Research yearbook. The Institute of Philosophy and Law. The Urals Division of the RAS

5-27

Authors: Malyshev Mikhail A.

The article is dedicated to the investigation of illusions in the work of Emil Cioran–French thinker of Rumanian origin. Cioran calls himself a skeptical, but his skepticism could not be reduced neither to negation nor to simple doubt; it includes the aspiration to lucidity and, therefore, to the multiplicity in the comprehension of human life. As a skeptical thinker, Cioran reveals several fundamental illusions, inherent to the human existence: the obsession by glory, the utopian persecution of the radiant future, and dethrones some prejudices related to the problems of death and suicide. According to Cioran’s existential skepticism, ontologically, non-being has the same rights as being, because anything that exists eventually is doomed to oblivion. Hence, he is warning about hasty and categorical judgments, as well as about attempts to construct universal philosophical systems. Cioran’s philosophy presupposes the desire to consider antipode of all phenomenon and to keep the principle of priority of existential doubts over unquestioning faith. According to the thinker, a man is thrown into being and doomed to sufferings against his will, but his sufferings are compensated by the privilege of being, i.e. to be the chosen one, capable of knowing joys and sorrows of life.