Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

“A Thought on Poetry and Universities” is a three-page typescript, dating to 1971, which was in a folder with a number of other typescripts, all labeled “Unpublished Material: Inactive.” From now on, it will also be known as Folder 16 of Series 1.D.

The last paragraph reads:

Orientation to the future, which is not the same as futurism or even future shock, is at present an essential of human experience and apparently will be an essential from now on through history. Perhaps, surprisingly, it is not easy for poets, as I have attempted [to] show elsewhere, to be future-oriented in depth. For this, not only poets but humanists generally need to be more at home with diversified fields of knowledge, not only with our vastly expanded humanities but also with the sciences and technology, than most of us are. Humanists are often too fearful of science and technology, which are human creations if they are anything. We need a poetry that can include them and the rest of our growng awarenesses, not just carpingly but also critically, because understandingly.

From “Statement of Rev. Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University; and President, Modern Language Association of America” (White House Conference on the Humanities. Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Session, on H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to call a White House Conference on the Humanities. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978. 684-88):

Before writing, there was lore but no learning; great wisdom but not the reflective; sequential understanding that we know as philosophy. There was oral performance of great skill and beauty (such as writers can no longer achieve) but not what we know as literature. There was oratorical skill but no reflective exploration of the art of rhetoric—just as there were various aphorisms about the handling of disease but no articulated science of medicine. The highly sequential analytic understanding which the humanities and science bespeak cannot be achieved by the mind without some kind of writing system or without the mental process, such as science and history and philosophy, which the mind could not perform until it had invented writing. This means that, although the humanities are concerned with the totality of the human condition, as bodies of knowledge they are inescapably bound to literacy. (685)

Keith Walters’ “Language, Logic, and Literacy” (The Right to Literacy. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin. New York: MLA, 1990) is sometimes cited as a good critique of Ong’s work and it is intended to function as a refutation of Ong’s work. The piece is curious, however, in that it hardly ever discusses Ong’s theories directly. In fact, the only specific references to Ong’s published work are his summary of Luria in Orality and Literacy and his response to Patricia Bizzell’s “Arguing About Literacy,” in which Ong states he’s been misread. Walters brushes the latter off by suggesting that Ong believes in the autonomous authority of texts and, therefore is stuck in a contradiction.

Rather that directly discuss Ong’s own theories, Walters makes a bunch of inferences based on the work of other scholars such as Farrell, Olson, Hirsch, and Goody, assuming that their work accurately reflects Ong’s own thought. Consider, for example, page 178 of the essay in which Walters writes “To Nystrand’s critiques, others can be added. If, as Olson contends, meaning is (or even can be) unequivocally fixed in the text, one may ask how so many readers of the works of Goody and Ong could, in the eyes of those authors, misinterpret the meaning of their texts.” (more…)

From Mark Nielson’s “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80″ (America 167.16 (Nov. 21, 1992): 404-406):

The seminal discovery of his long career came nearly 40 years ago. “It happened while I was doing my dissertation research in France,” recalls Ong. “I was reading Rudoph Bultmann, the Protestant theologian, who made reference to the idea that knowing, for the Hebrews, had to do with hearing and sound, while the Greeks thought of knowing as related to seeing. I guess it took me about a day, but suddenly I could see how the whole thing fit together.”

The “whole thing” was how radically thought–not just the ability to express ideas, but the kind of ideas one could think about–was transformed by the arrival of writing and then print. Working in the reserve room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Ong saw for the first time that print, and writing before it, located knowledge in space, in words on the page, rather in the temporal world of sound. (404)

Mixing Memory has a repost on cognitive science’s return to linguistic relativity.

Over the last decade or so, however, cognitive scientists have been revisiting linguistic relativity (linguistic determinism is probably gone for good). They’ve discovered that language does in fact constrain the way we perceive and conceptualize a wide variety of things, including time, space, number, events, and perhaps even color (see this article for a short and accessible summary of some of the research, along with a nice reference section). In 2003, a collection of essays describing much of the research on linguistic relativity was published under the title Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. It’s an excellent book (and it includes a chapter by Michael Tomasello, for those of you who are in the reading group), presenting many interesting ideas and experiments. I highly recommend it for people who are interested in the topic. To give you a taste, I thought I’d post on one chapter ["Sex, Syntax, and Semantics"], which I chose both because I find it very interesting, and because the chapter is available, in its entirety, online.

The full post provides a summary of Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips’ “Sex, Syntax, and Semantics,” which is linked to above.

As I’ve stated many times before, much of Ong’s own work is rooted in an understanding that language use can give us insights into cognition, dating back to his dissertation work. As he explains it, while working in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, he came across Rudolph Bultmann’s reference to the idea that knowing was located in terms of hearing and sound for the ancient Hebrews and in terms of seeing and vision for the ancient Greeks. While it runs throughout much of Ong’s work, my favorite example is “’I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect,” which can be found in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture.

[Cross posted to Machina Memorialis.]

On rereading “System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism” (Bibliothèaue D’Humanisme et Renaissance 18 (1956): 222-239), I’m struck by how important this piece is for understanding Ong. It’s clear in this piece that Ong doesn’t regard literacy or the alphabet as some magical shift in consciousness as some have suggested. In this piece, Ong compares the Greek world as one much more visual than the Hebraic one by examining the metaphors both cultures use for the representation of knowledge:

(more…)

Ong has been, from time to time, accused of wanting to return to an oral past, a notion which he vehemently dismissed as a misreading of his exploration of the past. The passage below is far too early to be one of his refutations, but it does express his belief on the role of the past. From “Renaissance Ideas and the American Catholic Mind” (Thought 29.4 (1954): 327-356):

In treating of humanism in letters during the Renaissance, perhaps at the very beginning I should make it clear that I place little stock in Renaissances or renascences as expressive of cultural objectives. For two reasons. Frist, we have no warrant for attempting to revive the past. Indeed, we have not even the possibility of reviving it. The past, if it is anywhere at all, is inside us. As Gertrude Stein once remarked, there is one thing everybody is, and that is contemporary. We can, of course, understand ourselves better by studying the past which made us, and which is in us. Indeed, there is no substitute for this kind of study. With it, culture is possible. Without it, a void. But such study is not a Renaissnace. (327)

While I’ve read most of the essays in In the Human Grain, I read them in other collections or as typescripts or in their original publication. In short, while I’ve read the essays, I’ve never read “the book” which means I’ve never read the Introduction until a week or so ago. The intro’s one of those short useful pieces that covers a lot of territory that one ought to know before reading Orality and Literacy. The themes won’t be new to regular readers of this blog or for people who have read much pre-1970s Ong. Here’s a sample: (more…)

More passages from selected readings. This from “An Interview with Walter J. Ong, Conducted by George Riemer” in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry:

I realized that though intellectual knowledge has likenesses to all the senses, the Greeks were thinking of it more by analogy with seeing, whereas the Hebrews thought of it more as if it were hearing. We typically think of knowledge like the Greeks. The Greek word idea has the same root as video in Latin meaning I see. We say “I see” to mean “I understand.” We speak of ideas as images and viewponts. We describe them as clear, brilliant, and dazzling. Our language is shot through with figures, which “show” our visual bias. We’re so immersed in it that we don’t realize it’s a bias–You know, like everything’s wet if you grow up like a fish [....]

I wasn’t aware of how visualistic my own thinking was until I “saw” how the Hebrews regarded knowledge and I “discovered” they were doing something different. Since the Hebrews thought of knowing more by analogy with hearing, learning tended to mean listening to someone. They thought even of things as speaking, not only as showing themselves, but as declaring themselves.

Yadha’ in Hebrew means to know in the sense of to know your way around. It is something that has to do with the human lifeworld and human behavior.

Knowing for the Greek means to be able to explain. It means to analyze, to take apart, to show the different pieces of. It’s a very abstract knowledge. Our Greek visualist bias shows when we try to provide a rational explanation for everything. This can’t always be had, and the attempt to set it up becomes more and more suspect the closer we get to the source of life. There is a kind of wisdom you cultivate in not being excessively rational. 80-81