ABSTRACT
Decadence is the need to justify the silver river of life through religion, morality and science. For classical humanism and its various appendixes, appreciation of the human is concurrent with an overcoming of conventional religion. Despite the protestations found in so many areas of humanistic therapy, interpretation is inevitable. The last human is Friedrich Nietzsche’s term for the type of human he saw slowly coming into being at the end of the nineteenth century. For Nietzsche the labyrinth – with its elaborate combination of paths and passages where it is hard to find one’s way out, represents in architecture a more accurate reflection of the configurations of soul or psyche. The majority of Nietzsche’s vivid metaphors, from the eternal recurrence to will to power to amor fati, signal a point of rupture where the human gives way to the overhuman. The human must be overcome, Nietzsche famously says, in order to make space for the overhuman.
