McLuhan’s 1944 lecture (published in 1946), ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’,¹ requires analysis in a variety of ways. Here its treatment of Aristotle will be examined. But it is also interesting as an example of McLuhan needing to get out of his own way² and of his ‘University of Chicago’ writings in the 1940s.³ It is also, of course, one of a number of texts in which McLuhan attempted to investigate further the “ancient quarrel” set out in his Nashe thesis from 1943.

What is at stake in the lecture is the conflict between the ‘great books program’ and ‘humanism’ at the University of Chicago under its president,⁴ Robert Hutchins, with the education policy of liberals like John Dewey and Sidney Hook. The latter policy is said to mirror industrial technology in ‘modern America’ generally. McLuhan’s contention is that “this dichotomy”⁵ of Hutchins vs Dewey must be understood against the background of “the ancient quarrel” treated the previous year in his Nashe thesis over the 2000 years between classical Athens and Elizabethan England.⁶ In effect, the history of that ‘trivial’ quarrel between dialectic, grammar and rhetoric was now to be brought up to date in specific regard to contemporary university education in America:

Behind this contrast in basic postulates between Hutchins and his opponents there is a long history. What makes the explanation of the conflict rather difficult is the fact that while the [rhetorical] position of Hutchins is recognizably that of Isocrates and Cicero, the position of men like Dewey is not like that [dialectic] of Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, I think it can be shown that Dewey and the experimentalists are lineally descended from Plato and Aristotle via William of Ockham and Peter Ramus. My explanation of the modern quarrel is in terms of the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand. It is the quarrel begun by Socrates against the Sophists, from whose ranks he came.⁷

Aristotle’s major role in the piece, usually in consolidated combination with Plato (as seen twice over in the passage just cited), is to function as a stand-in for the ‘dialectical’ art of the trivium. The differences noted in the thesis between Plato and Aristotle, especially Plato’s frequent ‘grammatical’ recourse to myth, is left aside.

At the same time, grammar and rhetoric are similarly consolidated throughout the essay: “the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand”.

Such fusions are effected over and over again — Aristotle with Plato and even Socrates, and rhetoric with grammar in combined opposition to dialectic — fusions which are intended to serve as the historical background to “the basic cleavage of American culture”: “the modern quarrel”.

But while the “ancient quarrel” of the thesis is between the three arts of the classical trivium, rhetoric, grammar and dialectic, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ reduces that quarrel to a 2-fold “dichotomy”. This is achieved through the aforesaid consolidation of grammar with rhetoric or by ignoring grammar altogether, as here:

the Sophists made (dialectical) logic subordinate to rhetoric or persuasion, since their end was political. And this it was which raised against them the opposition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who were all agreed that dialectics should control rhetoric, that knowledge was superior even to prudential action.

Either way, the third power of the “ancient quarrel” is eliminated as an independent force and with it, the possibility of media-tion between the remaining two. Their middle becomes a “no-man’s land” of “conflict” and outright “war”.

For McLuhan’s own development, this reduction of the three to the two through the omission of grammar is particularly important in regard to industry, technology, science and philosophy, all of which he situated on the negative side of the “basic cleavage”:

The cultural cleavage of North and South [in America] reflects the broad divisions of the age-old quarrel between Socrates and the Sophists in the past and between science and ‘the great books program’ in the present.⁸

Man: a technological unit? (…) Whereas Hutchins’ program would make every citizen a potential ruler, the “liberals” conceive rather of the individual as a technologically functional unit in the state.

He who would understand how in the (…) great books program all knowledge is subordinated to the development of political prudence, must understand the nature and influence of Cicero. When this is seen it is easy to define the opposition which always rises against the Ciceronian program from the camps of technology, science, or philosophy.

When we speak of the humanities today as opposed to technology, the physical sciences, or highly specialized disciplines such as logic, we mean what Cicero (…) meant.

In the past century the abstract cadres of German scholasticism have completely disoriented American school and college organization away from humanistic ends, bringing our education into line with industrial technology. All industrialist organization of society is necessarily technological and abstract. 

As already brought forward in Aristotle 4, in his 1969 Playboy interview McLuhan mocked this approach that he himself had taken a quarter century earlier:

For many years, until [the late 1940s when] I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951], I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was…

Through this self-critique and associated gestalt-switch McLuhan adopted “a totally new approach”:

I ceased being a moralist and became a student. As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man[kind] adopt a new survival strategy. 

But McLuhan could not adopt such a “totally new approach” as long as he was mired in either-or dualisms. Where there are two and only two fundamental powers, without an inter-media-tory third enabling their modulated community, it is necessary that one of them should “control” the other and that that other should be “subordinate” (if not eliminated altogether). For if fundamental basic powers exist in some kind of balance, however dynamic and variable that balance may be, there must be some third power enabling that community and its modulation. Contrariwise, absent such a third, there is not even a proper border between the antagonists, let alone a basis for their community. The ineluctable result is the collapse of the two into an “entire” singularity via all-out “conflict”:

Conflict, however, will inevitably arise between these parties [the dialecticians and rhetoricians] when either attempts to capture the entire education of an age or a country. 

‘Conflict’ is a technical term used four times in ‘An Ancient Quarrel”, along with ‘contrast’ (twice), ‘battle’ (twice), ‘dispute’ (twice), and ‘war’. All appear in such phrases as “the battle of the books”, “a dispute that began in ancient Athens”, and the “contrast in basic postulates”. All are stand-ins for ‘quarrel’ (used 14 times) and refer to the “ancient quarrel” whose nature McLuhan was attempting, unsuccessfully at the time, to plumb.

But just as in his Nashe thesis, where the possibility of another Aristotle is broached in its concluding section,⁹ one beyond the Aristotle of a dialectic caught up in dualisms, so in ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’. In a footnote a citation from Aristotle’s Topics (101a) appears that was already given in the Nashe thesis as well (Classical Trivium, 48):

[Dialectics] has a further use in relation to the ultimate bases of the principles used in the several sciences. For it is impossible to discuss them at all from the principles proper to the particular science in hand, seeing that the principles are the prius of everything else: . . . dialectics is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries.

McLuhan was speaking to himself here with this repeated citation. It was first of all he himself that needed to locate this “path to the principles of all inquiries”! And the way to do so was already demarcated, however obscurely, in his 1944 essay. He needed to articulate the role of the third power of the trivium, namely grammar, in the varied expressions of the dialectical and rhetorical powers relative to each other. This third power already appeared in his essay in such offhand expressions as “the means to wisdom” and “the bond of the state” and especially in the assertion in its concluding paragraph that “between the speculative dialectician (…) and the eloquent [rhetorical] moralist (…)  there need be no conflict.”

Principles as “the prius of everything else” cannot be both plural and only in “conflict”. They must reduce to a singular one (when ‘conflict’ is supreme) or be exfoliated in a society of at least three (when ‘conflict’ is not supreme and some kind of balance prevails despite fundamental difference). 

Principles cannot be a merely conflicted twofold. In the principial realm there is ultimately either a singular one or a community of three (or more than three). For either the two belong together in community as first principles, in which case their relation must be in some kind of balance and they cannot be only in conflict — in which case there must be a further principle, or principles, accounting for that balance and even for the differentiating border between them¹⁰ — or there is no such further principle, or principles, in which case there is no community or border and ‘they’ cannot be plural (aka, they cannot be more than one).

At the same time McLuhan needed to see that “all inquiries” must include technology, science, industry, logic, and abstraction, all of which in ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ are still dichotomously contrasted with ‘humanism’ — and thereby excluded from his valorization and his investigation. But principles cannot be principles if they apply only to a selection of their field (just as chemistry cannot cover only some physical materials).

McLuhan would have to find a way to loose himself from himself. He would have to come to see that even, or especially, his moral perceptions were not timeless observations, but relative assertions — thereby requiring an investigation of the relativity of “all inquiries”.¹¹ But this would necessitate not only a focus on ‘grammar’ as the binding third power of the ‘ancient quarrel’, but the submission of himself to it. How else undergo the trans-formation to “a totally new approach”?

Aristotle would be the primary — but not at all exclusive — means through which, by the end of the decade of the 1940s, the required somersault was achieved in McLuhan’s thought and, indeed, identity.