A pseudo-scientific 'philosophy' has perverted the culture. As long as we insist that 'science' is 'fact' and not experience, we can pretend that it is purely rationalistic. And this pretence has now subverted culture where it lives, namely, in the ground of creativity. But science is based in 'objectivity', and objectivity is an experience, and not a fact. Objectivity is the creative basis of science. And when we look closely at the experience of objectivity, we discover that it is anything but rational. The cult of rationality is utterly alien to it. But in the name of this cult of 'rationality' or pseudo-objectivity, the entire culture has been perversely reduced to a baseless faith in 'the rational'. 
            In literature, this makes the critic superior to both artist and work of art. In philosophy, it means the abnegation of philosophy. In the plastic arts, we paint and sculpt 'ideas', commonly platitudes that could be written out in one or two clichéd sentences. 
            What we have entered into is a new scholasticism, in the most pejorative sense. The aesthetic equivalent of scholasticism is the salon, a word derived from the arbitrary narrowing of aesthetic sensibilities characterized by the Parisian Salon of the latter half of the 19th century. The difficulty in confronting the salon, as in confronting degenerative scholasticism, in its own time, is that it inevitably presents a veneer of professionalism that, to the relatively shallow contemporary onlooker – brought up in the strictures of this narrow frame – it appears both comprehensive and profound. We look back at the truly pornographic calendar art that won honors at the Salon, and we wonder how it is possible that anyone, going to the Louvre and witnessing the grand history of the media, could become caught in such a self-limiting bind. 
            But the same kind of false belief system is at work in both. Rationalism, as such, not only has an extended history in the roots of modern thinking, it has all the apparatus of an established 'professional' system. In fact, one has to assume a denial process. But where medieval scholasticism was the final excrescence of an artificial intellectualization of spirit, modernist rationalism is the final excrescence of an arbitrarily anti-spiritual system. 
            The problem is, that in rejecting all that stands outside concept, rationalism has rejected the very creative ground on which, not only culture, but concept itself, ultimately stands.