Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08415_Field_TCGG T180.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 988b | 16 lines

and nationalism were merely latent in the scribal mode. For in
the highly tactile product of the scribe the reader found no
means for splitting off the visual from the audile-tactile
complex, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth century reader
did. A great deal of what is said by Bernhard van Groningen in
his study of the Greek time sense, In the Grip of the Past , is
useful in understanding the effects of visual bias as they
concern the time sense. As might be expected, the new Greek
sense of chronological order and a one-way movement of
events was an overlay on the older mythical and cosmic idea of
simultaneous time, which is common to all nonliterate
communities. Van Groningen observes (p. 17): “The Greeks
often refer to the past and by doing so, they bind the matter in
question to a chronological conception. But as soon as we
inquire after the real meaning, it becomes obvious that the idea
is not temporal but is used in general sense.”