For Emil Cioran (1911-1995), music was not simply an object of aesthetic study, but rather the singular justification emerging from the disaster of existence. While thought fails to hold off suffering with abstract concepts, the art of sounds stands as an escape route and a revelation. Through writing that was meticulous, fragmentary, and awash with lyricism, the Romanian thinker found in the architecture of sound the decisive bridge between the wound of birth and the longing for an unattainable absolute. For Cioran, music was not just a pastime; it was, instead, the highest justification of existence and the only way out of the pain of living. While verbal and reflective discourse crumble before the world’s senselessness, music offered him an all-encompassing, universal comfort.
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Starting in the seventeenth century, Western Modernity opened a deep rift in modes of understanding the relationship between sound and logos. With the advent of Cartesian rationalism, music was initially relegated to a subaltern position among the passions, needing to be governed by the clarity of the intellect. During this time, the sonic arts were closely linked to affect theory; sound was a vehicle with which to move the soul, but always under the watchful eye of a mathematical and rhetorical structure. Enlightenment philosophy saw in music a form of ornamentation or, in the best of cases, a rudimentary language of the emotions that paled in comparison to the precision of philosophical and scientific discourse. Nevertheless, this semantic subordination underwent a radical shift with the coming of German idealism and romanticism. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer entirely subverted the Cartesian order, postulating that music does not copy ideas, but is rather the immediate objectification of the Will itself. Music ceased to be the lowest rung of knowledge to become the supreme metaphysics. Cioran inherited this Copernican turn, but stripped it of any systematic optimism. The modern and post-romantic context situates music as the critical reverse of enlightened reason: where the concept shuts down and shows its seams in the face of pain, music appears as an incorporeal testimony, a language that does not need to mean anything in order to be real.
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In Cioran’s thought, words have a peculiar limitation: they lie and they categorize. But music is lacking in concepts and, therefore, it communicates the naked truth of being. This leads to another implication: following the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music is the pinnacle of art for the Romanian thinker; he places it above literature, painting, and philosophy. But it is not just a question of hierarchy. Music is, in fact, the anesthetic of the ego. The art of sounds dissolves the conscious self, allowing us to experience a temporary but pleasurable death in the midst of life. Thus, more than a musical aesthetic, Cioran concludes that supreme beauty is linked to tears. True art must evoke the original loss of being. Perhaps this is why music is a sort of “tomorrowless redemption”: a safeguard that redeems human suffering only as long as the melody lasts. When the music stops, the absurdity of reality instantly returns. In this unique experience, it seems that music teaches us to let go of the world. It shows us that nothingness can be beautiful and that emptiness need not be terrifying—the void can be, instead, a perfect melody.
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In Anathemas and Admirations (1987), Cioran deems music the last bastion of purity, elevating it above consciousness and linking it to the divine structure of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. In a fierce critique of the “spectacularization” of music, Cioran casts his darts at the work of Richard Wagner: the “total work of art” defended by the man behind Lohengrin is the noisy materialization of history, the manipulation of the passions and a false theological redemption through myth. For Cioran, music functions as a means to learn to die, not in a stoic sense, but in one that is strictly mystic and diluent. While stoicism demands control, reason, and acceptance of one’s fate, Cioran’s music operates out of contempt for reason and absolute submission to ecstasy.
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In Cioran, music might open the door to a mysticism of nothingness. The moralist, the stoic, the right-thinking human being dominates or seeks to control his passions through reason (logos). For the Romanian thinker, on the other hand, music is the path to the annihilation of reason and of the self. Music does not exist in order to help us withstand pain; music wants to dissolve within it. Perhaps for this reason, music delays suicide in the face of said desire. Music does not grant a stoic strength through which to endure the world’s absurdity; it is, rather, a motive given to human beings to not commit suicide immediately. It is a painkiller, not a conduct manual. But also, in Cioran, music can be understood as a “general rehearsal” for death. This is why he defines it as a “voluptuous death.” Listening to Bach or Brahms allows us to experience a weightless detachment from the body, simulating a state of nonexistence, but pleasurably. Perhaps, as in so many other areas of his work, Cioran displays his mastery of paradox here: his suggestive and contradictory ideas on music become a sort of “unlearning of being,” a curious dictum for a “good death,” which would consist—in the act of listening to music—of letting go of identity, the ego, and the curse of having been born. Music erases chronological time, facilitating this transition into emptiness. The ideal universe should be extinguished to the tune of a melody. Music is the only aesthetic framework that makes our final destruction tolerable.
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In the twentieth century, aesthetic reflection on music bifurcated down marked theoretical and historical paths, embodied by contemporaries of Cioran’s like Theodor W. Adorno and Vladimir Jankélévitch. The distance that separates the Romanian thinker from these authors is both epistemological and temperamental, revealing a radical difference in the ways they conceived of the sonic act. Adorno addresses the phenomenon of music from a rigorous sociological dialectic. For the Frankfurt theorist, music—especially that of the Second Viennese School—is a reflection of material tensions, class contradictions, and the subject’s alienation under late capitalism. Adorno seeks a conceptual decoding of the score as a historico-critical document. Cioran, on the other hand, abhors any historical or sociological reductionism. In music he seeks not the tracks of social alienation but the marks of the cosmic exile of the human being. For Cioran, music is not a product of history, but rather an escape route from submission to historical time. Jankélévitch, for his part, approaches music through a philosophy of mystery and the ineffable. In works like Music and the Ineffable (1961), the French philosopher claims that music says nothing because it expresses that which cannot be said any other way, defining it as an art of the “almost nothing” (presque-rien). While Cioran shares the notion that sound escapes the tyranny of the concept, he keeps his distance from the subtle lightness and melancholic enchantment of Jankélévitch. Where the French philosopher identifies a ludic, evanescent mystery, Cioran finds a heartrending experience, a theological wound and an upright absolute that pauses breathing and adjoins the darkest of mysticisms.
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In Cioran’s spiritual geography, we must abandon the idea of musical composition as entertainment. Music is an embodied ontology and its primordial function is to serve as metaphysical anesthetic and as simulacrum of redemption. Far from putting forward a taxonomic definition, the author distributes throughout his work a narrative characterization articulated through four fundamental properties. Firstly, music is manifested as a dissolution of individuation, a torrent that spills over the borders of the self and dilutes the weight of the flesh into an incorporeal fluidity. Secondly, music operates as a subversion of chronological time, replacing the tyrannical succession of minutes on the clock with a pure and static time, a sort of portable eternity accessible to mortals. Thirdly, music has a lachrymal and cathartic essence; it appeals not to our intelligence, but rather to a nocturnal lucidity born of tears and purified despair. Finally, music is defined by its capacity for divine impersonation, presenting itself as the last vestige of divinity in a deserted universe, as aesthetic evidence of transcendence where theology has failed. In his masterpiece, On the Heights of Despair (1934), Cioran beautifully synthesizes these qualities as he writes about the power of listening and the dissolution of existential limits: “Music is the sobbing of space, a cry that rings out from the depths of matter until it is lost in the infinite. To listen to music is to allow the self to sweetly bleed empty, it is a bodiless death throe in which the soul is freed from the weight of the earth.”
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In Cioran’s life, insomnia held a legendary status as the driving force behind his thought. For the Romanian thinker, insomnia was not just a medical dysfunction, but a metaphysical catastrophe that deprived him of the innocence of unconsciousness. In the context of this nightly torment, his correspondence and his fascination with Buddhism converged through music. In his letters, Cioran drops the mask of the cynical essayist to reveal how music operated directly upon his body, devastated by sleepless nights. He describes his chronic insomnia as a “demential lucidity” that turns his mind into a factory of suicidal thoughts. In his letters, he admits that music is the only stimulus able to “ease” the tension of his muscles and his nerves contorted by nighttime panic. Paradoxically, in these same intimate texts, he confesses that music heals him but, at the same time, weakens him in a beautiful way. He writes that, after listening to certain pieces, he feels an absolute “purpose in not going on living.” Sound loosened the springs of life; it did not heal him so he could go back to his routine the next day, but rather left him suspended in a void where biological pain ceased. In his correspondence with his brother and his close friends, Cioran describes the musical experience as almost a chemical substance: an injection of infinity that permeated his flesh. Sound achieved what no medicine could: it paused time and replaced the flow of blood with the flow of the chords.
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In Cioran’s personal pantheon, two names stand out above the rest, turning into categories of his own thought: Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He conceived of these composers not as mere aesthetic preferences, but as two different ways of relating to the Absolute. On the one hand, Cioran’s veneration of Johann Sebastian Bach takes on some signs of an aesthetic theodicy. For a thinker who declared that God was dead and railed tirelessly against the hope offered by faith, Bach’s polyphonic architecture is the only crack through which the hypothesis of divinity becomes tolerable. The perfection of his counterpoint and the rigorous geometry of his cantatas are, for Cioran, not just technical exercises, but proof that heavenly order is possible, even if the Earth is damned. In a well-known aphorism from All Gall is Divided (1952), he writes cuttingly: “If anyone owes everything to Bach, it is God.” The cantor of Leipzig’s music justifies all of creation; it is the very structure of being reconciled with spirit. On the other hand, for Cioran, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart embodies the dimension of uncorrupted grace and angelic melancholy. If Bach is the cathedral of sound, Mozart is the light that comes in through the windows without breaking them. Mozart’s music represents the longing for a prelapsarian paradise, a state of purity in which human suffering is transfigured into a weightless, sovereign beauty. Faced with the pain of the world, Mozart offers consolation that does not deceive, sadness that smiles into the abyss. While Bach elevates the thinker towards a severe transcendence, Mozart momentarily reconciles him with the fragility of his condition.
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The core of the relationship between Cioran and music becomes clear as he confronts the outer limits of language: silence and emptiness. Philosophy is built on the word, the concept, and argumentative logic. Nonetheless, for Cioran, logos is a fraud, a veil that disguises our inability to come to terms with nothingness. When philosophical thought reaches the extremes of its lucidity, it comes up against the existential void, an emptiness that the written or spoken word only betrays in attempting to name it. Here, music is revealed as an ontological antecedent to discursive thought. Music does not need contextual intermediaries to manifest its being; it is anterior to the split between subject and object. Lacking a semantic referent in the material world, the fabric of sound springs directly from the primordial abyss. It is the only force capable of colonizing the void without destroying it, lending silence an intelligible architecture without shattering its mystery. Where philosophy fails, left dumbstruck by nothingness, music assimilates this void, feeds on it through its pauses and rhythms, and transforms it into a tolerable mystic experience. For Cioran, music is superior to philosophy because it does not seek to explain away pain or senselessness; instead, it dwells within them and elevates them to the dignity of pure beauty.
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The last stop on this abrupt, spasmodic journey between Cioran and music is, perhaps inevitably, silence. For Cioran, the silence that comes when the music stops is not simply the absence of sound; it is the culmination of experience and the definitive encounter with the truth of being. If music is the vehicle that transports us, the following silence is the final destination: the void, purified of all hope and illusion. The experience of this post-musical silence can perhaps be articulated in the following terms. Firstly, while the music is playing, the listener experiences an ecstasy that Cioran calls an illusion of the absolute. But, when the last note ends, this illusion fades away, revealing the harsh reality of the world. Cioran observes, for example, that the silence that follows a Bach piece is not the same silence that existed before it began. It is a silence pregnant with meaning, a space in which the self has been ground to pieces and stripped of its defenses. It is the closest a Westerner can come to experiencing the emptiness (Śūnyatā) prescribed by Buddhism without turning to formal meditation. Secondly, silence becomes an end goal: in his notebooks, Cioran puts forth the radical argument that music is, ultimately, a distraction—the noblest of them all, but a distraction nonetheless. This brings a unique implication: the danger of comfort. In one of his most gratifying paradoxes, Cioran suggests that music deceives us, making us believe pain has an aesthetic justification or the universe possesses a secret harmony. The following silence destroys this deceit. It returns us to primordial nothingness, forcing us to face the senselessness of the universe head-on, but now with a mind calmed by the beauty we have just witnessed. Finally, music reveals to us an aesthetic of the fragmentary and the silence of writing. This is molded by the way Cioran writes. His rejection of the grand philosophical treatise and his choice of the aphorism (the brief fragment) imitate the dynamics of music. An aphorism by Cioran is like a note played on the harpsichord: it bursts into nothingness, wounds us with its lucidity, and is immediately extinguished, with the reader left adrift in a reflective void. Writing is one way to skirt around this wound.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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