Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, tr. Richard Howard, ch. 6, Abdications, In The Secret of Moralists:
. . . acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my “neighbor” it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer “myself” if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it. Placed at the antipodes of naïvete, of integral and authentic existence, the moralist exhausts himself in a vis-á-vis with himself and with others: comedian, microcosm of second thoughts, he does not endure the artifice which men, in order to live, spontaneously accept and incorporate in their nature. Everything seems convention: he divulges the motives of feelings and actions, he unmasks the simulacra of civilization, because he suffers at having glimpsed and gone beyond them; for these simulacra give life, they are life, whereas his existence, in contemplating them, strays into the search for a “nature” which does not exist and which, if it did, would be as alien to him as the artifices which have been added to it. All psychological complexity reduced to its elements, explained and dissected, involves an operation much deadlier to the operator than to the victim. We liquidate our feelings by pursuing their detours, and our impulses if we ambush their trajectory; and when we detail the movements of others, it is not they who lose their way. . . . Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.
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