“Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.”

—  Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 298

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in …" by Marshall McLuhan?
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan 416
Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980

Related quotes

“When we link things metaphorically we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of attributes of another.”

Christopher Tilley (1955) British postprocessual archaeologist.

[Buchli (Ed.), Victor, Christopher, Tilley, The Material Culture Reader, 2002, Berg, 1-85973-559-2, Oxford]

Robert Frost photo

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?"”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
General sources

Thich Nhat Hanh photo

“If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist
George Holmes Howison photo

“Mathematics is the science of the functional laws and transformations which enable us to convert figured extension and rated motion into number.—Howison, G. H.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

"The Departments of Mathematics, and their Mutual Relations," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 170. Reported in Moritz (1914)
Journals

Osip Mandelstam photo

“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) Russian poet and essayist

Source: Selected Poems

Aleister Crowley photo

“Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.”

Aleister Crowley book Diary of a Drug Fiend

Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend

Robert Frost photo

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
1930s

Michel Foucault photo

“One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

"What is an author?" (1984)

“We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog ‘I’ that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book I, Chapter 2, p. 65-66
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Edward Gorey photo

“Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

Related topics