Nietzsches Begriff der décadence : kritik und analyse der moderne
Doctoral Thesis
1998
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University of Cape Town
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Nietzsche himself has placed the problem of décadence into the centre of his thinking. But he mistrusts any definitions which tear concepts out of the context of their becoming and reduce them to a static 'meaning. In his analysis of décadence there a no unambiguous causes and effects. The very historical breadth and ambivalence of the word ' décadence ' does not allow the unambiguous assignation of the word to a 'meaning. Nietzsche's remarks about décadence allow us to postulate two hypotheses as their basis: the first, 'Darwinist' hypothesis would be that occidental culture impedes the development of humanity because it makes 'natural selection' ineffective. The second, 'historico-philosophical' hypothesis would be: everything has existed before, nothing changes, there is neither progress nor degeneration. Nietzsche uses the discoveries of the natural sciences of his time to question radically the separation between biology and culture, natural history and human history, physis and psyche. One of the dominant themes of physiology of the 19th century was the boundary between the pathological and the normal. Nietzsche transfers the medical scheme of diagnosis, aetiology and prognosis to a social and cultural phenomenon such as décadence. In contrast to a conservative critique of culture Nietzsche does not bemoan the disintegration of eternal values, which are supposed to underpin a High Culture, but questions the values of religions and philosophies themselves which pretend to be eternal but subordinate life to false aims. Nietzsche drafts a psycho-pathology of the type of the décadence, the embodiment of which is the Christian. Nietzsche sees the "nihilist religions all as: systematis[ed] stories of illness in a religious-moral terminology". In the centre of the psychopathology of Christianity Nietzsche makes out the negation of the body. Nietzsche terms the movement which opposes all idealisms a nihilism. Nihilism derives from the understanding that the highest philosophical, religious and ethical values have become devalued. The understanding that truth is based on mere appearance and that it is no 'thing as such', as believed by Platonic and Christian tradition, leads to a renunciation of the truth claim.
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Reference:
Horn, A. 1998. Nietzsches Begriff der décadence : kritik und analyse der moderne. University of Cape Town.