Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08639_Field_TCGG T404.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 915b | 16 lines

          Nevertheless, since life becomes transparent only
     against the background of death, and death against the
     background of life, the bone-rattling vitality of the late
     Middle Ages appears not devoid of some deeper wisdom.
     What one did was to build up a philosophy according to
     which a fictitious immortality became transparent
     through a real mortal man as its temporary incarnation,
     while mortal man became transparent through that new
     fictitious immortality which, being man-made as
     immortality always, was neither that of life eternal in
     another world nor that of the godhead, but that of a very
     terrestrial political institution.

     The Roman jurists had also conceived an “objectivication”
of the ruler’s persona publica , and the Roman emperor is
sometimes called “a corporation sole.” But neither Greek nor