by Louisa McDonald

Associated with the end of the 19th Century, the French Decadent movement grew out of Symbolism and focused on ideas of excess, artificiality, sensuality and, most importantly, a desire to react to the perverse materialism of the modern world. In France, the poet Charles Baudelaire was one of the first people to use the word ‘décadent’ to refer to his own body of work in his 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil); the term came into more frequent use with the publication of the French journal ‘Le Décadent’ in 1886. Yet although the movement had its origins in France, one of its most important influences was the work of a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.

Born just a month later than Lord Byron, Schopenhauer did not share the Romantic fascination with nature. Rather than celebrating nature, as the Romantic poets did, Schopenhauer was repulsed by it, believing that art should not be inspired by nature, but rather should be thought of as the only way out of it; art was the cure for the oppressive materiality of the world.

Portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, c. 1815

To understand why Schopenhauer had such a view, one must first delve into his metaphysical theories. According to the metaphysical picture given by Schopenhauer, the world has a double aspect: ‘Will’ (Wille) and ‘Representation’ (Vorstellung). Simply put, Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘Representation’ pertains to our perceptions of objectivity or externality, and the ‘Will’ to subjectivity or internality, a unified world ‘in itself’. As Schopenhauer himself put it, “The world as Will (“for us”, as he sometimes qualifies it) is the world as it is in itself, which is a unity, and the world as representation is the world of appearances, of our ideas, or of objects, which is a diversity.”

Unlike Kant, who thought that the ‘thing in itself’ caused our perceptions of it, Schopenhauer claims that the will does not cause our representations; rather, will and representation are one and the same reality looked at from different angles, like two sides of the same coin. Another way in which Schopenhauer’s view differs from Kant’s is that he does not see the will as pertaining to rationality, but rather as “a mindless, aimless, non-rational impulse at the foundation of our instinctual drives, and at the foundational being of everything.” The emphasis, then, is put not on human rationality or dignity, but on the more animalistic impulses that drive us; this makes Schopenhauer’s worldview compatible with Darwinism. Schopenhauer’s contempt and distaste for nature can be explained by the fact that he sees it as inevitably bound up with biological necessity, as is the case for most of our perceptions.

The only way to transcend the divide between the world of appearance and the world in itself, according to Schopenhauer, is through art. This is because aesthetic perception allows us to “lose ourselves in the object, forget about our individuality, and become the clear mirror of the object.” In other words, whilst most of our perception is subject to the demands of the will, aesthetic appreciation is a kind of ‘will-less’ perception insofar as we conceive the objects of aesthetic apprehension not as bound up with our own self-interest, but rather as ideal; since we implicitly universalise any aesthetic judgements we make (that is, we assume that everyone should think the same as us), we must thereby assume a universally-oriented state of consciousness. In this way, Schopenhauer claims that art gave us a way of communicating with otherwise inaccessible Platonic Ideals that are part of the world in itself. Schopenhauer views music as the most metaphysical of the arts because the structure of music mirrors that of the physical world; Schopenhauer claims it has the same structure as the Will itself. Music, and art more generally, helps us access transcendent states of mind by embodying abstract forms of feelings, taken out of their everyday context.

Schopenhauer’s influence on the writers of the Decadent movement is apparent in many ways. In some instances, the philosopher himself is explicitly mentioned, such as in Guy de Maupassant’s story ‘At the Death Bed’, which deals with questions of mortality and identity as the plot revolves around a German man who knew Schopenhauer and observed him on his deathbed. But more generally, we see Schopenhauer’s distaste for the natural and material world reflected in the work of the Decadents, who, like Schopenhauer, wished to transcend the materiality of modern life by seeking higher art forms as a means of escape. We see this attitude in Baudelaire’s work; the title of Les Fleurs du Mal itself ties nature inextricably to evil, and the poems themselves focus on urban landscapes rather than natural scenes. But perhaps an even more pertinent example is Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours, sometimes translated as ‘Against Nature’, a book which set the tone for much of the Decadence movement. Often referred to as a novel without a plot, À Rebours centres on an aristocrat, Jean des Esseintes, who has become disgusted with society and decides to retreat to a house in the countryside, spending his days engaging in aesthetic contemplation. Interestingly, the protagonist adores the poetry of Baudelaire and the Symbolists whilst detesting that of the Romantics, and even goes so far as to praise Schopenhauer’s ideas. The parallels between Schopenhauer’s worldview and that of this paradigmatic Decadent character reveal the influence of the German philosopher’s aesthetics and metaphysics on the philosophy of Decadence more generally; whilst nature and the material world were viewed as corrupt and impure, art was seen as humanity’s only means of salvation.

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Huysmans’ influence extended beyond France; in Oscar Wilde’s famous decadent novel The Picture of Dorian Grey, it is thought that À Rebours is the ‘poisonous French novel’ that corrupts Dorian. Furthermore, in Wilde’s novel, we see the importance of the opposition between art and nature as Dorian resists a natural ageing process through an art form (his portrait), resisting materiality and aiming at metaphysical transcendence.

Schopenhauer’s theories by no means exhaust the ideas behind the Decadence movement, but they can give us some clue as to why these authors may have chosen such a different path to the Romantics with regards to the relationship between art, materiality, and nature. Whilst Guy de Maupassant claims that « Schopenhauer a marqué l'humanité du sceau de son dédain et de son désenchantement. » [Schopenhauer has stamped humanity with disdain and disenchantment], the artistic merits of Schopenhauer’s theories extend far beyond his pessimism. In fact, one could even see his faith in art as the means of restoring humanity in a world that lacks it as a strange kind of optimism about the power of the aesthetic.