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I had a good time hanging out with my brother's family, especially teaching my nephews some finer points of football. Everyone was down at my mom's for Thanksgiving this weekend because it's so hard to come out on top of every one of the holiday scheduling conflicts of the sisters-in-law. Yesterday I had a job interview. We'll see.

Via ALDaily is this article from its editor, Denis Dutton, reviewing a book about evolutionary psychology applied as literary theory. Interesting stuff. I wish I'd known of this kind of thinking before. I might have been very satisfied with my English studies.

Evolutionary psychology has typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into the cognitive content of stories and art.
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Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself. This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian, music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means.

Update: Also, if you found that as interesting as I did, read his entry, Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology, from The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics.