Plato and McLuhan: Truth and the Medium
McLuhan does not directly address the idea of truth or reality but does state that by understanding the structure of various media forms, we can become more aware of how it shapes our thinking and our environment. McLuhan's idea of truth is to reveal the structure of media and thereby not succumb to its effects. He offers different ways in which we can attempt to unravel the structure of media. How does his approach contrast with Plato's method of knowing reality and Truth?
Plato's declaration in Phaedrus is basically that humans acquire knowledge through a recollection process. According to Plato, a person is born with an innate knowledge of the truth that is not acquired through learning or conditioning. When people recognize something as being true, it is due to this inherent concept within. They recall this "truth" when they are compelled by external forces. As Plato (32)[footnoteRef:1] describes it, we recognize reality by recollecting the things that our souls have once seen in the course of our journey as companions to a god. During this foray, our souls encountered the world in a heightened, more real state, and saw the true nature of things. Like the imprisoned individuals in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we were taken outside of our two-dimensional world of shadows and shown the actual three-dimensional universe full of color and light. While there is a definite logic and reason applied to this mode of understanding, its premised on comparison to and evaluation of an ideal plane of existence we not only had access to, but memories of. [1: Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2002. Print.]
While the premise of inherent knowledge of the universe might not work well in the modern age, the analysis of how we experience the world and how our perception (or the mode by which we perceive something) warps "reality" is more timely than ever in this...
McLuhan's focus is less metaphysical (does the world exist) and more epistemological (how do we know the world exists). If, as he says, the business of man is learning and knowing, then the "how" we learn or know something is crucial, especially in the this media saturated age. McLuhan's approach to media takes on a process of careful triangulation among its different forms. He uses the 'hybrid energy' of clashing media environments to demonstrate the specific qualities of each medium. This triangulation and comparison focuses on how do we know what we know and is this knowledge affected by the medium through which it is delivered? McLuhan attempts to identify the weaknesses, strengths, and dangers of the various mediums in order to understand "contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them"(7)[footnoteRef:2]. For example, he analyzes digital media and reframes it as translators of experience or metaphors. According to McLuhan, "all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms"[footnoteRef:3] (85). In today's world, this is evident through the almost ceaseless translation of information into binary code and back again into some sort of representative presentation. [2: McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence W. Gordon. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.] [3: McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence W. Gordon. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.]
Content, as McLuhan, suggests is one medium being embedded within another. This basically means that in every medium, there is a hidden idea separate from the mode of conveying the content. What a person sees on TV might be an image of a juicy meat, but the hidden idea is basically to get the person to think about food and activate their taste buds to desire a juicy meat, which would distract them from what they are watching at…
