Nietzsche, Decadence, and the Greeks

Abstract

"Decadence" is Nietzsche's last great preoccupation, which has a decisive role in the books he composed in 1888: Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Wagner Case, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo. From a conventional view of modern decadence established by French writers like Gautier and Bourget, Nietzsche constructs a radically new set of relationships whereby decadence is understood as a perennial and inevitable phenomenon, but one that is peculiarly dominant in the modern age, and one whose antithesis is to be found, above all, in the culture of pre-Socratic Greece.