Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08317_Field_TCGG T82.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 957b | 16 lines

“momentary deity” or revelation, as it seemed to nonliterate
men. Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth  presents this aspect
of nonliterate human awareness, surveying the wide range of
current study of language origins and development. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century numerous students of
nonliterate societies had begun to have doubts about the a
priori character of logical categories. Today, when the role of
phonetic literacy in the creating of the techniques of
enunciation of propositions (“formal logic”) is well known, it is
still supposed, even by some anthropologists, that Euclidean
space and three-dimensional visual perception is a universal
datum of mankind. The absence of such space in native art is
considered by such scholars to be owing to lack of artistic skill.
Cassirer, reporting on the notion of words as myth (the
etymology of mythos  indicates that it means “word”) says
(p. 62):