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despicable republican practice ... perfectly illustrated how decadence
ensued from the replacement of a mystique by a politique."
In Chekhov's
The Seagull,
Madame Arkadina calls her son
"decadent" after watching the abortive play he has written in part as an
attack on her own brand of conventional, "decadent" theater. Besides
condemning as decadent all erotic subjects in literature, the aged
Tolstoy asserted that the "shutting out of the masses from the pleasures
of art" was a central characteristic of a decadent culture. Even Oscar
Wilde, the unrivaled victim of the word's vagueness and malleability,
contributed to the confusion. In
The Decay of Lying
his spokesman
Vivian says that " the third stage is when life gets the upper hand and
drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true decadence and it is
from this that we are now suffering." Here the primacy of art is being
defended against the "decadence" of all that refuses to acknowledge it.
Although he never wrote a sustained work on the subject,
Nietzsche's writings are full of comments on and references to deca–
dence, and these hundreds of occasions make up a lexicon of the word's
uses as a term of disapprobation, as well as of everything about it that is
generally ambiguous and disconcerting. At the center of his obsession
with the decadent is his conviction that civilization went wrong at a
very early date. In
The Will to Power,
the book of his which uses the
word most vehemently and in the most diverse and startling contexts,
he writes that " the great Greek philosophers represent the decadence of
every Greek excellence and make it contagious."
His argument, which will recommend itself only to those who
share his fundamental interpretations of human experience in history,
was that philosophy had the effect of making virtue "abstract," which
in turn was "the greatest temptation to make oneself abstract: i.e.,
to detach oneself." Writing about Socrates, he says that "one had only
one choice: either to perish or to be absurdly rational." He means that
the disintegration of the age, caused by what he interprets as the
excessive demands of the instincts, could only be cured by a Socratic
type of rational control. But this control was decadent because it set
itself up against the instinctual life; it represented a decline, a "falling
away."
Whether or not one accepts this theory of the relationship between
rationality and the instinctive life, it is undeniable that Nietzsche's
ascription of decadence to the birth of philosophic thinking runs
counter to any use we could have imagined for the word. But Nietzsche
is prodigal with such shifts or reversals of the word's previously
