It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition
Not hard to envision at all; only hard, perhaps, to implement. It shouldn’t take all that much imagination to summon the thought of a society in which people were better rewarded with status (and all its trappings) for things like solving mathematical problems, or composing complexly-structured music, as opposed to all the various generalized forms of pure politics that determine the lion’s share of status in the world we know, than they actually are in the world we know.
In fact, we can look around and find historical examples of societies where that was the case. In my Otium comment I pointed to one: Imperial Germany (pre-WWI). That was a place where a figure like Max Reger could achieve high status in general culture—without even needing to be a Nietzschean superman to do so. All he had to do was follow the rules of society, which happened to permit someone with those kinds of compositional aspirations to become a celebrity.
My radical belief is that the fact that this is the same culture that also produced leading figures in every other field of creative intellection (and a place where shops in university towns sold pictures of professors in postcard form), and indeed is credited by Tyler Cowen with “deliver[ing] the goods in terms of innovation”, is not a coincidence.
This is an extreme example—in fact the best I know of, at least at the level of entire nations—but the phenomenon is a matter of degree.
Well, for a start, there are certainly “fine things in life” that are best understood in social terms; for a handy example that fits squarely in the realm of art, consider so-called “literary” fiction.
Yes. Narrative fiction is the least physically-oriented of the arts. Its existence is most of the reason for the qualifier “at least certain forms [of art]” in my comment on Sarah’s blog.
Note that it is also the only art-form that is widely appreciated at anything like a sophisticated level by the “rationalist community” as a whole. This is a problem. (Basically, it reflects an implicit belief that only STEM is about physical cognition; since all art is assumed to be almost wholly social, LWers opt for the “least pretentious” variant, i.e. the most socioculturally “accessible” form to them, namely fiction, specifically fanfiction.)
It’s not the absence of “social cognition” in its entirety
I never said it was. What made you think otherwise?
Above, I specifically said that arts synthesized physical and social cognition, and implied that that was important to their value.
The problem I’m talking about is the absence of physical cognition, not the presence of social cognition.
Not hard to envision at all; only hard, perhaps, to implement. It shouldn’t take all that much imagination to summon the thought of a society in which people were better rewarded with status (and all its trappings) for things like solving mathematical problems, or composing complexly-structured music, as opposed to all the various generalized forms of pure politics that determine the lion’s share of status in the world we know, than they actually are in the world we know.
In fact, we can look around and find historical examples of societies where that was the case. In my Otium comment I pointed to one: Imperial Germany (pre-WWI). That was a place where a figure like Max Reger could achieve high status in general culture—without even needing to be a Nietzschean superman to do so. All he had to do was follow the rules of society, which happened to permit someone with those kinds of compositional aspirations to become a celebrity.
My radical belief is that the fact that this is the same culture that also produced leading figures in every other field of creative intellection (and a place where shops in university towns sold pictures of professors in postcard form), and indeed is credited by Tyler Cowen with “deliver[ing] the goods in terms of innovation”, is not a coincidence.
This is an extreme example—in fact the best I know of, at least at the level of entire nations—but the phenomenon is a matter of degree.
Yes. Narrative fiction is the least physically-oriented of the arts. Its existence is most of the reason for the qualifier “at least certain forms [of art]” in my comment on Sarah’s blog.
Note that it is also the only art-form that is widely appreciated at anything like a sophisticated level by the “rationalist community” as a whole. This is a problem. (Basically, it reflects an implicit belief that only STEM is about physical cognition; since all art is assumed to be almost wholly social, LWers opt for the “least pretentious” variant, i.e. the most socioculturally “accessible” form to them, namely fiction, specifically fanfiction.)
I never said it was. What made you think otherwise?
Above, I specifically said that arts synthesized physical and social cognition, and implied that that was important to their value.
The problem I’m talking about is the absence of physical cognition, not the presence of social cognition.