McLuhan lecture date set

We knew that the conference was October 26-28, but I just learned that my own talk will be on the 28th. The title is “Maximum McLuhan,” which is of course meant to be catchy and provocative, but also meant to indicate that I think McLuhan is of great importance. Most likely I’ll be discussing his concept of formal causation, though it isn’t written yet.

McLuhan saw himself as the third in a series of thinkers that began with Francis Bacon and Vico. (James Joyce is another of his favorites, though the connection is never made quite as clear in theoretical terms.)

One of the biggest pleasant surprises of my intellectual life was being told, by none other than Eric McLuhan, to go back and reread the second half of Novum Organum. My first and previously only reading of the book had been as a sophomore in college, and apparently I hadn’t been letting the text speak directly to me, but had made too many readerly concessions to the popular image of Bacon: “do as many experiments as possible, and use the results to dominate nature.”

What one actually finds in the second half of that work is a rather strange (not to mention entertaining) metaphysics of formal causation that seems like it does owe much to the alchemical tradition (Frances Yates wrote on related themes in connection with Bacon). And more than that, Bacon actually mocks efficient causation to a large extent. It’s not the scientism we’re familiar with, even if Bacon is often cited as a venerable ancestor of present-day science worship in philosophy.