collection of essays about them and you will look in vain for a single visual metaphor among the Pre-Socratics. That means, pre-phonetic alphabet. The moment alphabet came in all the metaphors in philosophy became visual. The ideas of Plato are all visual. The archetypes are all visual. But up till the time of Plato, the ideas of Heraclitus and Thales and so on are all non-visual. And their poems—and they wrote their philosophy in a poetic form—their poems are all acoustic.
Forsdale: That is, tend to call upon images which are acoustic in nature?
McLuhan: Well, for example, the sphyros , the idea of the universe as a sphere, a perfect sphere. This is where Humpty Dumpty came from, by the way. It’s a sphere that
