/lit/ - Literature

>>20721308
SKEPTIC & BARBARIAN by Emil Cioran

IF it is not hard to imagine all humanity in the grip of convulsions or, at least, of fear, it would be an over-estimate of the race to suppose it can ever raise itself as a whole to the level of doubt, generally reserved for a few elite outcasts. Yet humanity accedes to doubt in part during those rare moments when it changes gods and when men's minds, subject to con-tradictory solicitations, no longer know which cause to defend, which truth to adopt. When Christianity burst upon Rome, the slaves appropriated it without hesitation; the patricians resisted, needing time to shift from aversion to curiosity, from curiosity to fer-vor. Imagine a reader of the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes faced with the Gospels! What artifice could reconcile not two doctrines but two universes? How greet in-genuous parables when one is grappling with the ultimate perplexities of the intellect? The treatises in which Sextus Empiricus, early in the third century A.D., reckoned up all the ancient world's doubts are an exhaustive compilation of the Unbreathable, the most dizzying pages ever written and, it must be said, the most boring. Too subtle and too methodical to compete with the new superstitions, they were the expression of a world already consummated, future-less, doomed. Yet skepticism, whose theses they had codified, managed to survive a while on lost positions, until the day when Christians and barbarians joined forces to reduce and abolish it.
A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt; a theoretical doubt which, once it turns against itself, becomes quite practical. No civilization can begin by questioning values it has not yet created; once pro-duced, it wearies of them and weans itself away, ex-amines and weighs them with a devastating detach-ment. For the various beliefs it had engendered and which now break adrift, it substitutes a system of un-certainties, it organizes its metaphysical shipwreck-with amazing success when a Sextus is on hand to help. In the twilight of Antiquity skepticism possessed a dignity it was not to regain in the Renaissance, despite a Montaigne, nor even in the eighteenth cen-tury, despite a Hume. Pascal alone, had he so desired, might have saved, might have rehabilitated it; but he turned away, leaving skepticism to straggle in the margin of modern philosophy. Today, when we too are about to change gods, will there be sufficient res-pite for us to cultivate it? Will it find itself back in favor or, on the contrary, banned outright, will it be smothered by the tumult of dogmas? The important thing, though, is not to ascertain whether it is threat-ened from without, but if we can genuinely cultivate it, if our powers permit us to confront without suc-cumbing to it. For before being the problem of civili-zation, skepticism is an individual case, and as such concerns us without respect to the historical expres-sion it assumes.

>>19723753
But I'm telling

>>19510408
Yeah? What determined that? LMAO