Walter J. Ong

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Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003), was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Contributions in perspective 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) 2.2.1 Works of related interest 2.3 The Presence of the Word (1967) 2.3.1 Works of related interest 2.4 Fighting for Life (1981) 2.4.1 Works of related interest 2.5 Orality and Literacy (1982) 2.6 An Ong Reader (2002) 2.6.1 Works of related interest 2.7 Works about Ong 3 Publications 3.1 Lectures 3.2 Books 4 External links

Biography

Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother; he was raised as a Roman Catholic. In 1933 he received a bachelor of arts degree from Rockhurst College, where he majored in Latin. During his time at Rockhurst, he founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity, Alpha Delta Gamma. He worked in printing and publishing prior to entering the Society of Jesus in 1935. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946. In 1941 Ong earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University. His thesis on sprung rhythm in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (see An Ong Reader, 2002: 111-74) was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan, who was working at that time on his Cambridge University dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. Ong also received the degrees Licentiate of Philosophy and Licentiate of Sacred Theology from Saint Louis University. After completing his massively researched dissertation on the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Ramism under the supervision of Perry Miller at Harvard University in 1954, Ong returned to Saint Louis University, where he would teach for the next 30 years. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on Ramus by dubbing Ong a knight, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academique. In 1966-1967 Ong served on the 14-member White House Task Force on Education that reported to President Lyndon Johnson. In 1971 Ong was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In April and May of 1974, he served as Lincoln Lecturer, presenting lectures in French in Cameroun, Zaire, and Senegal and in English in Nigeria. In 1967 Ong served as president of the Milton Society of America. (Milton's Logic is a textbook based on Ramus's logic, which Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger translated in Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton (8: 206-398); Ong also supplied a magnificent introduction to it (144-205).) In 1978 Ong served as elected president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association of America. He was very active on the lecture circuit as well as in professional organizations.

Contributions in perspective

Introduction

In 2004, the University of Chicago Press reissued Ong's 1958 Harvard University Press book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, with a new foreword by Adrian Johns. On the back cover, we are told that Ong today "enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles."

As we shall see below, from the time of Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue onward over his long and productive life, Ong works with a thesis regarding technological transformations of the word and their impact through cultural conditioning on human consciousness.

In Ong's most notable works from the 1950s onward, we could say that he is constructing a multidimensional model of Western culture from its preliterate oral matrix through the development of alphabetic writing in the ancient Hebrew and Greek traditions to the development of the Gutenberg printing press and to the more recent development of communication media that accentuate sound. This sequence of historical developments is arguably the most widely known part of Ong's thought. But he does work with a number of over themes as well, which can be characterized as dimensions of his multidimensional model of Western culture: (1) the historical development of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought; (2) the mathematical transformation of thought in medieval and early modern logic and beyond; (3) oral cyclic thought (which can be found even in Plato's Republic) versus linear or historical or evolutionary thought, as Ong variously characterizes this dimension of our Judaeo-Christian tradition; (4) the movement from oral heroic poetry to mock-heroic poetry in print culture to the realist tradition in literature to the modern antihero; (5) the historical development in manuscript culture and print culture of the inward turn of personalized ego-consciousness, or inner-directedness as David Riesman styles this historical development in The Lonely Crowd (1950; reissued in 2000 by Yale University Press with a foreword by Todd Gitlin); (6) the new dimensions of orality fostered by communication media that accentuate sound, which Ong styles secondary orality to distinguish these developments from all earlier forms of ordinary talking and public speaking.

Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958)

Ong's most important work is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), which is a pioneering work not only in the field known today as print culture but also in the field known today as cultural studies. Ong elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that he found in Louis Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (1942). In addition, Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled "a new state of mind" to emerge in print culture, as he himself puts it in The Barbarian Within (1962: 72) -- a state of mind representing "a real mathematical transformation of thinking" (ibid.) associated with the emergence of modern science.

The companion volume, Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958) is a notable work that is a rudimentary contribution to the field known today as book history, because Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.

On the back cover of the 2004 edition of Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, the University of Chicago Press has aptly characterized Ong's book as a "challenging study." Because Lavelle's key works on visualism (1921, 1942) are not easily found today, readers might want to read Andrea Nightingale's Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (2004) beforehand. For a penetrating related account of visualism in philosophic thought (the tendency to equate knowing with "taking a good look"), see Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) by Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Ong himself further discussed visualism in four essays reprinted in The Barbarian Within (1962: 26-40, 68-87, 164-76, 220-29) and in two other essays reprinted in Faith and Contexts: Volume Three (1995: 69-90, 91-111).

Between Lavelle's books and Ong's 1958 book, the visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought had been documented well enough for Ong to turn his attention more toward the oral-aural dimension of life.

Works of related interest

As mentioned above, Ong supplied a lengthy introduction to the 1982 English translation of Milton's Logic, which is based on Ramus's work. In his introduction, Ong describes the historical development of personalized ego-consciousness under the influence of visualist cultural conditioning. In general terms, this development can be characterized as the development of a greater sense of inwardness, or inner-directedness as David Riesman has characterized this process. For recent studies of this historical development, see Phillip Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self (2000); Ineke van 't Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (2004); Denis Renevey, Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (2001); Anthony Low, Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (2003); and Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Apart from studies of manifestations of the inward turn, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola should be mentioned here, because the exercises aim to enable the person to develop his or her inwardness. In addition, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., should also be mentioned in this context, because it is an extended guidebook for developing one's inwardness and self-appropriation. On a more modest scale, the rational-emotive-behavior therapy developed by Albert Ellis and others is also designed to guide persons in developing their inwardness and self-reflection.

In addition to the studies of visualism in Western culture by Lavelle, Ong, Nightingale, and Lonergan, see Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (German irig. 1954; English trans. 1960); Raymond Adolph Prier, Thauma Idesthai: The Phenomenology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek (1989); Robert Hahn, Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origin of Greek Philosophy (2001); Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (2002); Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds., Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (2002); Allison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (2000); Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (2001); David Michael Levin, The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (1999); David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994); Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, eds., Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (1996); Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003); Anthony Woodiwiss, The Visual in Social Theory (2001).

In addition to Ong's two 1958 books on Ramus and Ramism, mentioned above, and McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), other pioneering studies of print culture are Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (1957); Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (French orig. 1958; English trans. 1976); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (German orig. 1962; English trans. 1989); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (1979); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (French orig. 1992; English trans. 1994).

The Presence of the Word (1967)

Ong's second most important work is The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, which is also pioneering work both in the field known today as cultural studies and in the field known today as media ecology.

We should note here that, prior to 1964, Ong had established himself as a cultural and religious historian through the essays collected together in Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957), American Catholic Crossroads (1959), and The Barbarian Within (1962) as well as in the collection of essays that he edited and contributed to entitled Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives (1960). From the 1950s onward, the theme of cyclic versus evolutionary thought runs through Ong's work the way the Mississippi runs through the United States.

Ong's technology thesis in The Presence of the Word, as we may style it, "is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: [my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (Interfaces of the Word, 1977: 9-10).

Ong works with this thesis implicitly in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, even though he does not happen to advert explicitly there to secondary orality today.

However, despite the emphasis that Ong places on the role of technology, he should not be characterized as a technological determinist or as a media determinist in any serious sense of the term "determinist," because he does not deny the role of human freedom and creativity in determining what kinds of new things under the sun emerge. For Ong, technology contributes a determinative dimension by establishing contexts and conditions, but human freedom and creativity contribute in determining the shape of what emerges over time.

Works of related interest

Marcel Gauchet does not happen to refer to Ong's account of cultural and religious history in The Presence of the Word (1967), but Gauchet surveys much of the same historical terrain in The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (French orig. 1985; English trans. 1997). Even though Ong does not happen to advert explicitly to the phrase "the disenchantment of the world" associated with Max Weber (but first used by F. Schiller), Ong's account of cultural and religious history suggests that the disenchantment of the world (also known as secularization) is a historical byproduct of the ascendancy of visualist tendencies, especially after the impact of the Gutenberg printing press. Ong himself suggests as much in his essay "Post-Christian or Not?" in In the Human Grain (1967: 147-64). In this important essay he sets forth the extended passage in which Nietzsche discusses the "death of God." Nietzsche's discussion shows the historical development that can be described as the disenchantment of the world, or secularization. Ong considers this larger historical development to be related to visualist tendencies. In short, this historical development represents the movement away from the ancient oral sense of life as an event, and movement toward the growing interiorization of literacy and visualist tendencies in personalized ego-consciousness.

Ong here is studying the historical development of personalized ego-consciousness, not the archetypal level of the human psyche (described by Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette in their recent series of five books). Ong's account of visualist tendencies suggests that personalized ego consciousness is somewhat distanced from the archetypal level of the human psyche through visualist cultural conditioning and the development of a greater sense of inwardness. When Ong toward the end of The Presence of the Word expresses hope about the impact of what he styles secondary orality, his hope can be understood better now in light of Moore and Gillette's work on the archetypal level of the human psyche. In effect, Ong's hope is that the cultural conditioning of the communication media that accentuate sound will help enable people in the Western world today to learn how to access the energies of the archetypal level of the human psyche. In the culminating essay in Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957: 104-25), Ong calls on his coreligionists to develop what he styles a new "mystique" toward life. Even though he repeats the term "mystique" several times, he gives no examples of persons who have developed such a mystique. However, Hopkins develops something like a mystique in his well-known poem "God's Grandeur." Ong himself was one of the first American writers to call attention to the thought of the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose books The Human Phenomenon and The Divine Milieu can be understood as contributions to the development of a new sense of mystique toward life. But today instead of referring to a mystique, we would probably speak of a spirituality. Through a well-developed personal spirituality, such as the Ignatian spirituality that Ong and Hopkins and others Jesuits appropriated, men and women usually are able to learn how to access the energies of the archetypal level of the human psyche that Moore and Gillette describe. But as Moore knows, people usually also need the help of ritual processes that can enable them to have truly liminal experiences, not just liminoid experiences (Moore takes these terms from Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure [1969]). Jean Houston has been using trial and error approaches to try to develop fresh ritual processes for people today in her Mystery School, a school or program for the cross-cultural study of spirituality and ritual process.

Fighting for Life (1981)

Ong subsequently developed his observations regarding polemic in The Presence of the Word (192-286) in his book length study Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. As C. Jan Swearingen has suggested in Media, Consciousness, and Culture (1991: 210-22), Ong deserves credit as a male voice calling attention to a strong male tendency toward agonism. Even though Ong does not advert explicitly to what Plato refers to as thumos, Ong's agonism may be understood as the psychodynamism of Plato's thumos. While this dynamism in the human psyche can undoubtedly be overdeveloped, it can also be underdeveloped.

Works of related interest

For related discussions of thumos and male development, see:

• Matthew Biberman, 2004. Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew.
• Harold Bloom, 1982. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism.
• Stephen P. Clifford, 1998. Beyond the Heroic "I": Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and "Masculinity".
• Thomas J. Farrell, 1998. "Faulkner and Male Agonism" in Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on Walter Ong's Thought, pp. 203-21.
• Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, 1998. Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition.
• Angela Hobbs, 2000. Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good.
• Barbara Koziak, 2000. Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender.
• Harvey C. Mansfield, 2006. Manliness. Yale University Press.
• Maurice B. McNamee, 1960. Honor and the Epic Hero: The Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry.
• Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette, 1992. The Warrior Within" Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche.
• Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, eds., 2003. Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity.
• Richard Terry, 2005. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse.

Orality and Literacy (1982)

Ong's most widely known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), a volume in the New Accents Series, has been translated into eleven other languages. In it he reviews the transition from an oral culture to a writing culture, that is to the use of the technologies of written words for communication. Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock, who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece. Ong describes writing as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and females, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally.

For works of related interest, see Thomas J. Farrell, Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies (2000: 229-87).

An Ong Reader (2002)

Because Ong has written so extensively on orality and on rhetoric, this 600-page selection of works by him has been organized around these two extensive and diversified themes in his rather wide-ranging list of over 400 publications.

An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry includes his 1967 encyclopedia article on the "Written Transmission of Literature" (331-44); his most frequently cited article, his 1975 PMLA article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (405-27); and his most frequently reprinted article, his 1978 ADE Bulletin article "Literacy and Orality in Our Times" (465-78). Taken together, these three essays make up a coherent approach to the study of written literature against the background of oral tradition. Even so, these three essays are best read in conjunction with Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative (1966) and Erich Kahler's The Inward Turn of Narrative (1973) -- also see the studies of the historical development of inner-directedness mentioned above. (Professor Scholes reports that a second edition of this landmark book is currently being prepared.)

Works of related interest

For recent works related to different themes developed in An Ong Reader, see Jeff Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (1983); Donald Wesling and Tadeusz Slawek, Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah (1995); Paolo Vivante, Homeric Rhythm: A Philosophical Study (1997); Jed Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (2004); Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000); Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (2002); Shane Butler, The Hand of Cicero (2002); Jonathan A. Draper, ed., Orality, Literacy, and Colonialism in Antiquity (2004); Jonathan Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading (1993); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (1999); Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992); David, Ze Walter Ong's Paradigm and Chinese Literacy (1995); Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (2003); D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800-1300 (1994); David Robey, Sound and Structure in the Divine Comedy (2000); Stephan Fussel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (2005); Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order 1450-1830 (2003); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999); Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000); Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (2002); Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (2003); Alexis Tadie, Sterne's Whimsical Theatres of Language: Orality, Gesture, Literacy (2003); Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the eighteenth-Century Novel (2003); William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004); Jonathan A. Draper, ed., Orality, Literacy, and Colonialism in Southern Africa (2003); David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (2000); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (2003); Paul Goetsch, The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2003); Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); Gerd Hurm, Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain: The Aesthetics and Politics of Orality in Samuel Clemens's Fiction (2003); Willi Erzgraber, James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art (2002); Richard Swigg, Look with the Ears: Charles Tomlinson's Poetry of Sound (2002); John McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care (2003).

Works about Ong

The most thorough study of Ong's thought has been written by his former student and friend Thomas J. Farrell: Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press, 2000). Farrell has responded in detail to the allegation about a 'great divide theory' (16-26, 200-04). The most notable critique of Ong has been written by the British literary critic Frank Kermode; it was originally published in the New York Review of Books (March 14, 1968: 22-26), and later reprinted in Kermode's Modern Essays (Fontana, 1971: 99-107).

A 400-page Festschrift for Walter Ong has been published as a double issue in the journal Oral Tradition (1987). Subsequently, two other collections of essays have been published about his thought: Media, Consciousness, and Culture (1991) and Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts (1998).

Further information about Ong's thought can be found in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1st ed. 1994: 549-52; 2nd ed. 2005: 714-17); Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (U of Toronto P, 1993: 437-39); Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999: 822-26).

See also: secondary orality.

Publications

Lectures

• 1985 Wolfson College Lectures at Oxford University, Opening Lecture, "Writing Is a Technology That Transforms Thought." In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986).
• 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986).
• 1979 Cornell University Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981).
• 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967).

Books

• Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002) has been translated into 11 languages.
• An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002).
• Faith and Contexts, 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992-1999).
• Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971).
• Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977).
• Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
• Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
• The Barbarian Within (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
• In the Human Grain (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
• Frontiers in American Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1957).
• American Catholic Crossroads (New York: Macmillan, 1959).

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