Art and evolution: Nietzsche's physiological aesthetics

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 109-126

  Moore, Gregory ^a  

^a SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61249304286     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608780110099895     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Nietzsche. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1967- ). VI 3. p. 416.
2. All subsequent citations appear in the text. References to Nietzsche's notebooks are from this edition: all translations are my own. In addition. I quote from the following works available in English translation: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (henceforth abbreviated as BT), translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 1999);
3. On the Genealogy of Morals (GM), translated by Douglas Smith (Oxford. 1996);
4. Twilight of the Idols (TI). translated by Duncan Large (Oxford, 1998).
5. Heidegger, Nietzsche (San Francisco, 1979), I, The Will to Power as Art, p. 127.
6. Other examples of this tendency include Julius Zeitler, Nietzsche's Ästhetik (Leipzig, 1900);
7. Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie: Nietzsches ästhetische Theorie und liter-arisches Schaffen (Stuttgart, 1985).
8. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London. 1759; repr. 1970), part IV, sections vii and xix.
9. Price. Essays on the Picturesque, 3 vols (London, 1810) I, 88-9.
10. Kant. The Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith (Oxford. 1952). p. 130.
11. Eighteenth-century attempts to construct a physiological aesthetics were not confined to Britain. See e. g. the Viertes Wäldchen of Herder's Kritische Wälder, in Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Pross (Munich, 1984- ), II. 57-240
12. and his Plastik, Werke, Viertes Wäldchen of Herder's Kritische Wälder (ibid., 401-542).
13. Lange. Das Wesen der Kunst, 2 vols (Berlin, 1901), I, 13-15.
14. See also Max Burckhard, 'Die Kunst und die natürliche Entwickelungsgeschichte', in Aesthetik und Socialwissenschaft (Stuttgart. 1895):
15. Max Nordau. 'Evolutionistische Ästhetik'. in Paradoxe (Leipzig, 1885).
16. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London, 1877), pp. viii and 2.
17. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (London. 1872), II, 627.
18. See e. g. Schiller: 'How early or late the aesthetic artistic impulse [Kunsttrieb] should develop will depend simply on the degree of fondness with which Man is capable of lingering at mere appearance' (On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Bristol, 1994). p. 127).
19. Haeckel. Die Natur als Künstlerin (Berlin, 1924). p. 10.
20. Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig, 1904). p. 8.
21. For a more detailed discussion of Haeckel's evolutionary aesthetics, see Kurt Bayertz, 'Die Descendenz des Schönen: Dar-winisierende Ästhetik im Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts', in Fin de Siècle: Zur Naturwis-senschaft und Literatur der Jahrhundertwende im deutsch-skandinavischen Kontext, ed. by K. Bohnen and others (Copenhagen. 1984). 88-110.
22. For a discussion of the persistence of pre-Darwinian theories of non-adaptive models of organic change in the nineteenth century, see Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore, MD, 1992).
23. Bölsche, 'Vom Religiösen in unserer Zeif. in Weltblick: Gedanken zu Natur und Kunst (Dresden, 1904). p. 149.
24. Bölsche. Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe. 3 vols (Jena, 1906-7), II, 392.
25. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, second edn. 2 vols (London, 1877), I, 91-2.
26. Bölsche, 'Charles Darwin und die moderne Ästhetik̈, Der Kunstwart, 1 (1888): 125-6, p. 125.
27. Bölsche. Das Liebesleben in der Natur, II, 387.
28. Bölsche, 'Charles Darwin und die moderne Ästhetik', p. 125.
29. See e. g. The Gay Science 349;
30. Nietzsche's theory of evolution is discussed in more detail in my book Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge. 2002).
31. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 50.
32. See also: 'In animals this state produces new materials, pigments, colours and forms: above all new movements, new rhythms, new mating calls and seductions' (VIII 3, 14[120]).