In the heights of thought, contributing anything new is extremely rare. But McLuhan made several contributions towards one major one.

1.The elements or archetypes or ontologies or media in the artefactual domain are ratios. Now Plato had suggested as much in maintaining that the ontological battle of the idealist gods and materialist giants was ‘always going on’ (Sophist 246).¹ So the two were always actively engaged with one another and this could be understood as a constantly varying relation or ratio between them. But did Plato or Aristotle (who did indeed set out tables of binary oppositions) see that the ratio between oppositions is the key to investigation of the artefactual domain? That the medium is the message?²

McLuhan called this “the ineradicable power of doublets” (From Cliché to Archetype, 108) and the “principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order” (Spiral — Man as the Medium, 126) and probably became focused on the notion shortly after he arrived in Toronto through Eric Havelock’s study of the epyllion form.³ But the notion itself went back at least to Cartesian coordinates and was slowly developed in the course of the twentieth century as structuralism in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, literary criticism and cybernetics. It was in the air when McLuhan began to intuit his life’s work in the late 1940s. But as was typical of McLuhan, he took the notion in new directions that remain today (2024) largely unexplored almost a half-century after his death.

2. Elements or archetypes or ontologies or media, as ratios, can be expressed either as varying emphases of their numerator/denominator poles or as manifestations of their mediating middles — media in a fundamental sense. That is, any elementary form can be defined by the “resonating interval” (or mode of relative emphasis) between its poles.⁴ The medium is the message.

3. The elementary media as ratios are not only two or three, say, but are likely to be quite numerous, like the chemical elements, once the possible configurations of their ratios begin to be understood.⁵ For the ratios of gods/giants and giants/gods (for example) would seem to have a great many permutations depending on the dynamic relations between them: the medium is the message.⁶

4. The resulting investigations, if they amount to a ‘new science’, do not constitute a sister species to the existing domains of the physical sciences, but are integral to a new genus of sciences.⁷ This idea has often enough been suggested either by denying that artefactual inquiries are scientific at all or by insisting on their fundamental difference from those of the physical sciences. But McLuhan’s ‘new science’, which he took to be implicit in Francis Bacon and Vico, is explicitly an entirely new genus of investigations with its own laws.⁸

5. McLuhan saw with Harold Innis that the relativity of all human cognition could achieve demonstrable insights, even laws, without — necessarily without! — eventuating in some kind of matching or merging between the experiencing subject, individual or collective, and the investigated object. Achieved truth of this sort (and there is no other sort) is irremediably finite and always subject to future adjustment and revision, but is nonetheless — actually only on this basis — true. Such finite but truthful insight he called making as contrasted to matching or merging and this artefactual nature was one of the many parallels he perceived between the arts and sciences.

6. McLuhan emphasized the plurality of time, here following (some he did  knowingly, others not) Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Saussure and Heidegger. See McLuhan’s times. The time of the weighing and selecting of possibility ratios is not the same as the time of experience as their effect. Meanwhile these diverse times exists only in ratios of their own and a further time or times characterizes the media of the ratios.

7. The being of human beings consists in the moment to moment to moment katabasis or descent into the possibilities of experience (objective genitive) and the activation ‘there’ of some one of them. These possibilities are always ratios (see above), but future investigation must determine if possibilities are activated only as ‘elements’ or also as ‘compounds’, perhaps even as ‘mixtures’. Here McLuhan might be seen as retrieving Heraclitus: ὁ ἥλιος νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρηι ἐστίν (fr 6: ‘the sun is new every day’). As McLuhan repeatedly asserted, his model here was language where vocabulary, grammatical form and gesture are momentarily selected in a process which is almost entirely unconscious. Just as with language, what was needed was a ‘grammar’ of this process of the making of experience where the key was to treat any and all experience as effect. “Our new dictionary includes all human artefacts as human speech” (Laws of Media, 224).

Taken together, these contributions could instigate (and therefore should be used to instigate) a whole new series of sciences based on the elementary ratios of media. With it would come a new understanding of human being, one whose ongoing explorations would, according to McLuhan, amount to a “survival strategy” — this at a time when human folly threatens civilization and even the  biosphere itself.