RICHARD GILMAN
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tional mode, as "decadence" is, means that the latter ought to be
immediately suspect. But its very unreliability as an accurate descrip–
tive makes it wonderfully available as an epithet. Together "progress"
and "decadence" have moved through our language and our thought
as poles between which lies a void.
If
the ideas of progress and decadence are really two sides of an
illusion, then their persistence is an illustration of the power of
language and thought to keep the non-existent in imaginary existence.
We accept such unreality, the "lying" action of metaphor, for example,
when it operates in its proper spheres: the creation of fictions in the
esthetic realm, one of whose purposes is to relieve us of the burden of
the world's facticity, its givenness; or in scientific explorations, where
it functions in connection with hypotheses. The metaphors of fiction
and poetry, of all the arts for that matter, are in the service of what
might have been and might be, and have the effect of giving us,
through this added dimension of possibility, a space in which to exist
otherwise.
The question then is not whether or not such metaphors are
true but whether they are real, whether in fact they create such a space.
(In science the question is whether or not metaphors do lead to the
discovery of actualities, real processes or conditions.)
This is what Picasso meant when he called art "the lie that leads to
truth." But there is another type of lie or untruth in which existence is
not added to, in order to create a new truth, or provisionally reshaped,
in order to expose its secrets, but rather is wrongly seen. Here history
and the present are subjected to an action of metaphor whose effect is to
destroy their actuality, in the mind at any rate. The metaphors of art
and of science recognize the actualities of the world and go beyond
them; those of illusion replace the actualities with themselves. Both
"progress" and "decadence," the latter even more intractably, are
metaphors that express both a wish that the world move one way or
another and an assumption that it does.
In
J.
B. Bury's
The Idea of Progress
there is the following
confident assertion: " ... every great civilization of the past progressed
to a point at which instead of advancing further it stood still and
declined, to become the prey of younger societies or, if it survived, to
stagnate. Arrest, decadence, stagnation has been the rule." In Oswald
Spengler's immodest tome,
The Decline of the West,
the notion is
repeated, this time with the addition of that familiar image drawn from
human chronology: "Every culture passes through the age-phases of
the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old
age. "
