The Nashe Thesis
I have been setting up to make the case that a) a sense of proportion is lacking from our perception of the material world, both natural and artificial, and that b) Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) gives us the fastest and easiest way to restoring that proportional sensibility via the slow and difficult study of his work—studies I’ve been diligently undertaking since 2017.
To make my point, I must begin by hyping the first “book” he wrote, one which virtually nobody outside the circles of Media Ecology has read.
I suspect that Marshall McLuhan’s doctoral thesis for the University of Cambridge, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time is the most audacious and erudite historical overview of philosophy and intellectual history ever written. It’s nothing less than a total synthesis of everything in Western culture from Homeric poetry and the Socratics straight up to the enlightenment, oriented totally around the proportional and resonant word: the Logos:
Inseparable from the doctrine of the Logos is the cosmological view of the rerum natura, the whole, as a continuum, at once a network of natural causes and an ordo naturae whose least pattern expresses analogically a divine message. This notion, already implicit in the Chaldean cosmology, is the very basis of Plato’s Timaeus, the work of which had the greatest influence of any of his works, both in antiquity and in the medieval times. If its full influence is to be explained, this dialogue should be seen as a statement of a cosmology already many centuries old, and one which had, long after Plato’s own day, exponents as different as the Pythagoreans and the Stoics. (pg 20-21)
While it was completed in April of 1943, the “Nashe thesis” was only first published and released for public reading in 2006 under the still-modest title The Classical Trivium.
Buy This Book!
Unfortunately, the sensibilities of readers which has been cultivated by contemporary marketing has made my intention—which is to sell you this book—much more difficult.
Our Top-10 bestseller bookshelves have overflowed for decades with absolute garbage heralded as “sweeping,” “masterful,” and “life-changing.” Popular non-fiction authors can take a single subject and drag it on for hundreds of empty, redundant pages of unbearably over-finessed prose. If you have the stomach, you can breeze through such books in a single afternoon.
On the other hand, meatier books which are often made assigned readings in school or recommended in more intellectually-inclined web forums present a challenge to the reader by intentionally withholding straight-forward explanations. They’re written either in needlessly-complicated, “edumacated” language, or in a style basically simulating madness, so as to create a visceral sensation of out-of-control, non-linear thought.
By contrast, the difficulty in reading The Classical Trivium is simply the density of the information, the reader’s inexperience and unfamiliarity with the subjects under consideration, and the nuance and profundity of the over-arching premises. We live in a post-Semiotic world. The idea of language as “signs” or “signifiers” which “signify” “signifieds” has so utterly saturated the intellectual discourse that McLuhan’s classical Western understanding of language seems utterly alien.
Pinning the Post-Modern Present with a Pincer Move from Past and Future
And so, the first mistake than any naive reader would make encountering McLuhan’s thesis would be to assume that they could take any philosophical or scientific “paradigm” which is widely taught in school today and fit The Classical Trivium within its frame. The opposite is true: the modern world, including the contemporary fields of linguistics, information science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and anything else you might name, is subsumed within McLuhan. When you read him properly, you realize that he got there first.
How so? For one, by seeing and analogically scaling the individual human who has remained a constant proportion of embodiment and faculty in relation to their society and environments as he or she has survived throughout millenia of historical change, and describing that human existence in mere words. Everything we understand to be true about the human creature is thus implicit within the text: especially the brain-dichotomy which is today most well-known as Daniel Kahneman’s “Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking” systems. (I actually bought and read Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2013 after I had physically placed it on the Top 10 best-seller shelf in the store I worked at. This certainly primed me for appreciating the topic under discussion today).
For another, consider this excerpt from the quote up above: “…whose least pattern expresses analogically a divine message.” Then consider this section from Douglas Rushkoff’s 1993 reconnaissance of the dawning digital domain, Cyberia:
Fractals were discovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot, who was searching for ways to help us cope, mathematically, with a reality that is not as smooth and predictable as our textbooks describe it. Conventional math, Mandelbrot complained, treats mountains like cones and clouds like spheres. Reality is much “rougher” than these ideal forms… Mandelbrot’s fractals—equations which grant objects a fractional dimensionality—are revolutionary in that they accept the fact that reality is not a neat, ordered place…
Mandelbrot’s main insight was to recognize that chaos has an order to it. If you look at a natural coastline form an airplane, you will notice certain kinds of mile-long nooks and crannies. If you land on the beach, you will see these same shapes reflected in the rock formations, on the surface of the rocks themselves, and even in the particles making up the rocks. This self-similarity is what brings a sense of order into an otherwise randomly rough and strange terrain… (pg 21-22)
As I laid out in my last post, the grammatical function of perceiving and stating analogical proportions between different scales of reality is exactly the artists technique for providing answers to Mandelbrot’s guiding questions, not only through scales of space but also across stretches of time. McLuhan’s discussions of St. Augustine, for instance, read him justly proportioned with Plato and Virgil and Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure and Meister Echkart and Erasmus and Etienne Gilson and Alfred Korzybski, as though all were gathered together and in dialogue. In fact, they were: within the discourse of the author. Another clichéd accolade, that the author “brings new life” to those whom he writes about, is exemplified without exaggeration by the Nashe thesis. Again, this is possible because McLuhan’s perception scaled the human across generations and cultures.
Just consider that it took a decade for him to write this thesis. In the introduction, McLuhan explains how he spent two years reading everything he could from the 16th century, only to learn that everything he read about English prose in the 16th century was wrong. And then he took it upon himself to start from scratch, reading everything he could on writing, or “rhetoric”, in the 16th century—most of which was classical. And then ended up spending several more years learning the other two parts of the trivium. The introduction to the Nashe thesis seriously has sentences like, “This imposed the task of reading all the available texts, and of tracing the history of their vogue and mode of transmission from ancient to medieval to modern times. Numerous scattered monographs have made this possible…” And:
The problem of understanding Thomas Nashe is the same problem as that of discovering the main educational traditions from Zeno, Isocrates, and Carneades through Cicero, Varro, Quintilian, Donatus, Priscian, Jerome, and Augustine. Once once has established the main traditions as they are formulated by St. Augustine, one knows how to tackle the Middle Ages.
For the rest of my life, I will not be able to take seriously anyone who talks about “Logos” or philosphy or the like without consideration of what one can learn from a few years of careful consideration of this one weighty tome. Not as a matter of intellectual vanity, but as a matter of survival in a world exceeding the complexity of even the one through which McLuhan swam (while most others sunk).
The scopes and scales of our totally illusory world of media content, when everyone is a visionary undertaking fantastic “world-building” exercises for fiction and roleplaying, can only be apprehended within continuity with the past by the techniques of perception and synthesis demonstrated by McLuhan in his Nashe thesis. Today, when multiple fictional “Universes” enchant our populations with mythic forms, the light McLuhan shines on the mythic past of alchemy and interpretation appears like the distant, long-sought exit of a labyrinthine cave.
Just Read It Already
In an age when every new book promises to “change the way you see your world,” I ask you indulge me when I promise you that this is different. This one really will. In the posts which follow, I will strive to do justice to the topic at hand for any readers who choose to “take my word for it.” But really… you should take the time to read and understand this book (a real encyclopedia and large piece of paper for drawing timelines will be essential at a minimum). After that, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, From Cliché to Archetype, and Take Today will be cakewalks!
For a second opinion, may I recommend William Kuhns’ 1996 review of the Nashe thesis from before its publication and wide availability. Kuhns tries to give away as much as he can within the space permitted, for curious readers unable to acquire a copy. You, however, can actually get one!
At any rate, I’ll dig into the meat of the matter in upcoming posts in this series.
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