McLuhan’s annotated copy of the 1935 edition of Jacques Maritain’s An Introduction to Philosophy 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, 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 in Winnipeg via Coleridge whom he cited in his 1934 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 experience1 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.2 He found this contest of foundations (which McLuhan would later style “the 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] book 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 mind (…) 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”.3 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 you 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 farmboy set loose among the sophisticates,4 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 cite 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 was taking place in regard to religion. Aristotle was central on both fronts and Maritain’s Introduction, along with the Poetics studied with Q, were the drivers of it.
- From early on McLuhan rejected the idea that human types belong only to thinking. Instead, he insisted, they must apply to the whole person: “the literary or artistic expression of such temperaments has properly the same validity as has the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist”. The word “temperament” is revealing. For McLuhan was already emphasizing, this in 1934 as a 22 year-old, that such types cannot apply just to thought but must cover any sort of temperament whatever, including, as he would soon insist, those of ‘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 life but, rather, 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 had: “this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes in (…) the (…) moment of (…) awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive (in general) and the creative (is revealed in poetry) by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension”. (Bracketed insertions here are editorial.) 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 philosophy and art as special cases of it). ↩
- 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). ↩
- Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, #12, 1864. ↩
- 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 his fellow students from Britain, so in another way would his relative maturity and greater knowledge. ↩