Hi Lisa, I would like at the very least to talk about McLuhan and Gebser, and see what comes of it. I noticed a couple places where McLuhan (or a commentator/collaborator, in the case of the preface to The Global Village) links the tetrad with “integral awareness”; another connection to the integral concept is that the four-fold structure of the tetrad has some formal correspondence with the “four quadrants” of Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It also recalls the later Heidegger’s “fourfold” of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. And, as has been mentioned, Aristotle’s fourfold causes.
I would be particularly interested, however, in studying and going deeper into the last chapter of Laws of Media, on “Media Poetics.” I think McLuhan is bringing attention to a similar yet different kind of grammar than Gebser did in his study on the “grammatical mirror” of the integral mutations in poetry he was aware of. The tetrad seems to offer a “key” of sorts to deciphering the grammatical structure (or how the syntax flows) of the whole realm of human creations, if we grant that the things we make are “words” in this meta-language of the things themselves.
That said, I think it is interesting that McLuhan explicitly excludes the Quadrivium from his approach—he does not do mathematics, astronomy, geometry, or music. He is all about grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (which I have always seen as “logic”). Susanne Langer], whom we just previously studied, her Philosophy in a New Key, is more sensitive to the musical dimensions of the transformation of what she calls symbols. I imagine that we could calls McLuhan’s “words” symbols too.
The musical dimension is the temporal dimension—it is about how formal transformations, with specific shapes and sounds (which are symbolic, according to Langer), flow in time and we feel something. McLuhan focuses of the logical transformations of the patterns he discerns in all human productions. That is another difference from Gebser as well, who I think describes a variety of qualities of the integral mutation, from aesthetics to grammar to its dimensionality, without reducing the field to a particular four aspects or effects.
I like your nuance here, John, and prefer “collaborative” to “collective” too actually, since the former preserves the sense of individuals in community, as well as a sense of “labor” (as in, we must labor to be beautiful… excellent… at our best), whereas collective erases the individual somewhat. I love all the rest you have to say, too. Much to smile about. Yours is an omni-perspectival, open-ended, reflexive and suggestive statement that I would like to return to, retrieve, carry forward.