How Understanding Media and Plato S Phaedrus Line Up

Plato and McLuhan: Truth and the Medium In Understanding Media, McLuhan makes the case that the medium contains as much meaning as the content which the medium conveys. In a sense, McLuhan breaks deconstructs the process of communication to show that messages are not inseparable from the medium used to transfer them. Plato suggests however that messages are distinct from a medium in the sense that they relate to or do not relate to objective truth.

McLuhan's focus is not on truth, but rather on the meaning of the medium used to convey ideas (whether those ideas are concerning truth is irrelevant). This paper will show how Plato's message relates to McLuhan's in the sense that the text which contains the Platonic philosophy is related to how the message is perceived and thus impacts the acceptance of that message. This knowledge of the medium bears on the overall idea of innatism by giving it substance (visual text) and validation (through the Socratic example of dialogue).

The written message in the text Phaedrus is essentially that all knowledge comes from a process of recollection -- which suggests that "truth" is innate -- that it is written on our souls or in our minds when we are created, and that when we recognize something as being "true" it is because we have this concept of truth already inside, and we recall it when that outside of us compels us to recall.

In this sense, Plato is a believer in an objective truth outside ourselves -- a transcendental truth -- the unum, bonum, verum. As he states, "This is recollection of the things which our souls once saw during their journey as companions to a god, when they saw beyond the things we now say 'exist' and poked their heads up into true reality" (Plato 32). But as McLuhan notes, the printed text itself also conveys a message -- in this case, a message of authority.

McLuhan in Understanding Media asserts that "the medium is the message" (McLuahn 4) and this suggests that Plato's innatism may be viewed as the transference of the message of the "thought" of speech -- the content -- through the ears and into the mind, or the "text" of the print, as when we read Plato, through the eyes and into the mind.

The content, as McLuhan suggests, is what carries the meaning -- and in every medium there is typically to be found some content that is separate from the medium conveying it -- a medium within a medium, so to speak.

How does this lead to innatism -- or "recollection" as Socrates calls it in Phaedrus? That is a question that might more readily be put to Socrates, or Plato -- depending upon how one chooses to approach the dialogue -- as a character within the scene or as a reader of the text. Scientific knowledge at least in the modern sense is based on empirical evidence, whereas other types of knowledge, such as revelation, are faith-based, or there is the Platonic sense of knowledge which is intuitive or innate.

The Platonic idea of knowledge was based on the idea that the intellect could be used to know reality and truth. This idea was utilized throughout the middle ages as well, what with the scholastics basing their doctrine on the classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Thus, the limit of skepticism is that of empiricism. Each depends on statistical analysis and denies the use of reason, or common sense, or innatism or recollection. Descartes, on the other hand, appealed to the intellect, as did Plato and Aristotle.

McLuhan appeals to the intellect not so much in order to discern an objective reality or truth but rather to understand how the medium of television -- the flashing light medium -- is structured in order to reduce the passive viewer to a vegetative state whereby information is spoonfed through ears and eyes. Observation certainly plays a part in the acquiring of knowledge, but data is not required where common sense can play a part.

With television on the other hand, the medium does not require sense (in terms of intellect) to play a part, when it utilizes the sense organs as instruments to convey the content used within the medium. Implicit in common sense, of course, is the idea of the existence of universals, or rather traits that are common to all men and to existence everywhere.

McLuhan suggests that the architects of the medium of television understand this perfectly well, which is why they are able to appeal to a mass audience at one and the same time: human nature is not any different in Toledo, OH, than it is in New York.

In this context, it may be appropriate to preclude that for McLuhan the Phaedrus is "the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action," which essentially means that the dialogue is the primary way that Plato means to convey "truth" yet the actual character of the dialogue, as for any medium (as McLuhan suggests) is lost in the content of the dialogue or medium (McLuhan 9).

For instance, a printed text carries with it the connotation that what is inside the text is important enough for someone to read and therefore is mostly true. McLuhan would suggest that one consider the medium, first, and ask whether or not there is an agenda behind the medium.

The network news on television may serve as another example: news anchors may report that Syrians are all terrorists and viewers, because the information is on television, might give it more credence than if they saw this same message written as graffiti on a wall in a city. The medium itself is a message of authoritativeness that colors the context of the inner message delivered by the news anchor.

McLuhan is not so much interested in truth as he is in deconstructing the framework, the construct, the medium and the medium within the medium, which is also the message. For the Plato, the aim is to convince via dialogue; for McLuhan, the aim is to examine the medium that is the "dialogue" and see how it in itself is a message to us. Thus, while Plato's method of knowing reality and truth is to.