The fundamental concept of classical science is the differential representation of movement. Classical science studies movement between two points or between two instants of time. Peripatetic physics is based on a static scheme of natural positions, and it only considers movement from the point of view of its limiting points. Its theory of movement does not take account of the local state of moving bodies at every intermediate point of their path. Classical science, on the other hand, deals with instantaneous local states, which, in the special case of a body left to itself, do not change; in the general case, the interactions of bodies consist in acceleration that is proportional to the force applied. Thus, the basic concepts for classical science are the limiting relations between the distance traversed and the time taken, and between speed and time; and these lose their meaning in the absence of an integral concept of moving bodies. Classical science appeared when the differential concept of movement became a system of differential laws, and found its essential mathematical formulation in the infinitesimal calculus. There had already existed a vague and unformed concept of a unitary local event, state, or relationship, which could be subjected to scientific analysis to the extent that it was conditioned by preceding events, states and relationships and itself determined subsequent ones. This concept had not yet been connected to the study of movement, it was sometimes applied to areas very remote from mechanics, while at other times it approached very close to physics, mechanics and mathematics, to the ideas of classical science. It approached very close—but it had not yet entered into these ideas. This was the dawn of classical science.

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.

The destiny of our age is rationalisation, intellectualisation and, above all, a disenchantment with the world. The success of science as a technique of forecasting has broken a spell; there is no longer a complete image of the world that can be revealed by rational knowledge. Scientific activity is no royal road to the gods, nor to the essence of the world, nor to the truth of nature lying hidden behind its outward appearances; the spell of mysterious powers to be discovered or invoked has died away with the multiplication and the success of objective, neutral, purely technical instruments for the mastery of natural phenomena. If science robs the world of enchantment, it is because it offers only instrumental answers to the questions we ask of it.

The explorer who realizes that an island, a passage, an ocean for which he has been searching do not exist is compensated for his disappointment by an adjustment of the map to carry his name for all to appreciate; the ethnographer who pushed the platypodes and the triamatikoi over the brink into fable land had the satisfaction of a gain in the regularity and rationality of our world; but the historian who somewhere between analytical description and synthetic reconstruction discovers the non-existence, or better though less dramatically: the inappro-priateness and functional inoperativeness of his key concept, can do nothing to mask his discomfiture than to set forth his negative conclusion as stringently as he would have its opposite.

Let me begin by defining my subject geographically and chronologically. For the purpose of this paper, by “Mediterranean World,” I have understood, on the one hand, the Levant which included Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent with Egypt at its western terminus, Syria-Palestine forming its western band, and Assyria-Babylonia constituting its eastern bow, and, on the other, Greece and Rome. By India I mean the Indian subcontinent. I shall deal with my subject roughly in four chronological periods, which, for the sake of convenience, I shall designate as Indo-Mesopotamian period, Indo-Anatolian period, Indo-Hellenistic period, and Indo-Roman period.

The uses of economics are many, as are also the methodologies by which its various purposes can be defended or elucidated. In this paper I shall confine my attention, however, to but one of its many aims—the predictive intent that constitutes a distinguishing characteristic of so much economic work. Lest I be accused of claiming that prediction is an integral part of all economics, let me explicitly point out that the discipline has taxonomic, structural, purely formal, normative, and still other aspects, none of which involves prediction, and all of which have their useful roles to play. Nonetheless, I do not think that most economists would disagree with my contention that a predictive purpose lies at the heart of much of economic science today, in particular when that science is used on behalf of policy.

In La Nouvelle Héloïse Rousseau states that everyone uses figurative expressions; he adds that only fools and geometricians express themselves without using metaphor. Can one allow even these two exceptions? It has become increasingly clear in the field of culture that metaphor can be used in a foolish manner: how many doctrines have a dominant analogy at the basis of their reasoning; how many metaphors have become dogmatic as the areas in which they may be applied increase? And if metaphor is central to faulty reasoning and foolish arguments, is it altogether absent from the geometrician's work? The geometrician's categories are certainly limiting in this respect, and it appears paradoxical to wonder whether geometrical concepts, such as a straight line or a point are not figurative expressions borrowed from other fields. However the problem becomes far less paradoxical when one moves from geometry to mathematical astronomy, mechanics and by degrees to the whole of physics. For in most fundamental categories, those which instigate a new field of knowledge, a metaphorical dimension, then become apparent. The further one descends Comte's ladder of science, the more the terminology retains the stamp of the transitional stage from which the concept originated. A straight line, a point, a circle are perhaps first concepts as regards expression and invention. But attraction, natural selection, physiological division of labour, or division of social work bear in their very names the mark of the intellectual transference through which they were formed. With the result that scientific invention does not use non-figurative concepts; it often finds its mode of expression through metaphor. Neither the fool nor the geometrician escape the metaphorical realm of thought, because it is the usual means of expression and conceptualisation. Because of this the metaphor used by the fool and that used by the geometrician link up, and it becomes possible with regard to certain predominating metaphors, to tackle the question of the quality of reasoning and the question of the discovery of knowledge, the study of argument and the study of conceptualisation, together: for beyond the general usage of metaphor, it is the expressive nature of speech itself with which we are primarily concerned.

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.

At first sight, the situations of Venice and of Genoa seem to be almost as identical as mirror images. They are set at the head of the two deepest bays in the Mediterranean, both of them being virtually at the physical centre of that sea, and seemed fated by geography to act as rallying-points for East and West, and as bridge-heads for North and South. This, however, is not overly important: all countries, all nations are, in their own eyes, the physical centre of the Universe. The opportunity is always there, but it needs initiative to take advantage of it. For Venice, just as much as Genoa, had to overcome serious difficulties, both being almost cut off from their hinterland, Venice by the lagoons, Genoa by the mountains. Both cities were republics, and both ended up by having even the name of their supreme magistrate in common: the Doge. The merchandise that they exported and imported, the routes covered by their merchants, the currency, contracts, techniques, beliefs, and prejudices, only differed in a few details. The colonial empires were connected at several points. This made the wars between Venice and Genoa more fierce, but also made their ententes more intimate.

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.

For some years, much effort has been deployed in several countries to put at the disposition of the responsible authorities a presentation as explicit as possible of the costs and advantages which would proceed from the different courses of action among which they have to choose. In the United States this is called “Planning-Programming-Budgeting System” (or PPBS), in France “Rationalisation des Choix Budgétaires” (or RCB), in England “Output Budgeting”.

This paper sketches an analysis of the public realm in Western democracies. It has often been said that there is a decline of public life in advanced industrial societies, and that this decline threatens the nature and function of political democracy. I doubt this. The most that I would claim at this stage is that large masses of the citizenry are excluded from the contemporary political scene, and that the most urgent political problems are discussed by social organizations representing the interest of individuals and groups. This is of philosophical interest; for these organizations, and not individual citizens, are constituting now the public life. It would take me too far afield to show how the new radicalism of the 1960s and many other social and political movements of today reacted against the threatened liquidation of the public realm. My main object is to draw attention to the lack of participation, least of all of political participation, of the citizens, and to answer the question why this happened.

In Brave New World the ability of a woman to creep into bed with one man after another and to do so with enviable and breath-taking capacity, literally and figuratively, was regarded as an admirable and expected accomplishment. Unrestricted and uncritical promiscuity became the New Look in virtue. The only form of Original Sin—at least in the sphere of sex—was to enter into a relationship that expressed the classic sense of romance. This would have been a voluntary and protracted relationship in which a mutually satisfying, sexual relationship was criss-crossed with a chiaroscuro of shared values, sentiments, ideas and goals and, at the same time, was overlain with the mutual exploration, by both partners, of one another's fullness of being. Today, in Maslow's terminology, this kind of relationship between the sexes would be called B-Love, that is, Being-Love or the deep affection for the total qualities of the loved one and not solely her face and curvaceousness or his vigor and pocketbook. In Brave New World “love” consisted of sexual togetherness, that is, of free and frequent access to the opposite sex. Privacy, in this, the most intimate and potentially nurturant of human relationships, was taboo. A deep and focused affection—one capable of yielding a type of experience which can enable both men and women to transcend the limitations of their everyday being-in-the-world—was an aberration.

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...”

Chosen by English-speaking anthropologists to designate the ritual buffoons discovered among the North American Indians, in Africa and in Oceania, the word “clown” is no misnomer. Our circus clowns are the descendants of these puzzling ceremonial figures, and it is perhaps thanks to their filiation to them (confirmed, as we shall see, by etymology) that our spleenish makers of laughter owe their fascination and their capacity to survive the vicissitudes of the stage. But we shall also see that in tribal society a clown becomes a clown only in a subsidiary way, the origins of this figure going back to a complex of causes having little to do with the jocularity assumed to be his unique purpose to arouse, but which overlays and conceals the true nature of his original role.

Translated by Raoul Makarius.

The great imperial or royal cities of the medieval Mediterranean world were, by their nature, active centres of commerce; in them all the different cultures of the maritime countries, and, often, of those from the ultramontane regions, or of countries beyond the deserts, met face to face. Thus, for example, flourished Cordova, Constantinople, and Palermo.

In Genoa, the consequences of the meetings of the different cultures were not dependent on political power, nor on the extent of empire, nor on the personality or vagaries of any particular sovereign. The town was not a great administrative centre, nor was it a centre of intellectual or religious activity. Although a beautiful town, well built in solid stone, and endowed with imposing palaces, Genoa was not even the centre of a particularly active artistic life. The cultures met because of the very nature of the city, its essential functions. Genoa is a merchants' city, open to distant cultures uniquely by virtue of trade.

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.

The imaginary is rightly called a power of contestation and of creation. Insofar as such a power wields images drawn from practical processes and dry abstraction, it is assumed from the first that we are able to evoke such images. This faculty, which can be compromised by certain developments and types of culture, must first of all be named. Let us call it, as Charles Fourier might have done: image-evocative power. By postulating its existence, we are acknowledging the fact that we notice it, and acknowledging the links that attach it to Nature. But we are also noticing the things that threaten it in an era of technology which tends towards analytical reduction and operational formalism.

It is often difficult to distinguish between the animals of fable and those of zoology. The sphinx, the chimera, the centaur and the hippogriff belong, and always have belonged to the first category. But animals such as the unicorn have long been catalogued and described in works of natural science. In the seventeenth century, a catalogue such as John Johnston's A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts, written in Latin, translated into English and published in London in 1678, still distinguishes eight different types with corresponding illustrations. Indeed, a unicorn is no more improbable than a narwhal, whose horn, incidentally, was long thought to be the unicorn's. If we thus confuse real animals with mythological ones, what becomes of the habits, size and appearance given to them by travellers on returning from the far countries where they claim to have seen them?

In a book which appeared some thirty years ago under the title: The Future of Culture in Egypt, our learned friend Taha Husein put forward a seductive thesis which was as hard to accept in toto as it was to reject: the relation of the culture, literature and science of his country to the West, or more exactly to that Mediterranean culture which is the meeting-point of East and West. Ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic, even the Arab and the Moslem, all subscribed to this “Mediterraneanism,” to coin a phrase, instead of being linked purely and simply to the East, where a scholarly and traditional attitude delighted in classifying it. This abrupt turn to the West is quite justified as far as the Hellenistic period of the country is concerned; but with regard to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Fatimids and the Mamelukes, and without under-estimating its ties with the other Mediterranean countries, one cannot overlook all the aspects which linked it to the Near East, to Babylonian Mesopotamia, to the Arabia of Mahomet, and to the Persia of the Abbassids. But the merit of this paradoxical book, as is often the case in Taha Husein's work, is its vigourous insistence, albeit in a manner which is too rigid and exaggerated, on this undeniable fact: the unity of Mediterranean culture in Antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, although this is contrary to the opinions of Henri Pirenne, which, beyond the differences of religious creed and political allegiance, of language and custom, touches the intellectual heart of man, touches, as it were, his mental predicaments, touches a common spiritual patrimony. More than in literature and art, this “common” quality (or community) is well illustrated in the appreciation of knowledge, in the study and elaboration of knowledge down the centuries.