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his own most significant and esoteric teaching, he is far from confident that grammar can be or ought to be entirely superseded.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
- 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’.” ↩
- 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. ↩
- 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. ↩