Plato and McLuhan: Truth, Media, and Perception

Introduction: Two Theories of Truth

McLuhan does not directly address the idea of truth or reality, but he does argue that by understanding the structure of various media forms, we can become more aware of how media shapes our thinking and our environment. McLuhan's conception of truth involves revealing the structure of media so that we do not succumb to its effects. He offers different strategies for unraveling that structure. The central question this essay explores is how his approach contrasts with Plato's method of knowing reality and Truth.

Plato's Innate Knowledge and Recollection

Plato's declaration in the Phaedrus is essentially that humans acquire knowledge through a process of recollection. According to Plato, a person is born with an innate knowledge of truth that is not acquired through learning or external conditioning. When people recognize something as true, it is because of this inherent concept within them — they recall this "truth" when compelled by external forces. As Plato describes it, we recognize reality by recollecting the things that our souls once witnessed in the course of our journey as companions to a god. During this experience, our souls encountered the world in a heightened and more real state, perceiving 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 definite logic and reason applied to this mode of understanding, it is premised on comparison to and evaluation of an ideal plane of existence to which we not only had access, but of which we retain memories. The soul, in Plato's framework, is the ultimate arbiter of truth — not the senses, and not the medium through which information arrives.

McLuhan's Epistemological Approach to Media

While the premise of inherent knowledge of the universe may not translate easily to the modern age, the analysis of how we experience the world — and how our mode of perception warps "reality" — is more timely than ever in this era of screens. McLuhan's focus is less metaphysical (does the world exist?) and more epistemological (how do we know the world exists?). If, as he argues, the business of humanity is learning and knowing, then how we learn or know something is crucial, especially in this media-saturated age.

McLuhan's approach to media employs a process of careful triangulation among its different forms. He uses what he calls the "hybrid energy" of clashing media environments to demonstrate the specific qualities of each medium. This triangulation and comparison focuses on how we know what we know, and whether that knowledge is affected by the medium through which it is delivered. McLuhan attempts to identify the weaknesses, strengths, and dangers of various media in order to understand "contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them" (7). For example, he analyzes digital media and reframes it as a translator of experience or a metaphor. According to McLuhan, "all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms" (85). In today's world, this is evident through the nearly ceaseless translation of information into binary code and back again into some form of representative presentation.

Works Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence W. Gordon. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2002. Print.