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Understanding McLuhan
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06609_Field_TCUM T174.txt
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1996-04-10
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916b
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Again, in speech we tend to react to each situation that
occurs, reacting in tone and gesture even to our own act of
speaking. But writing tends to be a kind of separate or
specialist action in which there is little opportunity or call for
reaction. The literate man or society develops the tremendous
power of acting in any matter with considerable detachment
from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate
man or society would experience.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in
a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that
language is a human technology that has impaired and
diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the
extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach
itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson
suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally