DÉCADENCE

Décadence, Nietzsche says, is anarchy of the instincts. It is the propensity to choose what is bad for oneself. As such, décadence is a symptom of decline. For Nietzsche, the figure of Socrates sums up the decadent type (Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Problem of Socrates’). Socratic moralism is the product of its originator’s realisation that he himself represents a crisis of the norm that is the Ancient Greek psyche. The drives and passions that constitute the abiding condition of organic life are, for Nietzsche, channelled in various ways to constitute human identity. A different ordering of the drives yields different cultures and, hence, beings endowed with different arrays of dominant instincts. Socrates appears on the scene of a Greece where the organising of the dominant instincts has begun to disintegrate. This is a social world which is in decline in so far as the dominant customs that make it what it is are on the wane. It is a world already falling under the spell of décadence. Socrates’ reaction to this problem is to turn to reason and dialectic. In other words, he seeks to confine the threatening anarchy of the drives by caging them in rationality. Thus, the claim that ‘Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight’ (Twilight, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, §10). The problem for Nietzsche is that this represents a typically decadent response to the problem, for it turns away from the spontaneous conditions of active existence in favour of a world of contemplative reflection. The meaning of décadence is, however, as with so many things in

Nietzsche, never clear-cut. In Nietzsche’s last complete book, Ecce Homo, a deeply original work (possibly Nietzsche’s most original: an at times outrageously funny text, packed with spiked comments about others, oozing self-parody), he claims that in order to have insight into decay and decadence one must actually be decadent, for one has thereby the wherewithal to resist it (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, §1). Being ill, it turns out, is a precondition of seeing beyond one’s own everyday world. Daybreak was written in an intense state of intellectuality brought on by uninterrupted headache that lasted for three days punctuated ‘by the laborious vomiting of phlegm’ (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, §1). In better health, the insights of this book would not have been possible. Daybreak, as a work of ‘dialectical clarity’, reflects its author in a state of decadence, his physiological trauma. Nietzsche then reminds us that, for him, dialectics is symptomatic of décadence (recalling ‘The Problem of Socrates’). ‘After all

this do I need to say that in questions of décadence I am experienced?’ (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, §1). This, though, is only half the story, for Nietzsche is both decadent and anti-decadent. Being both is a matter of perspective (see perspectivism) and deliberately invokes Nietzsche’s image of himself as a wearer of masks (Beyond Good and Evil, §40), an embodiment of contrary views on life: one person who is himself a wealth of oppositions and stuggles. Such oppositions and internal conflicts are what make human beings rich in potential. Thus, to take a famous example, it is not a matter for Nietzsche of being in favour of either noble morality or slave morality: ‘there is, today, perhaps no more distinguishing feature of the “higher nature”, the intellectual nature, than to be divided in this sense and really and truly a battle ground for these opposites’ (Genealogy, Essay I, §16). ‘I am a décadent, [but] I am also its antithesis’ (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, §2). Décadence may mean choosing what is bad for you but Nietzsche says he always ‘instinctively’ selected the correct means of recovery, which is why his philosophy expresses his ‘will to health, to life’ and enacts its self-overcoming.