Those Who Devote Their Lives

Precisely Because Galilean Science Is, In The Formation Of Its Concepts, The Technic Of A Specific Lebenswelt , It Does Not And Cannot Transcend This Lebenswelt . It Remains Essentially Within The Basic Experiential Framework And Within The Universe Of Ends Set By This Reality.

A Work Of Art Can Be Called Revolutionary If, By Virtue Of The Aesthetic Transformation, It Represents, In The Exemplary Fate Of Individuals, The Prevailing Unfreedom And The Rebelling Forces, Thus Breaking Through The Mystified (and Petrified) Social Reality, And Opening The Horizon Of Change (liberation).

The Neo-conservative Critics Of Leftist Critics Of Mass Culture Ridicule The Protest Against Bach As Background Music In The Kitchen, Against Plato And Hegel, Shelley And Baudelaire, Marx And Freud In The Drugstore. Instead, They Insist On Recognition Of The Fact That The Classics Have Left The Mausoleum And Come To Life Again, That People Are Just So Much More Educated. True, But Coming To Life As Classics, They Come To Life As Other Than Themselves; They Are Deprived Of Their Antagonistic Force, Of The Estrangement Which Was The Very Dimension Of Their Truth.

The Music Of The Soul Is Also The Music Of Salesmanship. Exchange Value, Not Truth Value Counts. On It Centers The Rationality Of The Status Quo, And All Alien Rationality Is Bent To It.

The Truth Of Literature And Art Has Always Been Granted (if It Was Granted At All) As One Of A "higher" Order, Which Should Not And Indeed Did Not Disturb The Order Of Business. What Has Changed In The Contemporary Period Is The Difference Between The Two Orders And Their Truths. The Absorbent Power Of Society Depletes The Artistic Dimension By Assimilating Its Antagonistic Contents. In The Realm Of Culture, The New Totalitarianism Manifests Itself Precisely In A Harmonizing Pluralism, Where The Most Contradictory Works And Truths Peacefully Coexist In Indifference.