The metaphysics of Marshall Mcluhan: Technology, Ethics and Human purpose

Abstract

In 1954, Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher, wrote a book called The Technological Society which posited that once new technologies are developed their application becomes almost inevitable.  Ellul warned that personal transformation is necessary to retain one’s humanity in the face of technological imperatives.  “Technique,” as he called expanding technology, needed to be confronted “without compromise” to keep human freedom alive.  Technology, he said, is the “metaphysics” of the 20th century.  Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher, also saw media as transformative not only of our psyche and consciousness but as extensions of our very biology.  In his book, Understanding Media (1964, the year Ellul was translated into English), he takes us on the journey of our altered perception in which our consciousness moves from linear to tribal.  This paper examines the juxtaposition of these ideas and shows their origins in the cultural ferment after World War II and brings the questions and insights McLuhan and other theorists of the mid-20th century have to offer our saturated media world of today.

Keywords

Technology and Metaphysics, McLuhan and AI-21st Century Perspectives, Technological Determinism, Ethics in Media

Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain…and as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.  So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a world of tribal drums, interdependence, and superimposed co-existence…Terror is the natural state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.  (The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 32)

1. Introduction

Over 60 years ago, the prescient scholar, Marshall McLuhan, realized that our organs of perception, the sensorium by which we “receive” and experience the world, were changing as the result of new technologies.  Not only were our senses suddenly co-opted and rearranged by new modes of receiving information through technological media but our moral valence, our relationship to each other, was beginning to change too.  He saw this movement in our psyches as an adaptation that was transforming ourselves and our culture.  His scholarship defined the new media phenomena and asked a question about our readiness for the shift: were we prepared to experience the effects of our own inventions?  It was his vocation, his joy, to open our eyes to what was happening.  When McLuhan, a literature professor, recognized that print had led us into a linearity that had made our culture orderly, confined, time-bound and structured and that the new direction of our culture through our media was breaking through “tribally,” holistically, expansively and simultaneously, he taught us how to awaken to this irreversible perceptual reorganization.  But it went beyond that– who would we become when the inevitability of our technology, the determinism of its trajectory, became REAL, our lived experience, not just a theory but a practice?   Over sixty years later, we have found out.  Who we are now is the result of the social and cultural changes McLuhan foresaw.  This paper will attempt to find the “soul” of his work and reflect on how the insights that emerged from his brilliant, metaphoric mind, seeing pictures of ourselves we could barely imagine, had come to pass—and then some!   

2. The Intellectual and Cultural Milieu of the Early to Mid- Twentieth Century that Shaped Mc Luhan and Its Paradoxes

McLuhan was born in 1911, grew up in the aftermath of World War I and lived his formative years imbibing World War II culture and its aftermath.  In his writings, he praises the work of the poet, T.S. Eliot, the novelist James Joyce, the Cubism of Picasso and the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg’s music.  He was drawn to those who were reconfiguring forms and finding how to break them into elements yielding new understandings.  In the time that McLuhan was a young scholar, the poet W.H. Auden wrote about the “Age of Anxiety,” a term he coined to describe the emotion that accompanied the dislocation of life that war had brought and the need to re-establish meaning and purpose.  Auden wrote in a long poem called “For the Time Being”(1944): Reason will be replaced by Revelation.  Instead of Rational Law…Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions. Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages.  Idealism will be replaced by Materialism.  And Justice will be replaced by Pity…and all fear of retribution will vanish.(These words resonate today.)  T.S. Eliot wrote of “the hollow men” (1925) and George Orwell wrote of the nature of propaganda, the distortion of truth and its power to kill and destroy those forced to deny what they see.  His masterpiece, 1984, was written in 1948.  All these had an effect on McLuhan.

Parallels of Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan in this period:

One of the fascinating parallels of the early to mid 20^th century was deep interest by philosophers in the nature of language and its power to influence behavior.  In the early 20^th century, there was a “linguistic turn,” an emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language in that time analyzing meaning and logic and references as the foundation of thought.  The linguistic theory and philosophy of language were in the ether at the time that McLuhan began his analyses of media, another form for the dissemination of language and meaning.  An example is the work of Jacques Ellul, who in 1954 published The Technological Society.  This was just a few years after McLuhan had published The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) about advertising and its propensity for manipulating and exploiting (McLuhan’s words) the consumer.   Though never having met, McLuhan and Ellul were on parallel tracks, both in their scholarly interests and in their spiritual quests.

Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, resistance fighter, professor and lay theologian. In his book on the technological society, he says that once new technologies are developed, their application becomes almost inevitable by reducing human freedom through “technological necessity.”  Ellul said personal transformation is necessary to retain one’s humanity in the face of technological imperatives.  “Technique,” as he called expanding technology, needed to be confronted “without compromise” to keep human freedom alive.

As a leader of the French resistance in World War II including efforts to save Jews from the Nazis for which he was awarded the Righteous Among Nations Award by the Holocaust Museum in Israel, Ellul was deeply disturbed about all movements and doctrines that sought to impinge on human freedom.  His writings are particularly concerned with the emergence of technological tyranny over humanity.  Ellul believed that “that which desacralizes a given reality itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality.”

Ellul, who was born a Protestant, had what he described as “a very brutal and sudden conversion.” The story goes that Ellul was working in his house alone and, without seeing or hearing anything, believed he was in the presence of something so overwhelming that it frightened him to his core.  He fled.  But he eventually concluded that he had been in the presence of God.  He began publishing theological discussions early in his career.  In his book, What I Believe, he writes: “the presence of faith in Jesus Christ alters reality…Hope is no way to escape into the future but there is an active force, now, that love leads us to a deeper understanding of reality.  Love is probably the most realistic possible understanding of our existence.  It is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is reality itself.”

What could be more human than this in the face of the depravity that Ellul had witnessed?  And what could be more human than the ways we communicate with each other, especially if we are communicating love?  

In 1964, The Technological Society was published in English.  This was the same year that Marshall McLuhan published his transformative book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  When McLuhan was studying at the University of Manitoba in the 1930s, he said that he had turned to literature at that time “to gratify his soul’s hunger for truth and beauty,” referring to this early period of his life as a phase of agnosticism.  Later, while studying the ancient trivium—grammar, rhetoric and logic—in England at Cambridge, he made the decision to convert to Catholicism.   This epiphany was influenced by his reading of G.K. Chesterton, who was a charismatic wit of the day and a prolific author of poetry, plays, essays and short stories.  He also wrote extensively on Catholicism to which he had converted though born in the Anglican Church.  McLuhan wrote in 1935 of Chesterton: “Had I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained agnostic for many years at least.  Chesterton did not convince me of religious faith but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy.  He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely.  He taught me the reasons for all in me that was simply blind anger and misery.” Faith would be an underpinning in the early years of the “age of anxiety” and during the cultural turmoil of the 1960s when technology was beginning its ascent.  Both Ellul and McLuhan felt this need in different but complementary ways. The need for a moral foundation was important to both men.  For McLuhan, who said “We become what we behold.  We shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” the importance of grounding was essential and he spent a lot of thought on what is figure and what is ground and pattern recognition to help determine what is salient.  At the same time, McLuhan also said, “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”  Simply said, the critical nature of McLuhan’s work was to teach us to understand media and, metaphysically speaking, that is a moral act.

3. Five Key Concepts That Are At the Heart of McLuhan’s Work, Their Metaphysical Significance and Their Expansion into The Laws of Media: The New Science

To parse the vast array of ideas that McLuhan brought to the analysis of media is almost impossible.  McLuhan was a polymath, a person of great learning in many fields.  Nevertheless, key concepts by which he will always be remembered open up the rich insights that have characterized his work.  Here are five that are timeless.

1. The Global Village
2. The Medium Is the Message
3. Hot and Cool Media
4. Media Ecology /Media Literacy /and The Media Mosaic
5. The Tetrad—The Laws of Media

The Global Village—The world has become like a village where we have access to it perpetually without the borders of space confining communication and where everyone can be known through these communication tools.  If we remember that McLuhan never lived to see the Internet, the World Wide Web, social media, smart phones or video conferencing, we must marvel at this revelation that the world is at our fingertips, “all at once.” The “universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow” is now a given in our lives.  For those of us who can remember when a long-distance phone call was a major achievement, the global village has long arrived.  Another interpretation of the global village is what he called “electronic interdependence.”  In this new age, humankind would move from individualism to a collective identity.  And yet, with all its unification, the global village has also been the stimulus for the opposite of this collective vision.  Issues of privacy, accuracy, agency, saturation, and surprisingly, loneliness—something that McLuhan, as far as I can tell, did not discuss—have arisen as a counterpoint to the intensity of the “tribal” culture the global village has created.  

The Medium Is the Message—There is probably no more notable phrase in all of McLuhan’s writing.  Talking about salience, he made us see that what has been considered most important in communications theory, the message, the content being conveyed, was really easily forgotten or placed in the background once transmitted.  It was old news.  But what endured was the medium that transmitted the message, the constancy of its presence and the form in which it relayed the message was more enduring and impactful.  This focus on the medium has expanded as media that McLuhan never got to see have proliferated.  He died in 1980, almost half a century ago.  But as early as 1962, when he was exploring the “end of the book,” he wrote:  “The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.  A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of saleable kind.”   This explanation could foretell the establishment of Amazon, a disrupter to so many industries, for example.  Amazon was founded in 1994, just when the Internet was getting its footing.  McLuhan foresaw it all without giving it a name.  Now, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is the third richest man in the world.  Interestingly, McLuhan rarely if ever spoke about profits.  His focus was the world of ideas, the forms and transformations.  In that way, metaphysically, he was a bit like the Plato of our time.  He thought in terms of ideals, not “deals,” a word we know all too well in our current politics.

Hot and Cool Media—Early in Understanding Media, McLuhan writes about what he calls “participation” in a medium.  He says that each medium can require either “hot” engagement and another “cool”.  A cool medium requires increased involvement due to the audience needing to fill in gaps or pay stricter attention to flow and meaning.  A hot medium enhances a single sense (like sound on the radio) which holds attention but does not require “work” to comprehend.  Cool media require attention and participation on the part of the user.  McLuhan described “cool” media as coming from the jazz and pop culture of the meaning of “cool” (still in use today) as detached, smart, noticeable, attractive, stimulating curiosity, requiring more effort to determine meaning.  Some say that McLuhan’s terminology derived from the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ distinction between hot and cold societies.  Levi-Strauss said the “colder” a society becomes, the more pronounced its endeavor to preserve the characteristics of its traditional culture as unchanged as possible.  A culture that is considered “hotter,” the greater its impetus toward a radical and rapid modernization.  These categories do not necessarily match each other but in both discussions—that of Levi-Strauss and McLuhan—there is no judgment about which medium or society is “better” than another.  Each has different requirements.  So the binary categories need to be understood along a continuum.  Hot and cool are measured on a scale rather than as a dichotomy.  Nevertheless, engagement , participation and attention are factors, says McLuhan, in the creation and evolution of a medium.  If one thinks now about the immense amount of research going into media “addiction” today, such as on social media or with artificial intelligence (which we will discuss momentarily), then we can understand how these temperature analogies can morph from external to internal processes.

Media Ecology, Media Literacy and the Media Mosaic—McLuhan was, unintentionally or not, the father of what became known as “media studies.”  I myself am a product of that charisma and the power of contemporaneity.  When I discovered McLuhan’s work, I knew I had to explore it with the background of my studies in English and Philosophy.  My  advisor in the English Education program at the University of Chicago, Dr. Janet Emig, allowed me to write my Master’s degree dissertation on the topic of “Rhetoric in a Media-Oriented Culture: Aristotle and Marshall McLuhan On Style.”  It was revelatory for me to combine ancient and modern and I knew it was a turning point in my personal scholarly life.  A few years later I enrolled in the first year of Dr. Neil Postman’s new, experimental program in what he called Media Ecology.  I am proud to be one of the first media ecologists.  Though we spent the first year of our program asking each other: “What is Media Ecology?  What are we doing?” I knew deep down that this quest to find the answer was the beginning of a new phase of my personal work life and that we were entering a new cultural moment in society.  McLuhan predicted it and he was right!   

This was the same time that the term “ecology” was gaining currency. We began to see the Earth as a system, not just a place. Systems thinking was deeply a part of what media ecology was about. Here is Neil Postman’s definition: “Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival (yes, he said “of survival!”). The word “ecology “implies the study of environments: their structure, content and impact on people.  An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes certain ways of behaving…in the case of media environments (such as books, radio, film, television, etc.), the specifications are obscure, concealed by our assumption that what we are dealing with is not an environment but merely a machine.  Media ecology tries to make these specifications explicit.  It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are , why media do what they do.  Media ecology is the study of media as environments.”

Media Literacy is another term that has confounded many who have tried to find a definition for the process.  Don’t we already comprehend what we see, hear and experience through our media?  Those involved in media literacy answer “No!”   As in the literacy skills of learning to read print, media literacy requires an understanding of a multiplicity of factors.  This can include production elements like cameras, sound, pacing;  messages that exhort, persuade, inform; and context such as purpose, audience, urgency  and relevance to a cultural context to name a few.  The movement of media literacy has accelerated as media have proliferated, especially those that target children, but this kind of literacy—the deep understanding of how media “work” to affect us and use their effects to reach us—is what McLuhan was pioneering though he never used that terminology to label what he was trying to do.  As a person with an extensive literary background, McLuhan did not see his “pedagogical” methodology as punitive or protective.  He opened up the mystery of media and revealed it through metaphors, examples, and a very large vision of what it was and might become.  One might not necessarily say that McLuhan was a teacher of media literacy.  But, he was, nevertheless.

And in this mélange of media ferment, there was McLuhan’s idea of media as a mosaic.  The paradoxical concept of “mosaic” referred to the interconnectedness of media and information and the fragmented nature of experience in the electronic age simultaneously.  The composite of different media fragments created new experiences of what can be seen, heard,  and absorbed through our perceptual capacities.  It includes the shift from linear to non-linear and encourages a holistic view of media in culture as the mosaic begins to cohere in a unified way despite its many pieces.  The mosaic style incorporates separateness and varied impacts of differing media within a  framework that still allows for connection, pattern, and meaning-making.  As McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, media are extensions of our senses.  The metaphors for media understanding—as an ecology, a mosaic, an underpinning of a new literacy—these were also part of the legacy McLuhan left.  Perhaps another name for him would be “magician,” someone who surprised us, made us laugh, wonder, and question. He was not didactic in a traditional way. He opened the door and let us explore the media with him.  McLuhan was a constant explorer and re-encountering him decades later still enchants.

 4. The Tetrad and the Laws of Media: The New Science

Though this section connects to the prior one in terms of McLuhan’s enduring legacy, perhaps this is the most metaphysical of all of McLuhan’s conceptualizations.  

In 1988, Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan’s son, published a book called Laws of Media: The New Science.  Both of their names were on it as authors though Marshall had died in 1980.  But Eric took the extensive work that his father had done when a publisher had asked him to revise Understanding Media for a second edition.  In the Introduction, Eric writes: 

 “One fundamental discovery upon which this essay rests is that each of man’s artefacts is a kind of word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form into another…Laws of Media provides both the etymology and exegesis of these words. It may well turn out that the language they comprise has no syntax. So, the accustomed distinctions between arts and sciences and between things and ideas, between physics and metaphysics are dissolved.

The book is written in five parts and each part is different.  It is written as a mosaic with each chapter in a different style.  As the ending of my paper, I want to take separate elements of the book that have struck me as the metaphysical engine of McLuhan. The fragments, I hope, will yield the brilliant facets that I have discussed throughout looked at with new lenses and new colors.  

First, I want to look at the form of the tetrad.  They developed the tetrad to answer the question: “What general, verifiable, (that is, testable) statements can be made about all media?  They found only four questions over twelve years of seeking:  What does it enhance or intensify?/What does it render obsolete or displace?/What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?/What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?(p.7)

Second is a distinction between “logos” and “mythos.”   “The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos, which was the speech of logic and reason and ordinary communication of people in daily life while “mythos” was the language of story encompassing myths, legends and tales of gods and heroes.  Mythos was metaphysical.  It transformed the everyday into moral lessons, explanations of natural phenomena and the purpose of human experience. (p.16)

Third,  “The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.” (p.98)

Fourth, “The Laws of Media  offer a bridge between the hemispheres (right and left in the brain), a dialogue in accordance with the role of the corpus callosum that neurosurgeons identify as the organ that facilitates interplay between the two types of cognition…it is only with the return to acoustic space in this century, to right hemisphere multisensory forms of awareness that the tables begin to turn once again from linearity.”(p. 125)

Fifth, “At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential…The laws of media in tetrad form reveal some of the subliminal and previously inaccessible aspects of technology. To the extent that these observations  reveal the hidden effects of artefacts in our lives, they are endeavors of art, bridging the worlds of biology and technology.” (p. 107)

These broad general principles chosen from many references in the book to science, history, psychology, and more seem to me to be universal principles by which the “metaphysics of McLuhan” can be ascertained. He and his son attempted to create “a new science” of media.  One of the critiques of McLuhan was that his books, his thought, were effusive, expressive and non-scientific on some deep level.  They were metaphoric and intuitive which is part of what made him so great.  He was seeing beyond the norm to a place which has manifested greater and wilder than he could have dreamed. It is fascinating that toward the end of his life, he chose to develop “Laws” though they are the product of intense humanistic learning.  McLuhan was one of those rare people who, like the corpus callosum in our brains, became a channel for science and logic and intuition and passion simultaneously.

Final Thoughts

What would McLuhan think of today and the tomorrow we are facing as a result of new technologies and advanced media that are causing fear, inciting greed and creating huge rifts in our society about how they should be used? In the 19^th century, there were the Luddites, people who resisted new technologies that were going to replace their jobs. The British government punished them by making destroying machines a capital crime, sending thousands of troops to industrial areas and arresting or executing many who protested.

There is not a publication today that is not writing about Artificial Intelligence, a technology that McLuhan never mentioned.  The threat to workers is exponential and it is already here with demands that have forced considerations such as should government be able to force AI to be in service of the Pentagon and be a weapon of war when the company that produces the technology is saying it will not accept the use of its services for these ends?

The crisis we are facing in our country regarding new media and how it is created is now dominated by machines that are humanoid. They are being trained to be of service to humanity (or so it is said) but at a huge cost of resources, layoffs, and a fear of unexpected consequences from their use, including what may be creating an intelligence that supersedes humans’.  This is called The Singularity. The Singularity is a “hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization.”  Some say that such a super intelligence could result in human extinction.  The consequences of a technological Singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human species have been greatly debated.

In the March 1, 2026 New York Times, an article says that people are sharing more with chatbots about their personal lives and this puts “a new spin on old Internet privacy rules.”  Are these personal revelations protected speech?  The March 2, 2026 cover of TIME Magazine has nine people on it who are anti-AI activists.  The title is “The People vs. AI: Behind the Growing Backlash.”

These are questions that McLuhan did not address although he did predict the intensity and inevitability of social change as a by-product of new media and with AI, the medium is definitely the message.  The commercial uses of AI are manifold but the current development of corporate control of AI means that guardrails are being left behind and so is Ethics.  If McLuhan’s original work led us to be immersed in media Metaphysics, this has been melded with the overwhelming need for a new commitment to Media Ethics.  The Deus Ex Machina, the so-called God in the Machine, used to refer to a literary device which McLuhan would have understood well—an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.  But now the Deus Ex Machina is needed for the Deus IN the Machine.

Soon after OpenAI released Chat GPT, poet Iain Thomas, a technological researcher, Jasmine Wang AND Chat GPT-3  asked and answered the question: “What Makes Us Human?” Here is portion of their answer (p.213):

“Nothing is so much at stake in our world, right now, as the human capacity to take a step back from immediate experience, to reflect, to imagine, to create connection between ourselves and others, to see ourselves in relation to something larger and more meaningful.”

The exploration of McLuhan’s work has led me to realize that this reflection, this use of imagination, is what is needed now for us to create a new media studies built upon the work of great thinkers like McLuhan but going beyond them.  We are more than a half a century away from his initial insights.  They are foundational.  As he took risks, so must we.  We must keep in mind the question of defining our humanity, keeping our hubris to a minimum and respecting the fact that we are the ones creating the media—even the media that we fear.  And we must be the ones to discern how far we’ve moved from McLuhan’s exuberant revelations.  It is time to pause, find faith in what we believe and understand media yet again, with new eyes and a new heart for what lies ahead.

Works Cited

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Thomas, Iain, Jasmine Wang, and ChatGPT-3. What Makes Us Human? Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2023.