the one major difference

Incidentally, I should add a word about my one major point of disagreement with the McLuhans… They read the tetrad structure as applying only to human artifacts, and they read all human artifacts as forms of language.

In short, they are “correlationists” in Meillassoux’s sense. But that disagreement is no more important than the graffiti on the atomic bomb. 😉

Another point of orientation… They see themselves as continuing the work of Bacon and Vico. Dialectic (meaning all discursive reason, not just Hegelian dialectic) is seen as a mere playing out of surface figures, while the real work happens at the level of rhetoric and grammar (the latter two terms are not as cleanly distinguished from each other by the McLuhans as they are from dialectic).

It was Eric McLuhan who first pointed out to me how terribly misunderstood Francis Bacon is, and what a great philosopher he was.

The textbook Bacon says little more than this: “do as many experiments as possible, and use the results to try to dominate nature.” But as Eric pointed out to me, if you focus on the second half of the Novum Organum, you find something completely unexpected: Bacon is interested entirely in formal causation. There are cryptic and concealed forms, such as heat, lying broken and crushed and compressed in the heart of every entity, and it is these forms that the sciences are meant to unlock.

Normal efficient or physical causation is viewed, by Bacon, as laughable. Bacon isn’t a naturalism fascist, he’s a Platonizing object-oriented philosopher.