thanks, Ian!

Ian Bogost IS RIGHT ABOUT THIS. Eric McLuhan did not answer my question.

One possible explanation I heard (from a McLuhan fan in Toronto) about the McLuhans’ reluctance to push their theories beyond the human realm is that they are too much under the spell of Vico’s notion that we can understand best that which we made ourselves. (Vico, Bacon, and Joyce are perhaps their three greatest intellectual heroes. And by the way: have I said lately that Francis Bacon is a very underrated philosopher? It was Eric McLuhan himself who convinced me of this, and his reasoning turned out to be flawless. You have to read the stuff on formal causation in the second half of the Novum Organum. Formal causation is the key to Bacon’s book, not the usual boring propaganda about using experiments to dominate nature.)

But it seems incorrect to me to say that we understand human artifacts better than we understand nature. Do we really understand governments and economies better than we understand the atom? It is a dubious proposition to say the very least.

(Please note: Eric and I are on friendly terms and correspond occasionally. We’ve simply never agreed about this point. Fair enough— the tetrad is his concept, not mine, and he’s entitled to speak as he wishes about it. He also hasn’t been given enough credit for the tetrad and his role in shaping it. It really is one of the underappreciated gems of the humanities in the 20th century. Even some McLuhan fans scoff at it, just as most Heidegger fans scoff at das Geviert.)