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To Cioran, life is at once absurd and fascinating. "Everything that a man does turns against him," he explains. "You will be punished for everything. That is the tragedy of human destiny." Mocked by life, mankind becomes "a race of convulsionaries at the center of a cosmic farce." Since philosophical systems inevitably fail, Cioran is led to denounce reason as "the rust of our vitality" and the study of history as "the terror of chronology," both of which lead men to separate consciousness from reality. To Cioran, all truth is ultimately hoax, all certainties no more than "functioning lies."
Cioran believes that Western civilization is today at a stage of helpless paralysis. Modern man, he writes, is aware that every action eventually negates itself, every profound idea will give rise to another refuting it, and that every revolution leads to inevitable counterrevolution. Even nihilism and atheism are false options, since they too involve a commitment that will eventually crumble. "At our limits a God appears, or something that serves his turn," says Cioran, who is at once an unbeliever and a profoundly religious man. "I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot." Yet Cioran rejects faith as just another self-deception. "I write to rid myself of my obsessions, of my anguish," he says. "But I believe in nothing."
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, of order, of harmony, that we gain consciousness of ourselves."
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 I do not despair of acquiring."