Marshall McLuhan on Philosophy

"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

"Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind."

"The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch."

"The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man."

"Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography."

"There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious."

"Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man."

"The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is."

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation."

"New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers."

"Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies."

"Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational."

"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience."

"Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning."

"For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning."

"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change."

"The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz."

"Logic is figure without a ground."

"The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them."

"Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses."

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."