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Title: Degradation through Work Author: Emil Cioran Date: 1934 Language: en Topics: anti-work, death, existentialism, metaphysics, nihilism, pessimism Source: Excerpt from On the Heights of Despair. Notes: Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston.
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. Man sees work as beneficial to his being,
but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets
himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin
to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in
other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his
origins. 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.
I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the
world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a
light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into
infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory
feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and
unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in
the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that
my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of
my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.