Intuition On Medium

As a scholar who has an important status and profound influence in the history of communication research, McLuhan has a reputation which once went through repeated rises and falls. The reviews about him are mostly confined to one kind of speech at will, short of discussions on the level of scientific principle and academic values in the strict sense, no matter they are praises or censures. In these reviews, the knowledge of McLuhan's method of thinking is particularly superficial and confused, flooded with kinds of unrealistic and irresponsible viewpoints based on a narrow field of vision all along. These prejudices seriously hinder the development in depth of McLuhan studies.In view of the present situation, the dissertation proposes that McLuhan's method of thinking may be accurately judged and deeply understood in the phenomenological horizon. The dissertation considers that as one of the most important philosophic thoughts in the modern west, phenomenology is of extremely great methodological significance, and can be radically regarded as one kind of philosophic method which takes universal intuition as its core. Through the explanation of McLuhan's texts, the dissertation discovers that McLuhan's communication research obviously embodies the phenomenological spirit of facing matter itself, and as the inevitable result of phenomenological description and reflection on the self-consciousness about the effects of medium, his most representative argument that the medium is the message declares the essence of medium which can be grasped directly and in fact displays the successful application of universal intuition in medium understanding. For the above reasons, the dissertation points out that in a broad sense, McLuhan can be regarded as a phenomenologist who did not participate in the movement of phenomenology subjectively but really follows the basic principles of phenomenology and utilizes the basic methods of phenomenology objectively in his academic practice, and there is a remarkable relationship between McLuhan's communication research and phenomenological method.On the basis of expounding the chief method of McLuhan's communication research as phenomenological method, the dissertation further points out that as the two basic traditional methods of communication research, positive method and critical method radically are empirical method based on induction and speculative method based on deduction respectively. By comparison, the dissertation considers that on the level of philosophic methodology, phenomenology solves the problem of the relationship between individuality and generality, phenomenon and essence which can not be solved by the traditional philosophy of empiricism and rationalism, so in a sense, its universal intuition which regards phenomenon as essence bridges the gap between phenomenon and body, thus contributes to counteract the weaknesses of positive method and critical method, and realizes the transcendence over these two traditional methods of communication research.In view of the above-mentioned superiority of phenomenological method compared with the traditional methods, the dissertation proposes that it is necessary to introduce phenomenological method into communication research, because phenomenological method can enrich the methodological system of communication research, highlight the characteristics of the times of communication research and widen open the vision of thought of communication research. The dissertation points out that in the situation that the lack of research method's having been a huge roadblock which hinders the development of Chinese communication, it is necessary to make use of all kinds of the methodological thought of western communication research including phenomenology, and advance the theoretical construction of Chinese communication with the solid methodology research.