Nietzsche’s Evolutionary Aesthetics
Wednesday, 19 March 2025, 16:00-18:00
Senate House, Room 261 (Click to register)
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Nietzsche’s last writings are characterised by a markedly new set of concerns, and by new terminology. One instance is the term ‘decadence’, which appears overwhelmingly in 1888, and which was famously applied, by Nietzsche, to both Wagner and to Nietzsche himself. This term is part of a family of words relating to physiological decline, decay, succumbing, ill health and so on – often drawing from the degeneration literature of the period. In many ways, the puzzle for Nietzsche, in this late period, is as follows: why do those around him give such a positive evaluation to moral codes, practices and works of art which he associates strongly with decline. A prime instance of this is the high praise given, by the public, to decadent Wagnerian art.
My argument in this paper is that Nietzsche’s decadence charge against Wagner forms a part of Nietzsche’s evolutionary aesthetics. Evolutionary aesthetics, popular in Nietzsche’s day, may be understood as the attempt to work out what new theories of evolution implied about art, and vice versa. Could evolution explain why we value works of art? Could it explain why art has a place in our lives at all? Could it provide criteria of valuation for works or even genres of art, or support systems of evaluation which we already employ? Nietzsche, of course, offers his own answers to these questions, against the backdrop of his late focus on the will to power as a form of essential life force. It is with this in mind that we can best read his repeated attempts to connect aesthetics and physiology: ‘after all, aesthetics is nothing but applied physiology’. But the paper puts Nietzsche’s own views in perspective by comparing him with contemporary version of evolutionary aesthetics developed in England and France. One consequence of reading Nietzsche in this context is to move the emphasis away from the long legacy of reading Nietzsche in terms of value-creation, self-creation, or becoming the artists of our own lives – readings which do not fit the late works very well. Another is to see the ways in which Nietzsche’s approach is original compared with those around him.
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