To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, 
to get to like anything else whatever afterwards was for 
me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps,had ever been more
 dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended
himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been
 so overjoyed atridding himself of it. A long history! 
”Shall I give it a name?”  If I were a moralist, who knows
 what I might not call it! Perhaps a piece of self-mastery.
 ”But the philosopher does not like the moralist, neither
 does he like overblown words.
What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands
 of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become
 timeless. With what then does the philosopher have the
 greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him the
 child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child
 of my age as Wagner” i.e., I am a decadent. The only
 difference is that I recognised the fact, that I struggled
 against it. The philosopher in me struggled against it.