A self-styled “liberal” ruling class gains the support of the masses through rigged elections and by appealing to the base instincts of individuals through drugs and low-level entertainment…
Some people are concerned with building a more civilized society and are therefore accused of sowing hatred and violence, and are oppressed by liberticidal laws…
The European citizens seal their union by singing the anthem of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony…
A deadly epidemic wipes out the population, decimating the weakest individuals, especially those already hospitalized…
Racial clashes erupt in the four corners of the earth…
Is this the lineup of a modern-day news program?
Not at all!
These are plot elements from an extraordinary dystopian story by Daniel Halévy, written in 1903: Histoire de quatre ans, 1997-2001.
One wonders what filmmakers are waiting for to make a film version of this prophetic book!
***
Daniel Halévy, Histoire de quatre ans, 1997-2001, Editions Kimé, p.160
The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing!
Western culture begins with the invocation to the Muse at the beginning of the Iliad: from this consideration we can grasp the meaning of the essay Walter Friedrich Otto published in 1954 on the controversial topic of the origin of language: The Muses and the Divine Origin of Word and Song.
Otto’s study begins with the Nymphs, the mythical creatures who populated the natural elements and who provoked in those who abandoned themselves to the contemplation of nature a spiritual earthquake similar to that of poetic infatuation. Like the Nymphs, the Muses also enrapture the souls of mortals, elevating them to the role of poets.
The Muses, from whose name derives that powerful realm of sounds we call “music,” were daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. These daughters of the father of the gods and of the Titanic mother who symbolizes memory, the nine Olympian deities gave voice to the wonders of the world.
Mythology has also handed down the stories of the sons of the Muses—Linus, Orpheus, Thamyris, and Rhesus—who represented the different forms of expression in song and poetry.
In the Christian era, in the year 404, a fire destroyed the statues of the Muses in the Senate of Constantinople. According to Zosimus, who reports the episode, this was a sign of the profound miseducation that was about to overtake the human race.
Otto believes that the myth of the Muses is the most convincing demonstration of the divine origin of language, which was born primarily as song. Indeed, language can be a simple system of acoustic signaling, but when expressed through articulated song, as also occurs in some animal species, language presupposes an attitude of self-representation that connects a being with the world: in song, a living knowledge resonates.
As von Humboldt argued, things become present in language: they appear to the word as mythical entities. Proof of this is the many abstract concepts that originated as personifications: love, freedom, fidelity, victory…
And not only do the Muses sing, they also dance, and in dance the body rediscovers itself entirely, in the rhythmic movement that follows the music.
Modern theories on the origin of language speak of the birth of words due to utilitarian motives. But in reality, every human language possesses an astonishing richness and capacity for nuance, and if language were to satisfy only material needs, it would be enough to express itself with the sounds of animals.
Precisely for this reason, poets and musicians are the representatives of an absolutely original form of language. Goethe also expressed a similar concept when he said that listening to Bach’s music, he felt as if he were hearing something that had happened in God’s heart shortly before the creation of the world.
Otto’s book is still formative reading for scholars of classics and linguistic disciplines, even if in some respects the essay has been surpassed by more recent philological research (for example, Otto reports the old etymology of Juno Moneta, recently clarified by Jean Haudry).
Otto’s conclusion somehow recalls Heidegger’s idea of ”listening”: the words are one with the goddess’s song, that is, the revealing opening of the world and the divine.
____________
Walter Otto, Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens, Diederichs,, 1956
Emil Cioran, the philosopher of despair who better than anyone else explored the feeling of anguish, is still a little-studied figure given the crucial importance of his work. A significant contribution to a greater understanding of the Romanian thinker is Fabio Rodda’s book, Cioran, l’antiprofeta. Fisionomia di un fallimento(“Cioran, the Antiprophet. Physiognomy of a Failure”). Rodda, a young philosophy scholar and graduate of the University of Bologna, made a brilliant debut on the literary scene with this thorough and well-researched essay.
The first part of the book analyzes Cioran’s Romanian period. In 1933, at just 22 years old, Cioran published On the Height of Despair, a work characterized by remarkable maturity and stylistic certainty, which was immediately appreciated by the intellectual world. Even in this first publication, the fundamental themes of Cioran’s thought emerge: nihilism, anguish, the pain of living, and existential disorientation. On the height of Despair also attracted reader’s attention for his choice of language, not purely philosophical, but decidedly lyrical. This youthful period also included his support for the “Legion of the Archangel Michael,” Codreanu’s political movement, which, with its mystical and apocalyptic nationalism, fascinated the most brilliant minds in Romania at the time. In 1936, Cioran wrote the nationalist essay Schimbarea la față a României (“The Transfiguration of Romania”) and collaborated with far-right magazines, writing articles that would later provide his opponents with the pretext for a predictable accusation of “fascism,” which, naturally, would damage his intellectual career.
Rodda, who makes no secret of his sympathy for liberal democracies, nevertheless reveals an ability to unprejudicedly grasp the motivations that inspired the ideological choices of Cioran and many intellectuals who lived in those historical junctures, and objectively analyzes some of Cioran’s consensus statements regarding nationalist regimes. Cioran, however, had no ambitions for a political career, and by the late 1930s, he had already shown little interest in the events involving Romania during the tumultuous years of the Antonescu regime. The philosopher continued his intellectual journey by publishing in 1937 Tears and Saints, a major work that explores the dimension of faith and the condition of sanctity, which Cioran defines as an “exact science.” Cioran, an anti-dogmatic thinker by definition, condemns the systematization of faith in theology and is fascinated by the vertigo of mystical experience, through which man approaches that indeterminable dimension to which he instinctively tends and which he can touch in moments of ecstatic rapture. This book also highlights Cioran’s particular interest in music, seen as a privileged means of approaching the transcendent. The second part of the essay is dedicated to the period that began with Cioran’s move to Paris in 1937.
The Romanian philosopher decided to write in French, a language that allowed his works to be much more widely distributed, and in 1949 his masterpiece, A Short History of Decay, was published. This book is a kind of prose poem in which the human condition is viewed with merciless lucidity in its absolute meaninglessness and the impossibility of any foundation: the analysis of existential positions is pushed beyond limits that even Leopardi and Schopenhauer had not dared to transgress. Rodda also analyses Cioran’s relationship with the culture of the time, and in particular with that of engaged France, in which Sartre was the intellectual of reference. Naturally, Cioran’s thought, entirely focused on the exploration of nihilism, could not be in tune with the superficial optimism of progressive intellectuals, and while Sartre led the crowds of 68 in the squares of Paris, Cioran lived on the threshold of poverty in the modest attic where he had found a home. Cioran’s intellectual activity continued with the publication of other important books in which the thinker continued to reiterate the total lack of meaning in life, going so far as to define failure as the inescapable horizon of human experience. Particularly interesting is History and Utopia (1960), which examines man’s two fundamental attitudes towards history: the time of action, which is a mad enthusiasm blinded by contingency, and utopia, which is an illusion provided by history itself as a way out of it. With extraordinary foresight, Cioran outlines in History and Utopia the demonic horizon of globalization, and writes: «the dispersed human flock will be reunited under the guard of a ruthless shepherd, a sort of planetary monster before which the nations will prostrate themselves, in a state of dismay bordering on ecstasy».
In the final chapter, Rodda notes how Cioran’s thought has become an essential point of reference for navigating an era of great uncertainty that calls for new cultural and ideological syntheses. Cioran, a master of aporia, yet never lost his passion for research and discussion, develops an “incendiary” thought capable of challenging every dogma. Rodda cites at the end of the book a quote from the great Romanian thinker that effectively describes the sense of uprootedness afflicting the contemporary world: “I am a metaphysical stateless person, a bit like those Stoics at the end of the Roman Empire who felt they were ‘citizens of the world,’ which is to say they were citizens of no place».
Fabio Rodda,Cioran, l’antiprofeta. Fisionomia di un fallimento, Mimesis, Milano 2006, pp.214
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