Ep. 377: Emil Cioran's Pessimism (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On A Short History of Decay (1949), a pessimist/existentialist somewhat text from the most famous Romanian philosopher.
Cioran's short essays touch on art, humor, God, salvation, time, nostalgia, mourning, death, disease, suicide, revolt, freedom, Buddhism, Daoism, and the role of the philosopher.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys where at one point |
| 0:11.6 | set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. |
| 0:14.6 | Our question for episode 376 is something like, what is the human condition? |
| 0:20.3 | And we read parts of the first essay from Emil Choran's 1949 book, |
| 0:25.2 | A Short History of Decay. |
| 0:27.2 | For more information about the text of the podcast, please see partially examined like.com. |
| 0:31.5 | This is Mark Lintonmeyer, habituated to a discipline of horror in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:36.8 | This is Seth Pasquin, having killed the prophet in me and having no place among men in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:42.3 | This is Wes All One, a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| 0:48.3 | This is Dylan Casey decomposing in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:52.3 | So I don't remember who suggested this to us. |
| 0:56.6 | It was definitely multiple people. |
| 0:58.3 | This is my favorite self-help book. |
| 1:00.9 | There's definitely multiple people over the years. |
| 1:03.3 | I think that's kind of how I take a lot of the, I don't want to discourage people from sending us suggestions, but a lot of the way that I do it. |
| 1:10.3 | If I just haven't |
| 1:10.9 | heard of the person, is I wait until somebody else mentions the person. So I don't know sort of how |
| 1:16.9 | respected in the canon or whatever, whether he's more of a popular figure. He's definitely a good |
| 1:22.6 | literary figure, but like do the same people that like Baudriard or whatever, like, |
| 1:28.0 | Charon, I'm not really sure. |
| 1:30.5 | You know, he's not overtly Marxist or anything. |
| 1:32.6 | He's, he's a pessimist. |
... |
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