Marshall McLuhan was engaged with the University of Chicago for the entire decade of the 1940s (his age 29 to 39). Notably, this engagement, which began when McLuhan was a low level lecturer at St Louis University just starting his academic career, came to involve him with the top leadership at UC: Robert Hutchins, John Nef, Richard McKeon, Ronald Crane and Mortimer Adler.

Until late in the decade McLuhan remained a fierce critic of what he took to be the dialectical Aristotelianism there, especially in the work of McKeon, Crane and Adler. This led to an associated criticism of the university’s support, enabled by Hutchins and Nef, of the teaching and research of the three. But his engagement with Chicago and, through it, with Aristotle, brought him by the end of the decade to a life-changing and life-defining change of mind. As he described in his Playboy interview 20 years later, he “ceased being a moralist and became a student”:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951, written in the late 1940s], 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, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation.¹ I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.²

Until the late 1940s McLuhan’s knowledge of Aristotle, aside from the Poetics that he had studied in some detail at Cambridge in the mid 1930s, was mostly secondhand and superficial (when not simply wrongheaded). Then in 1947 he began to engage with McKeon’s anthology, Introduction to Aristotle, which was published that year.

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This, together with work he was doing then on Eisenstein, Pound and Mallarmé, along with his perennial consideration of Eliot and Joyce, effected such a revolution in his thought that he was able to write in a 1950 review that investigation of “the creative process” (including first of all his own creative process) “must begin (…) in the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”!³

This was central to his transformation from ‘moralist’ to ‘student’! Since he had been completely wrong about a giant like Aristotle, and had even deemed his ignorance as fitted to morality, what might he not also be utterly wrong about? For McLuhan, such ἁμαρτία necessitated “a totally different approach” and this not as a one-time event, but as a continuing foundational questionability, first of all of his own perceptions, and then of perception in general. And while such universal questionability might seem to undermine the very possibility of science, McLuhan agreed with Thomas Kuhn that science and revolution enable each other and do not all contradict.⁴ Hence McLuhan’s later ever-repeated maxim of the necessity of “making, not matching”  — ‘making’ in the sense of the “creative process”. Hence his “new science of media” grounded in, and pursued on the basis of, that process.

In a Commonweal article in 1954 he reflected on this then quite recent fundamental change of orientation as follows:

When I wrote The Mechanical Bride some years ago [1946-1950] I did not realize that I was attempting a defense of book-culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me to much that was actually happening for good and ill. What we have to defend today (…) must be (…) analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves…⁵

This “citadel” of “the creative process involved in human cognition” was none other, he came to understand, than the object of investigation in “the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”. In this way, McLuhan’s originally only critical engagement with the University of Chicago and with Aristotle led him to recognize his own blindness (Aristotle’s ἁμαρτία) and the need to focus on the “creative process” of media (Aristotle’s μεταφορά, μεταβολή and μίμησις).⁶

The following are posts describing McLuhan’s engagement in the 1940s with the University of Chicago in its rough chronological order:⁷

McLuhan’s 1940 review of Adler
Giedion to Nef: “a young scholar of English literature”
McKeon, Gilson and Rorty
McLuhan and Aristotle 4 (Synthesis between Plato and Aristotle)
McLuhan and Aristotle 5 (dualisms in 1944)
McLuhan’s realism 6: dialectics and erudition not enough
The Failure at Chicago
Proposal to Robert Hutchins 1947
Nef on McLuhan’s proposal