ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Nietzsche's complex relations to, and reactions against, those often entwined Romantic and Decadent tendencies that he identifies in philosophers, writers, and artists. That Nietzsche's relationship to Romanticism and Decadence is both philosophical and poetical in nature indicates the novelty of the approach he adopts to the broader questions of art and aesthetics. Nietzsche's ambivalence towards Socrates equally holds true for the stance he adopts in relation to both Decadence and Romanticism. Nietzsche observes in The Gay Science that the Romantic spirit, like Decadence, is a sickness which the highest type must overcome by conquering 'not only his time but also his prior aversion and contradiction against this time, his suffering from this time, his un-timeliness, and his romanticism'. As Henry Staten neatly proposes, 'Romanticism would not be something external to Nietzsche's project but something that works from within, as what has to be opposed so strenuously because it is so intimate, so proper to Nietzsche's own economy.
