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PARTISAN REVIEW
accepted meanings and usages. Philosophy, religion, and morality
(any moral system at all) are decadent or symptoms of decadence, he
argues. "Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the
priests, against the powerful, the strong, the men," because she "brings
the children to the cult of piety, pity, love." "Ugliness signifies the
decadence of a type"; "to let oneself be determined by one's environ–
ment is decadent";
Don Quixote
is "part of the decadence of Spanish
culture"; "the 'good' and 'bad' man are merely two types of decadent";
"one wonders whether a tendency towards generalizations is not
already a symptom of decadence."
Though these formulations are intelligible and persuasive in
varying degrees, the important thing about them is that they all arise
from Nietzsche's violent decisions about what constitutes health or
illness, vigor or debility, in individuals as well as in societies. Thought
weakens the emotions; pity weakens the strong; generalizations take
the edge off the specificities of the world;
Don Quixote
mocks the
boldness of the chivalric imagination; "good" and "bad" participate in
a system of moral evaluation that attenuates fierce, original human
energy.
All this may be true, if such matters can ever be said to be true or
false, but, in any case, Nietzsche's use of "decadent" to describe nearly
every manifestation of what he sees as humanity'S mistaken course
leaves the word emptied of nearly all substance. After treatment like
this it exists without specificity, as an expostulation, a black mark, a
debit sign, its original stock of meaning, however unclear and contra–
dictory that might have been, is long since exhausted. De Gourmont
might have been thinking of Nietzsche when he wrote that "stripped
of its mysticism, its necessity, of all its historical genealogy, the idea of
'decadence' is reduced to a purely negative idea,
to
the simple idea of
absence."
To begin to account for "decadence" passing through so many
uses, so many oscillations, divergences and reversals of meaning, its
being, in different periods, both a curse and an aggressi ve term of
honor-(as it was in late nineteenth-century France)-and its falling so
easily into the simulacra of meaning which intellectual fashion of the
kind we are witnessing today has the power
to
contrive-we have
to
see
it as damaged, or vulnerable, from the start. To speak in this way of an
"injured" word may seem an indulgence in the sort of anthropomor–
phism we have been rejecting.
If
this is so, one may describe it as a form
of intellectual judo, using an opponent's strength or weight against
him, or else as a species of homeotherapy.
