we plan our careers. The average person has no qualms about working a mind-numbing, alienating job for their entire life just to save money for retirement. It doesn’t cross their mind that the last year on the job may also coincide with the first stage of dementia. By the time they go on their long awaited golden age vacation they will have been so flagellated their own shadow would make them faint. Nietzsche’s Myth of the Eternal Return is an antidote to all such cowardly projections of the self. He says that this life, each and every moment of it, will repeat for all eternity. Every day is judgment day. Eternity exists in every detail, every scene, every character. Adrian comes in contact with Nietzsche’s idea and decides to save his soul, his present self. He hears Nietzsche’s wake-up call clearly. He realizes that he is encircled by alien forces bent on ripping him apart and that he has to either fight or self-destruct. He decides to take a stand. As the tension between Adrian and his social environment intensifies, blood begins to spray like from a fountain.

NN: Philosophy is prevalent in the novel. Which philosophers do you find most influenced this work?

Other than Nietzsche, Romanian nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran influenced “Ich Will”. Cioran grew up in Romania but moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his career and wrote in French. Throughout his life Cioran suffered from insomnia and this affliction is a theme of his writing. Basically, he argues that sleep makes life bearable and creates the illusion of meaning. Cioran thought of himself as the only lucid thinker, the only philosopher who can stare into the abyss without blinking. A lover of libraries and brothels, he dedicated himself to challenging God and the entire universe in a most beautiful literary style.

Cioran’s life-long struggle with insomnia reminded me of other mental mechanisms designed by evolution to make life bearable. Three of these are forgetting, repressing, and self-deception. With regards to forgetting, it’s strange how many of us remember adolescence as an idyllic time, but we know, deep down, that back then we were confused and miserable. In effect, I wanted Adrian Norton’s thinking to be like Cioran’s; that is, free from the Maya veil created by adaptive cognitive tools. When something bothers Adrian, for instance, he remembers it vividly. When his mind designs a story meant to hide an ugly truth, he throws away the narrative veil and examines the repulsive truth with a magnifying glass. In consequence, Adrian’s project of redeeming himself in the face of Eternal Recurrence becomes more urgent and dramatic than that of someone with a normal psychology.

NN: What do you think Ich Will has to offer the youth of today?

“Ich Will” is a call to arms, a battle cry. The youth today feel, deep inside, that they are being cheated by a perverse and oppressive social system; that their social environment doesn’t even give them the chance to develop an identity, to form a soul. They don’t have the tools to articulate their problems and express themselves. Among other things, this is because education has become a commodity. Capitalism commodities everything, it’s a grinder that sucks absolute values and turns them into goods for sale on the market. This is a system rooted in our atavistic fear of being free, the unconscious desire to balance this impotence by oppressing others, and a collective primal compulsion towards mass-suicide.

“Ich Will” is a close look at the way capitalist society tries to discipline and domesticate Adrian Norton. It advocates the idea that Adrian is morally justified in resisting systemic violence as a form of self-defence. There’s nothing wrong with fighting violence with violence. On the contrary, it’s strange when being repeatedly disrespected doesn’t give rise to any instinctive response, like in the case of a comatose patient. Then the organism is not healthy. But this sort of passivity is to be expected in a society which mangles and brutalizes its youth. Adrian was lucky enough to escape this spiritual holocaust and attain self-knowledge. He’s prepared to defend what he holds sacred and enact his own justice. In this sense he’s exemplary.

Some of the scenes in “Ich Will” may offend some readers’ moral sense but this is partly because our western society has a hypocritical and narrow perspective on violence. We ostracize physical violence but we turn a blind eye to psychological violence or systemic societal brutality. Let’s say John is a teenager who loves poetry and wants to go to a summer camp for young poets. Charles Bukowsky, his favourite writer, will be there, running poetry workshops. John is so excited about the prospect of learning from his idol Bukowsky that he tells one of his friends, more or less jokingly, “Oh man, I’d give my left arm to go to the poetry camp.” John’s parents, however, don’t let him go because they think that poetry is a waste of time and time is money. The point is: isn’t this act of refusal the same, or even worse, than ripping John’s arm off? But our reaction to John’s parents ripping their kid’s arm out of its socket is much stronger than to them not letting him go to a camp. However, this gut reaction is misleading, the simple product of our evolutionary make-up, since John himself perceives the second act as being more savage.

NN: What are you working on next?

I’m working on a novel with the working title Odin Down South. While the story of “Ich Will” takes place in Canada, Odin Down South happens in Romania of the early ’90s, after the fall of Ceausescu’s communist regime and the invasion of American-style capitalism. It’s about a group of rebellious teenagers who realize that God is dead while discovering the mind-altering effects of hard-liquor and extreme metal imported from the West.

It is commonplace in our culture that adults are judgmental and repulsed by angry teenagers and their erratic behavior. In most documentaries about adolescents there’s some narcotized soccer-mom complaining about her kid playing video games all day and saying “Whatever” when she tries to reach out. Odin Down South is based on a reversed perspective. It is the rebellious teenagers who try to struggle out of the various forms of putrefaction and decay they find around them. It is about their judgment of adulthood. The novel is a metaphysical journey, under the guiding light of primal aggression and disgust, into the rotten core of what we call “being alive”.

For my Legionaries

I'm reading Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's "For my Legionaries (the Iron Guard)". Codreanu's strong personality, moral integrity, mysticism and spirit of sacrifice are mesmerizing. Blinded by decades of communist and then "free-market" capitalist propaganda, many generations of Romanians had only a distorted idea of the leader of the Iron Guard. However, now that his writings are widely available, Romanians and people around the world are free to open their eyes, wash the mud off their faces, bask in the Capitan's spiritual glory and follow into his footsteps up the hidden, steep mountain path. In our age of unfettered, decadent capitalism Codreanu's writings point the way towards a unified, organized resistance and meaningful counterattack. His example, as well as that of other leading Romanian intellectuals like Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Nae Ionescu provides a invaluable source of inspiration for everyone who struggles against the capitalist hydra. 

 

Dostoyevsky begot God by repeatedly striking his pen against his temple. God crawled out of the writer's head wound. Then God knew the Holy Spirit and they begot Jesus and his brother, The Captain. Once the Pharisees and Sadducees heard of the new leaders they ordered them killed. Their spirits were already tainted by murders and plunder and they didn't want Jesus and his follower to reveal their corruption and decay. Knowing they are in danger, Jesus and the Captain retreated deep into in the forested Carpathian Mountains and they prayed to a cross made of swords. There they found one of the painted monasteries built by Stefan the Great. They spoke with the saints and angels on the walls, and Archangel Michael himself flew out of the stone to know them better. But, underneath their calm, peaceful voices were bitter screams of pain and agony coming from the stones, and curses and gritting of teeth. Jesus and the Captain knew that Romanian peasants had been buried into those walls by the Pharisees and Sadducees who meant to silence them: wipe them from the face of the earth and burn their memory. The two leaders closed their eyes and prayed. The voices from the walls rose steadily as the saints and angles turned into warriors with painted faces and weapons at the ready. The church itself grew and began pulsating like a woman's ripened womb. Rivulets of blood poured from its foundations, gripping the earth like a red dead hand. Jesus and the Captain followed the blood and its whispers.

        "This is my blood," Jesus said.

        "These are the songs and poems of the stillborns," the Captain added.

     Looking ahead towards the green valley and the mountain crests, Jesus replied: "Let's hope someone will hear the tears of the forgotten saints."

 

Emil Cioran on Corneliu Zelea Codreanu:

"Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was but an inhabited Sahara...I had only a few conversations with Corneliu Codreanu. From the first moment I realized that I was talking to a man in a country of human dregs... The Captain was not "smart," the Captain was profound... He didn't want to improve our miserable condition, but rather to introduce the absolute in the daily existence of Romania. Not the revolution of a moment in history, but of history itself. Thus the Legion was not only meant to recreate Romania, but also to redeem its past, to make amends for its secular absence, to recover, through inspired and unique madness, all the time that has been wasted...In a nation of servants, he introduced honor ...In absolute terms, if I had had to choose between Romania and the Captain, I would not have hesitated a second... With the exception of Jesus, no one else has managed to live after death the way he did."

Emil Cioran, The Inner Profile of the Captain, December Issue of Glasul Stramosesc, 1940.