In a May 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli, McLuhan points out the poetry in the placement of an experimental atomic reactor pile mentioned in a scientific report.
That it should be situated symbolically in a football stadium is too perfect. American sport, the artistic imitation of American business. Our great emotional educator and indicator.
You see, American business, excluded form the lib. arts curriculum conquered the college for all that. The dialectically organized curriculum omits all emotional education. That is entirely in the hands of the symbolic stadium. You see how perfectly this ties up with the “real life” of the outside worldâthe alumni. Lethal nostalgia and revenge on the pedagogues. From outside the school the business man conquers the curriculum. What need to fool with actual courses?
I have all this stuff on slides. Show the entire interaction of all levels of our wake-a-day and dream lives. The areas of consciousness, though, are now pin points. Just a mind here and there struggling against freeze-sleep. Sent it as a book to Reynall Hitchcock but haven’t heard from them. Embraces the entire business of Existenz by anticipation.
As I move through these correlations you can see why I crave the materials provided by [Cyril] Connolly and Existenz. I begin to see deeper into the consciousness of Poe and Faulkner. Their rage is relatively noble. Rooted in a community born in the decadence of the Greek revival they were peculiarly alive to the impact of technology. Invalid or Dying from their inception, they had the hyper-awareness of the sick-man for his enemies. Disgust with themselves was mounted on disgust with their external foes. Inner exhaustion was called on to fight an empty robot. A nightmare of nullity. And yet symbolically in such as [Allen] Tate and [Cleanth] Brooks, a note of modest confidence in renewal of the human condition. Not the abstract assertion of such a possibility as in [Lewis] Mumford the urbanite, but the quiet cultivation of a positive grammatica. Stirrings, however dim, of a genuine culture. Knowledge and supply of a real pabulum. That’s where, I too, take my stand. The view is horrible, but the garden is there too.
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 184
A week later he gives some constructive criticism to Walter Ong regarding a published piece in which Ong compare Reader’s Digest to a circus run by P.T. Barnum.
Now a word about your essays. The America papers were good but your analysis would have been better for a closer view of the typical items. In fact, you yourself would have been shocked had you taken even the very best items and considered them closely. I mean with regard not only to their structure and texture but with a view to their assumptions about audience. The whole function of thought and entertainment embedded in that mag. can be a parabola of the most profound contemplation. (Have you seen the last 2 issues of Partisan Review?) But I am being though with you were Walter only because its the only point at which I can be of help to you.
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 186
The McLuhan’s Milieu feature will take a deep dive into the archives of Partisan Review, which is available online for free thanks to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. To start that journey, let’s consider a possible origin or catalyst for McLuhan’s 1946 craving for material on Existenz. Looking at the two issues mentioned to Ong, we find that it could very well be creditable to an essay appearing in the first, written by one of the magazine’s many prolific contributors: What is Existenz Philosophy? by Hannah Arendt. (PDF)
As distinct from existentialism, a French literary movement of the last decade, Existenz philosophy has at least a century-old history. It began with Shelling in his late period and with Kierkegaard, developed in Nietzsche along a great number of as yet unexhausted possibilities, determined the essential part of Bergson’s thought and of the so-called life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), until finally in postwar Germany, with Scheler, Heidegger, and Jaspers, it reached a consciousness, as yet unsurpassed, of what really is at stake in modern philosophy.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1
Arendt provides a broad overview of philosophical history following the destruction of the unity of Being by Immanual Kant, “the true, if also clandestine, founder of the new philosophy: who has likewise remained till the present time its secret king.”
More depends than is commonly supposed in the history of secularization on Kant’s destruction of the ancient unity of thought and Being. Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of God destroyed that rational belief in God which rested on the notion that what I can rationally conceive must also be; a notion which is not only older than Christianity, but probably also much more strongly rooted in European man since the Renaissance. This so-called atheising of the worldâthe knoweldge, namely, that we cannot prove God through reasonâtouches the ancient philosophical concepts at least as much as the Christian religion. In this atheised world man can be interpreted in his “abandonment” or in his “individual autonomy.” For every modern philosopherâand not only for Nietzscheâthis interpretation becomes a touchstone of philosophy.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1
Arendt dedicates a particularly long section of the essay to explaining the major points of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, such as Existenz/Dasein, and throwness/Geworfenheit. To this, she contrasts the work of Karl Jaspers:
From an historical point of view, it would have been more correct to have begun the discussion of contemporary Existenz philosophy with Jaspers. The Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, first printed in 1919, is undoubtedly the first book of the new “school.” On the other hand, there was not only the external circumstances that Jasper’s big Philosophie (in three volumes) appeared some five years after [Heidegger’s] Sein und Zeit, but also, more significantly, the fact that Jaspers’ philosophy is not really closed and is at the same time more modern. By modern we mean no more than that it immediately yields more clues for contemporary philosophical thinking. There are such clues, naturally, also in Heidegger, but they have the peculiarity that they can lead either only to clues for polemic or to the occasion of a radicalization of Heidegger’s projectâas in contemporary French philosophy. In other words, either Heidegger has said his last word on the condition of contemporary philosophy or he will have to break with his own philosophy. While Jaspers belongs without any such break to contemporary philosophy, and will develop and decisively intervene in its discussion.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1
Arandt’s essay is worth reading in full, so I’ll close with a question which you might find the answer to while reading it.
In a 1978 letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star, McLuhan proffered his own definition of the philosophic tradition of Husserl and Heideggerâwhat Arendt is calling Existenzâin regards to classifying Roland Barthes:
As for Barthes, he is a “phenomenologist”âthat is, one who tries to see the patterns in things while also playing along with the dominant theory of his world.
Personally, I prefer to study the pattern minus the theory.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 549-540
How did McLuhan come to that definition? That is, what is he communicating by defining Phenomenology/Existenz in those terms?
Adam Pugen
Excellent and very useful retrieval work!
As you know, I have pursued similar lines for the past few years reaching the following conclusion regarding the nexus of McLuhan, phenomenology, and the digital (excerpted from my thesis):
“[W]hile McLuhanâs background in medieval exegesis and modernist
poetics provided him with an impressive awareness of modes of sensibility, informing his
often incisive phenomenologies of different media forms, his lack of training in, and even
personal repugnance toward, formal logic and mathematics evidently exacerbated his
inability to precisely determine the manner in which, as I have been claiming, the tactile
ratio-nality informing conscious awareness is extended into the world by the formal
properties of computer media. We may direct the same critique toward the post-
Husserlian phenomenologies of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, whose
existentialization of Husserlâs phenomenological project garnered compelling insights
about being-in-the-world, while at the same time making the error of intentionally
disregarding the basis of Husserlâs phenomenology in the relationship between the
âtranscendental egoâ and mathematical logic. It was perhaps the apparent lack of
correlation between formal logic and the structures of daily experience formed by radio
technology that biased such thinkers against realizing that mathematical abstraction,
through computer technology, was on the way to forming the very lifeworld structures,
which, as I will soon argue, the development of the phenomenological method, under
Husserl, was intended to explicate. It is in this sense that, in order to bring forward an
existential phenomenological approach to the digital lifeworld, the latter of which was
properly characterized by McLuhan as fostering the tactile perception of a plurality of
worlds and sense-ratios (or, in Husserlian terms, simply âsensesâ), we must return, I
argue, to the digital environmentâs conditions of possibility, which, as secondary literacy,
reflexively retrieves Aristotelian primary literacy both as Leibnizian mathesis universalis
and as Husserlian transcendental phenomenology” (The Intellective Touch: A Phenomenology of Digital Modernism, 2020, p. 158).
ALP
02:
Existentialism Politicized: Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers
Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman
There has been much debate about how to locate Hannah Arendt within the tradition of political philosophy. This article argues for an âexistentialistâ reading, claiming that Karl Jaspers’s categories reappear, politicized, in Arendt’s own thought. Her language and arguments do not, in fact, become completely intelligible until read in the context of Jaspers’s Existentz philosophy. The authors contend that the apparent obscurity and ambiguity of Arendt’s writings owe to her attempt to stretch the framework of existentialism to fit the milieu of classical antiquity, to which it is fundamentally alien. Conversely, Arendt appropriated only those aspects of Aristotelian theory that suited her existentially defined concerns while ignoring the rest, a procedure that accounts for many of the tensions and contradictions found in her work.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/existentialism-politicized-arendts-debt-to-jaspers/C88EDC32511271AE78AB7EB0AA5CFFAE
Cameron McEwen
McLuhan’s considerations of phenomenology were more complex than those offered in his 1978 Star letter. For further 1978 thoughts on the topic see https://newexplorations.net/mcluhan-on-phenomenology-in-1978/