The Furtwängler Principle

Lyndon LaRouche: Today, we are going to inaugurate something which is unusual for this theater, shall we say, but it is quite relevant to what we do in this place, usually. The subject itself is one of the greatest accomplishments in science in the past century or so, and that is the development of the principle of Vernadsky and company, as others, which come into, what is music? What is musical composition; what are the principles of it, what is the relationship of this to physical science? What is the relationship of this to the way in which mankind should organize his and her affairs?

Matthew Ogden: Well, I think that the subject of our discussion can come under the heading today of “Escaping the Prison of Sense Experience.” And as you've said many times, now recently, on this forum, and also in some recent writings, the best means by which we can escape the walls of sense-experience as such, is via Classical art, and specifically, Classical music, as performed, and understood, by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Furtwängler was a conductor in the first half of the 20th Century. And just as a cautionary note, the standard of Furtwängler is the key to this: that we are not discussing Classical music as it's conceived of today, the kind of entertainment that you usually get over the radio. But this is a rigorous standard, which has the quality, in and of itself, of scientific principle, which is unfortunately lost in our culture; after two to three generations of a real de-generation, most people in our culture today have lost a living connection to the understanding, to the experience, of what the Furtwängler Principle is.

And it's precisely this: I would call it the “Furtwängler Principle.” Because the principle which he expressed repeatedly, not only in his performances, but also in his writings, is not only a principle, which must inform how music should be performed and understood, but, in fact, the Furtwängler Principle is a universal physical principle, which must inform and redefine our view of the entire ontology of the physical universe, as such.

`Between the Notes'

Now, just to introduce the subject: What is this phenomenon that we describe as the Furtwängler Principle? What is it that makes Furtwängler's performances so characteristically unique? It has been described by Mr. LaRouche, that his first experience of hearing a recorded performance of a symphony, in this case a Tchaikovsky symphony, by Furtwängler, after the conclusion of World War II, while he was stationed at an Army base outside of Calcutta, was that of total shock--something completely distinct from anything that he'd experienced before. And I believe the way you described it, Lyn, was being practically pulled off of your chair, physically, by the relentless suspension of this performance, from opening to close. This remarkable coherence of the entirety, as a unity, from the beginning to the end.

Also, this has been described by another conductor,¹ who had the experience of sitting in on rehearsals of Furtwängler's, when he came to Milan, as an “electric tension,” which would pervade the orchestra pit when Furtwängler would even walk in. And it's a tension which was all-pervasive, which pervaded not only the tones as such, but the silences between the audible tones, when there's no sound.

And then, most recently, Lyn has described this as the “pre-tone” and the “after-tone,” which one hears in the mind, as distinct from the audible tone, as such, as heard by the ear.

Furtwängler's predecessor and mentor was a conductor named Arthur Nikisch, to whom he grants much of his experience of what this living principle was, having heard Nikisch's conducting. Nikisch was described as a conductor who was able to give an ineffable, indefinable, mysterious feeling which existed “between the notes.” And I think this idea of what happens “between the notes” is the characteristic phenomenon which we hear in Furtwängler's music. And for the sensitive mind, for someone who has not been made mentally deaf, and whose soul has not been crusted over by popular music and a generally cynical culture, which we have today, upon listening to a performance, a recorded performance--anything, of Wilhelm Furtwängler, one will hear this immediately--and it will grab you, too! And you will have, invariably, extreme difficulty in putting this into words.

It's this “mystery” itself, which allows us to, as I said, peek into that world, which lies outside the prison walls of our sense experience.

What Furtwängler's secret was, ontologically: If the mind can experience something other than, something which is independent, and comes prior to sensation as such, then that means that the mind is not contingent upon sense experience. It's not an aggregate, the summation of all of its sense experience, prior to that moment. Rather, the sensory experience itself, which comes from a lower chemical or physical domain, becomes subordinated to, and contingent upon the more necessary substance of mind. And not only does this turn on its head the reductionism of the way that we're told to view the human mind today, and invert it, turning it completely inside-out, but it also allows us to invert the entire bottom-up ordering of the universe, to establish what's actually a clear, top-down hierarchy, an ontological hierarchy of a creative universe as such.

So, with that said, I would assert that Furtwängler understood this, in its full implications--the full universal implications of this idea--which he discovered from inside his world of music, but understood this as a universal principle of the creative human mind, and of the creative universe.

Just to put some meat on that assertion, this is one short passage of one of the writings of Furtwängler. He said: “Let us consider the activity of artistic creation. When we look more closely at this process, we find that we can distinguish two levels. On the first, each individual element combined with those adjacent to it, to form larger elements. And these larger elements then combine with others, and so on, a logical outward growth, from the part to the whole. But on the other level, the situation is the reverse. The given unity of the whole controls the behavior of the individual elements within it, down to the smallest detail. The essential thing to observe, is that in any genuine work of art, these two levels complement each other, so that the one only becomes effective, when put together with the other.”²

Classical Music and Physical Science

This is one of the most ontologically precise statements of scientific principle that you could ask for, from anybody, in the entirety of the 20th Century. And it's not a coincidence that this echoes several of the greatest scientists that were alive at exactly the same time--two specifically, Albert Einstein and Max Planck. And not coincidentally, both of these scientists required as their recreational activity--actually, the moment in which they, as Einstein said in his own words, made their greatest scientific discoveries--the practice of Classical musical performance. Planck was a very skilled pianist and organist, and Einstein was a skilled violinist, who played in many string quartets. Vernadsky himself, also a contemporary, said that some of his greatest insights into the living quality of the universe, came when he was listening to great Classical music.

So, this is not a coincidence: that Furtwängler, a musician, also turns out to be a great physical scientist in his own right. Because the very playground of the human mind, for the human mind to discover its identity as a creative substance, and to then see the reflection of the universe in that, is physical science. And this is what we're participating in, with the performance and understanding of great Classical art.

So, it's also not a coincidence, that what Furtwängler stated in the passage that I just read--that the given unity of the whole dictates the behavior, down to the smallest detail of each individual elemental part--that this echoes the greatest philosopher of the last three centuries, at least, Gottfried Leibniz, who, in many places in his writings, in the Principles of Metaphysics, in The Monadology, in an essay he wrote on the “Ultimate Origination of the Universe,” everywhere in his writings, exactly the same idea is expressed: that nowhere in finite things as such, or the aggregate of all the finite things, can we find the sufficient reason for that finite thing. But rather, the existence of a superior substance, which necessarily has to lie outside the finite thing, or the aggregate of all finite things, a dominant One, which lies outside and above these things as such, is the only place in which we can locate the ontologically sufficient reason for the existence of finite things.

And so, it's absolutely not a coincidence, that what Furtwängler discovered is not exclusively a principle of music per se, but rather, is a universal physical principle, which contains within it the ontology of the entire universe. Because--and this is the significance of Leibniz, and also the significance of LaRouche: When you start from the standpoint of the existence of a Creator, which is that necessary substance, which has created all of the finite things; and then the fact that man is in the image of that Creator--when you start from that, then, only then, can you understand what we're experiencing, as a sacred experience, with the performance and composition of Classical music.

Now, what I want to have some fun with momentarily, is taking a look at what the Furtwängler Principle allows us to do, to overthrow all of our ingrained and habituated notions of linear, chronological clock-time.

If it's true, as Furtwängler stated in the passage that I quoted, that you have a simultaneous, dynamic, mutual reciprocity between the whole and the parts, with the dominance belonging to the whole, then, where--and also when--does that whole, in a piece of Classical music, exist? If the reason, or the cause of the existence of any of the parts can not exist in the parts alone, can not exist in the finite parts themselves, then it's this superior whole which dictates the behavior and the very existence of all of these parts as such, then where does that whole exist, if it can not exist in any moment of experienced, so-called time?

So, if we're talking about something which can't exist anywhere in sensed experience, and can't exist anywhere within the parts of this mere succession of tones, as such, then at no moment, can the sensed experience, can the mental experience of the whole be perceived by the senses. However, if this whole must exist at all times, and always dictating the behavior of all its parts, the question is: Where and when can we locate the existence of this unifying whole?

If you put yourself into the shoes, for a moment, of a performer, and understand that at every moment of this experienced process, as such, there has to be, necessarily, the yet-to-be-completed totality existing within the mind's ear of the conductor, then you're dealing with something which contradicts all ideas of linear clock-time as such! You're talking about something which lies completely outside of the moment in time, lies completely outside of the idea of mere sequential time, and you're dealing with a domain in which the conductor himself--and Furtwängler describes this vividly--is as if listening to the future, as if listening to the whole upon completion, which has not yet occurred in sensual experience. You haven't yet arrived there, for the experience of the senses, but one is listening backwards, from the standpoint of a non-experienced, or not-yet-experienced, future totality of the whole.

And so, this listening “from the future,” as he navigates the unfolding of each of the parts in the present, this is the experience of the performer, this is the experience of Furtwängler, the conductor. And this is what Lyn, in various places, has called “the memory of the future,” where you actually have the echoing of the future, into the “ear” of the present.

And so, this can not exist as isolated from the other, because the coming-into-being, the becoming of this whole, is something which is unfolded over the course of experienced time, but the other directionality of listening backwards from future-time, is this interaction of the whole, as situated above time as such, and outside of experienced time, the interaction of this whole, and then the process of the parts of the temporal performance in time: The interaction of the “above-time” with the “in-time”--this is the mental experience of the performer.

`Near' Sound and `Far' Sound

And one way in which Furtwängler expresses this, what I would call a “dynamic quality of musical space-time,” is, he uses two terms: He uses the expression, the Nahören, which you could say is the “near-sighted sound of the present moment”; and the Fernhören, which is the “sound from afar,” the “far-sighted sound” of the whole, of the future upon completion of the totality.³

And it's this constant interaction, the constant collision, between Nahören and Fernhören, which is the experience, in each moment of passionate performance, of this piece of music. Furtwängler says that the two of them meet and intersect at each moment. And it's this collision, this intersection between listening to the present from the future, and listening to the future from the present, which is the relentless tension, which expresses itself as the experience of preceding preconsciously, and also the ghostly after-presence of the tone, as such, as simultaneously experienced in the human mind. So, this dual directionality, of listening to the present from the future, and to the future from the present, is what Furtwängler described.

Now, significantly, this same Fernhören of Furtwängler was rather famously described by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a passage from a letter I think he wrote to his sister, that describes his experience, what it means to be inside the mind of a composer. And in the same way that Furtwängler describes this Fernhören, Mozart's description was an “overhearing” of a piece, “as if from above,” which is not a succession of parts, it's not a sequence of tones, or a mere succession of phrases, but something that occurs one after another, not something which occurs all at once, instantaneously, as if in a single breath, in a single moment. He uses the description of seeing a beautiful face: We don't see its parts, we see the face in a single instant.

So, this experience, of the “hearing from above,” or the Fernhören of the whole, of the unity of the whole--where does Mozart say that this experience takes place? Nowhere in sense experience, nowhere in the succession of mere chemical or physical sensations as such, but in the imagination.

And if we're understanding the mere shadowland of sensed experience as the pale shadows cast, as if from the unheard melodies, from the imagination--to bring this back to our point of ontology: If the whole is more real, in terms of substance, than the contingent, subordinate parts, then must not this imagination--the only domain in which this supra-temporal whole can all at once exist--be therefore necessarily more real in terms of substance, than the world that we sense? The world that we think we taste, see, hear, and we think of as being real?

As we saw from Leibniz, this is necessarily so.

And so, therefore, I think, with this understanding, and allowing ourself, out of the corner of our eye, to understand this world which exists, which can be accessed most efficiently for the sensitive soul and the sensitive mind, through the standard of performance of Classical art as set by Wilhelm Furtwängler, we've at least glimpsed the world that lies outside of the walls of the prison of our sense-perception.

The Future Shapes the Present

LaRouche: There is a complement to what Matt's just presented, in my own work in economic forecasting. Because every forecaster I've run into--that is, in the formal area of economic forecasting--has been intrinsically incompetent (Figure 1. And the reason is simply, as we've done studies at this table and so forth on the life-cycle, the process of living processes within our universe as we know it: that the future shapes the present.

Now, that's what I do. Every forecaster I run up against, would-be forecaster, has been intrinsically a failure, incompetent, because the future, just as in the case of our studies of living processes of the principle of the future, which we call “growth,” or “development,” or “revolution,” or whatever, a principle is added to the repertoire which changes the character of the whole process.

Now, most people in economics are conditioned to believe that the deductive method is the method that determines the present economy. And every economist I've known on this matter has been incompetent, and is incompetent, because they always take the so-called “realistic,” deductive approach. Now, the characteristic of living processes generally, and the characteristic of the human mind, the characteristic of a successful economic forecaster, which I claim to be, is precisely that you are anticipating the future.

Now, the question of the future in economics takes a very specific form: You are defining a change, a change in what you're doing. You are not deducting from what you know, you are creating something new that takes you beyond. And all creative artists, all creative scientists think that way. Economists, generally, do not. There are some economists who have a stroke of genius in them, but it's not the way they were trained in their profession. They've gone outside their profession and they become competent by reaching into the area of creativity. Creativity is simply recognizing a future which lies beyond experience. Creativity means searching for a future event, a future development, which does not exist in the present or past. That's creativity.

And what does that mean? Well, in physical science, as applied to economics, you have an innovation of some quality. The easiest way to explain this kind of thing is with physical science, when you make a new discovery of a new principle, and essentially that's what they call it. Creativity in mathematics or in physics, is always discovering a new principle that you didn't have before; it's discovering a principle the other guys didn't have. The other guy will take the deductive approach, stick in there, defend himself deductively by saying, “experience has proven to me, that BOOM!”

And it means the guy's a failure! He has failed from the beginning, because he has failed to recognize the importance of the discovery of a principle. And to have a principle, we do that, by what? We define a problem: We define a failure in the system. We seek out, to imagine what the secret to that failure can be.

And that's the same thing in music.

Mankind is essentially distinguished from the animal by creativity. That's the nature of mankind, the essential nature of mankind--it's creativity. It is always reaching into the future. It is always discovering a principle that did not exist before. And in making discoveries like this sort of thing, once you get into a state of anticipation, a moment of suspension, in any time you're doing something creative, in all my experience in this sort of thing, there's always a moment of tension, and you wonder if you can make the next leap to the next level.

And the competent economist--they're very rare; they mostly imitate something that was forgotten and they figure it out again, and say, “Oh, this was wonderful, we should have considered this before.” But in all scientific work, it's the same. You recognize that everything you now are doing, is probably intrinsically stupid. Not that it was stupid in the past, but it is stupid going into the future. And if you can not make that gesture of getting into the future, as like a surprise, the effect of having a surprise of discovery--not only a surprise, but you realize that it's valid, that it works, it can be used. And the same thing in music. The same thing as all Classical artistic composition.

And the problem in today's society is, there are very few people who are capable of thinking creatively. What happens in music is an example of this: the degeneration of music which has gone on, both in discovery--I mean, Brahms is almost the last scientist of music; there are other cases which reflect the same thing, but when Brahms died, music was almost dead, except for echoes from the recent past.

And that was a long process: You had a period from Bach on, which was a great progress of discovery! Bach was a complete discovery! Discovery upon discovery, upon discovery! It's the same as the principle of forecasting.

So, the difference between man and the beast, is the beast is like an accountant. The beasts think like accountants, and accountants often think like beasts. Whenever you've had to deal with one, you'd know that. So that this principle of the future, the experience of the future, the future as a change for the better, a change for advancement, is a discovery of a new principle.

And this is expressed concisely in the work of Furtwängler, and all of us who have been exposed to Furtwängler as I have, have always had this sensation: You know you're listening to the future! That whatever his subject is, you're talking about the future of that subject-matter. Just as we should be doing in everything.

But we live in a society which is highly decadent. There's not much intelligence. Even the so-called scientists aren't too intelligent these days. They get less and less so. There is a process of degeneration which is going on now, which is carrying us toward the threat of the destruction of the human species. We're close to that now: Why? Because we didn't discover. Because we adopted looking into the past, or looking just to the present--like an animal, not like a human being! You try to keep pace with current opinion, you try to fit in, which makes you stupid.

And only with this sense of shame, of not being creative, the sense that you're doing the same old thing, when you should be doing something new, and fresh, that solves problems, that opens doors to things that you have never done before. Going to new planets, hmm? Going into space. Facing the problems of the defense of mankind, in terms of the Solar System. Something new, something fresh! Keep ahead of the process of deterioration and stagnation.

Anyway. And I think we should also point out some of the implications of our dear friends.

On the Subject of Riemann

Jason Ross: Well, on the subject of Riemann, first, that was really fun: Because music really provides an affirmative view of what so often seems to be created negatively or provocatively, or in an anticipatory fashion in the sciences, and in music you can affirm it in a much clearer way. And for Riemann, the creation of new entireties was the primary substance of the universe, it wasn't the parts. When you take that away, you've got a real flatness. You don't have a lively personality any more. When you're in the prison of the senses, everything is flat, and there's no room for actual growth in it any more. In reality, the universe itself has a very complex personality, one in which you could say we play a role in developing, by our ongoing dialogue with it, by our changing conceptions of it, by our work that we do in changing it and shaping it. It is a real dialogue, it's a real musical dialogue.

Just one thing about Furtwängler: With some conductors, you can describe their conducting style almost as a shtik. Like, “this guy really likes to draw out things,” or “this guy really, he's got...” You can describe something about the notes and the way they perform notes and passages. When you try to describe Furtwängler, it ends up becoming a series, if you're talking about pieces or the actual notes, it ends up being a very dense specificity. Because the pieces are distinct, they have a distinct idea, a distinct personality. So, at best, when you describe him as a person, or as a conductor, you end up doing it in a very different way from the way you describe other conductors, I believe.

So, on the use of Riemann in this, and understanding economics in particular, just yesterday some of us went to a Global Space Exploration conference in Washington, D.C., and one of the discussion panels was about understanding the value of the space program. And it was a clear problem for everybody, that they didn't really have a way of distinguishing--I talked to the people afterwards--between the physical profit of science, and the financial profit of investing in the stock market; that they didn't really have a way of getting that across to people, or really have a good framework for understanding it themselves.

I'd like to bring up one specific example of what Riemann did, in terms of developing a non-localized idea of change. Typically, these terrible economists, these bad forecasters that Lyn was just describing, they see an economy as a system, at best, but a system that is composed of pieces, and then ordering among them.

To give a geometric example: The difference between a sphere and a watermelon is one where a large variety of local changes have been made. The sphere has been stretched out, and if you looked at it as a bunch of little pieces made out of watermelon skin, they've changed, they've deformed; you've gone from a sphere to a watermelon (Figures 2 and 3). The distinction between say, a three- and a five-axis mill, or the U.S. economy before and after the Apollo program, where the payback from Apollo was measured, when it's measured in dollars, has the problem that the dollars after Apollo weren't the same as the dollars before.⁴ With a scientific investment, the payback isn't measurable as a scalar with the cost. With financial investments, you

invest money, you make money.

When you do that with Apollo, the different transcendental economy that you've got afterwards is expressed in a direct analogue, geometrically, with the difference between a torus and a sphere. Just to describe one difference between the two: On the sphere, any loop that you draw on a sphere, you can condense down to a point (Figures 4-7). That's not the case on a torus. If you've got a torus, and you can draw a loop that goes around it, like a little meridian line, you can't shrink that down to nothing. It's an irreducible loop (Figures 8 and 9).

That distinction between the two is a global difference. It's not one you can arrive at by any series of local changes: If you took a sphere, there's no way of changing any of the relationships among all the parts of that sphere, to arrive at a torus. It's a qualitative distinction.

The Personality of Creation

When you look at the problems that are plaguing modern science right now, say, just the failures in quantum mechanics, where, with Niels Bohr and others, the solution they proposed was to give up on ever finding the real cause of quantum effects, they ended up saying, “Look, we're going to stick with the senses. We're going to stick with the description of appearances, and we're going to, in fact, try to prove that it's impossible to know what the cause of these events are.”

In reality, you don't really get a proof of randomness with their work. What you get is a lack of real study into the principles that are driving it from the future.⁵ For example, life and cognition, where time doesn't operate the same way as it does in the abiotic.

So, I think, overall, if you look at what the method of science is, what the method of Kepler's vicarious hypothesis was, you have a system that you're inside, you've got a way of thinking that you're inside; and then, you end up getting outside of it, through discovery, through metaphor, but not in a way that you're reaching to an already-existing outside. That is, the complexity is created from within, by a process inside, however, which creates a higher complexity. So it has the feeling of stepping outside of a current state. However, that creation exists from within it, exists from what we do, standing inside of it.

On the universe as a whole, that characteristic activity is the personality of Creation. I was thinking about the issue of the pre-tone, that was being discussed: That when you've got the approach of Kepler's vicarious hypothesis, he creates an insoluble paradox that causes the hearer or the reader, to get a premonition of the sound of a solution, that doesn't yet exist; and creating that premonition in the mind of the hearer, is the key to communication. That creation of a premonition is what exists in successful musical composition, that doesn't exist in a collection of sounds.

So, I was struck by how well music, affirmatively creates a concept of what we might call it “outsidedness.” It creates affirmatively a very clear idea of creativity, that you just can't do without it. The lessons we can learn from music are essential for a scientific approach, and the lack of a scientific, the lack of a Classical musical culture, is one of the major factors in the deterioration of science, because the concept of the universe as a whole becomes degraded to one of a world of sense-impressions that are around us, and the ability to grab onto the true reality, fades.

So, Planck and Einstein referred to this explicitly, on the question of quantum mechanics, where, in a discussion, the reference was made to Bach's fugues, that the standard idea of time, sensory time, is going to have to go, if we are to resolve some of the most troublesome problems of modern physics. That the standard concept of time will not allow a resolution if they have the quantum paradoxes. And the higher idea of time that we get from life, or most clearly, from musical composition, that's going to be key, to then resolving, what might seem to be a physical problem, but one whose resolution can't lie in abiotic physics. There's no way in an abiotic laboratory that we're going to resolve quantum physics, for example.

LaRouche: Yep, exactly. It's the same thing. It's always reaching toward the relative future. And also, it's the difference between dead things and living things, because the process of life is what's crucial. All the things that don't fit the calculus, usually belong to the department of life. So that the action in the universe is motivated and controlled by life, the action of life, not life being controlled by the action itself. And that's the difference. It's the precursor viewpoint.

Ross: And they're precursors of a very specific, new type of personality, a very specific new kind of life. It's not flat. It's not a combination of the already-existing, it's something that's new in a way that's newly specific.

The Precursor Principle

LaRouche: Well, this goes back right to the musical question: The composition of Classical musical composition as such, depends upon the precursor principle. Otherwise, there's no music. The music lies in the precursor function. It does not lie in the elements, but only in the precursor function. And if you don't have an efficient precursor function, you're just making noise.

And that's the point! That's the difference. Because the sense of life always involves this kind of precursor sense; you always get a precursor, an anticipation, that sort of thing. The solution lies there, the meaning lies there.

And we train people in schools and otherwise, “behave yourself,” they say. And you say, “Just when you say that, I'm going to defy you, because you make me angry. I'm disgusted with you. You're trying to tell me to shut up about my precursors! And I don't want to hear any more from you, because we've heard that stuff before.”

And that's exactly it: We have, in every area of life, in every area of human activity, specifically human, we have this precursor function. That's what distinguishes us from the dead. The non-living processes are what we call “dead” processes. Now, there are dead processes that function in the universe, but the dead processes function only because life drives them! If it's not the life from inside the process, it's life from outside the process that defines it.

And as in music, in actually performing it; for example, what moves it? What moves it is the mind of man, the power of the creative imagination, specifically, the principle of life. It's the fact of life itself, which defines the meaning of life. It's self-defining. Life itself is creativity. So, we have the three categories: We have the non-living; we think that's a category, and foolish people think that the non-living practical stuff is real; then you get the animal life, which has the instrumentality of life, but isn't able to create new forms of life; then you get the human prototype, and the human prototype is distinguished by the fact that we can innovate new forms of life. We create new forms of life, even though we don't change our own biology, we change our behavior, our biological behavior.

And this, then, becomes our connection to creativity. Just like you do when you're forecasting in economic forecasting: What are you looking at? You're looking at, on the one hand, dead things, and you're talking about what's controlling the motion and development of these dead things? Well, there's something living.

Ross: Right. That's real economics, as opposed to accounting, which, as you said, that's basically dead or beastly. Because when you make a system, if you try to create monetary economics, which is just such a ridiculous term; I mean, in a sane society, putting “monetary” and “economics” together, should sound like the beginning of a joke, because it can't possibly exist. You know, you're basically saying, “We're going to take the projections, we're going to take the shadows of the real lively characteristics of mankind's power over nature, we're going to look at the shadows of the effects of that, and try to run our society based on a bunch of shadow puppets on a wall,” as opposed to the specific, lively powers that're allowing us to exhibit such mastery.

An Act of Love

LaRouche: It's anger against being bored to death, is what's important. That you know the fact of your doing the same old thing, all the time--that's boring! And therefore, life, and the meaning of life, and the meaning of creativity, is always rejecting the idea of a closed system, of a fixed system, of a system of perfection: This is the permanent rule. It's always inventing a new condition and discovering it's valid, that you can make it happen, and it actually is a principle of creativity.

And what you get in music, in Classical musical Composition: It's an organized system. It is absolutely unique. Like the role of, say, religious music. Now, there are a lot of problems in that area, but intrinsically, when you look at Bach, for example, the development of Bach, you get the same thing. That creativity, per se--and it gets outside of anything you know now--what you have to do is, do what you never did before. And now discover what it is, what it is appropriately.

Ross: That's another one of the problems of people getting economic concepts today, is that because we have so de-industrialized, people, certainly younger people, don't have much familiarity with the real insides of what the human species does. And then, with education, it's similar to what you've got with the death of real musical culture, is that education just ends up being formulas and rules; you don't get inside it, the way you get inside of creativity, like really rediscovering how a piece ought to be performed, for example.

Ogden: And I think there's another point about that, is why is it, that with the influence of organizations like the CCF, the Congress for Cultural Freedom--which launched a vicious attack against Wilhelm Furtwängler. You know, he was actually interned, then there were de-nazification trials. He was not allowed to conduct for two years. This was a vicious, concerted attack, with a political intention. Why is it, since that point, that you had as a corollary of the decline of musical performance and composition, a decline of the moral standard of society as a whole?

And also, inversely, why is it, that the greatest scientists--Einstein, Planck, others--invariably, come across as being fundamentally good? And Furtwängler identifies this, precisely this. He says: Look, the deductive intellect can comprehend the parts as parts; can take this part, understand it; take that part, understand it. Maybe assemble these parts as blocks to built together. But the deductive intellect can never comprehend the unity of a whole.

The opposite of deduction, Furtwängler says, is love.

And it's only the passion which we identify as the intensity of love, of a religious, sacred quality of love, that can possibly allow the mind, the imagination, the passionate imagination, to tie the unity of the whole together.

And so, what's been done to musical composition, what's been done to scientific education, what's been done to culture generally, has actually amputated, has cut off the access of the young child, for example, to the experience of real passion, or love in this sense, as the opposite of deductive...

LaRouche: See, it's the proper role of the parent and the teachers. It is an act of love: It's always bringing the young people up to a higher level. This is the essential thing, it's actually the passion in the teaching process, which is the same thing with the parents trying to develop their children. It's the passion that's involved in getting the child to discover a next step. It's not always “teaching the child what you want to teach them.” It's stimulating the child to discover for themselves. The function of the parent and the teacher is largely that. It's not to teach somebody how to behave! It's to inspire them to discover how they should behave! And discover the experience of doing that. Then, that becomes a higher order of passion, as opposed to simply learning.

Ross: Yeah. Planck spoke about this. Earlier in his life, he got into a lot of big fights with Ernst Mach, who had this sort of dead, systemic approach to how science is moved forward.

LaRouche: It was more than apparently dead--really dead!

<jf30>The Passion To Discover the Cause of Things<cm

Ross: Okay, yes! Deadly, in fact.

And Planck had addressed it, also, from an emotional level. He said: You might be able, retrospectively, after scientific discoveries have been made, Mach, to come and lay out your categories of what these discoveries have in common. You know, Mach was a big fan of “economy,” whatever the simplest description is.

Well, Planck, in a letter to him, had said, or in an article, had said: What steels the researcher in his most difficult moments of demanding thought? It's not the hope of finding a principle of economy! It's the passion to discover the cause of things. So, there's an emotional problem here, with this--he addressed the emotional problem that was represented by Mach's dead outlook.

LaRouche: And then came Bertrand Russell, after that: The worst!

Ross: Yes! It's passion. You know, kind of like “monetary economics” is a silly term, so should “evil genius” be. You know, that really doesn't exist.

LaRouche: Well, in addition to what I think on this question of music, which is actually crucial, because there's nothing which is comparable with Classical musical composition, there's no other medium that has exactly that same quality. It doesn't exist. But we can learn from this process, we can learn this question, that the driver of it is passion. That's what makes it work!

But this idea, creativity, the experience of creativity, of creating something new, and being a participant in causing people to go through a new experience.

Ross: And it's a very direct kind of participation, it can't be at arm's length. To really hypothesize, you yourself are in it, you can't do it at arm's length.

LaRouche: No. You can't educate people at. You can't at-educate people!

Ross: No!

LaRouche: You have to inspire them! And that's the way it's done. You get the child fascinated with a problem, but bring the problem within the child's reach, give the child help to make that reach, but don't suppress them, don't tell them, “This is what you're going to learn.” Tease them, provoke them, evoke in them the sense of a desire to solve the problem, and just drop a few hints here and there, which might help them solve the problem. Then they will have the benefit of the learning experience, the actual learning experience.

Ogden: Even on that subject, it's very much worth the exercise of going through and looking at the young Wilhelm Furtwängler. The development of him, the education of him, where did this genius come from? And constructing some of this context of him, it's fascinating! His father was a very famous archeologist, who worked with Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered the true existence of Homer's Troy.

His mother was also a Classicist, and a painter; her father was a philologist who spent his entire life translating the works of the great Greek dramatists into German. And in fact, he was a close friend of Johannes Brahms, and dedicated one of his books of translations of Sophocles' plays to Brahms! And similarly, his father was also a very close friend of Mendelssohn.

So, this is the family. And then, Furtwängler's teachers, significantly, one of the main teachers that he had as a child, was a man named Joseph Rheinberger, who also happened to be the composition teacher of Max Planck, and lived in Munich. So these two geniuses had a teacher in common.

And the way that Rheinberger would teach counterpoint, was not according to deductive, dry, blab school rules. The way he would teach the young Furtwängler counterpoint, is he said, “Here's a copy of Beethoven's Late String Quartets. I want you to study it, and discover the secrets of Beethoven. And so, Furtwängler--you can imagine this young child, walking around the ruins of Athens with his father--his father took him to Athens to do these archeological digs with him--and in one of his back pockets, he would have a mini-score of Beethoven's string quartets, which he was intensely studying, and committed all of them to memory! He was famous for actually being able to sit down and play on the piano, note perfect, Beethoven's Late String Quartets, all four voices, without the score. And then, in the other pocket, his passion was not only for the tragedies of ancient Greece, but also of Shakespeare. And he said that his favorite play was King Lear.

So, this is the kind of childhood development of a great genius such as Furtwängler. And if you compare that, to what most people are robbed of today, then that very sense of injustice, should serve as motivation to win the kind of political fight that we're waging right now.

You Have To Know Mankind

LaRouche: Very good. What do you think?

Ben Deniston: This is the fundamental fight. This is what politics is, on the most fundamental level. That's always so unique about the work you've done, is actually taking it to the political crisis, the economic crisis, this is what defines the entire thing. So, actually looking at where we're at right now, and taking it to the most fundamental level of what actually defines mankind's ability to go forward, is this exact discussion right here.

LaRouche: Yes, this is what's important about it, which is why I thought it was important to push it at this point. Because we have to get a sense of the integration of the human mind, and avoid the dangers of specialization, in the sense of this compartmentalization. Unless you can see the active relations among things which are ironically juxtaposed, and see that this juxtaposition is necessary, and that if you don't have Classical artistic composition, you don't have mathematics, you don't have physics, in the same kind of consideration. You have to know mankind, and to know mankind, you have to take all, except the garbage. You have to take mankind as a whole, and take the aspects of what goes into mankind, in terms of human knowledge, human behavior, human experience. And make it an integrated experience! How everything affects everything.

Deniston: Because it's one subject.

LaRouche: Yes. Knowledge is one subject: And I think, the useful thing in having this thing taken up at this point, was to get to exactly that thing. And the way you do it, is you take Classical musical composition, and take the best example of it: And in this case, he is the best example of it, Furtwängler. The best way to get an immediate, broad, all-absorbing kind of conception. And then look at the other aspects of the departments of knowledge, so-called, and see how the principle which characterizes the goodness of these departments, all converges upon a single result. And the single result is: The human mind, dealing with the challenge of reality, and all these different facets which you experience, now, and your ability to bring them together, and to see their interconnection, defines you as a human being.

And therefore, when you get to physical science, you have to look at it in this way, you have to have all these characteristics; you can't fragment this thing, into isolated departments. You have to have a conception, of mankind, and what it takes for mankind to move things forward. And in order to move things forward, to discover what the problems are you have to overcome!

And music, this music, Classical music, and only Classical music--because what's happened is, with the degeneration of Classical music since the death of Brahms, in particular, just to get a point on this thing, we've had a destruction of the quality of mind of the population! And you find, if you know Classical composition, if you know artistic composition, if you know these things, then these are familiar to you. But if you don't have these things, if you're just a johnny-one-note, so to speak, in some specialty, you are actually dead most of the time! You may know one thing, but you don't know anything else. And when you leave that one subject, you go plunging into something, from which you will never return.

And this is what's crucial, is to get this total view of what being human means. And what it means in terms of challenges before us. And that makes the rest of it work.

Ogden: And just to put the point on the present moment in history, it's exactly what you just expressed: this oneness of humanity itself, this is, in this series of articles in the Russian publication Terra America,⁶ the final point, is that it's precisely this, about Lyndon LaRouche's world outlook, which makes this the only valid outlook which will carry nations through this crisis now. Replacing all of the failed systems of the last 50 years.

LaRouche: Yes. That's what the point is! That's the intention. And now, the question is, carrying out the intention, if you like to put a note on this.

Deniston: It sounds like a good opening salvo: You said this is going to be a series of discussions, so.

LaRouche: Yeah.

Deniston: I think we definitely shocked people a little bit.

LaRouche: Yes, necessary. And also to get this broader view, take what you can from Furtwängler's is ideal for this purpose. The broader view, take this as the central point, then bring everything else in, together with it, and see how these things interrelate. And the quesiton of interrelationship gives you a sense of wholeness of yourself, as opposed to being a johnny-one-note, or something. So that's it.

---

Footnotes:

1. Claudio Abbado, as quoted in The Devil's Music Master, by Sam Shirakawa (pp. 349-50). “Even when Furtwängler walked into the pit, there was tension around him like electricity. In the rehearsals, he would go over certain parts again and again, patiently explaining what he wanted, patiently, everything patiently. And slowly, this wonderful warm sound came out of the orchestra, and the tension, always this wonderful tension from beginning to end. He was one of the few musicians who could create tension even in the pauses when there was nothing but silence. That continuity, that flow was something I will never forget. Those rehearsals and the performances were something very special for me.”

2. Furtwängler on Music: Essays and Addresses, Ronald Taylor, trans., “Thoughts for All Seasons,” pp 123-124 (London: Scolar Press), 1991.

3. For example, see fragments in Wilhelm Furtwängler: Notebooks 1924-1954, Shaun Whiteside, trans. (Quartet Books), 1995. See also: Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ton und Wort: Aufsätze und Vorträge 1918-1954 (Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus), 1955.

4. See May 16 LPAC Weekly Report at http://larouchepac.com/node/22713 and Ross's report at http://science.larouchepac.com/riemann.

5. See “A New Quantum Physics: Rejecting Zeus” at http://larouchepac.com/node/18081.

6. See EIR April 20, 2012, and May 25, 2012.

Creativity: Looking Toward the Future

Lyndon LaRouche: We're going into the second phase of the discussion which we began last week. This time we're back with Bach again, but also our dear friend Wilhelm Furtwängler. And what we're going to be dealing with are the physical principles which underlie music, and specifically those of Bach, today, added to our original schedule....

In Bach and in Furtwängler, we're not talking about just music as such; we're talking about universal physical principles of the human mind, and they are physically efficient principles of the mind, such that people who understand these principles are actually superior in their intellectual capabilities and scientific capabilities to those who do not. Because there are fundamental principles of physical science, which are little understood these days, because of the particular character of the educational process, in the universities and so forth. And fortunately, we have been, in terms of some of our operating members here, we have people who have skills in both these areas, and are able to bridge the gap, apparently, between physical art and physical science. They are the same thing.

What Bach represents, and what Furtwängler represents, is a leap into a higher dimension of physical science than otherwise exists: That is, the ability of the human mind to understand the physical universe depends upon actually understanding the significance of the contributions, of Bach first, and of Furtwängler second. And people who don't like Bach and who don't like Furtwängler, are really not fully qualified in physical science.

This is, therefore, the second presentation at this table, which will have been done on this subject, and there will be a third one coming.

The Case of J.S. Bach

Matthew Ogden: Good, and that's precisely what I want to address today....

I think we can come back to the discussion that we had last week, and maybe this time around, we can class it under the heading, “Defying the Slavery of the Commitment To Simple Sense-Experience.” That is what we explored last week, from the standpoint of the Furtwängler Principle, as we defined it, as a physical principle, not just of Classical art, but an ontological understanding of the physical nature of the universe itself. This week, as Lyn just said, I'd like to come around and revisit this Furtwängler Principle again, this time, a little bit more specifically through the personality of Johann Sebastian Bach. And especially, how Bach was understood, uniquely, by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Now, this is something which is substantial, which can be heard immediately, when somebody listens to the performance of Bach's music by Furtwängler. This is completely different, yet again, from the way anybody else, practically, performs the music of Bach. Furtwängler, also some of the other artists that were directly influenced by Furtwängler: You can listen to the performances of Edwin Fischer, for example, a great pianist who worked with Furtwängler, and who recorded many of Bach's keyboard works.

Just like Furtwängler, Bach was no mere musician. Bach was not just somebody who was concerned merely with the musical art, as limited to that subject-matter as such, but Bach was a scientist also, in his own right, whose highly developed understanding of a universal scientific principle, explicitly, as such, we hear expressed in a very highly developed form, in his works of Classical musical composition.

And it's not a coincidence, I think, that not only was Bach working for most of his professional life in Leipzig, which was considered the intellectual capital of Europe at that time, the center of learning, also the center of publishing; it was called the “Little Paris” because of the level of the culture that was present among the general population, no matter who it was. And it was saturated with the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, who resided in Leipzig merely one generation before Bach.

We also know that Bach was directly influenced by not only the ideas, but the method of Johannes Kepler. And I think with these two scientists in mind, when we look at the personality of Bach, you'll recognize that both Leibniz and Kepler are the exemplary avenue by which we can begin to understand what Lyn has described as the “great principle of metaphor.”

When we understand, as we elaborated last week, that, for example, with Leibniz,² we can know that in none of the so-called finite, created, elementary things that we find in the universe, the things as such, or even in the aggregate of all of those things, can we find the sufficient reason for their existence; that the causes of what we see, the causes of what we hear, the causes of what we sense, do not lie in the objects that we sense.

And then, similarly in Kepler,³ that understanding that the causes of these finite things must lie outside and above, in a substance which is superior to the shadows as such; that it's only through the disagreement among these shadows, the disagreement among these finite things, that we can come to see what's unseen, and escape the ghostly shadow-land of our sense-experience and step outside of those prison walls into the real world which lies outside, in what we call the domain of substance.

This is what was in Kepler, this is what was in Leibniz, and this is the profound scientific understanding that we hear through the work and the performance, the proper performance, of the music of Bach. And his role was as the father of all Classical music, a real revolutionary as such, somebody who created, who introduced something which had not been understood in any physically efficient form before that time, that changed the course of all artistic composition after Bach. And Furtwängler knew him as such. Furtwängler described Bach as the “Homer of music,” the founder of this science, he says, “whose light shines through the musical firmament today, and who in a very special way, we have not ever surpassed.” He described him as a “creator, sitting on his throne above the clouds, who is beyond the reach, practically, of all others.”

Now, but a word of caution: This was not mere empty admiration, and I think we hear, through musical commentary today, again and again, empty words: admiration for Bach, because of an admiration for an effect that's experienced, but the lack of an understanding of the cause behind that effect.

That's not the case with Furtwängler. Furtwängler's admiration came from understanding the scientific principle as such, which lay behind the work of Bach. In his writings, Furtwängler came to understand that the same principle of performance which he associated with his own idea of the superior substance of the whole, which dictates the behavior of all of the parts, was absolutely the principle which lay at the root of the composition by Bach.

For example, in one of Furtwängler's writings about Bach,⁴ he compares him to some of the other contemporaries of the day who are skilled composers, including Handel, a very skilled composer, whose music, in fact, Furtwängler performed and did a brilliant job. You can hear the Concerto Grosso by Handel that's performed by Furtwängler in a way that you'll never hear it otherwise. But even with Handel, Furtwängler realized that in comparison with Bach, there was something still strangely arbitrary, strangely capricious about Handel's music, as compared to what he described as “the serene sureness of purpose,” which runs through every work composed by Bach.

And he identifies it by saying, “With Bach's music, we hear a concentration on the moment, linked with an immense breadth of conception, richness of detail linked with a grandeur of overall vision, with its simultaneous view of the microcosm and the macrocosm, with its concern both with the here and now, and with the ultimate goal, its union of what is close at hand and what awaits us in the future, Bach's music offers us an experience of the unshakable power of nature, such that we find nowhere else in the annals of music.”

And so, as you can see, the principle of composition that Furtwängler uniquely understood as what lay at the root of Bach's music--for example, in his fugues--becomes clear when we see it, and hear it, through the lens of the Furtwängler Principle, as we elaborated it last week. Think about what he just said, in terms of the macrocosm existing in every microcosm, the superiority of the whole over the parts, the reciprocally dynamic relationship between those parts and the whole, where the whole is always primary and always dictating the behavior of the parts, but you have a collision at each moment, between these two.

And this union of “the here and now ... with what awaits us in the future,” the simultaneous hearing of what's “close at hand” and “the ultimate goal”--that's how Furtwängler describes Bach's music, and that's what we experience through the Furtwängler Principle as Bach's music is performed, always listening both from the present to the future, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, and always also, simultaneously, from the future, which is not yet physically experienced, to the experience of the present, from the macrocosm to the microcosm. And this is the same, obviously, as what Furtwängler described as the Nahören and the Fernhören: the hearing of what's near and then the listening to what's far, intersecting at each moment of the experienced performance.

And so, through Furtwängler's view of Bach and the application of the Furtwängler Principle as a scientific principle, we escape this prison of sense-experience, and we defy the kind of simplistic notion of absolute space and absolute time as such. And from this standpoint, we can begin to understand that you have a knowledgeable principle of universal creativity, which Furtwängler clearly elaborates,⁵ as Bach, as the architect of a universe in and of itself, but in the reflection as a mirror of the Creator of the universe.

A Universal Ordering Principle

LaRouche: And this is clear in the question of the Preludes and Fugues in Bach. Because the question you're referring to, is this question of what is priority? Now, from a standpoint of physical science, which is where I'm approaching this thing, you are proceeding in reverse order: that we take dead objects, as a first category of organization, dead objects, dead planets, dead material; then you have another thing, the living thing, human beings, animals even. So you have animal life, which is the living, as opposed to the dead. Then you have a third category, the human mind, which actually is able to see the future, in itself.

So what happens then, is you have an order: We have dead things; we have living forms of animal life, all kinds; then we have human life. The difference is fundamental. First of all, they are dead things. Secondly, and which some people never understood, they are always trying to find life in dead things. And that doesn't exist. Life is a principle of the universe.

The problem here is really fascinating. The assumption is, that first, there were dead things, then there came life in the form of what we call animal life, thirdly, there's human life; and they assume that you got living processes in embryo out of dead things. And that from the living processes which couldn't think, actually think as humans can think, you would get human beings thinking. They would assume, that if you wanted to start a universe, you would start with dead things, and then somehow you would cook dead things until they become living things, or have animal life; then you would cook human beings out of animal life. You put in the roast, and it becomes a human being.

Well, this is obviously a little bit screwy, isn't it? The fact of the matter is, that contrary to this common conception of ordering, it is in the opposite direction. Now, how can you prove that? Well, there are many ways to prove it, but in the case of this context of music, it's elementary: The process of creativity, of human creativity, is the highest form of existence of life known to us. You don't get life out of non-life, and you don't get human life out of animal life: They come in a different order. Human life is the highest form.

Now, what we call human life, we think of human beings. Fine. But is it restricted to human beings? Is not this higher form of life, existing in the universe? Is man not therefore a descendant of the universe, rather than the other way around? Animal life is real life, it's a product of life, but you also get a higher form of life somewhere in this universe. We recognize that it's happening, because the universe is organized in a certain way which reflects intelligence of the type we call “human intelligence.” And therefore, we are merely a variety of this higher form of intelligence, which we share, in principle, as mankind, as distinct from the beast.

Now, what do we do? Put this from the standpoint of Bach, and then put this again from the standpoint of Furtwängler. What's the result? You realize that what Bach represents is a higher form of life than people who don't like Bach! Right? For example! You just want to make the point a little bit cruel, right?

Mankind is the highest form of organization of life as we know it, in the confines of this planet; but there must be, in the universe, still higher forms of life than we represent, and the animal is simply something which was popped in, in the oven so to speak, on the way to producing human beings as a reflection of this still higher form of life, which we know as the mental creative powers of mankind.

Now, what we call scientific discovery, the discoveries of principle, as opposed to a mechanical innovation, all principled discoveries have this same characteristic; the idea of a principle of nature belongs essentially to this category, that mankind reflects a special kind of principle of nature, which reflects this higher form.

Therefore, what's the significance of Bach? The significance of Bach is--the Bach fugue is based, as in the Preludes and Fugues, precisely on this concept of a transvaluation of valuations! Therefore, Bach is expressing this form of human intelligence, as distinct from a kind of mechanical attempt, like an animal imitation of human intelligence.

Furtwängler makes this very explicit, and he does it with great, free passion, which, because he rests upon not only Bach, but he rests upon the work of the followers of Bach, such as Mozart, Haydn before them, and Beethoven. The great composers who precede Furtwängler in his work are reflections of this process.

So when we say we “like music,” that's kind of silly. We admire what the universe represents, and admire man's role in the universe, and admire it as something which we have to admire, we're obliged to admire, and to emulate.

A Cultural Degeneration

And therefore, you have a problem: that European civilization has degenerated, under the influence of the opponents of these musicians; that the intellectual life of the typical citizen of the United States and Europe is inferior to that of their ancestors, of the relevant ancestors. There has been a moral and intellectual degeneration of human life and activity, and the thing we're fighting against is this degeneration. You saw it in music, you saw the opposition to Bach, the opposition to Beethoven, and then the attempt to exterminate those who went further, like Furtwängler.

Furtwängler--there was a campaign of extermination against him. They took a man in Germany, who had been the oompah band director, best loved by the Nazi Party, and they took Furtwängler, threw him in the rubbish bin, and took this oompah band conductor--he would conduct a symphony by stopwatch at the podium! He was caught by the members of the orchestra, using a stopwatch!

Ogden: And von Karajan was an official member of the Nazi Party! He had two membership cards in the Nazi Party!

LaRouche: Yes. What the British did, the Liberals did, the German Liberals did, is they replaced a human conductor of music, with a fascist, a Nazi conductor of music. And this Nazi conductor of music, and all the people who liked him, and liked the way he did things, were Nazis! Not because they had joined the Nazi Party, but because they had a state of mind which is specific to the same thing as the Nazi Party mind. And the British, of course, are richly endowed with that same Nazi kind of mind. Matter of fact, they sort of invented it: It's called the principle of the Roman Empire, as a British version.

So that's the point: that when we don't have this understanding of things which are typified by the Classical music composition of Bach and of Furtwängler, we really do not have music, and we do not have the competent development of the intellect.

The human intellect in, say, the 20th Century, in my lifetime, has degenerated. And I can trace the degeneration to what happened during the 19th Century, in the so-called Romantic movement in music. The Romantic movement was a form of decay which got to stink more and more, as it got older into the 20th Century.

Generate the Future

But this is what the issue is. This is not just “what is good music.” This is what is “good human.” Good human thinking. If you're not really steeped in Classical music, you do not know what humanity is. Because the very essence of the ability to perform a Bach fugue, say, from the Preludes and Fugues, and to understand what the distinction is, the change from the First Book and the Second Book; then you go to what Furtwängler was arguing; you go to the changes in composition developed by Mozart, which Haydn was astonished by; what the accomplishments were of Beethoven, which would have astonished Mozart.

And now you get what Furtwängler represents: He represents a reflection, a determined reflection as a great scholar, as a great thinker, as well as a great musician; he represents this. But this is not just music! This is the way the mind must work. This is why you must use the Classical mode in composing prose, because you must generate within the prose itself.

This becomes clear on the question of dramatic presentations on the stage: The great Classical works presented on stage are qualified because they compel the performers, as a group of people, to interact on the same basis, the principle of the future.

What is a great drama? It shows a principle of the future. Then you look back at this stuff, and you see, “Well, it works exactly that way.” And therefore, this is a quality, which, if you want to have an intelligent community, a community of competent scientists, a community of competent thinkers, of competent statesmen, what does a human being require? Or what have we lost? We have lost the connection to the future. We don't understand the future, we don't think the future. We don't think living processes; we try to deduce from dead things, what man must be.

But the key thing for humanity is, the purpose of humanity is the future. We have to generate the future, by ourselves; and by generating the future, we are creating what distinguishes mankind from the beast. People who like rock music are beasts! And they demonstrate it every time they open their mouths, or whatever other organ they open up for these kinds of performances.

And the purpose is to enable the development of the human being, to become a truly creative human being, which is the only human being; and you see this reflected in particular in Bach and in Furtwängler. Because the question is, what is the inspiration? The sense of the future. A thought of the future. To generate the future, onstage! To generate the future, in the mind of the personality, which is called “creative invention.” These are the issues.

So, we have come into a society, which is intrinsically morally decadent. Morally degenerate. And its social values, its popular sense of popular things, its admiration of popularity--what is popularity? It's death! Because everyone goes there. You become dead, therefore you're “popular,” because you do not challenge the present with the future; therefore, you're not really human. You only come as a human being in the box. But when you open the box, there's no human there, there's just a remnant of what was once the intention to create a human being! And that's what you get.

You get this sense which comes out in this forward and future, the future and the past thing in Bach, and in Furtwängler--it's exactly that; we have to find, in ourselves, an anticipation of the necessary future, and to act on that basis, and to create a future, as opposed to repetition of the past. And thus, this is not just music; this is something much higher; this is a devotion to mankind and to mankind's future. This is the only thing that distinguishes us from the beasts.

And you want to doubt that? Look at what you see on the streets now. Look at what you see in these young kids, on the streets now!

Look at what you see in our political leaders! The political leaders of the United States, with very few exceptions, are intrinsically cowards of a special kind. They don't challenge the future. They play it safe, by being stupid. Dumb, clumsy, failures. Look at them! Look at the leading politicians! The leading politicians, the leading political figures of the United States, they're all a bunch of stinking cowards, who have no sense of the future, they have no sense--“Oh, that's not for me. That's not for me, I'm not going to go there. That's not established. That's not established, that's not accepted. I'm not going to go there.” They are the living dead. They are committed, intellectually, to be dead.

Most of our leading politicians are that. You see that--I can go by name-by-name. I can prove the case, case-by-case, in our leading politicians. The problem is, they are morally dead, because they have no commitment to the future. They don't hear the voice from afar! They don't enter the future. “I don't go there,” they say. “You may be right, but I don't go there. You may be right, but that's not popular. I'm not going there.”

<jf30>Living in the Future<cm

Ogden: And just to make the point, the moral principle, as a musical principle: Furtwängler himself was famous for this. He criticized this “cult of personality” around the conductor; after a performance, everybody would go and want to have a “society evening” and everything, and he would slip out the back door, and he'd be walking home, at night, in the dark streets, thinking about what he had just done. He rejected all popularity.

And he said the same thing was true about Brahms: that Brahms, although he was a very sociable person and really liked people, when it came down to praise and admiration, and talking about his music, he hated it. He would shut down, and he would block that out. Because, he--as Furtwängler said--Brahms always lived every moment of his life with the future, with eternity in mind.⁶ And that's a moral principle. Brahms was one of the last of those, in the 19th Century, even. And then after the death of Brahms, and over the course of the cynical 20th Century, we lost that sense of even the human principle of living for eternity.

LaRouche: You see that, also, in physical science, the same development: Einstein reflected that; Planck reflected that, specifically, and others who followed expressed that.

No, it is in science, and that's what we've lost in science. That's why science has gone dead in performance; we put things together still, we make gigantic things based on principles we've known, like thermonuclear fusion: We've known that for a long time. Now, we use it as a threatening weapon to destroy mankind, we don't think about going into space with such power. We haven't gone to Mars. We should have gone to Mars already! We could have gone to Mars already! And the only way to go to Mars is actually to develop a thermonuclear system of propulsion. We didn't use it.

And you need the thermonuclear technology, also, in order to transform the territory of Mars, to make it somewhat livable, so that mankind can operate there. We haven't done that. We haven't even thought about that: And that's because we've lost this sense of the future.

The characteristic symbol of the future is what you see in Bach; that's the future, the principle of the future. In order to solve the problem of how do you find the future, how do you compose like Bach? That's based on the future. How do you compose, and perform and direct, like Furtwängler? That's the future.

So, this is not just music. This kind of music, and this conception of poetry, which is part of the same thing, is the point that if you want to live as a human being, be a mensch! Join the future! Get into the future! Be part of building the future!

Be a mensch--endlich!

Creativity Is the Primary Substance

Jason Ross: Yes, there's an existence in the future. People who can't understand how the future differs from the past in a way that's different from being just the opposite, aren't going to be able to understand this musical question, aren't going to be able to understand science. The correlation is between this, and then what Riemann did, where he definitely saw development as primary. He saw creativity as the primary substance--not the present, but what the direction was, the creation of the future. That was what was most real. And obviously, that means that you're not building the future--you didn't build the present from the past, you didn't build it up from pieces. There's something that's drawing you from the future.

And in terms of getting beyond the senses altogether, I want to take up as an example, Riemann's habilitation dissertation, which is the key work in physics of the 19th Century.

You have to go into a little bit of geometry, to set the stage for this, but, in Egypt, in Greece, people studying the relations between shapes and things like this, started to develop a whole geometry of different axioms and conclusions. People were seeking for the most basic assumptions, from which everything else would follow. That ended up being Euclid's approach, where Euclid took all of the discoveries of Greek science and then--he formalized it. And formalism is evil. Because instead of presenting discoveries as where they came from, from the process of mind that created them, he said, “No, we're going to start with basic geometric hypotheses, and show how everything follows from geometry, rather than from the mind.”

So, in laying out his basic definitions, and axioms and whatnot, one of them, the 5th postulate, caused a lot of trouble for the future: This is the one that says that you can have parallel lines, that it's possible to have two lines that just go along next to each other and will never meet, even if you extend them infinitely. Now, obviously, no one had ever checked; no one had gone to infinity to see if this was right. And it's actually not true!

Let's say you had a city, where the streets were laid out in an east-west grid, and you and a friend are on parallel streets and you're both going north. Now, if this city covered the entire Earth, what are these streets going to do at the North Pole? They're going to meet! So, on a sphere, for example, there are no parallel lines.

The same thing is the case with space. So, in the 1700s and 1800s, people like Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Carl Gauss realized that you could create geometries that didn't start from Euclid's presumptions, that didn't start from the idea that you could have parallel lines, that space was flat. They created other geometries! Lobachevsky created one, where you could have multiple parallel lines and none of them could meet.⁷ He even got Bessel, the astronomer, to help him test out whether this was true, by making astronomical measurements, to see if space was curved or not. He wasn't able to determine it.

These guys--not Gauss, but Lobachevsky and Bolyai--were what you might call “non-Euclideans.” They said, “Euclid made these presumptions and I don't agree with all of them. This one I don't agree with, and I'm going to make another geometry while changing this one assumption that he made.”

Riemann said, “No, the problem isn't in having a wrong geometric assumption. The problem is in starting from geometry in the first place! You're basically starting from perception, from appearances, from relations in space, as opposed to starting from physics.” So Riemann worked out fully, the total generality of different curved spaces--this is the work that was later used by Einstein, in eliminating space and time as concepts, with his Theory of General Relativity.

But Riemann said, “Forget geometry. The only way you're going to provide a real foundation for understanding the relation of these things is in physics! What are the principles that cause everything to occur? That's the basis for understanding their relations: What made them come about? You have to look at everything in terms of what made it. That's what it actually is.”

The thing with this anti-Euclidean approach, where the whole outlook of Euclid is rejected by Riemann, is you end up realizing that there's no actual answer to this question. There's no final answer to the shape of space, because we are never done. Physics isn't done. There is no Second Law of Thermodynamics; there is an unending density of development that lies in store for us in the future, with the discoveries we have yet to make, of principles which are currently, although unknown to us, governing the processes that we see. Like right now, the unexplained quantum processes, or life, or a number of other things.

So, the fact that we're never done, also means that our activity is itself a principle of the universe. You can't say, “I'm going to study the universe outside of human beings,” because what we do shapes it. When we make new discoveries, we literally are changing the shape of space; we're bending it.

No Fixed System

Take that, and look at the problems of thinking in terms of money, because, obviously, our financial system right now is disintegrating, as we speak, but there are some people who are seeking a different monetary system to replace it. Some of theM even call it a “credit system,” without knowing what the word means, where they say it's a different relationship of money. But the problems we've discussed with using money in an economy, the foolishness of even the term “monetary economics,” or the fact that money isn't able to distinguish this sort of specific new liveliness that's embodied in a new physical principle; money isn't able to understand qualitatively the introduction of fire, or agriculture, or nuclear power, or space technology; that the inability of money to “understand” that, is the same thing as what you get with trying to make a geometry based on things, as opposed to principles.

Under a credit system, we're not going to have a final credit system. It's not possible to lay out what rates of interest should be, how the banking sector should work, and everything, in a way that will be everlastingly eternal. Because it's always based on what your specific intentions are: Right now, NAWAPA and space, for example, space defense and Mars: These are goals that are going to change in the future, as we develop.

So, it reminds me of The Republic by Plato, where everybody's discussing the ideal republic, and they start thinking, “Okay, how are we going to make sure that this republic continues into the future? How are we going to lay down a basis for future generations to maintain this republic that we're creating?” And they realize that no set of specific rules will work! Both because people in the future aren't going to know why those would be good rules, and they end up coming to the conclusion that their process of deliberation is itself the only enduring foundation for an ideal republic. That future generations have to rediscover what the principle of the future is, and improve upon it.

It gets scary to think about that with a credit system; that there is no outside, non-human system that we're going to create, that will then govern economy; that economy is a lively thing, it's a human thing, and human intention has to be there all along the way, guiding it.

Changing the Universe

LaRouche: The question then is, what is the limit of mankind, in terms of development of the universe? Changing the universe, changing the rules, extending the rules? Well, we have the question of matter-antimatter conceptions, which is the so-called boundary condition today, what we think the physics boundary condition is, in terms of the speed of this, speed of that. But then, we say, that's impossible! And we just haven't created it yet. When we think about what we have to do with galactic systems, for example; things happen there that we're not conceiving of doing from Earth; but there's a part of the universe, in which things are happening which don't fit the matter-antimatter convention!

When you start to think about time, the time factor--well, we've blown up the time factor totally, with thermonuclear fusion. Right? The clocks don't mean anything in the same way any more. And when we get to matter-antimatter and we look at the universe, we just stare at it, and “See, that's a boundary condition, we're locked here forever! We're in a dungeon.” Well, it's a self-created dungeon: You didn't get the key yet, to get out of it.

Because, obviously, when you look at the cosmic system as a whole, you see ratios of time-action and so forth there, and bounding conditions there, which go way beyond matter-antimatter as it's simply defined. Matter-antimatter is actually a general principle, of many kinds of matter-antimatter! Of many qualitative stages of development of matter-antimatter! We're already yearning for that! Once we start thinking about the limits of our universe as we know it, about the Solar System, then we go beyond the Solar System, and go into the galaxy, and we sit there and we look at our charts, and we find out, how many million years do we go back in this process? How was this system put together? How were these changes organized?

So with matter-antimatter, we have a definition of an assumed limit, based on the assumptions of experiments that you have now. We are now getting into the matter-antimatter function much more familiarly, as something which does extend further, and we know that it's cognizable by the mind of man! And that fact tells us that's where we're going to go.

Ross: Yes, and the sense of finality is more a psychological quirk than anything you get from actual science. I mean, people in the past, at all sorts of times, have said, “We're basically done. What we've got right now, we can't imagine anything beyond it.” Well, of course not, if you're just looking at the system of what you know right now! But it's through the cracks that you're mentioning in astrophysics right now, things like that--there's plenty to discover that's out there, and it's just a matter of an intention to go ahead and do it. I mean, we could have had fusion energy by now, if there was an intention to make it happen: If there was a political will.

LaRouche: You have the intention to find the final answer to all questions? That's a very barbarian concept of a universe!

Ross: It sounds like an indecent desire.

LaRouche: It does, intrinsically very indecent.

Ogden: And I do think that's the key, as you mentioned: We're sitting here, right now, in the midst of a breakdown crisis, and nobody who calls himself a professional economic forecaster saw it coming. Except for one, and the question is, how are you going to be able to develop the ability to think like Lyndon LaRouche, and carry this civilization out of the fallacies that were embedded in how we reached this point right now?

LaRouche: You have to adopt that as a question. It's that simple. As a fungible question!

Ogden: And it's very possible. The barrier standing between us and that, is this refusal to defy the slavery of trust in sense-experience.

Ross: Yep, it's internal.

LaRouche: That's exactly it. And we've got further to go, but we're going to get into that next week.

---

Footnotes:

2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of the Universe” (1697), Paul and Anne Schrecker, trans. See also Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics” (1686), and “Monadology” (1714).

3. For more on Kepler's method, see

4. “Bach,” Furtwängler on Music: Essays and Addresses, Ronald Taylor, trans. (Scolar Press, 1991), pp. 27-31. Other quotes immediately above are included in this essay; for example: “Bach remains today what he has always been--the divine creator on his throne above the clouds, beyond the reach of others.... It is this that makes him for us the greatest of all composers, the Homer of music, whose light still shines out across our musical firmament, and whom, in a very special sense, we have never surpassed.”

5. Ibid. Furtwängler writes that in Bach we find “the power to create an entity which is a true experience in itself, an experience which reaches its own climax and fulfillment independently of its creator.... Every piece is carried to its fulfillment--or rather, finds its own way to its fulfillment--in terms of the law under whose aegis it was launched into the world. The creator of these choruses and these fugues--Bach--seems to be not a human being, but the spirit that rules the world, the very architect of the universe.”

6. Ibid., pp. 97-104, “Brahms,” the text of an address to the German Brahms Society in 1933 in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Johannes Brahms. Furtwängler writes: “Brahms's distaste for external show, his complete and utter lack of vanity, together with the `passionate objectivity' about which I spoke a moment ago, were equally characteristic of his daily life. His need for independence and his cast-iron determination not to allow himself to be disturbed by trivial interruptions, led to his living an unobtrusive, almost anonymous life.... He was loath to talk about his works at any time. Like all truly objective artists he was fully aware of the distinction between the real creative act and the sophisticated theorizing about it which was just beginning to become fashionable in his day.... Particularly in the last years of his life, he lived with the future, with eternity, in mind.”

7. For Euclid, given a line and a point not on it, there is only one parallel line through that point. In Lobachevsky's geometry, there are multiple parallel lines through that point. See http://bit.ly/KOH4z7.

Science and the Poetic Imagination

Lyndon LaRouche: The subject today is an extremely important one, under modest circumstances. It often happens that way, that some of the most important things happen under modest circumstances--or, ostensibly modest circumstances, which soon turn out to be something quite different than modest. And that's the way it should be today.

There's a piece I've written, called “Our Universe Beyond,” which pertains to the fact that we have to now begin to understand that Earth is merely a part of the Solar System, and the Solar System is merely part of the galactic system, and these systems are so intertwined, there is no integral separation of them from each other. We're now going into a point where a few billion years from now, the Sun will have been no more, and the Solar System will obviously be gone, too; the galaxy will probably persist. And we, as human beings, or whatever remains of us, or whatever our consequences are, will probably be part of that galaxy.

But where will man be? Well, man will probably be under, if we're fortunate, completely new circumstances, much more intelligent than we've been recently, and playing a different role in the universe than we were playing before. But hopefully, we shall have that consequence, and our consequence, then, is a part of the meaning of our life, now.

We had a gentleman, Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had some insight into this, who's known as a great musician, and he had an accurate insight into the general idea of this principle and this perspective. So what we shall do today, is we shall have a report from my associate here [Matthew Ogden], who will report on the great achievement which this great man made, and this gentleman [Jason Ross] shall respond to this, and I shall respond to it, and we shall have a discussion.

So, anchors away!

A Musician and a Scientist

Matthew Ogden: Good. So, if people have been watching, over recent weeks we've had a lot of fun here, and we've revealed something that has been a secret for far too long: that the great conductor and musician, and composer in his own right, Wilhelm Furtwängler, was much, much more than what he is normally perceived as being. He is a great musician, indeed, there's no doubt about that. But we revealed him as being much more than anybody has previously acknowledged him to be, with a far greater significance than most people even recognize. We've revealed that this great conductor was a uniquely significant figure in the history of scientific discovery, on par, I'd say, with several of the greatest scientific minds in the history of human civilization, and somebody whose own, uniquely demonstrated discovery of universal principle, actually allows us, now, to touch what still remain as the frontiers of physical science, to plumb the depths of the unanswered questions that remain before us, regarding what is man, and regarding man's relationship to the universe as such. And in fact, I'd even assert that Furtwängler's scientific insight goes even further than that, and has immense implications for a domain that we could class as the theological.

Now, what I'd like to focus on here, just in terms of overall subject-matter, is really the same question that we've been addressing in recent weeks, but this time in a slightly more specific form, informed by what we have presented here previously. The way the question can be asked is, how can we know the future, before that future has been experienced? Can we know the future, before that future has become the past? Or maybe to ask it in a slightly different way, but the same question: Can the mind escape the bonds of physical sense-experience?

Shelley: The Future Moves the Present

For the sake of surprise, actually, I'd like to introduce a new voice into our dialogue here, today: I'd like to continue to explore the Furtwängler Principle, but for a moment, I'd like to look at Furtwängler through the eyes of another unacknowledged physical scientist: the great poet Percy Shelley.

Now, Shelley was a great poet, as Furtwängler was a great musician, and he's been recognized as such. But he was not only that, and again, going far beyond the domain of what people normally perceive as art, and artistic principles, Shelley was no mere “weaver of words,” no mere poet in that sense, but as we've demonstrated with Furtwängler, Shelley's, also, was a mind on par with some of history's greatest scientists. And Shelley's insight is one that penetrated the very depths of some of the most significant ontological principles that lie at the root of the universe and man's relationship to the universe.

Now, Lyn has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, and the closing paragraph of that essay is something which is often quoted, but which is very rarely understood. Why is that? Reductionism. The same reason why Furtwängler's music is admired, but is not understood. Reductionism will tell you that time extends linearly, from the past to the future, from backwards to forwards. That the future is somehow the fruit of the “now”; that tomorrow is merely the extrapolation of today. And that every moment follows moment after moment, as cause leads to effect, so-called.

But what does Shelley say? At the end of the Defence of Poetry, he makes the point that real human history, especially in extraordinary moments, is never such that the elements which exist in the now, are something which logically lead to what will happen in the future. But rather, it goes the other way around: that the future is that which is constantly taking the present by surprise! The future awakens an effect in the present, that that present's past did not contain, in and of itself. And the individuals who exist in that present, will find themselves startled, will find themselves taken by surprise, as they're suddenly compelled to action that did not occur to them previous to that point, under the influence of a power which did not exist for them in their past, “moved by a spirit,” he says, that didn't originate, in a sense, from inside them.

So, Shelley says, the future has a power to move the now, an impulse to action which didn't exist in any form in the experience of the present or in the experience of the past, outside of the bounds of sense-experience. And in this way, it's the future which gives birth to the present, rather than the present somehow creating that future. Shelley calls it “an unapprehended inspiration” which moves the soul, or “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

This statement by Shelley completely violates everything that we're taught about physics, all reductionism, all bottom-up ideas about the physical universe, all ideas that you just put together elementary particles, elementary building blocks which then create the bigger object or the next moment in time. Because the reductionist would say, “Well, if the future does not yet exist, how can the future create the present?”

But, does the future really not exist? Or, is it merely, yet to enter the domain of physical sensation?

I think people can probably now get a smell of how this question that we're approaching through the eyes of Shelley, now resonates with everything that we've explored over the last two weeks, in regards to the Furtwängler Principle in music.

To recapitulate, as Furtwängler asked, in very precise, scientific terms: If the unity of the whole has to always be that which determines the behavior of the individual parts, where--and when--does that whole exist, relative to the present moment? And, if every moment of a performed composition, say, is merely the subordinate shadow of a higher and more dominant substance, where, if not in any of the temporal moments as such, can we look, to find that unity of substance?

Now, I don't think it's surprising, but people might not have looked far enough; actually, the beginnings of the answer to that question, lie right in Shelley's essay. In the very opening paragraph of the Defence of Poetry, Shelley identifies exactly this, very rigorous scientific question. He says: Look, there's two different, distinct types of mind. You've got two classes of mental action, he says. On the one hand, you've got what he calls “reason,” but on the other hand, you've got “imagination.” And he defines them successively. He says, reason is the contemplation of what already exists. But imagination is the creation of something new. Reason is that which is concerned with objects, and with their synthesis into larger objects. But imagination is that which contemplates the intervals between things, understands relations as such.

He says, “Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole.” And he concludes this opening, saying, “Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined as `the expression of the imagination....'|”

And now, what does this allow the poet to do, that the mere deductionist can not? Shelley says, if the deductionist is only concerned with what happens in the moment, with what already exists, then in no way can the deductionist, he who relies on pure deduction, see what will come to exist in the future, he who is only concerned with the “enumeration of quantities already known.” But the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present....”

And so, all of a sudden, we've discovered that we've uncovered a state of mind, which, if it does not exist for the scientist, the scientist is no scientist. But the poet, or the artist, or the musician, in Furtwängler's sense, or in Max Planck's sense or in Albert Einstein's sense, is he who is able to see the real domain of substance which lies beyond the shadow-land of sense-experience. The poet sees the substance of the future, which is what's casting the shadows onto the present, and in this way, Shelley says that the poet can, indeed, foretell the spirit of the future, if not maybe the form, which would be superstition or prophecy.

But it all comes out of the ability to escape the prison walls of sense-perception, to escape the reductionism of mere experience of the present and the past, but to carry the imagination outside of sense-experience as such. And this is what Shelley identifies directly, and it speaks to exactly what we discovered is at the root of the Furtwängler Principle, also. Shelley says the poet, uniquely, has the power to participate “in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.”

A very good example of this, something which Lyn has also brought up repeatedly, is something you can find from a very close friend of Percy Shelley, and a collaborator of his, John Keats. If you just think for a moment about the example of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that this moment of frozen time actually has the ability, as Keats says, to tease us out of time, that we can escape the bounds of chronological time, as experienced, through the shadow which we find of the substance which is cast onto the present moment, that this “doth tease us out of thought, as doth eternity.”

And Keats has a very beautiful way of saying what we have discovered as being at the root of Furtwängler's principle, also, that the relationship between the heard melodies of the sensual ear, and the unheard melodies, the spirit melodies of no tone, is what allows us to step from the temporal into the eternal ... and suddenly, we're back at the Furtwängler Principle. You have the relationship, as Furtwängler described it, between what's “near at hand” and what's “far away,” the near and far. The relationship between the moment and the eternal, the parts and the universal, the dominant whole, or the shadow and the substance.

Menuhin, Philo: A Theological Principle

And I think this is what you recognize, in terms of what echoes so loudly behind the notes and between the notes, of Furtwängler's conducting. This was recognized--just for fun--by Yehudi Menuhin, who was a very close friend, and also defender of Furtwängler, when Furtwängler was under attack by the CCF [Congress for Cultural Freedom], by the people who Menuhin identified as the “real Nazis,” they who appeased the Nazis for so many years before we opened the Western Front.

Menuhin said about Furtwängler: “There are many conductors, but very few of them seem to reveal that secret chapel that lies at the very heart of all masterpieces. Beyond the notes, there are visions, and beyond those visions, there is this invisible and silent chapel, where an inner music plays, the music of our soul, whose echoes are but pale shadows. That was the genius of Furtwängler, because he approached every work like a pilgrim who strives to experience this state of being that reminds us of Creation, the mystery which is at the heart of every cell. With his fluid hand movements, so full of meaning, he took his orchestras and his soloists to this sacred place.”

As I said in the beginning, the Furtwängler Principle extends far beyond music and mere art. It extends even far beyond just scientific principle as we know it; but what it tells us about man's relationship to the universe, and the ongoing, living process of creation of the universe as a whole, and what man takes part in, reaches to the point of actually theological implications.

What we're going to explore in the rest of the discussion here, is something which we have touched on in previous shows. We've taken what Leibniz had said, for example, where you realize that within this shadow-land of mere experience, what the reductionist would understand as just an endless series of nows--now, now, now, now--can not contain within it the cause of the being of those moments. That sufficient reason, the active cause for those parts, can not exist in the aggregation of those parts. So we have to look outside of that, look beyond, look behind the shadow-land.

Another figure, which also addresses this, maybe somebody we could call the “Leibniz of the early Christian era,” a man named Philo of Alexandria, who also vividly understands this as a theological principle, that if the active reason, if the cause of something must come from outside of the things as such, then at no point can the future be born out of the present, but it has to be always created as something new.

And it's this continuous process of creation in motion, which is a vividly living principle for Furtwängler. And in fact, Furtwängler was insistent, that the death of the music comes when you enter the domain of routine, that there can be no mere replication, that there can be no mere repetition, that it's always a fresh and new process of creation, and the conductor must have the personality of an always-living creator, a creator who's always alive.

Economic Forecasting

LaRouche: Now, just a comment on this, at this point, as an interlude: I have been forecasting economic processes for a long time--actually, since the 1950s--and I have been, in forecasting, not always delivering a precise forecast, but in my forecasting I've always been right, and everybody else has always been wrong. There's a very simple reason for this: that the human mind, creative mind, is quite different than the ritual mind. And all of us have, within us, as born people, we have the possibility of creativity, expressing it, that is, actually seeing the potential of the future. You can not really see the future as such; what you can see is the potential on which people can act, and that's the best you can do. At least the best I can do.

I've always been right, and they've always been wrong, why? Because they always depend upon a literal conclusion of deduction. They come up with a complicated deduction, or not so complicated deduction, or simply a fraud, just simply out of the air, belief out of the air, a wild wish. “Oh! This is going to work!” or, “No! That's not going to work!” sort of thing. But I've always been right, in these terms of reference.

We live in a post-Roosevelt society; [Franklin] Roosevelt was the last real leader of the United States who really had a sense of the future, that is an active, effective sense of the future. And that's what I have. And that's what I do. And the problem I've seen, and every time I've run into a forecast, where I've made a forecast, and others have made a forecast, and where they've always been wrong, and I've always been right, is the fact that I believe in the future. The problem with most people is they don't believe in the future. They don't understand it. They believe in the deductive view of reality; they take the things that exist now, and try to find a deductive solution, or deductive prediction that's going to flow from these factors. And in all major forecasting that I've known in the postwar period, since the death of Roosevelt, every one of these forecasters has been wrong on these issues. And I, in my own modest way, and I do mean modest way, have always been right.

Because you never really know all of the future. What you know is what is wrong about the conclusions concerning the present, at best. And that's exactly what you've been discussing, is exactly this, this poetic principle. We have, as human beings, the ability, to forecast things that don't arise out of deduction, deductive processes. Most people are trained not to do that. They say, “That's a baddie, you're not in the game, you're not playing by the rules.” And that's the nature of the problem.

My joy has always been to have the power of imagination. I have a creative imagination, I know what it means in Furtwängler's sense of the imagination, also, and that's what we require. Most people will never be able to save humanity from disaster, because they will always reject the insight into the future. They will always try to find a practical, deductive explanation of the present, and impose that on the sense of the future. We have now entered a period in which the entire human species is in danger of destruction by its own stupidity, its own rejection of understanding the meaning of the future, of seeing the future. And I know exactly how the minds of these people work. I know exactly how the minds of all these economists who do forecasting work. They're all incompetent, they're always wrong, on these kinds of issues. They're always wrong. And they're stubbornly wrong, because they believe there are rules which they must obey, obedience to custom. “Well, that's not customary, that's not the way our people think. You're saying something that most of us don't agree with.” But that's why I'm right, because I reject their assumptions.

And that's exactly what you're expressing. That's exactly what Shelley is expressing. And we have lot more to say on this, but I just wanted to interpolate that. That's the issue. The issue is, the human mind, as is exemplified by our hero today, what most people just lack: a sense of the future. They lack a sense of the future; it's not something that's mechanically produced by the past. But the future is something which the creative powers of the mind, in particular, in society, can create: a future which would otherwise not happen, except for the intervention of the creative powers of the mind. And that's what's at issue here.

If you want to survive, if you wish to exist, if you wish this nation to continue to exist, if you wish this planet to exist through this particular type of crisis we face now, you have to learn the song of the future, which is something that most leaders today, in society, do not know. That is why they're intrinsically incompetent. That's why their leadership intrinsically tends to lead toward the destruction of mankind and civilization, because of their very ego, their pride, in saying they're “practical people.” And the practical man is the greatest traitor to humanity that was ever invented.

Discovery: Beyond the Senses

Jason Ross: The concept of “future,” itself--I was just thinking during the discussion, that people often think of it as a thing, like a noun, but really, when we're acting on it, it's a verb, or it's certainly a result of action. It isn't a thing that exists out there. Even the concept of “the future” can be troublesome sometimes, because there isn't “a” future already, outside of what we do. And indeed, different people's ability to conceptualize the future, if you're a creative thinker, the way Furtwängler was or Shelley was, you're able to create an experience, a new future, that no one was capable of even imagining before, because you've got a new degree of freedom, you might say, you've got a new path for creative thought that lets you think differently.

What I want to address is how communication works, and how discovery works, or education, rather, because it's really all the same thing, and it gets at this going beyond the senses. So, if you go back, quite some time, to Aristotle, or we've been talking about Euclid, but with either of these two guys, you've got a fixed world system, that basically, everything's done, and future discoveries aren't really there, so much. At least nothing revolutionary.

If you read the works of Aristotle, they're kind of boring, because they're so declamatory. Aristotle says, “This is how things are, you know, slavery is the right way to go, because some people are meant to be slaves and some aren't. This is how physics works,” etc. There's no germ of discovery in it, it's just sort of “Here are the way things are,” and it's all very external. The same with Euclid. Rather than the product of discoveries, what he presents is sort of an external world of geometry, the way Aristotle presents an external world, which we might discover more about, but from which the mind itself is abstracted.

Now, contrast that with--you mentioned Philo; I wanted to read a quote from Philo, or Socrates. Here's Philo, in his work On the Creation: “For some men, admiring the world itself rather than the Creator of the world, have represented it as existing without any maker, and eternal; and as impiously and falsely have represented God as existing in a state of complete inactivity, while it would have been right on the other hand to marvel at the might of God as the creator and father of all, and to admire the world in a degree not exceeding the bounds of moderation. But Moses ... was well aware that it is indispensable that in all existing things there must be an active cause, and a passive subject; and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe, thoroughly unadulterated and thoroughly unmixed, superior to virtue and superior to science, superior even to abstract good or abstract beauty; while the passive subject is something inanimate and incapable of motion by any intrinsic power of its own, but having been set in motion, and fashioned, and endowed with life by the intellect, became transformed into that most perfect work, this world.”

Now, sometimes it's difficult, bringing up the God-word, because people have got a lot of different ideas of what's behind that, and I'll let what he said stand for itself.

But take a look also at Socrates, at the way he communicated things. We discussed The Republic last time, but in all of Plato's dialogues of Socrates, the point is often not the conclusions that are reached, but rather the way conclusions are reached, the means of discovery itself. And so, in one of them, in the Alcibiades, Socrates is making fun of this guy Alcibiades, who thinks he knows everything, and Socrates points out that usually when you come to discover something, you discover it after you didn't know it. And he's sort of probing Alcibiades to see when he didn't think he already knew everything, and Alcibiades really can't think of a time when he didn't think he already knew everything; and Socrates points out: Well, if your thoughts aren't the fruit of a discovery that you can identify, then really, what value are they? How are you certain that they're true, if you didn't come to them as overthrowing some other thought, or as a necessary idea, or something like this? It's just sort of a conclusion that you have, that you got from somewhere, that didn't really come from your own mind.

Kepler vs. the Empiricists

Now, jump forward a couple thousand years. If you look at the Renaissance, if you take a look at a map of population in the world, specifically in Europe, after the Renaissance, population just--whew!--it just takes off. Something happened to the human species. If you're looking at us in biological terms, you would say, “Something happened to the human species during this period. All of a sudden the human population is exploding! What happened?” And it wasn't that the climate was very nice and there was a lot more food available, or people just had more kids or anything like that, you know--they were all Catholics, so they were against birth control. That has nothing to do with it.

The fact is, that scientific discoveries people made, let us change our relationship to nature, and this was attacked. So now, let's compare the attack on the Renaissance, with Kepler.

Take for example, Fludd, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Voltaire--all these people, some of them more than others, were supposedly scientists. Francis Bacon wrote this great big treatise on how science ought to be practiced, although he didn't discover anything himself. These people aren't scientists though; they're political actors. These people get used, just like today. You know in academia, you go to an economics department--maybe some people there are unaware of it, but I think if you look at people in the know, these departments are political departments, they're not really scientific departments. Economics is a political goal, and then you have to come up with theories after the fact to support it; in large part that is what happens.

So what all these empiricists said is that we come to knowledge through our senses. And unlike Aristotle or Euclid, they said, “Yes, it's possible there might be more to discover, we don't know everything yet. Obviously, the Renaissance has shown us that. But,” they say, “hold on. As to the way we discover things, we're done! We've figured that all out, so we can tell you how all discoveries are made.” Like Bacon, writing a book about discoveries that he didn't make.

And they said that the basic key is induction. They got a breakthrough: Instead of starting from assumptions and hypotheses, and then coming to conclusions, why don't you start by making observations?

Okay, so you make observations, and then you find some way of generalizing them, and making a general statement that would include all of your observations. Now, that general statement is expressed in terms of observations. It's expressed in terms of what will one see, how will this process respond, etc. It never gets at a “why?” It never gets at physics, it never gets at power. It's not creative.

In contrast to that, take Kepler. Now here's something that Kepler wrote--remember the earlier distinction with Aristotle or Euclid, where the mind wasn't part of the discoveries; they existed on their own, and the mind was sort of written out? Here's Kepler in one of the introductions to his Astronomia Nova, his New Astronomy. He wrote:

“In what follows, the reader should overlook my credulity, since I am judging everything by my own wits. Indeed, the occasions by which people come to understand celestial things seem to me not much less marvelous than the nature of the celestial things themselves. I therefore display these occasions scrupulously, with, no doubt, some attendant difficulty for the reader. Nonetheless, that victory is sweeter that was born in danger, and the Sun emerges from the clouds with redoubled splendor. Therefore, O reader, pay heed to the dangers of our army, and contemplate the clouds, horrifying in their darkness. Contemplate, I say, for beyond these clouds the Sun of truth truly lies hidden, and shortly will emerge.”

So, he's saying here that the way we come to understand things is “not less marvelous” than those things themselves. The mind, and how it works, is “not less marvelous” than the planets. And this is from the foremost astronomer, ever, in his time. What did Kepler do? He completely threw away this whole empirical model. He, fact, did it very explicitly with his vicarious hypothesis. He said: “Okay, let's play your game: Let's make a bunch of observations”--and he did a better job than anyone else. “Let's make a model that would include all of these observations.” So he makes a model and includes all the observations. And he shows that that model disagrees with itself.

So he just says, “Look, we tried this out, we tried the models that everyone else was using. We got circular motion, or at least the equi-angular circular motion. We've got these planets, etc., and the model disagreed with itself.” This vicarious hypothesis had an internal contradiction.

Kepler was able to adjust it to get the right results, and a lesser astronomer might have stopped there, might have said: “Look, whatever, we can get the right observations with this model. Who cares if there's some problems on the inside?” Here's what Kepler says--he says, “No!” regarding his adjusted model: “Even considering the longitude alone, the lack of any perceptible difference in effects, between the as yet unknown true hypothesis, and the false one assumed by us, the vicarious hypothesis, does not make the effect identical. For there can be a small discrepancy which the senses do not perceive.”

Now, hang onto that: He's saying that even if you make a model that matches the observations perfectly, that matched the data perfectly, that in itself would not be sufficient to say that your model was right. Kepler said, no, you've got to look to causes. If you can't answer “why so, rather than otherwise”--like the method of Socrates: Was it a discovery, Alcibiades? Did it have to be that way, instead of another way? Kepler is saying, unless you can say why it had to be this way instead of some other way, unless you're answering a question, what you're getting couldn't possibly be the real truth.

You think about how he used that, in his Harmony of the World: It's similar to looking at a future that doesn't yet exist. He looked at the planets, and he looked at going beyond what he had done in his New Astronomy, where he understood the relationship of two planets with the Sun; he only used the Sun, Earth, and Mars in that whole book.

In the Harmony of the World, he extends this question, “why so, and not otherwise?” to the whole planetary system. And the answer that he arrives at, is that a harmonic system is set up, that both the major and the minor modes are required. He goes through the whole thing; but one of the important things, is that the harmonies that determine the system don't exist in the data themselves anywhere; that the harmonies Kepler finds are not in the motions of the planets; they're not in the speeds of the planets; they're not in the distances of the planets. They're in the perceived speeds of the planets, as the Sun would see them. And understood, through the sense of hearing. Which is the Sun is seeing.

So, without this whole, without the Sun as “conductor” so to speak, you aren't able to have the harmonies that he discovers in that work.

The Infinitessimal

Just to finish up, I'd say there are a couple aspects on music that are very relevant today. One of them is that what Kepler had done: You've got a certain continuity that underlies all the experiences, you've got the thing that drives all the “nows” that then follow. And you've also got a sense of how you break one of those continuities, one of those wholes, to arrive at a higher one.

You take a look at music today: What Kepler was saying, again, about how a difference that's imperceptible doesn't make things identical--you can have someone who even attempts to imitate, say, a Furtwängler, or somebody who attempts to imitate an actor; they're playing in a play and they're imitating the way another actor acts. Sometimes, even if it's very difficult to tell quite what's different at every node, or every passage or every word, you still know that something just isn't there. And often, just as an aside, with acting this comes up as sort of using a broad brush to paint a scene. So you say, “I don't know what that guy was saying, but I know he was angry.” As opposed to letting the words actually speak for themselves.

But this difference, the size of this difference, you really have to say, is infinitely small, because the difference between a new discovery and what was before--in the case of the vicarious hypothesis, it wasn't even perceptible. But take the case of the difference in using a bunch of polygons of increasing an number of sides to make a circle, versus the circle itself. If you put enough sides on that polygon, the difference can be as close to zero as you want, spatially; however, the power of the difference does not become infinitely small. Although it's spatially infinitely small, or almost nonexistent, the power that's represented in it doesn't exist in a spatial world; it's in a world of power, it's a dynamic. And if you try to focus on it itself, it might appear to be nothing, although it's actually more powerful than the “somethings” that it's causing to behave the way that they do.

And so, in terms of science now, we have to have this approach that Socrates and Plato had, that Kepler had, that some of the last people who had it recently had--Planck, Einstein, Vernadsky, Furtwängler--that this approach of what it means to make a discovery, of what it means to have a whole; if we don't bring that back to science, we're not going to get out of the empiricism that's preached by such as that evil, terrible man, Bertrand Russell.

Music's going to be an essential aspect of getting a real idea of what a discovery is, to bring science really forward now.

Science, Music, and the Imagination

LaRouche: Yes. We've reached a certain point in the three weeks of discussion on the subject. The subject is not closed; the subject has merely been demarked, for further consideration. But this is extremely important, because we have to understand the function of what most people would consider the imagination. And in this area, people would say, “But that's only the imagination.” But you have to look at the catastrophes that result from ignoring the imagination! And therefore, it's important that we go into the domain of the imagination, as we do here, because we're dealing with factors which we know, as factors; they're empirical factors. But we don't understand fully the mechanisms by which they operate. And that's precisely the issue. What we've gone into in these three-week sessions, are some of the foundations of questions, or questioning, which are used by us to expose the frauds which we ordinarily believe.

And therefore, we do not come up with final answers; we come up with conclusions which denounce things that some people think are final answers. And it's the progress of continuing that process, which is essential. And only when you enter the doubt about your sense-certainties, do you actually begin to acquire genuine knowledge. And that's the function I believe we've tried to perform in these three-week sessions.

There's a lot to be said. There's so much of it, which I already have [in my new paper]. But just as you have expressed again, Furtwängler has been expressing this question, about the factor of uncertainty in conclusions. The question is, you have to get to define the uncertainties. And those then become the missions to perform.

But the important fact here is that what most people believe and rely upon, especially in government and what is often called science, that these things are frauds, because they are assumptions which are made, in defiance of evidence to the contrary. You find there are lacunae in what you know. Somebody then introduces an explanation which is relatively arbitrary and therefore denies the unknown which needed to be explored.

What science can do for us, is to point us in the direction of questions to be answered, and point out to us things that are the wrong answers, to a certain degree. And between the two of these kinds of conditions, we are able to steer ourselves into investigations.

For example, my own case as a forecaster: Most of my forecasts have determined the actual course of history, since the first one I made a long time ago, I should say now, back in the 1950s, that period. And the 1950s forecast I first made stands up today, in terms of method. It's the ability to foresee, as you expressed in your report on this, to foresee the future, as a necessary future, even though it is not demonstrated as deductible from the recent past. This is what we define, really, as creativity: the ability to see the option of the future as distinct from the recent past or what seem to be the shadows of the recent past.

That's it. If we don't have that, if we don't have that self-critical drive, to get into the future and look back at the present, in this way, as the great forecasters have, you can not forecast competently. That is the reason why every modern forecaster who's publicly accepted by universities and so forth generally, why they're all incompetent: because they rely on only deduction, reverse deduction. They do not see the future. They would be embarrassed to mention the future. “That's only speculative!”

Well, it's not speculative. “I proved it's true, again and again, and you guys are still saying it's only speculative? Is it not the case that you're being stupid? Or stubbornly stupid, for trying to seek approval from the past? And you call yourself a person who's going to forecast the future?”

And this is the essential issue, and what I've got here in this piece on The Universe Beyond, will indicate some of the things that these questions portend.

Time To `Wise Up'

Ogden: And this is the urgently necessary political question for people to face.

LaRouche: People have got to realize that many of them have been stupid. They don't like to hear that, but it's true. Stupid in what sense? They don't accept the creation of the future, that the future is a creation of something which has no active precedent as such, no literal precedent. It's the attempt to see what's wrong in the present, what's a failure in the present, what's a destructive force in the present, and to change it, and to see what you can do to change it!

Right now, the United States is threatened with destruction, self-destruction under British influence. We have the worst kind of President you can imagine, as a President. We have creepy characters who are running our government, in other capacities, who are actually destructive forces. They doom humanity by their very presence, let alone their bad breath! Because they have no opening to reality. Reality is always a change from the present to the future, and they can never get to the future.

I've gone through this again and again in forecasting. Every time I've raised a major forecast, it worked. The other guys were wrong. The most famous one, of course, was 1971, where I had made this forecast, you know, in 1966, that this is where we were headed, this is the calamity your present policies are going to carry us into, and it was delivered in the Summer of 1971 [with the end of the Bretton Woods System]. And not a single economist in the nation who had piped up earlier, or piped up then, not a single one, had even after the fact admitted the fact of what had happened.

And it went on like that, again and again and again, up to the present time.

Ogden: Right. The point is, that the future has to be defined in its own terms. You can't define the future according to the terms of the present.

LaRouche: Well, let's take a case of discovery; like we've had various developments in chemistry, the nuclear and super-nuclear factors; these keep piling on to us. The more we discover, the more that they reveal to us, factors which are determined factors, which were not taken into account. Many of these things, like the discoveries in medicine which have saved lives, were things that did not exist until the actual discovery, as an original discovery, was made.

So it is this factor of discovery, in that sense, which defines human intelligence. And people who go by deduction, always going by deduction, “You have to prove this by deduction!” is the hallmark of stupidity. And also calamity.

And that's the point. You have to develop what is called sometimes “the poetic principle,” the creative principle. You find, in the great discovery by Furtwängler, this discovery was earthshaking, literally. Here it was, a musical discovery, it has an effect, of the fore-tone and after-tone, but exactly that, the idea of the fore-tone and the after-tone, exactly, defines the very principle of musical composition. And the very scientific principle of that subject.

And here, this guy emerges with a concept which corresponds to the creative powers of the universe, in this music. And you realize that the music is not just music per se. The music is a message! It's a message to man's destiny, a message to man's opportunity for the future. And here's a man, who's considered “merely” a conductor, merely an imaginative conductor, and he actually produces the greatest scientific discovery in the current history of mankind.

And that's the lesson to be taken from this table. And we should enjoy it, and participate in it, and ambulate this kind of discovery.

Ogden: Well said!