... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.

... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value.

[Art] acts as 'an instrument allowing us to see through the gaps of dominant ideologies, and the source from which new methods could be drawn in the struggle against the system(s)'.

... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

... Weber insists that the value of science is always to be questioned and not simply presupposed... He is... critical of the presupposition which underlies Strauss' position, namely that scientific reason is necessarily of value.