NIETZSCHE ON "DECADENCE" AND "MODERNITY"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 178]
In one of his last works, The Case of Wagner (1888), Nietzsche points out that "decadence" has been the central theme of his philosophical career:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 179]
Nothing
has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence—I had
reasons. "Good and
evil" is
merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eve for the
symptoms of decline,
one
understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred
names and value
formulas:
impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates
life.51
This short passage actually sums up the essential directions and insights of Nietzsche's thought, and it is hard to imagine a better way of characterizing his contribution in equally condensed and lapidary phrasing.
To understand adequately Nietzsche's passionate critique of decadence—and, indeed, the profound dialectical quality of his philosophy as a whole—we have to keep in mind all the time that he speaks of decadence from personal experience, as a man who knows the value of health for having been sick and who, therefore, cannot fail to recognize the philosophical value of sickness itself, without which health would be unable to achieve self-consciousness. In this sense, as he himself suggests quite unequivocally, his attack against the preeminent decadent, Richard Wagner, contains throughout, even in its moments of greatest bitterness, its own dialectical opposite, namely, gratefulness.
. . .
Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses. Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this
sickness. When in this
essay I
assert the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom
he is nevertheless
indispensable—for
the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the
philosopher is
not free to
do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he
needs to understand
it best... .
I understand perfectly when a musician says today: "I hate Wagner. but I
can no longer endure any
other music.'
But I'd also understand a philosopher who would de dare: 'Wagner sums up
modernity. There
is no way
out. one must first become a Wagnerian. "52
In a famous passage in Ecce Homo (also written in 1888), Nietzsche speaks in a more general sense of his own dual nature. He characterizes himself ("already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and becoming old") as "at the same time a
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 180]
"decadent and a beginning," and goes on to say quite emphatically: "I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par excellence for this—I know both, I am both. "~ In the same chapter ("Why I Am So Wise"), Nietzsche relates his experience of disease, to which he feels indebted for his "dialectician's clarity," dialectic itself being, as he does not fail to stress, "a symptom of decadence. "~ And the section I am quoting from ends with the following tribute to de cadence, where pathos and irony fuse:
A long,
all too long, series of years signifies recovery for me; unfortunately it also
signifies relapse. decay, the
periodicity
of a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that in questions of decadence
I am
experienced?
I have spelled them forward and backward.... Looking from the perspective of the
sick
toward
healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again from the fullness
and self- assurance of
a rich life
down into the secret work of the instinct of decadence—in this I have the
longest training, my
truest
experience. . . . Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives:
the first reason why
a
"revaluation of values" is perhaps possible for me alone.55
Such assertions, useful as they may be in guarding against the all too often simplified accounts of Nietzsche's thinking (which tend to reduce its richness to vulgar black-and-white types of contrasts or, conversely, to a fundamental and insoluble "ambiguity"), suggest only partially the actual complexity of Nietzsche's idea of de cadence. To be fully aware of this complexity, one has to realize first to what an extent the spirit of decadence is deceptive, that is, tries to pursue its destructive work under the most reassuring and healthy appearances. For Nietzsche, the strategy of decadence is typically that of the liar who deceives by imitating truth and by making his lies even more credible than truth itself. Thus, in its hatred of life, decadence masquerades as admiration of a higher life, and, because of its mastery in the art of seduction, it is able to make weakness look like force, exhaustion like fulfillment, cowardice like courage. Decadence is dangerous because it always disguises itself as its opposite.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 181]
Wagner, "the Cagliostro of modernity," is a "typical decadent who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it is a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment."56 According to this logic, something that seems decadent, something that presents the unmistakable "signs of decay" may have little or nothing to do with decadence proper. For example, let us consider two aphorisms from The Gay Science (I, 23, 24). The first one, entitled "The Signs of Corruption," is clearly written with the period of Roman decadence in mind, and it turns out to be an attempt to rehabilitate and revaluate this period, to pierce beyond the cliches (corruption, superstition, exhaustion, moral decay, etc.) by which it is usually described. All these negative features reveal, to the penetrating eve of the philosopher, a latent positive content. Superstition, Nietzsche contends, "is actually a symptom of enlightenment." because "whoever is superstitious is always, compared with the religious human being, much more of a person; and a superstitious society is one in which there are many individuals and must delight in individuality. "~'~ And he goes on to show that the automatic association of corruption with exhaustion is also incorrect:
What is
generally overlooked is that the ancient national energy and national passion
that became gloriously
visible in
war and warlike games have now been transmuted into countless private
passions.... Thus it is
precisely in
times of "exhaustion" that tragedy runs through houses and streets,
that great love and great
hatred are
horn, and that the flame of knowledge flares up into the sky.
Such times of "corruption," we are told in the conclusion of the argument, "are those when the apples fall from the tree; I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future.. . . Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people." As we shall see, for Nietzsche such a natural process is not necessarily linked to de cadence, which is a phenomenon of the order of the will—decadence is a loss of the will to live, which prompts an attitude of revengeful ness against life and which manifests itself through ressentiment. 58
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 182]
Thus understood, decadence—which always involves sell'- deception—is a permanent danger and belongs to every age, not only to those traditionally called decadent. The aphorism entitled "Diverse Dissatisfaction" comes much closer to the problem of actual decadence than the one just cited. But here again Nietzsche, in the demystifying mood that pervades the whole of the Gay Science, chooses to point out some of the advantageous consequences of real decadence (as opposed to the frightening alternative of what he calls "Chinese 'happiness' "). The aphorism opens with a typical Nietzschean distinction between the weak and quasi-feminine type on the one hand and the strong or masculine type on the other, but this distinction is developed in an unexpected fashion, at least for the reader who is influenced by popular cliches about Nietzsche. The feminine type, endowed with a "sensitivity for making life more beautiful and profound," has been prevailing in Europe since the Middle Ages. It has been deceived occasionally and has settled "for a little intoxication and effusive enthusiasm, although it can never be satisfied altogether and suffers from the incurability of its dissatisfaction." This type is responsible, Nietzsche stresses, for the "continuation of the real misery," but, at the same time, without it "the celebrated European capacity for constant change might never have come into existence, for the requirements of the strong among the dissatisfied are too crude."
The opposite has happened in China, where "large scale dissatisfaction and the capacity for change have become extinct centuries ago." Confronted with the Chinese alternative, European "feminine dissatisfaction" turns out to be a real blessing:
Socialists
and state idolaters of Europe with their measures for making life better and
safer might easily
establish in
Europe, too, Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness," if only
they could first extirpate the
sicklier,
tenderer, more feminine dissatisfaction and romanticism that at present are
still superabundant here.
Europe is
sick but owes the utmost gratitude to her incurability and to the eternal
changes in her affliction:
these
constantly new conditions... have finally generated an intellectual irritability
that amounts to genius and
is in any
case the mother of genius.59
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 183]
Nietzsche's fondness for the European spirit (which he opposed to the suffocating narrowness of German nationalism) and his famous maxim about living dangerously should be understood in light of ideas such as those just cited. As for decadence, the most important thing is to recognize it, to become conscious of it, and to resist being misled by its various tricks and disguises. This point is made in a series of notes included by the editors of Nietzsche's late Nachlass in The Will to Power. Insofar as it is an unavoidable aspect of life, decadence is nothing to be fought; it is a necessary phenomenon and belongs to every age and every people. What should be fought, however, is the contagion of the healthy parts of the organism.60 One should always keep in mind that for Nietzsche this contagion is not a matter of physiology (where decay is as natural as growth) but exclusively a matter of psychology.
Thus, one can be sick or weak without being a decadent: one becomes a decadent only when one wants weakness. The distinction is that between actual sickness and sickliness (the latter's moral corollary being "resignation and meekness in face of the enemy"). Nietzsche stresses: "Health and sickness are not essentially different. . . . One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. That is silly nonsense... "61 Decadence, then, appears as a form of psychological, moral, or aesthetic self-deception, as a result of which weakness becomes a task, as Nietzsche puts it.
The first and most harmful mystification of decadence leads to a confusion between cause and effect. The spirit of decadence falsifies the normal perspective and makes its own consequences appear as its causes. If this misconception is not dispelled, fighting against decadence (against its supposed causes. which are in fact only its effects) is an entirely quixotic enterprise that achieves nothing but the opposite of its goal, namely, a promotion of decadence. Nietzsche has emphasized this crucial point several times:
One
confuses cause and effect: one fails to understand decadence as a physiological
condition and mistakes
its
consequences for the real cause of the indisposition; example: all of religious
morality. 62
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 184]
If we take Jaspers's well-known methodological advice and look in Nietzsche for passages contradicting those quoted above, we soon realize that they are not at all difficult to find and that in fact the philosopher is, in a large sector of his work, a straightforward de fender of the conception of man as a "fantastic animal" whose great ness is measured by his will to illusion and by his ability to work out a whole web of delusional concepts and deceptive mechanisms that falsify reality. There are indeed numerous aphorisms in which mathematical and logical concepts, laws of science and such fundamental philosophical notions as reason, truth, cause, effect, subject, and object are seen merely as fictions, and in which human knowledge is viewed as an entirely metaphorical activity. In his Philosophy of 'As If,' Hans Vaihinger devotes an important chapter to Nietzsche and offers a rich—if somewhat biased—collection of quo ations that support his contention that the author of Zarathustra is a philosopher of the will to illusion and a forerunner of the "Metaphysic of As-if."63 Vaihinger is obviously aware of the relevance of such ideas to both aesthetics (whence they are derived) and ethics, but his discussion is confined to matters of epistemology alone. As a consequence, we may reproach him with having avoided a series of questions that, no matter how difficult, should be asked and answered by a student of Nietzsche's work as a whole. For instance, if it is the nature of art to be aesthetic play and longing for illusion, why is Wagner accused as an illusionist and a liar? What is so wrong with Wagner's lying, especially for someone who can write (the quotation figures in Vaihinger): "Ah, now we must embrace untruth, now at last error becomes a lie..."
As a rule, Vaihinger selects only the passages in which Nietzsche speaks positively of lying, mythologizing, and fiction. and leaves out all those in which the apparently opposite ideas are expressed. The fact that Nietzsche could sometimes take fictions in malo sensu is mentioned only briefly and inconsequentially, although the relationship between "bad fictions" and "the concepts on which morality is based" is pointed out.65 But Vaihinger clearly does not share Nietzsche's antireligious feelings. This makes him speculate,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [page 185]
in the conclusion of the chapter on Nietzsche, about what directions the philosophy of the latter would have taken if his career had not been cut short by illness. "He would not have revoked his Anti christ... , but he would have presented the 'obverse of evil things' with the same relentless frankness: he would have 'justified' the utility and necessity of religious fictions. "66 Who knows?
At any rate, to understand Nietzsche's approach to decadence, it is important to realize that for him neither truth nor error, fiction, or lie has any value whatsoever in and by itself. They can have positive or negative value only in relation to life and to whether they promote or hinder life .Nietzsche. as Georg Simmel has pointed out in his essay on "The Conflict in Modern Culture" (1914, pub. 1918),
finds in
life itself the purpose of life which it is denied from the outside. This life
by its nature is increment,
enrichment,
development towards fulfillment and power, towards a force and beauty flowing
from itself ... It
is only the
original fact of life which provides meaning and measure, positive or negative
value.67
It is this supreme valuation of life which justifies Nietzsche's grandiose project of a transvaluation of all values and which accounts for the feverishly dialectical quality of his thought.
Thus, Nietzsche can argue in favor of lying in an extramoral sense (as in the 1873 fragment Ueber Warheit und Liige un ausser moralischen Sinne, whose importance Vaihinger stresses) and, without actually contradicting himself, reject Wagner's music as an example of decadent (moral) lying. The whole question is one of perspective, and it may be useful here to recall that Nietzsche has characterized his own philosophy as "perspectivism." There is a great difference between the perspective from which one can realize that truth is a fiction (a creation of life meant to help life achieve its purposes) and the perspective from which the decadent ascribes a character of truth to a fiction which as fiction, and under particular circumstances, might even have been justified in the name of life. If we place ourselves in the first perspective, we engage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 186]
our mind in a fruitful direction in which illusion becomes self-conscious and self-consciousness is usually a liberating and life-enhancing force. On the contrary, when we treat illusion as a reality, when we endow it with the "moral" prestige of truth, we blind ourselves to its nature and become the slaves of a lifeless dogma. Morality, Nietzsche seems to suggest, kills the vital aspects of illusion (those same that consciousness could render more in tense) and opens the door to bad faith and self-deception. There is actually no inconsistency in Nietzsche's view that the complex relationships between truth and falsehood, reality and fantasy, or know ledge and invention, can be exploited with equal effectiveness for the purposes of life and, conversely, for those of ressentiment and the revenge against life.
From a terminological point of view, it is interesting to note that Nietzsche started using the term "decadence" (with the French spelling) at a relatively late stage. It was argued that the reading of Paul Bourget's Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883) was decisive in Nietzsche's adoption of the term, but Walter Kaufmann dispelled this error by pointing out that the word first occurred in a text written around 1878, that is, five years before the publication of Bourget's Essais. In that text, Nietzsche said that Cervantes's Don Quixote "belongs to the decadence of Spanish culture."68 There should be little doubt, however, that Nietzsche picked up the noun decadent from Bourget, who was the first prominent French writer to use it (as we have seen, it occurs in earlier dated entries of the Diary of the freres Goncourt, but the Diary only began to be published in 1887). It is also clear that it was after having read Bourget that Nietzsche employed the specific phrase "style of decadence." More than that, Nietzsche clearly paraphrased Bourget in The Case of Wagner, in his famous definition of the "style of decadence":
What is
the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole.
The word becomes
sovereign and
leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of
the page, the
page
gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page187]
is no
longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time,
the anarchy of atoms,
disaggregation of the will... 69
The striking fact about this borrowed passage is that, read in the context of Der Fall Wagner and the other works of Nietzsche's last period, it both sounds and is original; and this is so because it is enriched by the complex and dialectically ambivalent significances that Nietzsche attaches to the idea of decadence—enriched to the point that one can see it, as Walter Kaufmann does, as a description of Nietzsche's own "monadologic" style.70 In this light the philosopher's claim to have been a decadent—a "self-overcoming" decadent—should be taken in all seriousness. Also, the fact that such an obvious paraphrase can acquire meanings and qualities that are missing in the original (paradoxically, Bourget seems to be remembered today largely because Nietzsche praised him) should speak against exaggerating the "influence" of this particular French writer over the German thinker. It would be more correct to say that Nietzsche's adoption of the French words decadence and decadent (the latter almost certainly taken from Bourget), as well as certain aspects of his theory of cultural decadence, were results of his long and close familiarity with French literature and philosophy, and of his meditations on the broader theme of French decadence since the seventeenth century. As we have seen earlier, the sense of decadence was widespread in France after 1848 and, with dramatically increased acuteness, after 1870. Nietzsche's indebtedness to Bourget should be seen against the larger background of Nietzsche's well-known affinity for French culture, a subject that has been satisfactorily studied by, among others, XV. D. Williams in his book Nietzsche and the French. 71
The terms decadence and decadent offered Nietzsche the opportunity to synthesize and unify a great many related ideas (decline, degeneration, sickness, etc.) that had become constitutive elements of his dialectic of life against death. His concept of decadence actually originated, more than in his attitude toward French culture, in
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 188]
his reaction to German cultural modernity (evident as early as 1873—74 in his
powerful idea of "untimeliness") and in his critique of romanticism,
whose relevance to modernity he was one of the first to stress. Nietzsche's
rejection of romanticism as a manifestation of decadence reminds us of Goethe's
famous dictum, "Classisch ist das Gesunde, Romantisch ist das Kranke"
(Classic is the healthy, roman tic is the sick). Another central idea of
Nietzsche's vitalistic philoso phy may be associated with Goethe's no less
famous thought that "the purpose of life is life itself." We may sax'
that Goethe had an infinitely deeper impact on Nietzsche as a critic of
romanticism than did French conservative criticism since Nisard, with its
explicit pairing of romanticism and decadence. To a large extent it was what he
most admired in Goethe that enabled Nietzsche to diagnose the romantic
sickness" from which the two great models of his youth, Schopenhauer and
Wagner, had suffered. Nietzsche probably owed to Goethe even his early
distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but he certainly was
indebted to the author of "the best German 1)00k that there is"
(Conversations with Eckermann) for the later revision of that distinction, in
which the Dionysian, including the Apollonian, came to be opposed to decadent
romanticism. Interestingly, it was the old Goethe who embodied the Dionysian
spirit as Nietzsche conceived it toward the end of his career. Goethe, he wrote
in The Twilight of the Idols (published in early 1889), is "not a German
event, but a European one
...a
magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by
an ascent to the
naturalness
of the Renaissance—a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century.... He
surrounded
himself with
limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself in the midst of
it; he was not faint
hearted but
took as much as possible upon himself, over himself into himself. What he wanted
was totality. .
. . In the
midst of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said
Yes to everything
that was
related in this respect—and he had no greater experience than that ens
realissimum called
Napoleon. . .
. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and
trusting
fatalism, in
the faith that only the particular is loathsome,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and that
all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more. Such a
faith, however, is
the highest
of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 72
Goethe as an historical personality is perhaps the closest approximation that Nietzsche cared to give, in more concrete terms, of what he understood by "overman." But Goethe had been a "mere interlude" in a period of decadence, "chaos," and "utter bewilderment, 'dominated by an "instinct of weariness" and "romanticism of feeling": "Is not the nineteenth century... merely an intensified, brutalized eighteenth century, that is. a century of decadence?"73
Nietzsche's theory of decadence reveals its entire philosophic and aesthetic significance only when, together with his admiration for what Goethe symbolized, the details of his critique of Schopenhauer and Wagner are considered. Nietzsche's polemic against both, full of the most intense and genuine intellectual pathos. is more illuminating in regard to his concept of decadence than anything he has to say about the French decadents from Rousseau (by far the most ferociously attacked of all the French thinkers) to Baudelaire. An examination of the relation of Nietzsche's philosophy to Schopenhauer would take us too far into matters with which we are not directly concerned here, so I shall limit myself to discussing the "case" of Wagner. This will offer an opportunity to place Nietzsche's view of decadence within the larger framework of his conception of art in general.
Like philosophy, art is designed to serve life, its specific task being that of organizing experience in an aesthetically meaningful way. The problem is: what kind of life is art promoting? Says Nietzsche.
Every art.
every philosophy. may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either
growing or
declining
life: it always presupposes suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of
sufferers: first. those
who suffer
from an overfullness of life and want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic
insight and outlook on
life—and
then those who suffer from an impoverishment of life and demand of art and
philosophy. calm.
stillness,
smooth seas, or. on the other hand, frenzy,
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 190]
convulsion, and anesthesia. Revenge against life itself—the most voluptuous
kind of frenzy for those so
impoverished!74
In the genealogy of the arts, Nietzsche thought, music in general is a latecomer, it appears as a typically autumnal product in any particular culture:
Music
makes its appearance as the last plant among the arts, ... it arrives last, in
the fall, when the culture
which belongs
to it is fading.... Only Mozart transformed the age of Louis XIV and the art of
Racine and
Claude
Lorrain into ringing gold; only in the music of Beethoven and Rossini did the
eighteenth century sing
itself
out.... All true, all original music, is swan song.75
This does not mean, however, that all music is decadent. As pointed out earlier, for Nietzsche decadence is a question of "will" and an "ideal," not decline as such (a fact of life that would be cowardly to deny) but acceptance and promotion of decline. Even within the overwhelmingly decadent context of modernity, Nietzsche recognizes the possibility of a music "that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music—but Dionysian."76 The first section of The Case of Wagner offers an example: Bizet's Carmen, conceived as an absolute counterpart of Wagnerian decadence. If we reverse the terms of Nietzsche's characterization of Bizet, we obtain in a concentrated form his main arguments against Wagner.
This music
seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant,
it does not sweat. . ..
This music is
evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular—its subtlety
belongs to a race, not to
an
individual. It builds, it organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite
of the polyp in music, the "infinite
melody."
Have more painful tragic accents been heard on the stage? Without grimaces.
Without counterfeit.
Without the
lie of the great style.77
As for Wagner, who pushes the romantic spirit of decadence to the extreme—he is the great liar: his "music is never true. But it is taken for true. 78 "True" here is meant in the restricted sense of being "true" to the genius of music qua music, of music as an
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 191]
autonomous art, justified aesthetically by this very autonomy. Wagner's lying consists in his using music for essentially nonmusical purposes. Here Nietzsche employs a concept that had been common in the theory of decadence since Nisard, who, as we recall, accused Victor Hugo of painting with words, that is, of using words to obtain effects characteristic of an art other than poetry. But Nietzsche's insight is infinitely more profound than that of Nisard and other previous theorists of decadence. Wagner's perversion of music does not represent an accidental deviation from the specificity of an art—it is expressive of the whole crisis of modernity, which manifests itself by what Nietzsche calls quite suggestively, theatrocracy. Wagner is an incomparable histrio," an actor. He is not a musician who errs, he is not a poet either, he is only an actor of genius—"he became a musician, be became a poet because the tyrant within him, his actor's genius, compelled him." So,
Wagner was
not a musician by instinct. He showed this by abandon— in~ all lawfulness and,
more
precisely.
all style in music in order to turn it into what he required. theatrical
rhetoric. a means of expression.
of
underscoring gestures. of suggestion, of the psychologically picturesque.... He
is the Victor Hugo of music
as language.
Always presupposing that one first allows that tinder certain circumstances
music may not be
music but
language, instrument. ancilla draomaturgica. Wagner's music, if not shielded by
theater taste, which
is very
tolerant taste. is simply bad music, perhaps the worst ever made.79
The comparison between Wagner and Victor Hugo is extremely interesting. Was Nietzsche aware, beyond Bourget, of Nisard, who had applied his theory of decadence specifically to Victor Hugo? In any case, Nietzsche—considering his philosophic and aesthetic beliefs—was naturally inclined to dislike Victor Hugo's personality as a whole, and particularly Hugo's social romanticism. And even if Nietzsche was familiar with Nisard's rejection of Hugo, by comparing the latter to Wagner he opens an entirely new perspective on the phenomenon of modern decadence. In contrast to the "elitist" view of decadence, Nietzsche is among the first to stress the crowd-
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 192]
pleasing quality of decadent art as illustrated in both Hugo and Wagner:
Victor
Hugo and Richard Wagner—they signify the same thing: in declining cultures,
wherever the decision
comes to rest
with the masses, authenticity becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, a liability.
Only the actor
still arouses
great enthusiasm.80
It is noteworthy that, while stressing the "popular" quality of Bizet's music, Nietzsche speaks of the mass appeal of such artists as Hugo and Wagner. Modernity leads to theatrocracy because "the theater is a form of demolatry [worship of the masses] in matters of taste: the theater is a revolt of the masses [em Massen-Aufstand] a plebiscite against good taste—This is precisely what is proved by the case of Wagner: he won the crowd, he corrupted taste, he spoiled even our taste for opera."S1 Here Nietzsche is very close to proposing a definition of what was going to be designated toward the middle of the twentieth century by the term kitsch—bad taste as an aesthetic category. Also, Nietzsche introduces here the larger theme of "the revolt of the masses"—a theme rendered notorious by the controversial book Ortega y Gasset devoted to it in 1930, La rebeli6n de las Inasas.
Nietzsche was certainly aware of the modern crisis of Christianity. The great religion of decadence had undergone a process of disintegration started, on a larger scale, during the eighteenth century, that same century in which the philosopher discovered the first unmistakable signs of modernity. But why, then, did he de scribe modernity as essentially decadent? The answer to this question measures the originality of Nietzsche's thought as compared to that of previous and contemporaneous philosophers of history: what modernity had inherited from Christianity was not a set of symbols (some of which attracted Nietzsche to the point of fascination) but the deep spirit of ressentiment, the hostility against life. And this hostility was perfectly able to do without the specific symbols and dogmas of Christianity, using for its purposes the whole range of "modern" secular intellectual myths. Nietzsche had the penetrating
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 193]
intuition that the time consciousness of modernity was not substantially different from the Judeo-Christian concept of time, and it was this intuition that led him to make the idea of "eternal recurrence the core of his philosophy.
Nietzsche was one of the first Western thinkers to point out the secret indebtedness of apparently anti-Christian modernity to Christianity. The idea gained acceptance and, half a century later, Ortega y Gasset—perhaps the most brilliant follower of Nietzsche- could stress the impact of Christianity upon modernity almost as a matter of course. In the chapter "Valuations of Life" in The Modern Theme, Ortega writes:
Modern
times represent a crusade against Christianity. . .. By the middle of the
eighteenth century the divine
world to come
had evaporated. This life was all that remained to man. . . The thought of the
last centuries,
though
anti-Christian, is seen nevertheless to have adopted an attitude in regard to
life which has a strong
resemblance
to that of Christianity.
And this is so because the modern "doctrine of culture" is nothing but "a Christianity without God." In the perspective of modern cultural ~progressivism," Ortega emphasizes,
The
meaning and value of life, which is essentially present actuality, are forever
awaking to a more
enlightened
dawn, and so it goes on. Real existence remains perpetually on the subordinate
level of a mere
transition
toward an utopian future. The doctrines of culture, progress, futurism and
utopianism are a single
and unique
ism.82
In the ancient world, Ortega concludes very much in Nietzsche's spirit, life bad been less affected by "trans-vital values" than in both Christianity and modernity.
Trans-vital values, Nietzsche would argue, are basically anti- vital values, and as such are signs of decadence. Decadence turns against life whenever it ascribes to life meanings other than those of life itself, whenever it introduces the idea of a redeeming "beyond"—whether this "beyond" is conceived in terms of the Christian "afterlife" or in terms of the modern secular utopia. Aesthetically
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 194]
speaking, the modern decadent—personified by Wagner—can easily pass from revolutionism to nihilism to Christianity- all these alternatives express the same basic need for redemption and try to subvert the "Yes-saying" spirit of authentic life. But how can life become self-conscious of its meaning in a world without decadence? How can one practice the essential art of self-overcoming if there is no decadence..—no temptation? Nietzsche leaves such questions unanswered. Without decadence—without a real danger—the notions of moral (or immoral) courage, drama, tragic consciousness, and many other central concepts of Nietzsche's philosophy—would simply become meaningless. After all, Nietzsche did not only overcome himself as a decadent—ironically, he also com posed the most complete laus decadentiac.
Nietzsche's theory of decadence is ultimately a theory and critique of ideology. Although the current notion of ideology in the sense of "false consciousness" comes from Marx, it should be ob served that Nietzsche's analysis of decadence, and specifically of modern decadence, constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive and radical critique of ideology in general, with a particular emphasis on modern bourgeois ideologies (political, social, cultural), including the ideologies of modernity. If we exclude the fragmentary views on the question of ideology advanced by Marx and Engels, there is nothing in the whole nineteenth century that begins to approach the dialectic complexity and profundity of Nietzsche's philosophy of decadence. Karl Mannheim, the leading figure in the twentieth-century sociology of knowledge, has recognized in Marx and Nietzsche the two major precursors of the new critique of ideology. About Nietzsche, he writes:
The other
source of the modern theory of ideology and of the sociology of knowledge is to
be found in the
flashes of
insight of Nietzsche who combined concrete observations in this field with a
theory of drives and a
theory of
knowledge which remind one of pragmatism. . . . From Nietzsche the lines of
development lead to
the Freudian
and Paretian theories of original impulses and to the
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[page 195]
methods developed by them for viewing human thought as distortions and as products of instinctive mechanisms 83