There are three main issues I wish to discuss here. First, I want to point out the changing pattern of scientific explanation in physics. Briefly speaking, the model of Nature underlying the explanatory schemes has become more realistic. Communication is substituted for causality, or information flow for the simple energy flow described by the equation of motion. The second point I want to make is to explain modern symmetry physics in terms of information theory. Finally, last and not least, my third issue is to show how this new conception of scientific method can help us to understand the human (or life or social) sciences.

Before entering the vast subject that I have determined upon, I must at least make a rapid sketch of the contemporary environment in which we are to place the role and position of music.

The title of the article mentions “industrial society,” an expression often used to designate and compare societies which have evolved economically. But it is necessary to go further and deeper: for the phenomena which are typical of the world today, such as mass-production and consumption, mass communications (or mass media), and mass culture, all these phenomena with which music in our time is confronted, are characteristic of a technical civilisation whose chief traits are found in all industrial societies, not only the Western European and North American, but also the Eastern collective ones.

The term “alienation” designates a state which is simultaneously both cognitive and affective in character.* It involves an awareness of the other and a felt estrangement from it, accompanied with a feeling that this ought not to be so. The “otherness” of the other is a necessary precondition for the feeling of alienation, but the “other” is only a correlate of the “I” in reference to which alone alienation can ever arise. Things are not related by the relation of “I-other,” nor can they possibly be related by it. Even among animals the relation is only implicit, for the consciousness of the “I” is never explicitly there. With man, who is essentially a being conscious of himself, the relation “I-other” constitutes the very essence of his distinctive being in this world.

It is a strange and puzzling fact that philosophers have acted almost as though man were not sexual.

It's as though sex had no significance for human thought, or as though it made no difference that the thinker was also a sexual creature.

This philosophical blind spot has been remarked from time to time by one solitary observer or other. In the last century the German sociologist Georg Simmel noticed that the discussions in Plato's Phaedrus and the Symposium and “the very one-sided reflections of Schopenhauer,” apart from occasional individual comments, “are all that the great thinkers have contributed to this problem.” As Erwin Reisner sees it, philosophy has paid strikingly little attention to this phenomenon so absorbing to the poets. “Indeed, one can almost say, it has industriously ignored and skirted the subject, exactly so, as if it had to fear that it might be corrupted by the notion...”

Some years ago, Vance Packard—neither wholeheartedly a sociologist nor economist, but a voice with a dazzling mastery of all that bears reference to the procedures and jargon of advertising—uttered a cry of alarm, applying himself to the task of taking to pieces a strongly developed socio-economic system: the system of wastage in our opulent societies, with American society topping the bill. In a prefatory image he said: “In a sense the American people are becoming a nation sitting astride a tiger. The Americans have to learn how to consume more and more, or else their magnificent economic machine will turn round on them and devour them.” The idea of consuming more and more involves both the incentive to and the organisation of wastage. The waste-makers, those who organise or create wastage, are as necessary to the American economy as the American economy is to them, thanks to an intimate and indispensable complicity. The super-abundant production of consumer goods calls for the development of a collective ethic of wastage, which, in return, provides for it. But deep down it is preparing its ruin, by the gradual exhaustion of natural resources.

There was the young Marx and the old Marx. There was the young Freud and the old Freud. There was Marxism and Marxisms, Freudianism and Freudianisms. There has even been a Freudo-Marxism. One speaks of Freudo-Marxism because it is after a certain level of understanding of Freud that one comes to Marx, in order to bring the two together in an articulated whole which admits of mediations between the two geniuses of reductive analysis of social man and of human society. Hunger and social effort to satisfy it, on one hand, love and desire aimed at satisfaction, related in an unfathomable way with death, on the other, are established as the constituents of the historic and social nature of Man and of humanity in general coming to grips with the great cosmic whole. (Both Marx and Freud seem to have overlooked the Will: the will to power, indeed the will to possess a will. But another, falling between them, included it: Nietzsche.)

The problem of knowing how to define art, and how to divide it into categories, has always been a serious one for theoreticians and aestheticians. In his major work entitled The Concept of Art in the Past and in the Present, Professor Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, a distinguished Polish aesthetician, studies the origins of the concept of art and the successive modifications which it has undergone from antiquity to today.

In Greece, Rome and the whole of the West in the Middle Ages, art was considered either as a profession or as a science. Together with grammar, rhetoric or geometry, the second category, known as “artes liberales,” also included music, which thus became what we call today musicology, or the science of music. The other category-that of “artes vulgares”-had a more practical character and included among other subjects agriculture, medicine and architecture. In the 12th century, the philosopher Hugh of St. Victor counted among the seven “artes vulgares” a discipline to which he gave the name “theatrica” and which, Professor Tatarkiewicz tells us, comprised not only the theatre but in a general way the art of amusing the people in public, in fact all stadium games, races and circus entertainment. Poetry came under the heading of philosophy.