Word: exists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...attempt to draft nurses during World War II that was stymied by Congress. Anthropologist Margaret Mead favors conscription of all youth for public service and sees no reason why girls should be exempt. The present draft, she complains, "sets girls and young women apart as if they did not exist...
Cioran's first book published in the U.S., The Temptation to Exist (Quadrangle; $5), presents his dark vision in a series of highly personal, paradoxical meditations that almost defy criticism and can only be categorically accepted or rejected. An unsystematic thinker who refers to his essays as "fragments," Cioran (pronounced Cho-ran) presents his arguments in ironic, aphoristic prose (see box). It is rather as if Dostoevsky had written Notes from Underground in the style of Pascal's Pensees. Although his gloom has affinities, with existentialism, Cioran is hard to pigeon hole; his eclectic thought contains echoes...
...because of his obsession with privacy-he refuses to reveal his first name, rarely gives interviews, shuns Parisian literary circles-Cioran is hardly better known in Europe than in the U.S. Yet there are impressive testimonials to his significance. Critic Susan Sontag, in her introduction to The Temptation to Exist, calls him "the most distinguished figure writing today in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein." And Nobel prizewinning poet, Saint-John Perse, hails Cioran as "one of the greatest French writers to honor our language since the death of Paul Valery. His lofty thought is one of the most...
Confronting futility, Cioran neither yields to the absurd nor makes a sudden leap to faith. Instead, he adopts a perilous, intentionally irrational balance designed to sever the roots of reason. Since all life is futility, he contends, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational act of all. For once man sees through his fictions, there can .be no rational basis for living, a judgment that recalls Camus' point: the only philosophical question is suicide. "I subsist and act insofar as I am a raving maniac," Cioran writes. "It is by undermining the idea of reason...
Cioran contends that the only common ground between men-believers and nonbelievers alike-is the illogical temptation to exist, to resist the acceptance of nothingness. The difficult duty of man then becomes to combat both his doubts and certitudes, and to hurl himself toward a silent, detached state of unreason. He sees the philosopher's task not as pointing out the truth but rather as showing the way toward freedom through acceptance of futility, the only tenable stance for the conscious man. "After the banality of the abyss, what miracles in being!" Cioran writes. "To exist is a habit...