The synthesis effected by St. Thomas between Plato and Aristotle…(Classical Trivium, 229n2)

As seen in Aristotle 3, McLuhan’s 1943 Nashe thesis begins by highlighting the opposition between Plato as a sometime grammarian and Aristotle as a dialectician:

[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his own most significant and esoteric teaching, he is far from confident that grammar can be or ought to be entirely  superseded.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)

But the concluding part of the thesis briefly refers to the “synthesis effected by St. Thomas between Plato and Aristotle”. Here it appears that “the triumph of Aristotle in St. Thomas” was not a triumph of dialectics over Plato and grammar as may initially have appeared, but, rather, was Aristotle’s triumph as the philosopher of Catholicism¹ — achieved in Thomism via insight into the complementarity of Aristotle and dialectic with Plato and grammar.

This new (for McLuhan) possibility of an integrated Plato-Aristotle relation indicates the terminus of the winding road McLuhan’s thought would take over the following years of the 1940s, leading to the identification in 1950 of his life’s work as a “voyage of discovery into the creative process“² — “a voyage of discovery”, moreover, which “must begin (…) in the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”.³

In 1944, the year after his Nashe thesis was approved and his Cambridge PhD granted (oral defense being suspended on account of the war), McLuhan moved back to Canada from St Louis. After a 2-year stop at Assumption College in Windsor, this would lead him to the University of Toronto in 1946. There at St Michael’s College he would become a colleague of Etienne Gilson, who had been the single most cited author in McLuhan’s Cambridge thesis via Gilson’s favorite pupil, and McLuhan’s best friend in St Louis, Bernard Muller-Thym.⁴ But Gilson’s master work, Le Thomisme, does not appear in the bibliography of that thesis.⁵ He would read it when he got to Toronto, however — in French because there was as yet no English translation of the latest 1942/1944 editions — and its effect was to give him a much more nuanced view of Aristotle through the lens of Saint Thomas.

At the same time, Sigfried Giedion, who met and befriended McLuhan in 1943, tried to interest the University of Chicago in hiring him. And this, too, prompted a renewed interest in Aristotle since influential professors there like Ronald Crane, Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon⁶ were avowed Aristotelians. As recorded in McLuhan’s unpublished essay, ‘The Failure in Chicago’, from 1946 or 1947, McLuhan strongly opposed the views of these professors. But to do so cogently, he had to take on their understanding of Aristotle and to do that he had to have better knowledge of Aristotle himself. 

For religious, theoretical and practical reasons, McLuhan came to engage with Aristotle in the later 1940s. This was a time in which he went through a ‘second conversion’, going from being a rather brittle moralist to being a student of all human experience regardless of what might be taken to be the moral implications at stake. He described this transformation in his Playboy Interview in 1969:

For many years, until I wrote [in the late 1940s] 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, 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. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience (,,,) 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. 

Now Aristotle had a central role in this transformation via his related treatments of metaphor and mimesis. Future posts will document McLuhan’s increasing understanding of these notions in the works of the Stagirite. Suffice it to note here that McLuhan’s “totally new approach”, adopted in the late 1940s when he himself was in his late 30’s, amounted to a turn from a rigid dualism (between the moral and immoral, agrarian and civic, ancient and modern, natural and mechanical, etc) to a more complex understanding of all such oppositions as at the same time deeply, indeed essentially, related (although never merely identified). This amounted to a gestalt switch (“a totally different approach”) for McLuhan, whereby metaphor and mimesis were taken to ground the experience of these oppositions, not as figures based on them.⁷

Of course McLuhan was not then able to articulate these matters as he later would do. By way of anticipation, however, it may be observed that he came to take metaphor and mimesis as means (or media) determining the meaning (or message) of any and all such oppositions: ‘the gap where the action is’ as seen through ‘the flip of figure and ground’. Where metaphor and mimesis were taken as secondary figures on stable oppositional ground, the ‘effect’ was the experience of such oppositions typical of the Gutenberg galaxy and the mechanical. Taken, rather, as primary dynamic ground, the effect or figure was the fundamentally different sort of experience of such oppositions typical of the Marconi era and the electric. Either way, the medium determined the message and therefore was the message also in a deeper sense as the variable elementary structure of the artefactual field — the field of the effects of human being (dual genitive) in any and all thought and action.

McLuhan’s bumpy road in the 1940s toward his ‘second conversion’ via Aristotle, may be glimpsed in unpublished essays from the time — the subject of the next McLuhan and Aristotle posts. In them, as in the faltering steps taken in the preceding decade described here, and in the previous McLuhan and Aristotle posts, McLuhan’s “voyage of discovery into the creative process” was underway (although, of course, not yet consciously). It was to reach its goal in 1950 in the decisive insight, at last, that research into “the creative  process (…) must begin (…) in the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”.⁸