In Laws of Media (1988) McLuhan cites Jacques Lusseyran‘s violent childhood loss of sight to support his own communication theory:

Blindness works like a dope, a fact that we have to reckon with. I don’t believe there is a blind man alive who has not felt the danger of intoxication. Like drugs, blindness heightens certain sensations, giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the senses of hearing and touch. But most of all, like a drug, it develops inner as against outer experience, and sometimes to excess.¹

Inspired by Lusseyran’s depiction of sensory blindness, McLuhan forms his own Media Tetrad by extending the Sciences of Francis Bacon and Gambattista Vico, asserting that ‘Bacon’s four idols constitute the basis for a complete theory of communication in that they account for the various forms of blindness and ignorance conferred upon self and society by technology and culture alike.² Bacon summarizes four cognitive biases (idols) as…

Idols of the Tribe (idola tribus) a bias rooted in ‘the tribe or race of men… a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of all things… the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it’. Idols of the Cave (idola specus) a bias of the individual man ‘which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others’. Idols of the Marketplace (idola fori) a bias ‘formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other… words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies’. Idols of the Theatre (idola theatri) a bias which has ‘immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies… all the received systems are but stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal scenic fashion’.³

While Vico’s New Science emerged almost century after Bacon’s Novum Organum, despite the pervading influence of Guttenberg’s Galaxy both managed to arrive at similar conclusions – i.e. that the human mind works in a highly poetic and creative way, constructing both itself and its environment via non-rational (non-Cartesian) principles.

1. Jacques Lusseyran (1963) And There Was Light. Trans by Elizabeth R. Cameron. Little, Brown & Company, p.49

2. Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan (1988) Laws of Media: The New Science. Univeristy of Toronto Press, p.83

3. Francis Bacon (1620) Novum Organum. Retrieved online 04/02/2011 from  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Novum_Organum