Emil CIORAN develops the concept of the undeceived man.

Emil CIORAN (1911.1995)

Autograph manuscript.

One page ½ large in-4°. Slnd

“Everything has not a meaning but a simulacrum of meaning. »

First draft manuscript by the Romanian philosopher developing the concept of the undeceived man which he will take up in On the Disadvantage of Being Born.

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On German radio, the priest said this morning Im leben alles hat einen sinn: in life everything has a meaning. But we can just as easily [think] that not everything has it. Up close, everything in fact seems invested with a certain meaning; from afar, this meaning evaporates – far away in space and time. This is why every past event seems necessary to us, because it happened, and gratuitous, because we no longer perceive its urgency. It might as well not have arisen. The necessity which gave rise to it appears to us, with distance, as arbitrary and even illusory.

From the point of view of higher knowledge – everything has not a meaning but a simulacrum of meaning , because ignorance is attributing to anything an intrinsic meaning. And we can live, all the same, with these simulacra. But the totally liberated man would be the one who could do without it , who would manage to live while denying that meaning is immanent in anything. We glimpse the possibility of such an existence, which is, to a certain point, that of every undeceived mind. But there is an interval between the undeceived and the liberated: the first is the product of disillusionment, the second of spiritual deepening. Both are superior to things but they are at different spiritual levels: they do not climb the same degrees and do not experience the same altitudes. Delivered is the remorse of the undeceived, who will always reproach themselves for having opted for the easy way .

 The undeceived is the one who has understood everything. Without drawing the spiritual consequences. The one delivered is the one who, having also understood the turn, has gone to the end of this revelation which empties time of its illusory content. The undeceived is, if you like, a dilettante Buddha, an esthete. A Buddha who would find a certain pleasure in belittling himself, in slandering himself; a Buddha remaining in the world, an enlightened one haunting the crossroads. »