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Emil Cioran (April 8, 1911 – June 20, 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist.

Early life

Emil Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran (born Comaniciu), was originally from Veneţia de Jos, a commune near Făgăraş.

After studying humanities at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Cioran, aged 17, started to study philosophy at the University of Bucharest. Upon his entrance into the University, he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, the three of them becoming lifelong friends. Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Ţuţea, became his closest colleagues for they all had Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu as their professors. Cioran, Eliade, and Ţuţea became supporters of the ideas that their philosophy professor, Nae Ionescu, had become a fervent advocate of – a tendency deemed Trăirism, which fused Existentialism with ideas common in various forms of Fascism.

Cioran had a good command of German. His first studies revolved around Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and especially Friedrich Nietzsche. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". During his studies at the University he was also influenced by the works of Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who added the belief that life is arbitrary to Cioran’s central system of thought. He then graduated with a thesis on Henri Bergson (however, Cioran later rejected Bergson, claiming the latter did not comprehend the tragedy of life).

Career

Berlin and Romania

In 1933, he obtained a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he came into contact with Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in measures taken by the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives — "what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania".

Cioran’s first book, On the Heights of Despair (more accurately translated: "On the Summits of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission’s Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Successively, The Book of Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936), and Tears and Saints (1937), were also published in Romania (the first two titles have yet to be translated into English).

Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard - a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods.

Cioran censored The Transfiguration of Romania in its second edition released in the 1990s; he eliminated numerous passages considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". The volume expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, published in English in 2005, gives an in-depth analysis of The Transfiguration.

His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. In 1934, he wrote: "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), which led to criticism from the far right Gândirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), as well as from various Iron Guard papers.

France

After coming back from Berlin (1936), Cioran taught philosophy at the "Andrei Şaguna" high school in Braşov for a year. In 1937, he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. After a short stay in his home country (November 1940-February 1941), Cioran never returned again. This last period in Romania was the one in which he exhibited a closer relationship with the Iron Guard, which had, by then, taken power (see National Legionary State) — on November 28, he recorded a speech for the state-owned Romanian Radio, one centered on the portrait of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, former leader of the movement, who had been killed two years before (praising him and the Guard for, among other things, "having given Romanians a purpose").

He later renounced not only his support for the Iron Guard, but also their nationalist ideas, and frequently expressed regret and repentance for his emotional implication in it. For example, in a 1972 interview, he condemned it as "a complex of movements; more than this, a demented sect and a party", and avowed: "I found out then [...] what it means to be carried by the wave without the faintest trace of conviction. [...] I am now immune to it".

In 1940, he started writing The Passionate Handbook, and finished it by 1945. It was to be the last book that he would write in Romanian, although not the last to deal with delicate and lyrical aphorisms demented by infinite pessimism.

1937 witnessed Cioran’s departure for France with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest. From the moment of his departure, Cioran only published books in French (all were appreciated not only because of their content, but also because of their style which was full of lyricism and fine use of the language).

In 1949 his first French book, A Short History of Decay, was published by Gallimard – the publishing company which came to publish the majority of his books later on – and was awarded the Rivarol Prize in 1950. Later on, Cioran refused every literary prize with which he was presented.

The Latin Quarter of Paris became Cioran’s permanent residence. He lived most of his life in isolation, avoiding the public. Yet, he still maintained numerous friends with which he conversed often such as Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Henri Michaux.

He is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery.