Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09051_Field_TCGG T816.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 973b | 16 lines

long been processed by print these metaphors would have
carried no interest whatever. Let us turn to a book by a
mathematician, Sir Edmund Whittaker, which explains how
some of this came to be. A passage of Kant’s from the Critique
of Practical Reason  (p. 14) will usher us into this territory:
“Since mathematics irrefutably proves the infinite divisibility of
space which empiricism cannot allow, there is an obvious
contradiction between the highest possible demonstrable
evidence and the alleged inferences from empirical principles. . . .
One might ask like Cheseldren’s blind man, ‘Which deceives
me, sight or touch?’ Empiricism is based on touch, but
rationalism on a necessity which can be seen.” Not only did
Kant not know that number is audile-tactile and infinitely
repeatable, but that the visual, in abstraction from the audile-
tactile, sets up a world of antinomies and dichotomies of
insoluble but irrelevant kind.