Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) February 25, 2022: The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle distinguishes four causes: (1) the material cause, (2) the formal cause, (3) the efficient cause (which would include the sub-category of instrumental efficient cause), and (4) the final cause. The medieval Italian philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, in effect, baptized, figuratively speaking, Aristotle's tetrad of four causes in the roman Catholic tradition of thought. For an accessible discussion of how St. Thomas Aquinas appropriates Aristotle's four causes, see Edward Feser's book Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Book, 2009, pp. 16-23).
Before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) officially demoted Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy a wee bit, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy enjoyed the church-sanctioned most-favored status in the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. For pre-Vatican II college-educated Catholics, to be a Catholic typically meant to be a Thomist.
Now, the young Canadian literary scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) converted to Catholicism in the spring semester of 1937. Because of the prevailing anti-Catholic sentiment at the time, his conversion meant, in effect, that he would never be on the faculty at Harvard University. In any event, McLuhan was a Thomist. This brings me to Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan's book Media and Formal Cause (Houston: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011).
The late literary scholar and media theorist Dr. Eric McLuhan (1942-2018; Ph.D. in English, University of Dallas, 1982; the eldest son of Marshall and Corinne McLuhan), has published the short book The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul: An Odyssey (2015). Dr. Eric McLuhan is also the author of the scholarly book The Role of Thunder in [James Joyce's] Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto Press, 1997). Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan co-authored the book Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988), in which they set forth their tetrad of four patterns of media - evidently designed as a take-off on Aristotle's tetrad of four causes.
Now, in the 2011 book Media and Formal Cause, the first three chapters are reprints of published pieces by Marshall McLuhan. But Chapter Four: "On Formal Cause" (pp. 83-139) reprints Dr. Eric McLuhan's learned and erudite essay that was originally published in 2005 in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, 4(3&4), 181-210 (published by the Media Ecology Association).
In it, Dr. Eric McLuhan includes, in the lengthy footnote 105 (pp. 91-92) a lengthy quotation from Marshall McLuhan in 1959), which is also included in Marshall McLuhan's posthumously published book The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek [a Roman Catholic priest] (Toronto and New York: Stoddart Publishing, 1999, p. 37). Next, Dr. Eric McLuhan then includes another lengthy quotation from Marshall McLuhan's May 25, 1979, letter to the editor of Commonweal about their review of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979), which letter, incidentally, is not included in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, selected and edited by Matie Molinaro [his literary agent], Corinne McLuhan [his widow], and William Toye [of Oxford Canada] (Oxford University Press, 1987). Here is the lengthy quotation from Marshall McLuhan as Dr. Eric McLuhan gives it:
[My book] The Gutenberg Galaxy makes no personal value judgements because it is concerned with formal causality and the study of effects, with reception aesthetics. Professor Eisenstein is concerned with efficient causality [which is the kind of causality most people think of when you say "effects"]: her title is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change! This level of descriptive narrative leaves ample room for the noting of content and the making of value judgments, both of which are alien to the level of formal causality [a point that Eric McLuhan belabors in Chapter Four: "On Formal Causality"].
In a utilitarian society, untrained in the formal structures and patterns of effect, efficient causality and moralizing is the only acceptable norm. Having written The Gutenberg Galaxy by way of turning in a fire alarm, it is curious to find some readers have charged me with arson . . . (quoted on p. 92; first bracketed text added by Eric McLuhan; second bracketed text added by me)
Subsequently, Dr. Eric McLuhan quotes (pp. 116-117) a lengthy passage from Martin Heidegger's book The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977, pp. 26-27). Then he says of Heidegger the following:
His struggle to invent formal cause, however, illuminates one of the problems to which phenomenology as a whole is a response. For centuries since the [medieval] scholastics, Dialectic has relied on the other [three?] causes and found them adequate to solving questions of figures minus grounds. But electric circuitry banishes uniformity and now we have several ground transformations per decade. This alone is enough to present philosophy with an urgent need for formal cause as a way to approach the world of electric technology. (p. 117)
Subsequently, Dr. Eric McLuhan says (p. 120, n. 150), "For a delightful history of final causation (teleological cause), see Etienne Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution (1984).
Subsequently, Dr. Eric McLuhan assures us that Marshall McLuhan "had no particular interest in efficient cause or final cause - either of which is in its own manner the domain of 'determinism,' and both of which are concerns of normal science" (p. 125).
Subsequently, Dr. Eric McLuhan quotes a lengthy passage (pp. 129-130) from a letter of June 19, 1975, from Marshall McLuhan to John Culkin (1928-1993) then of Fordham University, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987, pp. 510-511), mentioned above. In his letter, Marshall McLuhan says, among other things the following:
Formal cause is concerned with effects and with structural form and not with value judgments. My own approach to the media has been entirely from formal cause. Since formal causes are hidden and environmental, they exert their structural pressure by interval and interface with whatever is in their environmental territory. Formal cause[s are] always hidden, whereas the things upon which they act are visible. The TV generation has been shaped not by TV programs, but by the pervasive and penetrating character of the TV image, or service, itself. (quoted on p. 130; bracketed material added by Dr. Eric McLuhan)
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