On Jan Patočka's Analysis of Decadence
“History is the conflict of mere life, bare and chained by fear, with life at the peak.” - Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History
What is decadence? This is a timely question, and one that makes sense in the context of Matt Vandervecht’s essay on Alain De Botton’s definition of envy and Steve Pypker’s essay on vitalism in the architectural theory of Christopher Alexander. The value of this present essay hangs on the following thesis:
We want to be able to critique the apparatus by which consumerism encourages us to think of our lives as consisting in the abundance of our possessions, and the reductive materialism that treats place as thin. These critiques hinge on an assumption that authentic life is opposed to 1. a consumerist definition of success and 2. the theoretical reduction of life to inert matter. We need a sense of value, of what matters, if we will be able to oppose systems of thinking that put philosophical emphasis on what is not actually valuable. And we can do this in a kind of via negativa by ruling out what does not count as valuable.
Jan Patočka’s philosophy can help us to lump consumerism and reductive thinking into one category: decadence. His vision of history puts the conflict between decadence and the holy at the centre of human progress and of religious history. Patočka accepts a definition of decadence that resonates well with St. Paul’s understanding of the earthly mind: “Their god is their stomach”. This formalization of the spirit of decadence allows Patočka to identify it in every epoch. Whenever humans live as if their life is ultimately only responsible to itself, to the basic human needs of food, shelter, and clothing, their life is decadent. Notice that decadence applies equally to the subsistence farmer, the hunter-gatherer, and the haute-couture socialite. They all live “mere life, bare and chained by fear”.
What opposes decadence is revealed in intellectual history. History proceeds according to Hegelian “sublation” (German: aufheben) which is the simultaneous annihilation and preservation of a given thesis through history. Changes in historical epochs are marked by the the sublation of the formerly dominant thesis, which is sublated/raised up from the mess of historical change to an elevated position even as it is sublated/overrun by the forces of the stronger antithesis. All of this elevation and annihilation is denoted by forms of the same German word.
There are three stages of sublation that Patocka notes in his essay “Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?”. They are all opposed to decadence, which persists throughout history. 1. The orgiastic/the demonic/the sexual is the original opposite to decadence. The pagan holiday, on which transcendence is revealed, becomes the centre of human culture. In spite of bodily needs, pagan spirituality emphasizes ascetic practices, sacrifice, and the experience of a transcendent world of capricious divinities to whom our work must be devoted, and from this devotion arises the dominant theme of the orgiastic stage: responsibility. Bodily needs are made inferior to responsibility to others, and a transcendental value system is born.
2. This system is not complete, however, and does not fully destroy decadence. The next stage in this history is Platonism, where the gods are made responsible to reason. Socrates is condemned for two things: corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods. Why were his gods so strange? Because they acted according to reason. Platonic cosmology/theology subjects divinity to rationality, such that in this stage the capricious nature of the orgiastic is sublated.
3. Rationality is not the completion of history though: Patočka does not follow Hegel’s logic that “the real is the rational and the rational is the real”. Instead, in Christianity, the rational is sublated under the personal: God is defined as a Person. Although this definition is not filled out in Patočka’s opinion (“what a Person is, that really is not adequately thematized in the Christian perspective.”), it represents a narrowing of the rational in the same way that the rational narrowed the orgiastic. In this era, reason is no longer a universal classification for human souls but is rather enfleshed in a God who “sees into the soul without itself being accessible to view.” In Christ, God’s reason applies to us, but our reason does not apply to God.
Are these stages of sublation successful in banishing decadence? No, because sublation is both annihilation and preservation. How are bare appetitive existence, orgiastic responsibility, and reason preserved? As technocratic decadence. In 20th century society, Patočka identifies technology and the reductive naturalism that makes effective use of it not as the answer to decadence but as decadence in a new form.
Decadence is a key moment in the mood of our time, and may be the fundamental character of European responsible life. Patočka ends up proposing that the answer to his the question of his title must be obscure. His argument is as follows: authentic life would be to deal adequately with our own problems and to understand our own meaning. This is impossible because of an irresolvable dilemma: to embrace the pagan by refusing to suppress it is to be stuck in a decadence of subsistence, but at the same time, to suppress the pagan, the orgiastic and the rational means that they come back again and again as challenges to Christianity.
Therefore, Patočka has shown that decadence should not be predicated of us as a culture because it is the return of a past that was not European/was not ours/that we foreswear by being ‘Christian’ and ‘modern’. However, it should be predicated of us because our foreswearing is sublation/repression, not complete and total elimination, of the past. This is the ultimate, intractable ‘conflict between mere life and life at the peak’.
