There are pure, limpid forms of life undisclosed to those living under the sign of despair. Those whose life flows without obstacles reach a stage of delightful contentments in which the world appears charming and full of light. Enthusiasm casts a bewitching light over the world; it is a specific form of love, a way of forgetting oneself. Love has so many faces, so many aspects, and so many deviations that it is hard to find a typical form for it. Any science of love will look first for love's original manifestation. As one speaks of love between the sexes, love of God, for nature or for art, one can also speak of enthusiasm as a form of love. Which form is the essential one from which all others derive? Theologians maintain that it is the love of God and that all other manifestations are but pale reflections of this fundamental love. Pantheists with esthetic tendencies believe that it is the love of nature, and pure esthetes, the love of art. Similarly, for biologists it is pure sexuality without affection and for metaphysicians it is the feeling of universal identity. Yet not one of them will be able to prove that the form he defends is the most typical, because in the course of history that form has varied so much that nobody today could define it with any certainty.
As for me, I believe that the quintessential form of love is that between a man and a woman, not only sexuality but a rich network of affective states. Has anyone ever committed suicide in the name of God, nature or art? Love grows in intensity when it fastens on the concrete; one loves a woman for what makes her different, unique in the world: nothing can replace her at the height of passion. All other forms of love, though tending toward autonomy, participate in this essential form. Thus one generally does not place enthusiasm in the realm of love, when in fact its roots penetrate deep into the very substance of love, its emancipating tendencies notwithstanding. There is in the enthusiastic man a universal receptivity, an ability to gather everything with a surplus of energy which spends itself just for the pleasure of acting. The enthusiast heeds no criteria, makes no calculations; he is all abandon, restlessness and devotion. The joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity. We all have moments of enthusiasm, but they are too rare to stamp us permanently. I am referring to people in whom enthusiasm is predominant and constitutes the essential mark of their personality. They do not know defeat, because it is not the goal but the initiative and pleasure of acting that attracts them; they throw themselves into action not because they have meditated upon its consequences but simply because they cannot help it. Although not altogether impervious to success, the enthusiast is neither stimulated by it nor defeated by its absence. He is the last one to fail in this world. Life is more mediocre and fragmentary than we think: isn't this the reason for our decline, the loss of our vivacity, the hardening of our inner rhythms, the gradual slowing down of our vital flow? This process of waste destroys our receptivity and our willingness to embrace life generously and enthusiastically. The enthusiast alone preserves his energy until old age; all others, if not already born dead like most people, die before their time. How rare the true enthusiast! Can we imagine a world in which everybody will love everything, a world of enthusiasts? Such an image is even more alluring than the image of paradise, because its excesses of generosity surpass any of those born in Eden. The enthusiast's ability to be constantly reborn raises him above life's demoniacal temptations, the fear of nothingness, and the torments of agony. His life has no tragic dimension, because enthusiasm is the only form of life totally opaque to death. Even grace — so similar to enthusiasm — has less of this irrational ignorance of death. Grace is full of melancholy charm; not so enthusiasm. My tremendous admiration for enthusiasts stems from my inability to comprehend how there can be such men in a world where death, nothingness, sadness, and despair keep sinister company. It makes one wonder, to see people who are never desperate. How can the enthusiast be so indifferent to success? How can he act by virtue of excess only? What kind of strange and paradoxical form does love take in enthusiasm? The more intense love is, the more individualized. Men who love truly and passionately cannot love several women at once: the more intense the love, the more important its object. Let us imagine a passionate love without an object, a man without the woman on whom to concentrate his love: what would it be but the plenitude of love? Are there men with a great potential for love but who have never loved in this primordial, original way? Enthusiasm is love with an unspecified object. Instead of orienting itself toward others, enthusiastic love expends itself lavishly in generous actions, with a sort of universal receptivity.
Enthusiasm is a superior child of Eros. Of all the forms of love, enthusiasm is the most free of sexuality, much more so than mystic love, which cannot shed its sexual symbolism. Thus enthusiasm is spared the anxiety which makes sexuality play an important part in the human tragedy. The enthusiast is preeminently an unproblematic person. He understands many things without ever knowing the agonizing doubts and the chaotic sensitivity of the problematic man. The latter cannot solve anything, because nothing satisfies him. You will find in him neither the enthusiast's gift of abandon, his naive irrationality, nor the charming paradox of love in its purest state. The biblical myth of knowledge as sin is the most profound myth ever invented. The enthusiast's euphoria is due to the fact the he is unaware of the tragedy of knowledge. Why not say it? True knowledge is the most tenebrous darkness. I would gladly exchange all the harrowing problems of this world for sweet, un–self–conscious naiveté. The spirit does not elevate; it tears you apart. In enthusiasm, as in grace and magic, the spirit does not oppose life. The secret of happiness lies in this original nondivision of an impenetrable unity. If you are an enthusiast, you do not know that poison, duality. Life usually preserves its fecundity and productiveness through the tensions and oppositions of an agnostic struggle. Enthusiasm overcomes it, and acceded to a life without tragedy and a love without sexuality.
[Originally published in 1934 in Cioran's essay collection "On The Heights of Despair"]
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