Adam Coman
Cioran and music: from temptation to pleasure
It is well known that Cioran was a great admirer of music: his writings are full of exaltations of music and the experience of listening to music.[1] Even in a bitter and sarcastic book such as All Gall Is Divided, Cioran dedicates an entire section to praising music,[2] including aphorisms that suggest it is superior to philosophy: “What’s the use of frequenting Plato, when a saxophone can just as well offer a glimpse of another world?”[3], or elsewhere, in a book dedicated to Saints and Tears, “Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.”[4]
Cioran is frequently named alongside Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as “musical philosophers”, those who, perhaps similarly to King Saul, find music to be the only cure for internal demons and the pains of the world.[5] Save the works of Dostoevsky, it seems that for Cioran music is the only form of earthly delight that can be enjoyed without shame, regret or self-ridicule. It is one of the few activities, if not the only one which is both a source of comfort and an opportunity to transcend the world’s despair. More than that, those who don’t enjoy music, Cioran designates as enemies, people he cannot stand: “A person who tells me that music means nothing to him is straight-away liquidated for me. It is something very serious for me, for music stirs that most intimate region in human beings. I cannot have anything in common with someone who does not feel that; it is the heaviest of failings in my eyes, almost a curse.”[6]
Just as important, however, is Cioran’s confession that: “Bach is a god to me. Someone who does not understand Bach is lost; it is actually unimaginable, though it does happen”.[7]
The aim of this paper is to understand Cioran’s relation to music, specifically through Bach, and thereby illuminate its meaning to his philosophy. As we will see, Bach is not just another composer for Cioran, albeit superior to all others, but oftentimes shorthand for transcendence, order, surrender, and metaphysical possibility.
Music and the negation of language
Cioran’s special connection to music is rooted in his recurring disappointment with and aversion to the exact, the comprehensible, the unequivocal. This antagonism towards the systematic and the constructive is expressed not only in the content of his writing, but perhaps more so in his style of writing, and his main forms of expression, namely, the aphorism and short essay. These brief exclamations and investigations produce a body of work that is full of inconsistencies, self-contradictions, and paradoxes.[8] It is no secret that Cioran’s writing isn’t aimed towards creating a philosophical system; it is not about preaching unequivocally for or against Christianity, for example, but about expressing moods and feelings, such as despair, hatred, disgust, and anger. As such, in Cioran’s literature, ideas are often secondary to the tone, the rhythm, and the style of writing. One might say that his writing aspires to effects traditionally associated with music.
For Cioran, the main problem with language, a semiotic system, is that it is based on meaning and coherence, attributes which he typically resents and ridicules. As a writer he is only able to overcome the entrapment of meaning and coherence by writing more and more, by producing more books, by stripping language of meaning by overusing it, by seeking to divert attention from the exact meaning of words, the exact interpretation of ideas towards the chaotic, paradoxical, and nihilistic atmosphere of his entire oeuvre.[9]
Consequently, writing becomes for Cioran both his instrument of expression and his prison; it is almost always a painful experience, borne out of pain, in pain, to describe pain.[10] Moreover, recalling his thought that the saxophone might be superior to Plato, one is left with the impression that Cioran would rather have been a musician than a writer, not because music communicates ideas more effectively, but because it affords a stronger and more sensual experience, one that can be intuitively embraced without passing through the deceptive nature of language. Or, in Cioran’s words, “one ought not to write, because one desires, without admitting it, to bring about through words what only music can accomplish”.[11]
Consequently, for Cioran the adoration of music is connected to the negation of language: music is a superior form of expression to words; it is both a sensual and a metaphysical alternative to the verbal arts. It also provides spiritual comfort in a life of pain. Even words that describe pain are born in pain, whereas music is sublime, and transcends pain, exactitude, and the senselessness of meaning.
In order to further understand the nature of Cioran’s special relationship towards music, we must examine two interrelated issues: Cioran’s ambivalence towards Christianity, as well as his almost religious reverence for Johann Sebastian Bach.
Christian contradictions
We have mentioned Cioran’s paradoxical and oftentimes self-contradictory writing as a means of arguing that Cioran did not intend to build a firm philosophical system, but quite the opposite, to create a certain feeling, or atmosphere, akin to music. We will now look at one of the main discrepancies in his writing, namely, his relation to Christianity.
On the one hand, Cioran’s writings are full of biting remarks on Christianity. Mainly, in the vein of Nietzsche, he is horrified by Christianity’s destruction of the culture and values of the ancient world. He compares the decline of the pagan world to the solitude of the intellectual at all times:
How dear to me that Alexandrian philosopher named Olimpius, who hearing a voice singing the Hallelujah in the Serapion, went into exile forever! This was toward the end of the fourth century; already the lugubrious stupidity of the Cross was casting its shadows across the Mind. Around the same period, Palladas the grammarian could write: ‘We Greeks are no more than ashes today. Our hopes are buried like those of the dead.’ And this is true for all intellects of that time.[12]
Unlike Nietzsche, however, Cioran also idealizes certain aspects of Christianity, most often its radical saints, those that verge on madness, hysteria, and idiocy. Cioran immersed himself in the study of hagiographies and saints for his early work Tears and Saints.[13] In fact, Cioran seemed to admire eccentric saints such as St. Teresa of Ávila and Edith Stein, as well as Dostoevsky’s “foolish saints” Aliosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin, not so much for their religious devotion, as much as for their eccentricity, their radicalism, and for losing themselves in ecstatic dedication.
Cioran admires such unorthodox Christians because he is not interested in conventional faith, but rather in the mystical experience; he isn’t looking for divine world order, cosmology, or sense, but for a transcendental experience. And as he makes clear in Tears and Saints, the only other medium besides mystical faith which affords such transcendence is music.[14]
Bach
If music offers Cioran the closest experience of metaphysical transcendence, the strongest purveyor of this ecstatic, this almost narcotic experience, is Johann Sebastian Bach. Most readers of Cioran are acquainted with his almost religious devotion to this composer, which includes statements such as, “[w]ithout Bach, Theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.”[15]
In order to illuminate the importance of Bach, and following that the importance of music in general for Cioran, we must first look into some aspects of Bach’s composition, namely his religious background.
Bach, we should remember, wasn’t writing music for lay listeners, but for praying believers.[16] As a devout Protestant, his whole attitude towards music was influenced by Martin Luther’s theology. Luther himself extended the utmost importance to music within religious experience. According to John Eliot Gardiner:
The specific task of music, as defined by Luther, is to give expression and added eloquence to biblical texts: Die Noten machen den Text lebendig (‘The notes make the words live’). As two of God’s most powerful gifts to humanity, words and music must be forged into one invisible and indivisible force, the text appealing primarily to the intellect (but also to the passions), while music is addressed primarily to the passions (but also to the intellect). Luther maintained that without music, man is little more than a stone; but, with music, he can drive the Devil away: ‘It has often revived me and relieved me from heavy burdens,’ he admitted. This belief was to give fundamental justification to Bach’s vocation (Amt) and craft as a musician, lending credence to his professional status and comfort to his artistic goals, while his emphasis on a ‘vocal’ delivery of Scripture would later help to provide his raison d’être as a composer of church music.[17]
In other words, to Bach music is inseparable from faith and from religious experience. This is important not just for the composer, who must find the most harmonious way in which music accompanies the biblical text, but also for the listener, who must make use of this harmony in order to attain spiritual and religious awakening.
Moreover, Bach’s compositions are characterized by what contemporaries called pathopoeia, “‘by which the Orator moveth the minds of his hearers to some vehemency of affection, as of indignation, feare, envy, hatred, hope, gladnesse, mirth, laughter, sadnesse or sorrow’ in such a way ‘that no one remains untouched by the created affection’.”[18]
Considering these two fundamental aspects of Bach’s composition – the religious vocation as defined by Luther, and pathopoeia, the emotive stimulus – we can better understand Cioran’s adoration for his music. Namely, Cioran aligns himself with Bach’s intention to intensely experience a wide array of emotional states and feelings, to transcend worldly pain and find harmony. Importantly, this experience is more intuitive than rational; it is based on the ability to surrender and yield to harmony, rather than finding a cure for suffering through reason.
Cioran suspends his own disbelief and criticism of Christianity in order to give in to the music’s sweeping emotional force. With Bach, Cioran is no longer a lay listener; Bach’s music cannot be reduced to an aesthetic or intellectual experience; it cannot be analyzed with his ordinary tools of cynicism, self-contradiction, wittiness, and gall. Cioran takes in this music like the innocent believer he wishes himself to be, like a peasant accepting the blood and flesh of Christ; Bach and music are Cioran’s Eucharist. He embraces Bach’s music for its metaphysical, emotional, and ecstatic intentions (pathopoeia).
Nurturing the paradox
Nonetheless, Bach’s music also gives rise to a conscious, philosophical position. Given Cioran’s fondness for paradoxes and inconsistencies, his idolization of Bach affords yet another self-contradiction: in order to be a true heretic, Cioran must also be a believer. A true mystic, he seeks the sublime through the paradox: music is the only pleasurable diversion affordable, but it can only be enjoyed by yielding to temptation. It takes power, dedication, and intention in order to submit. As he writes elsewhere: “its submission is its triumph”.[19]
The paradox of idolizing a religious composer is further emphasized by Cioran’s treatment of Beethoven. In Cioran’s oeuvre, the two composers are often juxtaposed, representing opposite musical conceptions: while Bach writes liturgical music glorifying the greatness of God, Beethoven’s compositions are dedicated to the human experience. Cioran criticizes Beethoven for humanizing music, for introducing human feelings into it: Beethoven is accused of having “stripped divinity down to a human drama.”[20] Bach, on the other hand, “knew nothing of this descent toward the human”[21].
Bach and Beethoven can therefore be seen as representing an important conflict in Cioran’s work: it is the conflict between the divine and the human, between submission and revolt, between the desire for transcendence and accepting mortality. Within this conflict Cioran, the enfant terrible of French thought, expresses his disdain towards modernism, humanism, and history, by firmly siding with the religious composer – not because he shares Bach’s belief in the same Christian God, but because Bach’s music is everything that the 20th century isn’t. Where Beethoven represents the beginning of the modern era, Bach stands for archaic baroque; if Beethoven is the composer of the romantic, rebelling individual, Bach strives to surpass man and reach the sublime; if Beethoven depicts the human experience, Bach paints the harmonious geometry of the heavens.
One might ask why Cioran does not discuss other religious composers, particularly figures such as Olivier Messiaen or Francis Poulenc, whose works are likewise deeply rooted in Christian faith. Since Cioran himself is silent on the matter, any answer must remain speculative. One possible explanation lies in his persistent suspicion of modernity. As he writes: “The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest. Proud enough to isolate himself in the norm, he asserts himself by retreat.”[22] Moreover, it is not inconsequential that Bach’s work was considered obsolete already in his own lifetime, as the heaviness of the baroque was losing popularity in favor of the lighthearted Galant music. In both cases, Cioran seeks and idealizes the outdated as an expression of rebellion. In addition, Bach’s unusual achievements, both in technical composition, for example, creating extraordinary beauty within the strict formal constraints of the fugue, dubbed “music of magnificent defiance” by Gardiner,[23] as well as in the extraordinary scope of his compositions, indeed turn Bach into a “divine” composer, one whoe truly befits Cioran’s idealization.
Thus, Cioran is consistent in the nurturing of a philosophical contradiction from his early Romanian writings to his later French texts: a heretic, a nihilist, a cynic, he nonetheless reveres the works of the most religious and believing composer, the only creator whose work offers transcendence and comfort, all the while rejecting the composer of the modern, human experience, Beethoven.
Conclusion
Cioran’s relation to music is not that of a musician, but first and foremost of a believer willfully surrendering to the sublime. He capitulates to its power and glory, and this becomes the only field in which he allows himself a religious experience without later denying or ridiculing it.
Cioran venerates music more than any other form of art, admitting its superiority to philosophy due to its intuitive force, its sweeping effect that goes beyond the limited and flawed power of words. Indeed, music’s nonverbal nature makes it more potent and more effective than Platonic discourse and the futile attempt to explain the world and man in words. Where writing remains Cioran’s only instrument, he recognizes its limitations and admits the triumph of music.
Although he frequently depicts Christianity as the enemy of the great spirit and culture of the ancient age, he idolizes the most Christian composer of all. This paradox is not a mere flaw in Cioran’s philosophical system, but rather a statement: only music, and more specifically, only music dedicated to the divine, can provide a powerful experience akin to that of the radical Christian saints. Like King Saul, who can only escape his agonizing demons through the music of David, his competitor and threat, so must Cioran submit to Christian music in order to surpass the pains of this world.
Selected literature:
Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated by Bernard Schütze and Caroline Schütze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988.
Cioran, E. M. “Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E.M. Cioran.” Interview by Michel Jakob. Translated by Kate Greenspan. Salmagundi, no. 103 (Summer 1994): 122–145.
Cioran, E. M. A Short History of Decay. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Penguin Books, 2018.
Cioran, E. M. All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999.
Cioran, E. M. Tears and Saints. Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Cioran, E. M. The Temptation to Exist. Translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Garaz, Oleg. Emil Cioran și muzica elementelor primordiale (Hermeneutica). Bucharest: Editura Eikon, 2023.
Gardiner, John Eliot. Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. London: Allen Lane, 2013.
Kast, Christina. “To Learn How to Die – A Philosophical Approach to Music as Medium Between Life and Death.” In Musikk og religion: Tekster om musikk i religion og religion i musikk, edited by Øivind Varkøy, Henrik Holm, and Asbjørn Eriksen, 37–49. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2022.
Rucsanda, Mădălina Dana. “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven’s Music – Philosophy Lived in Cioran’s View.” Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series VIII: Performing Arts 8, no. 2 (2015): 97–104.
Streza, Nicolae Pavel Zian Streza. In “Emil Cioran muzicologul.” Caiete Cioran 2025, coordinator Ancan Sîrghie, 202-225. Techno Media 2025.
[1] Cioran’s relationship to music has been the subject of extensive study. Some recent examples include: Nicolae Pavel Zian Streza, “Emil Cioran muzicologul,” in Caiete Cioran 2025, coordinator Ancan Sîrghie (Techno Media 2025), 202-225; Oleg Garaz, Emil Cioran și muzica elementelor primordiale (Bucharest: Editura Eikon, 2023); Christina Kast, “To Learn How to Die – A Philosophical Approach to Music as Medium Between Life and Death,” in Musikk og religion: Tekster om musikk i religion og religion i musikk, ed. Øivind Varkøy, Henrik Holm, and Asbjørn Eriksen (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2022), 37-49; Mădălina Dana Rucsanda, “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven’s Music – Philosophy Lived in Cioran’s View,” Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series VIII: Performing Arts 8, no. 2 (2015): 97-104.
[2] E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 115-120. Originally published as Syllogismes de l’amertume (1952), literally „Syllogisms of Bitterness”).
[3] Cioran, All Gall is Divided, 116.
[4] E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 80.
[5] For King Saul, see 1 Samuel, 16, 23.
[6] E. M. Cioran, “Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E.M. Cioran,” interview by Michel Jakob, trans. Kate Greenspan, Salmagundi, no. 103 (Summer 1994): 135.
[7] Cioran, “Wakefulness and Obsession,”, 135.
[8] A deeper investigation into one case of this seeming self-contradiction, namely, Cioran’s relation to Christianity, will be presented in the next section.
[9] This action is comparable with the postmodern position on the excess and superfluousness of signs, for example, Baudrillard’s formulation in The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), that the “need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say,” (p. 30). However, it should be emphasized that Cioran’s version of overabundance isn’t about creating postmodern cacophony, but rather about a text that is closer to poetry or music.
[10] The insomnia that produced his first book in Romanian, Per culmea disperarii; later “The work on my first book, Précis de décomposition, was a regular torture, not the first copy, of course, but the attempt to write the book. In the end I reworked it four times and thereby almost lost all pleasure in writing. After this book, I said to myself, all right, it just doesn’t pay to plague myself in this way, and I wrote Syllogisms of Bitterness, my next book, more out of exhaustion. It went on from there, but I must mention that Paulhan always wanted something new from me to bring out in the N.R.F. I agreed to it, mostly halfhearted” Cioran, “Wakefulness and Obsession,” 138.
[11] Cioran, “Wakefulness and Obsession,” 135.
[12] E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 119. Anti-Christian statements are abundant, for example the section on religion in All Gall is Divided, pp. 91-104. Loosely, I ascertain three main themes reasons for attacking Christianity: as a cultural and spiritual crime against the ancient world; as a spiritual promise that fails and disappoints those who attempt to believe; for the sake of shock and spite.
[13] Music is a central theme in Tears and Saints, and Cioran establishes a strong connection between ecstasy and music.
[14] Cioran, Tears and Saints, passim.
[15] Cioran, All Gall is Divided, 116
[16] In this section I am relying on mainly on John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach (London: Allen Lane, 2013).
[17] Gardiner, Music in the Castle of Heaven, 129.
[18] Quoted in Gardiner, Music in the Castle of Heaven, 132.
[19] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 145.
[20] Cioran, Tears and Saints, 81.
[21] Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 159.
[22] Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, 122.
[23] Gardiner, Music in the Castle of Heaven, 137.
INDICAȚII DE CITARE
Adam Coman, ,,Cioran and music: from temptation to pleasure’’ în Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 7-8 / 2026
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