Monthly Archives: October 2024

McLuhan and Aristotle 3 (the Stagirite as dialectician)

Between McLuhan’s initial exposure to Aristotle at Cambridge in the early 1930s and his PhD thesis on Nashe in the early 1940s, his acquaintance with the Stagirite increased considerably. His view of Aristotle became much more complicated and as a result the Aristotle presented in his thesis is very different from that of his first understanding a decade before.

Here he is near the start of that thesis reversing his earlier ‘Platonist/Aristotelian’ contrast:

[Since] Plato (…) habitually employed the grammatical modes of poetry and myth to express his own most significant and esoteric teaching, he is far from confident that grammar can be or ought to be entirely superseded. Shortly afterwards, however, Aristotle established the nature of non-grammatical scientific method in the Posterior Analytics. His achievement bore no fruit until the [scholasticism of the] twelfth century (…) [and especially in the following] great age of dialectics (…) in the thirteenth century (…) [with] the triumph of Aristotle in St. Thomas Aquinas… (Classical Trivium, 17)

The “non-grammatical scientific method in the Posterior Analytics” and its scholastic fruit more than a millennium later were the sort of dialectics usually characterized as ‘Platonist’ when framed by the Platonist/Aristotelian, Idealist/Realist opposition.1 Indeed, throughout the Nashe thesis McLuhan sees Aristotle as a, even the, dialectician:

Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena. (Classical Trivium, 41)

A history of dialectics by a dialectician does not exist, apart from the brief remarks of Aristotle. (Classical Trivium, 43)

Aristotle, rather than Plato, raised dialectics to the status of an art..  (Classical Trivium, 47)

Rhetoric, placed under dialectics by Aristotle… (Classical Trivium, 119)

The rise of Aristotle and dialectics to supremacy among the arts was especially disastrous to grammar and the classics… (Classical Trivium, 138)

his [Petrarch’s] dread of that Averroism, rooted in the Arabic Aristotle, which drew so many into atheism during and after the thirteenth century.  (Classical Trivium, 158n63)

Just as McLuhan was returning to Lodge in his thesis with the idea that an essential2 threefold generates the twists and turns of the western tradition, so he was also returning to Lodge’s characterization of Plato as more than an abstract Idealist. This, in turn, correlated with the finding that Aristotle was more than a concrete Realist. What McLuhan termed “a fresh receptivity” in a letter home from February 1935, was apparently required not only in regard to religion and literature as had been occasioned by a first acquaintance with Aristotle at Cambridge and his related revised view of Plato there. Now, almost a decade later in his Nashe thesis, such “fresh receptivity” seemed to be required also in regard to Plato and Aristotle themselves.3

  1. Classical Trivium, 39: “At the conclusion of the De Sophisticis Elenchis Aristotle offers what is still one of the few accounts of the history of dialectics. That he was not entirely happy about the results of his inquiry one can easily judge: ‘Moreover, on the subject of Rhetoric there exists much that has been said long ago, whereas on the subject of reasoning we had nothing else of earlier date to speak of at all, but were kept at work a long time in experimental researches. If, then, it seems to you after inspection that, such being the situation as it existed at the start, our investigation is in a satisfactory condition compared with the other inquiries that have been developed by tradition, there must remain for all of you, or for our students, the task of extending us your pardon for the shortcomings of the inquiry, and for the discoveries thereof your warm thanks’.” ↩
  2. Essential threefold — whose components were mutually exclusive exactly because essential. See https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2024/10/mcluhan-and-aristotle-1-first-encounter/#fn-66783-3. ↩
  3. This development inevitably affected the number of types of human experience envisioned by McLuhan. He had gone from Lodge’s 3, to a Platonist/Aristotelian 2, back again to the 3 of the trivium, but the prospect was for many more types than this. For once the complications of both Plato and Aristotle were admitted, the ratios between them must be a much greater number than the few possibilities when they were taken within a monotone Idealist/Realist contrast.  Similarly with the three arts of the trivium. Once allowed the convolutions and varying permutations displayed in the two thousand years covered by McLuhan’s thesis, the number of the genetic types of experience — taken as the ratios of the arts of the trivium with each other — would have to vary over a considerable spectrum whose extent and defining characteristics would be forever open questions for investigation. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 2 (Maritain’s Introduction)

Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy cites a passage from Goethe’s Farbenlehre (1810) which may have been the source of Coleridge’s dictum1 (quoted in McLuhan’s 1934 Master’s thesis) that “all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians”:

Goethe, repeating the theme of Raphael’s wonderful ‘School of Athens’, in which Plato is depicted as an inspired old man, his face turned heavenward, Aristotle as a man in the full vigour of youth pointing triumphantly to the earth and its realities, has drawn in his Theory of Colours (…) a striking comparison between Plato and Aristotle. “Plato”, he says, “seems to behave as a spirit descended from heaven, who has chosen to dwell a space on earth. He hardly attempts to know this world. He has already formed an idea of it, and his chief desire is to communicate to mankind, which stands in such need of them, the truths which he has brought with him and delights to impart. If he penetrates to the depth of things, it is to fill them with his own soul, not to analyse them. Without intermission and with the burning ardour of his spirit, he aspires to rise and regain the heavenly abode from which he came down. The aim of all his discourse is to awaken in his hearers the notion of a single eternal being, of the good, of truth, of beauty. His method and words seem to melt, to dissolve into vapour, whatever scientific facts he has managed to borrow from the earth. Aristotle’s attitude towards the world is, on the other hand, entirely human. He behaves like an architect in charge of a building. Since he is on earth, on earth he must work and build. He makes certain of the nature of the ground, but only to the depth of his foundations. Whatever lies beyond to the centre of the earth does not concern him. He gives his edifice an ample foundation, seeks his materials in every direction, sorts them, and builds gradually. He therefore rises like a regular pyramid, whereas Plato ascends rapidly heavenward like an obelisk or a sharp tongue of flame. Thus have these two men, representing qualities equally precious and rarely found together,2 divided mankind, so to speak, between them.” (Maritain, Introduction, 91-92,n1)

McLuhan was always a man of the senses, especially touch and smell, who never tired of depreciating deodorants. He identified firmly with the Aristotle depicted here by Goethe and seconded by Maritain.  But he would soon come to distrust all heaven and earth oppositions and begin a lifelong process of learning from both Plato and Aristotle aside from such hopeless dualisms.

  1. Coleridge was notorious for his borrowings from the Germans, especially Schelling. ↩
  2. In regard to such “qualities (…) rarely found together”, McLuhan would come to a more nuanced position which disagreed with Goethe, Coleridge and Maritain in one way and agreed with them in another. He disagreed with them in arguing that all experience whatsoever is structured by some heaven and earth ratio. So little are they “rarely found together” that there is no experience at all lacking such a ratio and, therefore, no experience at all lacking some medium, or ‘resonating interval’, or ‘gap where the action is’, giving varying structure to the numerator/denominator poles of that ratio: “the medium is the message”.  What is rare, however, and here he agreed with them, is consciousness of this fundamental fact: “qualities (…) rarely found together” in conscious awareness and theory. McLuhan’s contention was that earth and heaven, manifestation and essence, figure and ground, exactly as always “found together in all experience”, would establish a “new science” once consciously focused and investigated.  And part of this “new science”, its prehistory so to say, would be the recovery of all those anonymous (in myth) and known thinkers (especially, for McLuhan, Plato, Aristotle and Thomas) who saw the point but proved unable to communicate it — at least to our benighted age. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 1 (first encounters)

McLuhan’s annotated copy of Jacques Maritain’s An Introduction to Philosophy1 is preserved in his library now at the University of Toronto. This book was apparently suggested to him by Maritain’s friend and translator, Father Gerald Phelan. Phelan frequently lectured  on Chesterton (then McLuhan’s hero) and was the priest who was to guide and inspire McLuhan’s conversion in a process that chiefly unfolded between 1934 and 1937. It was from this Introduction that McLuhan, newly arrived at Cambridge, received another view of philosophy from the one he had from Rupert Lodge as an undergraduate and master’s student at the University of Manitoba. The new view was ‘Aristotelian’, the old one ‘Platonic’. 

McLuhan already referred to this classification of outlooks via Coleridge whom he cited in his 1934 University of Manitoba M.A. thesis on George Meredith:

In his table talk, Coleridge noted that all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians. There are similarly, in all times and places, definite types of temperament displaying consistency of conformation. The literary or artistic expression of such temperaments has properly the same validity as has the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist.

There are “definite types of temperament” which are constant possibilities “in all times and places” and it is from these, as from a kind of birth, that human experience2 variously derives. Lodge himself saw three such primary types, not two, but he agreed that two of these were “the Idealist and the Realist”. Lodge thought that the central charge for ‘comparative’ philosophy was to recognize these possibilities in action and to weigh any and all assertions formed from them in light of how they might equally appear from the vantage of the ‘precluded’ ones.3 He found this contest of foundations (which McLuhan would later style an “ancient quarrel”) preeminently enacted in the dialogues of Plato.

Already in his first months in Cambridge McLuhan reported rethinking the ‘Platonist’ model:

Now I can heartily recommend GK [Chesterton’s] book4 on St Thomas (…) He deals with Plato and Aristotle and their influence on Christendom (…) It is useful broadly to distinguish PI and Arist as tending towards Bhuddism [sic] and Christianity respectively. Plato was an oriental in mind5 (…) Aristotle heartily accepts the senses just as Browning did and says: (…) “All good things / Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”.6 And that is why great Aquinas accepted Aristotle into Christian theology. (McLuhan to his family, November 10, 1934, Letters 39)

A few months later, early in 1935, McLuhan rejected Lodge’s comparative notion out of hand through his first exposure to Maritain’s Aristotle :

As a handbook on Philosophy with especial regard to its historical development I strongly commend Maritain’s “Introd. to Phil” (…) He is the greatest living French thinker and is one of the foremost students and interpreters of Aquinas. Like most French texts it is a marvel of lucidity and order. I have read or dipped into numerous histories (all of which supposed Augustine and Aquinas were spoofers) and which therefore misunderstood everything that happened in society and philosophy after them. It is for his sympathy in this matter as well as his general account that I recommend him to you7 as certain to prove most coherent and stimulating. Lodge is a decided Platonist and I learned that way [of thinking] as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative (!) religion. Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Xian doctrine. (McLuhan to his family, February 1935, Letters 53-54)

At just this same time, McLuhan was taking a course on the Poetics of Aristotle given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Q’, doyen of the Cambridge English school and editor of the renowned Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900: 

Having just returned from the Divinity School where “Q” recommenced his course on The Poetics of Aristotle, I wish to set down certain facts while they are fresh. There was just one other chap with me and so we were able to be a very chatty trio. (McLuhan to his family, February 7, 1935, Letters 57)

Philip Marchand’s biography of McLuhan makes too much of the image of the farmboy set loose among the sophisticates,8 but it must indeed have been a life-altering experience, one among many, for McLuhan to have had what amounted to a tutorial with one of the leading literary minds in Britain on, no less, Aristotle’s Poetics! As will be documented in further posts, McLuhan would continue to consider the Poetics, and to learn from it, for the rest of his life.

In his two undergraduate years at Cambridge, 1934-1936, McLuhan  experienced tectonic shifts in his foundations. He recorded the experience for his family:

My position in regard to English Literature is altering rapidly. I have discovered that having in previous courses sampled numerous bits of it, I came to certain conclusions about them which really discouraged a further expansion of interest. I have discovered the utmost reluctance to open Keats or Shakespeare (…) largely because of an unconscious reluctance to disturb my previous judgements about them.  I have recently, in this new atmosphere, dissolved the old incrusted opinions (even where they were “correct” but none the less sterilizing) and obtained a fresh receptivity… (McLuhan to his family, February 1935, Letters 53-54)

As seen in his remarks on Christianity above, the same process as was happening in McLuhan’s reading of English Literature was taking place in regard to religion. Aristotle was central on both fronts and the introductory treatments by Chesterton and Maritain, along with the Poetics studied with Q, were the initial drivers of it.

 

  1. French original: 1920. ↩
  2. From early on McLuhan rejected the idea that human types characterize only styles of thinking. Instead, he insisted, they must apply to the whole person or persons (in the case of social entities). Like the relatively concrete “literary or artistic expression” to which he assigned equal rights with philosophy, the word “temperament” is revealing with its implication of emotions. McLuhan was already emphasizing, this in 1934 as a 22 year-old, that a typology of human being must cover any sort of experience whatever including, as he would soon insist, ‘ordinary cognition’. It was around 1950 that he would come to the formulation of the point he maintained for the rest of his life. In a series of papers he would argue that art is not derived from our individual and social life but, rather, our individual and social life from art. An artwork ‘retrieves’ or ‘replays’ or ‘retraces’ the genesis of experience (objective genitive) which is originally ‘poetic’. As he put it in his 1969 Playboy Interview, the key insight concerns “the identity of the processes of cognition and creation”. But already in 1951 in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ he could put the point in this way: “this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning (ie, the perceptual in the sense of learning about the world before one) and the creative processes in (…) the (…) moment of (…) awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative (is revealed in art) by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension”. (The bracketed specifications in the preceding sentences are editorial additions.)  The types of human experience — what he would come in the course of the 1950s to call “media” — are not first of all philosophical or even artistic categories, but are the general poetics encoded in any and all experience (including in philosophy and art as special cases of it). ↩
  3. See The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge: “To take one pathway, of itself precludes taking either of the others.” McLuhan’s decided rejection of Lodge as an undergrad at Cambridge did not stand in the way of his adopting Lodge’s central ideas as the foundation of his PhD thesis a decade later. With Lodge he would argue that there are three recurrent forms in the western tradition and that “in studying the history of (the trivium), dialectics and rhetoric, as indeed, of grammar, it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts” given the “essential opposition” between them (Classical Trivium, 43). ↩
  4. The Dumb Ox, 1933.  McLuhan apparently read the book the year after its publication just after his arrival in Cambridge. He may have done so on the recommendation of Father Phelan in Toronto. But as an increasingly active Chestertonian, he hardly needed any external suggestion. McLuhan’s copy is not in his library in Toronto. ↩
  5. Maritain’s Introduction: “It would appear, by way of the Pythagorean school that certain distinctively Oriental conceptions and modes of thought first entered Greece, to pass from Pythagoreanism to Platonism and neo-Platonism, and thence, swollen by further additions, into Gnosticism and the more or less underground stream of heterodox speculation.” (59n) ↩
  6. Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, #12, 1864. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s brother, Maurice, who became a United Church minister. ↩
  8. When McLuhan entered Cambridge in the fall of 1934, he already had 6 years of university behind him and had been awarded B.A and M.A. degrees. He had toured England with Tom Easterbrook in 1932. While his western Canadian background would certainly have led him to different impressions of Cambridge than those of most of his fellow students, so in other ways would his relative maturity and more extensive knowledge. ↩