Emile Cioran from On the Heights of Despair:
My tremendous admiration for enthusiasts stems from my inability to comprehend how there can be such men in a world where death, nothingness, sadness, and despair keep sinister company. It makes one wonder, to see people who are never desparate.
And:
The enthusiast is preeminantly an unproblematic person. He understands many things without ever knowing the agonizing doubts and chaotic sensitivity of the problematic man. The latter cannot solve anything, because nothing satisfies him. You will find in him neither the enthusiast’s gift of abandon, his naive irrationality, nor the charming paradox of love in its purest state. The biblical myth of knowledge as sin is the most profound myth ever invented. The enthusiast’s euphoria is due to the fact that he is unaware of the tragedy of knowledge. Why not say it? True knowledge is the most tenebrous darkness. I would gladly exchange all of the harrowing problems of this world for sweet, un-selfconscious naivete. The spirit does not elevate you; it tears you apart.
Of course, the one thing the unproblematic soul generally shows very little enthusiasm for is being in problematic discussions like this one. Instead, he/she has adopted either a practical or an idealistic methodology for dealing with things like death and destruction and sadness and despair…or contingency and chance and change…or uncertainty and confusion and ambiguity. So, it is not likely we will ever encounter many we can vigorously challenge…philosophically? They are, after all, virtually immune to the existential probe by now.
Know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living. The truth will set you free. And yet more than just a handful of folks have located an actual heart of darkness in the very attempt to probe these things with both eyes open. In other words, the more they probed the more fractured and fragmented their knowledge of “reality” became.
And it is not a question here of whether Cioran’s speculations are rational. Who knows, right? They certainly appear to be rational to him. And to me. Instead, it is more a question of whether or not the unproblematic souls can demonstrate this point of view is irrational; that, say, it is not a perspective a reasonable man or woman would accept.
My own admiration for the unproblematic soul stems more from the awe I feel towards someone who – in this world – is actually able to sustain the illusion that there is, indeed, a way to keep the pieces from becoming even more fractured and fragmented than they already are.
How do they do that?