The Decay of the State

Abstract

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) perceived that certain fundamental structures’ from language to justice’ which had previously been enshrined by religious transcendence were by his time decaying through the democratizing impulses of the nineteenth century. He pondered the implications of this decay in its various manifestations, most significantly with respect to morality. Nietzsche viewed these structures not only as the means through which inter subjectivity takes place, shaping human relations and the communities that they make up, but also as the foundation of the human mind’ the self and its interior world. This paper takes as its starting point Nietzsche’s analysis of the decay of the state and explores the consequences of the dissolution of intersubjective structures in general on human communities and human consciousness.