A Definition of Degeneracy and Decadence

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naïvety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man—the domain of aesthetic judgement is therewith defined. Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ‘ugly’. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful…In the one case as in the other we draw a conclusion: its premises have been accumulated in the instincts in tremendous abundance. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: that which recalls degeneration, however remotely, produces in us the judgement ‘ugly’. Every token of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness, every kind of unfreedom, whether convulsive or paralytic, above all the smell, color and shape of dissolution, of decomposition, though it be attenuated to the point of being no more than a symbol all this calls forth the same reaction, the value judgement ‘ugly’. A feeling of hatred then springs up; what is man then hating? But the answer admits of no doubt: the decline of his type. He hates then from out of the profoundest instinct of his species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, far-seeing vision in this hatred—it is the profoundest hatred there is. It is for its sake that art is profound…

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A criticism of décadence morality.—An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality under which egoism languishes—is under all circumstances a bad sign. This applies to individuals, it applies especially to peoples. The best are lacking when egoism begins to be lacking. To choose what is harmful to oneself, to be attracted by ‘disinterested’ motives, almost constitutes the formula for décadence. ‘Not to seek one’s own advantage’ that is merely a moral fig-leaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: ‘I no longer know how to find my advantage’…Disgregation of the instincts! Man is finished when he becomes altruistic.—Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything’, the moral lie in the mouth of the décadent says: ‘Nothing is worth anything—life is not worth anything’…Such a judgement represents, after all, a grave danger, it is contagious—on the utterly morbid soil of society it soon grows up luxuriously, now in the form of religion (Christianity), now in that of philosophy (Schopenhauerism). In some circumstances the vapors of such a poison-tree jungle sprung up out of putrefaction can poison life for years ahead, for thousands of years ahead… 

-excerpted from “Twilight of the Idols” by Nietzsche (1889)