Schoenberg's dualism

 

For Arnold Schoenberg 12-tone composition became a way for the composer to master the chaotic noise of nature through the laws of the organized composition. In “Theory of Form” (1924) he writes:

[O]ne must . . . in all circumstances, use force on nature, on the material—sounds: that one must force them to keep to a direction and a succession laid down by us. One has to force nature—the material—by means of nature—our way of thinking—to work naturally according to our nature; otherwise, we can either not grasp it or else, if one lets the sounds run as they please, it remains a children’s game, like electrical experiments with elderberries or tobogganing or the like. Every more developed game comes about because the course of nature is modified by a force from the outside.

 

This is the result of the dualist thinking that 'the mind' and 'nature' are entirely distinct and separated entities, that there are no relations between the two, a thought going-back to René Descartes, the 17C French philosopher who influenced scientific thinking so strongly, who insisted upon a fundamental split between the two. However, it became a basic tenet of Western science and scientific thinking, with its ideas of progress, speculation and discovery, and was something that Schoenberg found very inspiring.

So, Schoenberg thought he could construct a system with its own logic unrelated to the physical reality of sound, which is defined by the harmonic series and to which the receptive system of our ears and brain is related because both are the result of evolution. However, humans are part of nature, and their mind is also part of nature.