The New Catholicism: Science and Art as post-modern religion.

I have considered a brief introduction preceding the essay is beneficial to clarify intentions that are embedded within the structure of the writing. The style of the essay carries a connotation of opposition toward science. This is a tactic to shake the reader from the innocuous binary system, by which, only a few may question apart from its own aim. Science is a process, and not the product that we possess from its findings. In as much, the criticism positioned against it are a means to cause the reader to think about the very concept of ideas such as ‘truth’, ‘authority’, and ‘authenticity.’ I do not wish to imply that science is wrong, or is faulted, for to have this view would go against the aim of the essay. I simply aim to place science as one philosophical method alongside others. Indeed, this was not a polemic position to be held until well into the twentieth century where the conceptualization of science underwent a redefinition that substituted that process with the statements formulated by the constituent properties of the process. The practical realities of my personal vantage toward science is withdrawn from the essay proceeding this introduction and should not be confused with my preference for what might be considered it’s abstract inverse: Religion. As will become clear, the gaze of interest is cast at why these systems are failing to produce the results that its engendered institutions had hoped for. The continuous opposition to each other; The result of which lead to the extraordinary shift in thinking about reality, nationalism, spirituality, and art that came after a disillusioned West was startled by the atrocities committed in the image of Religion during, firstly, the European conquests from the Crusades extending to the Thirty Years War and the concomitant fall of the Holy Roman Empire and, secondly, again during two World Wars as a result of which reason and rational — the enlightenment— lead to the French Revolution and Two World Wars in the authoritative claims promulgated by science. My criticism is not against the adoption of either institution, for in both cases, science and religion is better understood to be abused by men with idealistic aberrations of ethics. Therefore, my aim is disinterested in who or what is at blame. The interest then is in the power of these conflicts to reveal aspects of philosophical reality that slowly decants from one ‘universal’ consciousness to another.

Jonathan M. Blair July 15, 2020

12. The Goal of Science

What? The ultimate goal of science is to create the most pleasure possible to man, and the least possible pain? But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," * must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?* And it is so, perhaps!

The Stoics at least believed it was so, and they were consistent when they wished to have the least possible pleasure, in order to have the least possible pain from life. (When one uses the expression: The virtuous man is the happiest," it is as much the sign-board of the school for the masses, as a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.)

At present also ye have still the choice: either the least possible pain, in short painlessness and after all, socialists and politicians of all parties could not honourably promise more to their people, or the greatest possible amount of pain, as the price of the growth of a fullness of refined delights and enjoyments rarely tasted hitherto! If ye decide for the former, if ye therefore want to depress and minimise man's capacity for pain, well, ye must also depress and minimise his capacity for enjoyment.

In fact, one can further the one as well as the other goal by science! Perhaps science is as yet best known by its capacity for depriving man of enjoyment, and making him colder, more statuesque, and more Stoical. But it might also turn out to be the great pain-bringer!

And then, perhaps, its counteracting force would be discovered simultaneously, its immense capacity for making new sidereal worlds of enjoyment beam forth!

~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 1882

With Descartes’ announcement of the infamous cogito, ‘Je pense, donc je suis’ the age of Enlightenment had lavished itself upon the world(Descartes and Bennet, 1637: 15). Its chief aphorism, ‘I think therefore I am’ established the radical notion of a being apart from it’s thoughtful awareness. Its chief principal was a novel focus on the self, looking inward for truth rather than outward to the objective universe. The concept of Humanism radically shifted perceptions of the organized universe and gave birth to modern philosophy. A philosophy that posited the ideas of reason and logic, liberty and the inalienable rights of sovereign men, progress, toleration and fraternity. Indeed, the age of Catholic rule had been strangled by the egalitarian push of the masses. Theology was dead and in it’s shadow emerged a movement not based on theological fantasies but on objective and measurable truth.

Descartes’ severed the concepts of ‘idea’ from the external archetype and suggested a transfer to the internal perceptionof ‘self.’ In this transient, subjective realm the inception of the universal was supposedly guaranteed to present itself as truth. Idea’s that historically descended from the throne of heaven would now be open to individual opinion – thinking for one’s self.

Aristotle’s world conceived ideas as possessed by a unifying totality. Men were expected to discover them – as if a geographical position to be stumbled upon, the idea did not cease to exist simply because it was not yet approached by men – by their evidence in the world; by the senses of which a community could agree upon its existence and experience.

Descartes concept of the rationale made the idea the personal property of the thinker. Men did not discover such ideas, rather the universe was itself an idea o be constructed from the internal experiences of the projector.

How we feel something ought to be, and to structure our life around those beliefs is the entire point of our modern democracy. But such liberty lead to crisis and by the mid-twentieth century the idea had blurred lines between the individual and his community.

The universe projected function on to the individual:

(who am I?)

and the individual defined that function to the universe:

(what is it?)

The populace shaped and determined the idea:

(What is it?)

while at the same time the idea shaped the populace to describe an experience as either normal or deviant: (What am I?)

Concepts of individualism, of autonomy, the demarcation of creator and creation became enslaved to each other in symbiotic, cyclical definition.

A scientific method can only propose to be certain of that which we think to be a confident assessment. Such a method can not escape purview, experience, the codification of a system of language that shapes the way we understand our world.

The arts, long considered one of the great sciences under the discipline of the monastery Trivium transformed through a similar a process. The so-called Common-Practice-Era music translated much of the philosophic colloquialism of the enlightenment to an emerging musical grammar. Harmony sought equated symmetry by dividing the octave into a nearly equal partition which became known as the triad. This translated harmonic sonority from a conception in which points on a line were in constant flux of stable and complex ratios to a simplified sound object; the chord. Meanwhile, form adopted syntactical structure that mirrored literary concepts; The period, theme, statements, the sentence, and development. ‘Phrases’ comprised of ‘ideas’ that were developed and lead to logical punctuations of emphasis called cadences. One could ‘read’ sonic teleology in a literary understanding. Form and function were subjugated to a ‘structuralist’ archetype, while balance of mood, texture, and motivic development were transparently detectable to an audience that experienced the music as an intellectual—rather than as a populist, national, or religious — movement.

The skepticism of the Romantics bred conditions most prominently indebted to Nietzsche’s tasks. Adorno in musicology, Jung in psychology, Derrida in linguistics... Each focused with attentive discourse on the practicality of universal objectivity, at the resolution of a subjective saturation— in that sense described by a post-Hegelian theory of history spanning generational, cultural, and personal reflections of identity, each embedded with the potential to circumscribe, expand, overturn or re-order those demarcations.

Science(involuntarily and unaware as it might have proved) announced the end of itself as an objective oriented pursuit, whether insouciantly self-destructive or intentionally suicidal. Coterminous events in music culture during the early 20th century sparked a similar divorce from ‘logic’, in the departure from what was considered to that point a tonally enforced objective naturalist veneration, in exchange for purposefully reactionary(skeptic) theories by the Second Viennese School. As represented by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, Serialism(when understood as a representative idealism of modernism), attempted to divorce universal meaning from syntax. The tone-row, endowed with dissonance emancipation and self-referential function, ensured that the analysis of a piece, its statement and conclusion was open ended and complex. Dissonance reciprocation, consonance ambiguity, and perturbations of meter gave rise to endless discourse on the value and hinderance of so-called ‘atonal’ music.

However, fractured under the criticism of an inter-subjective school of disparate students only a generation later, these new composers rejected such Babylonian models of progressive modernism and placed themselves in retro-transient navigation to re-order the state of history’s anachronistic gaze. Time – and more importantly the styles which represented particular synchronic spaces – was to become a system of mapped nodes that could be mediated in transit from any set station. Likewise, scores became geographical landscapes that transferred the binary, temporal shifting of pulse and disruption of rhythm – a facet that marked the means of musical thinking for nearly 300 years before it – to something more dimensionally transient.

Facilitating the expanded modes of that expression, new iconography was created in the emergence of a new avant-garde.The Sonoristic Structuralism graphical scores of Penderecki offer enough evidence of that trend.

Although it may now seem unusual that Art should be so closely associated with Science, this obfuscation is likely due to retrospective attitudes placed on societal roles and expectations, and the insistence of the dogmas that each of these institutionalized disciplines formalized.

To briefly mention the contemporary mainstream belief, -one posited by a diachronically regressed devolution oftheology- Science was originally conceived as one of many subsections of philosophy(natural philosophy)and thus it’s aim was to attempt the explanation of experience through a singular set of restricted measurements; The scientific method. The resultant finding would be systematically categorized amongst other methods of probing and inquiry, subsumed into some higher truth.

This supporting position can only be considered incomplete and deeply flawed when it insists superiority over other methods of global and historical modes of experience. Where science ended, there was no desire to make it speak further. The benefit of science as a tool was its ability to challenge culturally held ‘proofs’ — previously tainted by religious compartmentalization, itself tainted by cultural necessities— through a critical examination of our perceptions, which, consequently would highlight the falsity of emphasizing the power of our subjectivity on observation.

Ironically(if not tragic) to our own generation, Descartes intentionally suspended the most prominent feature that we associate with Science today; our contemporary faith in the institution of a science to concern itself foremost with the ‘objective fact’.

During the age of Descartes, what was objective was equated to Christian Doctrine, i.e. a fact was that which the Church, culture, and tradition secured. Contrary to popular belief, such facts were not used to control masses of people; It was rather, the opposite that secured christian doctrine. Any enclave of bishops that would be called to evaluate new scientific methods and declare them within Church teaching would need to do so with the utmost caution. It was the masses that wanted a simplified resolution to the trauma of life. It was the masses that would be unwilling to depart with a worldview that they and their ancestors had previously structured their identities around. No one seems to discuss the point that Galileo was a close friend and honored papal guest to Urban VIII, being invited to the Vatican no less than 6 times to demonstrate his theories to a fascinated audience. The Vaticans position was positive enough that encouraged Galileo to pen ‘Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems’ in 1629. It was the publication and subsequent reaction of lesser clergy and common people that forced the Papacy to insist on a public renunciation of his work. As we know, under house arrest Galileo continued his work without clerical perturbation. One can easily view the arrest more as a protection than a punishment. The church would latter absolve Galileo and adopt his theories… when the time had come that the issue was no longer controversial for men of faith.

Descartes’ contribution can be viewed within a theological method itself. As humanity progressed, and the culture came to situate itself in a luxury that had not been experienced since the fall of Rome, the emerging culture became to entertain more complex questioning.

Where the ancient tenants of a scriptural based education did not satisfy the nuance of leisure, the necessity to unravel simplicity became an implicit exercise in expansion of experience. Worldviews will always experience a trajectory from the inception of discovery, to the foundation of a tradition, to the obscurity of being outdated. In its final state, it can no longer feed the curiosity of novel inquiry.

Today, science is resting toward that end. An outdated philosophic simulacra that has become so comfortable to be uninspiring; It does not encourage humanity to redefine, but forces its definition on mankind.

Science has come full circle. One only needs to look at the foundational institution that breeds current scientific research – the university system – to see the allegory of a new Vatican. It begins with undergraduate seminary indoctrination, political gesturing and grants approved by government institutions whose proofs are submitted as a prerequisite to funding; The research to assert that proof is the goal of the funding. This is carried out by practitioners in their early twenties whose potential career depends on carefully monitored and established by an inclusive group of peer-reviewed academics; a new clergy. This self-appointing body of institutionalized rhetoric is supported in one arm by a retinue of media corporation and the other arm political spokesperson, is the witness of a new Catholicism emerging from the ashes of the old

After the disillusionment of World War II, the German Musicologist and Philosopher, Theodor Adorno, fought against this constructed representation through the induction of the concept of ‘identity thinking’ which he described as a pernicious symptomatic result stemming from the cult of ‘reason’;

‘[C]ategorical thought... by which everything becomes an example of an abstract, and thus nothing individual in its actual specific uniqueness is allowed to exist... [T]he human race had gone from understanding the world through myth to understanding it through scientific reasoning, [and]...this latter ‘enlightenment’ was the same as understanding the world through myth.’

Jung cast a variant light on the argument That myth is no less true, psychologically and culturally speaking, regardless if one believes the empirical data surrounding the object:

‘[T]he standpoint of the creed is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. But if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement.’(Jung, 1958:)⁠

Jung puts into relief a tactic that Science has used to distract from it’s inherent contradictions; That to be religious means to read and comprehend the Bible in only one mode of understanding; Scientifically. However Jung illustrates a form of re-applied Kenosis; Christ’s renunciation of divinity to bind humanity back to God; Religion’s renunciation of naturalist philosophy to bind Science back to Truth; Musics renunciation of systems of cultural totality to bind aesthetic back to coherency.

Thus, it is that Science and Religion are incompatible only in as much as Hegel’s ‘dialektik’ pits thesis and antithesis in contradictory aggression against one another for the benefit of extracting a usable truth from the field of imbrications and aberrations that manifest as projections of aligned juxtapositions whose veracity is more accurately felt subjectively than can be defined objectively. To be sure, Science is religion as much as religion is a science.

Consider that scientific method hinges upon observation, and that what is observed must imply an observer. It is through our subjective senses that we are emancipated from definitions of religion. It is us that must observe and make sense of the Universe utilizing science as merely a tool, not Science that observes and makes sense of the Universe using us as tools.

When we burden Science with this responsibility, we construct the inverse of God, but at the cost of the old imprisonment of religion. An office under new management, the products repurposed for the same audience, the institution -- in regards to the truth of reality that it posits – remains the same. Subjective representation is false dichotomy of what the universal ‘I’ believes something to be rather than what it universally ‘IS’, regardless of how it is observed.

What binds the fashion of science to the trend of modernism in Music is offered by Adorno’s thoughts for Schoenberg’s conceptualization of serialism as a method to avoid the totality of tonality:

“By virtue of setting music free to undertake limitless domination over the natural material, the enslavement of music has become universal... All that can be heard in the serial works is the ordering principles of serialism itself raised superstitiously to the status of an object of veneration.”(Adorno, 1947 Schoenberg and Progress: Twelve-tone Melos and Rhythm, paragraph 1)⁠

It is here that a slight interjection is necessary – despite its abrupt appearance. Understanding it’s formal purposes will help us to clearly navigate the information that is presented as the second aim of this essay. The origin of Atheism was a theoretical and political tool proposed by thinkers who at least espoused Deism if not a religious affiliation. (Brand, 2017 8:07-11:30)⁠ For Descartes to propose his philosophy of skepticism it would need to somehow pass undetected from church censorship while arousing a populations curiosity.

Why should anyone question strongly held beliefs about the universe, where answers were already provided by the universal institution of knowledge, i.e., the Church?

To do so, Descartes had to frame his argument in a theoretical construct where God was suspended from the inquiry. His argument sought to question what a culture thought it understood of nature, not to prove the lack of existence of a deity. Atheism can be seen as an off-shoot and precursor to an older christian-theological method of rational, ‘Via Negationis’, or Negative Theory; The process of deduction by cogitating on what you can not know about God.(McFarlane, 2009)⁠ In Judaism, the term ‘Ein Sof’ translates to the No-thing-ness of God.

Rabbinical doctrine posits that to worship God in a way that presumes to understand what God is, is the equivalent of idolatry, and thus, the acknowledgement of nature and reality alone is a more acceptable form of worship than worshipping a corporealized icon of God, which is synonymous with the unlawful erection of the Golden Calf in the wilderness of the Exodus account.(Matt, 2010: 29-31)⁠ Thus, the conclusions of these methods uses Atheism as a tool to divorce the unverifiable mythologies surrounding a creator, and the veracity of nature to prove the existence of creation. For our purposes, and simply put, Atheism is only the necessary Yang, to Religion’s Yin.

In the Nineteenth century, Atheism varnished the political ideologies of revolutionaries who’s agenda was to remove the aristocratic oppression of the bourgeois by renouncing the validity of its power structures by divine appointment. The mask by which theory and politics usurped religious rule was forged in the hyperbolic abstract of Atheism, and, as the impassioned Diderot sentimentally echos,

‘Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’

Atheism was not conceived of indifferent rational, baptized in the virtues of a new form of reason and logic, rather it too was a subjective construct aimed with an agenda of removing one political regime to erect a new order based on objectivity by self-aggrandizement only, and not by self-evident reality, which reason and logic would assume as priori.(Diderot, 1875)

In order that we might combat this nihilistic disenchantment, the efforts of science have attempted to constrain its own skepticism by systemically employing an artifice for filtering out questions that penetrate its ability to confidently defend. It does so first by regarding that which is unique and individual as a singular representation of a replicated variation that can be classified and defined. What we understand as science is to describe partial observation.

Beethoven was a human; Beethoven was male; Beethoven was a composer; This objectivity is merely a form of iconographic order. This point consequently disregards anything subjective as being important. Beethoven was a genius; Beethoven had a complex relationship in history; Beethoven established the model of artistic embodiment. This last sequence is subjective opinions held by the majority of the population. However, it still can, and often has been challenged.

Do such subjective opinions detract or bear less authority to the truth of an image of Beethoven? Indubitably they reveal a more complex, comprehensive, authentic and honest definition of Beethoven. Beethoven can not simply be reduced to the categorization of column A, while although column B is open to debate, that debate no less the substance that lends verisimilitude to its subject regardless if the truth can be fractured into inconsistent formulations. Here it would seem that what might be most beneficial is to scrutinize the requirements of an object to be accepted as true, rather that inconsistency itself.

This inability to accept both elusive and concrete, both objective and subjective, both factual and interpretative data into a flexible amalgamation of authenticity, i.e., ‘Truth’, is part of a now universal malady whose resistance is articulated in the work of Jacques Derrida. His culture-shattering approach to semiotic analysis within phenomenology that became known as ‘Deconstructionism’ aims to disrupt our sense of a central identity in order to expose our presupposed axioms thatsubject themselves onto the neutral object and as a consequence aid to destruct those prejudices that are reified from theadoption of the Greek Democitus model of philosophy which displays an inherent superiority/inferiority complexforcefully purported by a diodic binary structure.

The phrase ‘you hit like a girl’ is seen pejoratively in a patriarchal society where the prejudice for male dominance is presupposed as the center. To eradicate this prejudice, one must deconstruct the idea of dominance. Any object under this analysis goes through a ‘deconstructive’ reading… characterized by its double structure, its traversal of the space between the commentary[The observation of the object] and the interpretation [the subjective truth made about that object.]’(Critchely, 2014: Chapter 3, subheading 3.3, paragraph 1)

This argument finds its way into musicology at both historical and cultural levels of authenticity. At the historical level,Historically Informed Practice can be seen as a reaction against modernism (but not for the fact that it is an artifact of the past). In essence, it is a purely contemporary practice that spontaneously interprets a document from the past, reappropriated to the present. Otherwise, how could we ever allow Bach to be played on a Steinway, or perform one of the Cantata’s while abandoning its spiritual clothing? The arguments that stem from ‘intention’ become fractured when we ask, who is the arbiter of authenticity? The Composer, the Performer, or the Audience? Is Bach confined to the processesof his own time, or can his music, as Adorno proposed, transcend its synchronic practices?

‘They have made him into a composer for organ festivals in well-persevered Baroque towns, [They have made him] into [an] ideology.’ (Butt, 2002: 4)

Indeed a case might be made of making Christ into an ideology and there is little doubt of Science spilling into the boundaries of political ideologies. Under such considerations it might well be received that what constitutes authenticity is more contingent on what an audience is willing to collectively perceive as true, and not what a scholar has labored to propose as accurate. Ideologies can be seen as a priori to facts.⁠⁠ The French composer, Tristan Murail notes this presupposition between nature and totalitarian objectivity of structuralism in post-war Europe:

‘The most sudden and important revolution to affect the musical world during the recent past was based not on some type of reflection upon musical grammar (serial or other), but rather—more deeply—upon the world of sounds themselves: in other words, in the sonic universe that summons the composer. For any composer reflecting upon his place in music’s evolution, this unprecedented opening of the world of sounds that we now recognize cannot fail to make itself felt in the compositional technique itself. More precisely: any attempt to integrate these new sounds that are above all, as we shall see, sounds of a ‘complex’ character, necessitates a profound revision of traditional compositional techniques (by ‘traditional’ I include serialism, aleatoric composition, stochastic composition, etc.: techniques that continue to use antiquated grids of parameters) and of our very conception of the compositional act.’(Murail, 2005)⁠

Murail is speaking of those techniques found amidst spectral works such of his own, Grisey, and Dufourt that challenged a ‘truth’ held by the age of Beethoven in which the Overtone series was evidence of the Major and Minor tonality as a phenomenon of nature.

Entire pieces are constructed out of a re-ordering of the harmonic spectrum. Inharmonic spectra, as employed by Jonathan Harvey in Mortuous Plango, Vinos Voco(1980) in which overtone frequencies are divorced from their normative integer relationships, as well as Defective Spectra, as employed by Murail in Désintégrations(1982) where integral partials are entirely absent.

This consideration for decentralizing tonal dominance by removing central frequency relationships toward the benefit of new harmonic coherency is analogous to the aim of deconstruction theory to destabilize objective coherency, and thus challenging what is culturally held to be objectively ‘natural.’

The second consideration by which Science protects it’s authoritative claim against religion is by degrading any element that might challenge definitions of the classification, reappropriating that which is subjective as intellectually inferior, and disregarding any skepticism toward its method or results to be of lower aim. To be sure, Science is in a perpetual state of transformation as new inquires(a subjective motion) lead to new opinions which create new beliefs amongst the public. The relationship between the subjective inquiry of the scientist and the contingency of the approval or rejection of the public to accept it implies an agreed-upon, democratically accepted subjectivity. Government as a non-autonomous, non-willed, non-living entity can only exist as a collective upheld insistence of its reality, identity, and legitimacy. There is no government to report to. We report to each other, and we all represent the will of the government. This replicates the divine-spirit presiding over medieval Europe.

This dialogue is replicated precisely in the answer of a post-modern culture. Anti-modernist musicians reject anything that ended with the collapse of tonality echoing the Neo-classicist, Stravinsky’s sentiments of Messiaen, “All you need to write like him is a bottle of ink.” Yet, this is voluntary prejudice that can be assumed from the historical account. There is no short list to the endless renunciations of music that individuals subjectively insist does not adhere to doctrinal and sound theoretical law even within the boundaries of tonality. The success of a composer was almost synonymous with the amount of sacrilege they professed for theorists and critics(priests and scientists) of the day. Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt, Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy all invoke this rebellion against dogmatic musical structuralism inside the parameters of tonality itself.

Thirdly, while Science continuously and confidently criticizes what we think we know, and reconstructs our reality by what it critiques, it reduces any criticism against itself as synonymous with religious indoctrination, to which it further correlates to naivety or insanity, effectively silencing those who would use the scientific method to question the scientific method. In this way it can divorce itself from the ironic criticism by which it condemns religion; That by its own methods it, itself, yields inconsistencies. This observation should also elucidate the fact that science implies that inconsistency is to be regarded as grounds for dismissal when a claim can not be articulated as definitive.1 Brian Greene laments in the opening stanzas of his survey of String-Theory,

‘Calling it a cover-up would be far too dramatic. But for more than half a century—even in the midst of some of the greatest scientific achievements in history—physicists have been quietly aware of a dark cloud looming on a distant horizon. The problem is this: There are two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests. One is Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the largest of scales: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and beyond to the immense expanse of the universe itself. The other is quantum mechanics, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales: molecules, atoms, and all the way down to subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed to almost unimaginable accuracy virtually all predictions made by each of these theories. But these same theoretical tools inexorably lead to another disturbing conclusion: As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right. The two theories underlying the tremendous progress of physics during the last hundred years—progress that has explained the expansion of the heavens and the fundamental structure of matter—are mutually incompatible.’(Greene, 1999: 1)⁠

In other academic disciplines, such as art, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, even the paradoxes of mathematical theory, such ‘mutually incompatible’ systems are a necessary juxtaposition toward the authenticity of the object under analysis. For instance works by John Zorn such as ‘Forbidden Fruit’(1987) juxtapose instrumentation, textures, mediums, moods, tonality and post-tonality at breakneck speed.

Lastly, Science promulgates itself not as a unique discipline amongst many in the pantheon of other aged and tested systems of study,⁠ but as the only valid system of study; It is thus the new Catholicism.⁠ It has dethroned every other academic undertaking as liberally subjective musings that concern themselves primarily as distractions from reality, and the effect is so prevalent, permeating every aspect of our culture, that to try to point out the fact that science is a fairly new, limited, and unique system in which to compile and experience our reality to a population who has grown to become increasingly unaware of both its simultaneous persistence and limitations, would be met with much the same confusion as explaining the unique experience of being submerged under water to a school of curious and attentive albeit uncomprehending school of fish.

⁠ It is not surprising, then, the 20th century, amidst the music culture has fractured into three main categories that are analogous to the Church, Science, and Post-modern eras of culture. There are those who are anti-modernist and believe that what was old and venerated in Beethoven was on par with refutable artistry. There are those who shunned the former idea and courageously forged into the unknown mapping of the chromatic universe in a means to progress further. In this way, this group employs itself in competition with its spiritual forefathers to overthrow them through reinvention. And there is those who break down the boundaries of time and space, making a distinct divorce from history all together and relying not on their own ‘nose’ to lead the path, but the accumulated inter-subjectivity that manifests itself independently of the objective bickering waged between the two former ideologies.(Lochhead, 2002; 18)⁠ In a worldwhere iTunes and Facebook transmit disparate examples for

consumption and labels for identity and a culture that insists on totality as binary options for reality, it is the values of de-totality that resist the failures of both Church and State religions; Truth is agreed upon not by the self-interest of the individual, but by the mutually respectful debates, opinions and predilections that shape what subjectively transforms into the ‘Objective Truth’ being subjected. The ideologies are shaped and being shaped by the democratic dialogue of a communally-individualistic-complex. In the wake of political and religious failure, human-beings turn to the only object that has abstractly affirmed and expanded truth by transcendent immanence…

⁠

‘SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman — what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women — that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien’

~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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