Aesthetics, Nietzsche famously declares in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, is ‘nothing but a kind of applied physiology’ (NCW, Where I Offer Objections). Yet for all the familiarity of this suggestive claim, critics have rarely discussed in any detail Nietzsche's frequent allusions to a projected ‘physiology of art’ in the last two years of his productive life. Heidegger's refusal to take seriously such utterances, arguing that it constitutes a ‘fatal misunderstanding on our part when we isolate such physiological thoughts and bandy them about as a “biologistic aesthetics”’, is no more than typical of a long tradition of Nietzsche scholarship which has viewed his characteristic appeal to the language and concepts of biology as mere rhetorical posturing, as an ironic counterweight to the otherworldliness of traditional Idealist aesthetics. But Nietzsche's ‘alleged biologism’ cannot and should not be dismissed in so casual a manner. For to do so is to ignore the historical backdrop against which he formulated the ideas that were to underpin his planned work on the ‘physiology of art’.

In this chapter, I shall accordingly suspend judgement about the metaphoricity of Nietzsche's naturalistic claims about aesthetics, locating instead this strand of his thought within the context of a more general trend in the nineteenth century towards accounting for the origin and function of art in terms of evolutionary biology. Nietzsche's project, I argue, can be viewed as a plausible and consistent enterprise when seen as one aspect of this widespread contemporary biologism.