Arquivo de philosophy | Page 112 of 116

Emil Cioran, Emeritus Master in Cynicism

I always seek inspiration in Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher who settled in France, broke with his own language and began writing in French as few. Some of his books, unfortunately, do not have Portuguese translation, such as the wonderful Aveux et Anathèmes and Solitude et destin — however, there are honorable initiatives in translating it, such as that of Professor José Thomaz Brum, through Editora Rocco. Fierce moralist, endowed with enviable erudition, it is common to see in Cioran a cruel sentence interspersed with some absurd, comical or risible metaphor. This, from the first reading, made me a very strong impression, at first generating a certain misunderstanding. Mockery amid moral matters? And then that I realized the obvious: it is impossible to reflect in depth not having a sense of humor. Our end is dust, our existence is a breath; stupid is take everything so seriously. And since the most serious things are in essence fleeting, everything is liable to laughter and derision. That is, true intelligence manifests itself through good humor. Cioran taught me to laugh at everything: at the others, the world, the death and myself. With him, I learned to provoke by grace, to disdain by charm, to denying only to prove to myself that I do not cling to anything. I discovered, in Cioran, that cynicism is noble as an exalted face of good humor; it is a sign of maturity, not the other way around… So sometimes I imagine myself lying in a bed in front of death. I still have one last wish. I can ask for the salvation of humanity, a dose of morphine, whatever I want. But I am going to die, that is for sure. Then I extend the view and address the figure that accompanies my torment: “Please, please… Only tell me the last joke.”

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Impositions of the Randomness

If we are in some extent hostages of chance, luck, nature and circumstances; if a disease can suddenly arise and annihilate us; if a burglar can put a bullet in our chest on a whim; if a traffic accident can silence our last breath; if our dwelling may collapse; if a sudden fire can reduce us to ashes; if our dear ones can suddenly abandon us; if we can see a plane crashing from inside it; if our greatest plans can prove stupid, or be annihilated by some misfortune; if all our life may not yield a single joke and be lost in the immensity of the specie and the vastness of time, I see no intelligent posture that does not start from humility.

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The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is certainly a book I will approach at other opportunities. The work, as well as Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Cervantes, is brilliant and can confuse the unwary. As I said on another occasion, I thank so much for not rating this book as hilarious, and I did it just for having read it with some intellectual preparation. Dostoevsky manages, more in this than in other books, to give focus to his obsession with personalities touched by the divine. Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of the book, is the embodiment of the noblest that can be achieved as a human being. Endowed with infinite kindness and complacency, the prince generates empathy wherever he passes; however, he is misunderstood: his fellow men associate his candidness with innocence, lack of sense, taxing him as an idiot. Among all the themes in Dostoevsky, it is this in The Idiot which fascinates me most: human elevation necessarily requires the annihilation of vanity. Myshkin knows himself a misunderstood, or rather: he knows that others judge him an idiot; and yet it does not alter his complacent stance towards anyone. What does it matter what other people think? Myshkin seems immune to lust and can stare evil in the eyes, being light by contrasting with the shadows that evidence around him. His candor assails, molests, and coexistence only exposes his moral superiority before others. Idiot? Like Alyosha of The Brothers Karamazov, it seems that Myshkin walks among men to prove the asymmetry between the human and the divine, the misery and the grace, the earth and the celestial. And he proves to us, undoubtedly, all the mediocrity of small desires, small vanities and pride, which annihilates what would perhaps be the only human virtue worthy of this name.

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The Contingency in Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a mathematician well known in Brazil, now that marketers have learned to use his name to sell consultancies, is certainly much more than a trader. If most idiots who sell buying recommendations in the stock market had read Taleb, they would learn the following: man cannot predict the future. Taleb, whose work invalidates almost everything that has been produced in modern finance, teaches that risk calculation is problematic because it seeks to establish future behaviors based on past behaviors. And that, as usual, whenever we try to predict the future, we will be held hostage by uncertainty. It is funny, because the human brain seems induced by an uncontrollable temptation to systematize the unknown; we simply do not accept the uncertainty, the absence of logical response, and then we put ourselves to elaborate theories, to risk explanations for the phenomena that surround us, seeking an objective pattern of events’ sequence and considering that patterns necessarily repeat themselves, since the universe is governed by static laws. According to Taleb, whenever we risk forecasts and leave no margins for an unexpected event, or when we project the future based on the past, we will be fragile. Mathematically speaking, this means that we cannot consider that something will not happen just because it has not happened before. That is: the estimated probability of nothing, and absolutely nothing, can be zero, because estimates require a margin of error. Every time I read Taleb I get the feeling that betting on the unlikely can be more coherent (besides having higher payoff), and that contingency, issue already addressed philosophically with several names (uncertainty, randomness, fate, fortune…), seems to be the true driving force of the determining events of history. That is why I disdain smiling of the meteorologist and his tare for quantifying future events, while I learn to respect the Indian, who, looking impassively at the sky, knows himself hostage to his own luck.

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