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The Vision of a Potential Society One needs only to look around to see that our society as a whole still firmly espouses the post-Renaissance scientific world view, even though that view may be somewhat on the defensive. As a recent article in New Society says, 'As recently as the 1960s, to call an argument "scientific" was a compliment; it is fast becoming a slur.'1 The article, however, is itself based on several unexamined assumptions of the kind discussed in Chapter 3, and concludes, 'Science as the repository of all objective knowledge and the crucial concept of objective reality, must not remain rigidly attached to its historical "method" if it is to survive the persuasive attacks of the anti-scientists.' It is not disputed that science is the repository of all objective knowledge (in so far, that is, as such a thing is presumed to exist); indeed, the words 'science' and 'objective knowledge' can be viewed as to all intents and purposes synonymous. What is disputed is the assumption implicit in the scientific world view that objective knowledge, knowledge divorced from him who knows, is the only valid way by which reality may be apprehended. It is a principal thesis of this book that the reality of experience, a reality in fact of even greater significance in our lives than the structure of atoms or of galaxies, is inaccessible to scientific method, and that it is this reality that art proclaims and explores. The revolution that took place in scientific thinking in the early years of this century, though of great importance, was essentially superficial as far as the basic attitudes and assumptions of science were concerned. True, nature has come to be conceived in terms ever further removed from our everyday experience, making science increasingly remote from the culture of ordinary people. True, the cosmos has come to be thought of as a unified field in which everything is part of everything else, and the concept of strict causality has had to be abandoned, and, true, the uncertainty principle and the principle of complementarity has caused some scientists to wonder with dismay if the universe may not be ultimately un-knowable after all (the artist has never doubted that it 5 98 Music • Society • Education is so). C.H. Waddington makes an interesting case for an interrelation between these scientific ideas and certain movements in the visual arts (complementarity and the all-round view of cubism, for example, or the over-allness of Pollock, Tobey and the Abstract Expressionist painters and the holistic field view of modern physics2 ), but, in the first place, this would require the artists to have read, and understood the implications of, the scientific literature (a highly unlikely supposition as even among physicists few understood it at the time), and secondly, the real revolution of art in our century is more profound than this, being nothing less than a revolt against the whole scientific world view and its ethic of domination. We have seen how classical music reflects the world view that gave rise to science; so the destruction of that tradition, whether deliberate or inadvertent, reflects a rejection on a profound level of its world view, its attitudes and its values. The rejection began in fact much earlier, with the Romantic movement in poetry, painting and music. In music, traditionally much slower to pick up new artistic currents than the other arts, we hear the first pre-echoes of Romanticism perhaps in Mozart's poignant chromaticisms and subtle dissonances, but the revolt is sounded loudly and clearly first in Beethoven. It was in fact Beethoven, so generally thought of as the supreme exemplar of post-Renaissance musical attitudes, who made the first serious attempt to transcend them. That he did not succeed completely is due not only perhaps to his comparatively early death but also to the fact that, lackingany experience of alien musical culture against which he could view his own, such as Debussy was to encounter sixty years later, not even his supreme genius could escape the 'Mindinaoan depth' of his musical conditioning. Nethertheless in his last years, alone of his age, he had turned his back on the central myth of European culture and was furiously composing his way through to a new world, whose outlines he could have perceived only dimly, where time, power and conflict had no meaning. He died before the vision could fully take form. It is easy, even customary in conventional criticism and biography...

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