Lyndon H. LaRouche
Classical Revolution / Révolution classique
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MUSIC & STATECRAFT
How Space Is Organized

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Printable version / Version imprimable

Author’s Prefatory Note on Music & Science: J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert, most notably, present us with music crafted to conform to what, viewed in retrospect, is implicitly a Riemannian conception of the characteristics of knowable physical space-time as a whole. Nonetheless, relevant hoaxes expressing a contrary opinion, continue to proliferate, some in the name of what are purported to be scientific explanations of Johannes Kepler’s discoveries, even, in one exceptionally disgusting, recent, Wikipedia-related case, planted, like a fungus, on the NASA web-site. The most essential facts about that latter hoax itself, will be identified, elsewhere, in testimony from relevant first-hand witnesses.[1]

Here, in this report, I stress a crucial, related, underlying issue; with what is written here, I now take the discussion of the underlying, ontological idea of Kepler-Riemann space itself, to its appropriate, needed, still deeper level.

It is stressed here, below, in the main body of this report, that a competent grasp of the form of organization expressed as the principle of gravitation in Kepler’s Solar system, requires the same rejection of the usually supposed real existence of a simply visible space-time, which remains crucial for any honest and competent grasp of Kepler’s work as a whole today.

That rejection, as I state it simply, as illustration, in these prefatory remarks, must always be raised as an emphatic denial of the separate functional existence of either a simply visible, or simply auditory space-time. That denial must be enforced in favour of a realization, that, essentially, it is precisely the apparently absolute contradiction between the two contrasted, naive notions of sense-certainty, sight and hearing, which is the required foundation, as in the notion of a "wavicle," for a competent practice of physical science in general, but emphatically so for any competent study of Kepler’s work.

The contradiction between those two senses (as, with the other senses), which, when they are combined in the method of experimental science, as a manifold, provides a single conception located within a higher quality of state of mind than is known among even many professionals today. This is a state of mind, above the superficiality of sense-perceptions as such, a higher, visual-auditory standpoint, which then becomes both the principal, and the principled component of that single experience of reality. This approximation, the visual-auditory manifold, then, serves, exactly as Kepler did in The Harmony of the World, as the replacement for a naive reading of sense-experience.

This manifold, when employed in a task-oriented search for a principle enclosing the universe, then serves as a single, uniquely human conception of a type otherwise known only to the person of the Creator: that must be understood to signify the will to discover the means to change the behaviour of the given form of the universe, either in part, or, potentially, on a broader scale. The method required by this higher, creative (i.e., anti-entropic) form of a single conception, must, therefore, replace the philosophical reductionist’s naive devotion to mere perception of a statistical repeatability located within the fixed confines of what is, actually, an ontologically non-existent presumption of sense-certainty.

The crucial distinction of human mental behaviour from that specific to the sense-perceptual manifold expressed as the behaviour of an animal species, is man’s specifically unique purpose, and ability to actually create, which is, essentially, the wilful intention which translates into the actual existence of a capability to violate the oligarchical Olympian Zeus’s ban against human knowledge of how to make seeming miracles of discovery of useful universal principles, to unleash knowledge of how man must change, first of all, the behaviour of man himself, as his own behaviour, and increased power, as a species, within the universe.

Thus, a proverbial Satan, typified by the Olympian Zeus and his pantheon, is the idealized prototype of the real-life oligarch who degrades men and women into the likeness of beasts, and therefore that Zeus, with the Delphi cult’s evil-twin lackeys, Apollo and Dionysus, serves the purpose of poets and other creative thinkers as the Satanic archetype of all imperialist tyrants, who appears to man as a beast among beasts, a beast, like a creature from H.G. Wells’ fictional Dr. Moreau, transforming men and women, his subjects and other victims, into the behavioural likeness of beasts. So, Delphi’s Nietzschean Dionysus, like the post-World-War II Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the "Frankfurt School" existentialists and former Freiberg Nazi professor Martin Heidegger, contributed toward the destruction of culture in Europe, and also, similarly, the savagely irrationalist "Authoritarian Personality" dogma of the cult of Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, et al. within the U.S.A.[2]

Thus, when this matter is viewed so, the case of Zeus has profound implications for the contrary standpoint of Classical musical composition and the latter’s performance; but, these implications also have a correspondingly profound importance for the comprehension of physical science generally, and for physical economy in particular. The systemic destruction of Classical musical culture, like the destruction of Classical drama’s performance, as by the existentialism-ridden pestilence of the circles of the post-war Paris Review of Teddy Goldsmith, John Train, et al., or Stephen Spender, is an important example of this.

Competent science and Classical art each begin, when the naive sense-certainty specific to virtually illiterate men and women, is put aside. The senses, such as, principally, seeing and hearing, are to be considered only as, like the other scientific instruments, built-in instruments, delivered in a package with the newborn human infant, instruments to be employed in aid of the socially replicatable discoveries of universal physical principles.

The fact of the rich development of the mind of a Helen Keller, who lacked a functioning sense of sight or hearing, should have reminded any thoughtful person, that it is only the human mind itself, which is the seat of knowledge respecting practicable knowledge of the world which surrounds us, even when we can reach that mind which is imprisoned within a place without sight or hearing, only by indirect means.

In fact, she created, within her mind, a functional, social mapping of the universe which, in effect, corresponded functionally to the map of the social life of the person with full sight and hearing. She developed her own map which served the same purpose for her functioning as a social human being, as if her mental map of experience had been, socially, that of a sighted person with normal hearing. To that end, she generated, which is to say "created," that functional map. With help, yes. With great need of that help, yes. But, after all that, she herself created it within herself.

The point I make here, also corresponds to the case of Carl Gauss’s and Bernhard Riemann’s collaboration with Wilhelm Weber on the true principle of electrodynamics, contrary to the foolish (and also nasty) Grassmann later: Weber et al. generated knowledge of a set of experimentally provable principles, a "map," discovered by the developed, sovereign cognitive powers of the individual human mind.[3] The leading admirers of foolish science have not accepted that crucial-experimentally created map, from that time, to the present day!

When the needed improvement in the method of judgement of experience has been made, we must, then, experience a revolutionary change in the way we must think about not mere space as such, but physical space-time. Hermann Minkowski’s famous 1907 argument, is a celebrated example of this fact; but, as I shall explain here, we must go much deeper than the otherwise able Minkowski did, then, with his faulty, Lobatchevskian, rather than Riemannian conception of a non-Euclidean physical geometry. For understanding this fact, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven will prove very helpful.

The crucial central feature of the greatly needed reform in the definition of scientific knowledge, must be premised on the actual inseparability of competent physical scientific method from the great musical reform by Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean Bach’s reform as also developed by his great Classical disciples. That is the vehicle of the true principles of poetry and drama; it is the science of insight into the proper true, dynamic nature of the role of the individual within society. Since every true fundamental, or relative discovery, is new to relevant forms of human experience, science without Classical poetic expression, as irony, is not true science.[4]

Now, look, on that account, at the function of what we know as the principled character of the social development of Classical music, as by Johann Sebastian Bach—the Bach of the Bachs.

I submit this report, as a work of conscience, which I would have wished to present as evoking a fond recollection of a great musician of our time, and very dear friend of decades, whose company I continue to miss, very much. He would probably greet my foregoing suggestion, with his typical bursts of that quality of laughter otherwise specific to the truly creative artistic thinkers I have known; my suggestion is, that, thus, after what I write here, departed scientist and author C.P. Snow, of Two Cultures fame, might now repose in sweet contentment.

To Continue... This article appears in the September 14, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review .