We may describe his precipitating healing experience as involving what Martin Buber describes as an optimal I-you experience in his classic 1923 book in German that is translated into English as I and Thou - a book that Ong never tired of touting.
However, if we accept Ong's account of our Western cultural history, then we should also recognize that we in contemporary Western culture today are culturally and psychologically removed not only in time but also in our psychodynamics from the historical Jesus and his fellow first-century nobodies (in Crossan's terminology) - who were much closer to the orally based characteristics of thought and expression that Ong succinctly sums up in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, esp. pp. 36-57). Nevertheless, even as highly evolved Westerners culturally, we remain capable of experiencing the healing involved in optimal I-you encounters of the kind Buber celebrates.
The Testimony of Walter J. Ong
Now, late in Ong's long and productive life, he began work on a new book that he seems to have envisioned as a synthesis of his own thought in his mature work from the early 1950s onward. However, he eventually stopped working on it for reasons that we do not know for sure (but health problems may have been a factor). Nevertheless, his uncompleted book project was published posthumously as the book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, edited and with commentaries by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg (Cornell University Press, 2017).
To whatever extent Ong envisioned Language as Hermeneutic as a kind of synthesis of his own thought, I should point out here that Ong published three books in the 1980s, each of which also represents a kind of synthesis of certain aspects of his thought: (1) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the expanded version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University; (2) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), mentioned above, Ong's most widely translated and most widely read book; and (3) Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Now, in Ong's book Language as Hermeneutic, we find Zlatic's essay "Language as Hermeneutic: An Unresolved Chord" (pp. 147-180). In it, under the subheading "The Argument" (p. 151), Zlatic says, "In his original prologue, Ong announced two theses for Language as Hermeneutic: [1] primarily, [that] all languages use is hermeneutic, and [2] secondarily, that all communication technology is fractioning or digitizing, creating increasing complexity and thus a need for integration at a higher level of complexity and understanding. The primary thesis speaks to the nature of language and its relation to thought. The secondary thesis is concerned with the evolution of language and thought in dynamic interplay with emerging communications technology" (pp. 151-152).
Now, subsequently, Zlatic, who has worked extensively with Ong's papers in the Ong Archives at the Saint Louis University Pius XII Memorial Library, says, "When in the 1980s Ong began research into Language as Hermeneutic, he created a series of notecard on aphorisms. It is significant that his definition of 'aphorisms' was written under the heading 'hermeneutics': 'a truth which contains its own reflection on itself - and hence incorporates within itself a dialectic which renders it bottomless as well as intellectually appealing' (Notecards 9-30-84). In this same set of cards Ong recorded from [the biblical scholar John Dominic] Crossan's influential [1983] book, In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus, such as, in the aphorism the hearer/reader is 'challenged to hermeneutics' (p. 14); the aphorism 'is always a heuristic matrix and a hermeneutical challenge' (p. 22); 'it defies all systems' (p. 10); it is 'a form of epistemological conflict' (p. 11); whereas method is more suited for proof and belief, aphorisms as knowledge broken 'point toward action' (pp. 14-16)" (p. 166).
Now, subsequently, Zlatic says, "Aphorism as 'knowledge broken' not only prefigures the first thesis of Language as Hermeneutic ([that] 'use of language from the very beginning is interpretation or hermeneutics') but also applies to the book's subsidiary thesis (that communications technology is fragmenting in that it decontextualizes knowledge from human dialogue and thereby atomizes knowledge into data). However, knowledge broken through technologies of the word still can be evocative [presumably as aphorisms as 'knowledge broke' also can be?]. The overwhelming proliferation of digitized and mathematized binary data make urgent a unitive effort toward integration" (pp. 167-168).
Now, because Ong took note of Crossan's characterizations of Jesus's aphorisms as building in "a form of epistemological conflict," I want to mention here G. E. R. Lloyd's classic study of ancient Greek culture, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1966). If we were to think of Crossan's characterization "a form of epistemological conflict" as involving what Lloyd describes as polarity, then we could say that Jesus's aphorisms implicitly embody the built-in dynamics that will eventually emerge in ancient Greek culture in Aristotle's invention of the formal study of logic, as Lloyd himself explains in Chapter VII: "The Development of Logic and Methodology in Early Greek Thought" (pp. 421-440).
In large measure, Ong's 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press) is a history of the formal study of logic in Aristotle down to the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and beyond. In it, Ong works with the aural-to-visual shift in the human sensorium (for specific page references, see the "Index" [p. 396]).
Of course, the historical Jesus did not emerge in ancient Greek culture, but in ancient Hebrew culture. No doubt phonetic alphabetic literacy also had an impact of ancient Hebrew culture, just as it had an impact of ancient Greek culture. Nevertheless, the historical Jesus embarked on his public ministry of teaching and preaching in a residual form of a primary oral culture (in Ong's terminology) - and Crossan claims that he was not literate.
Subsequently, Ong went from discussing the aural-to-visual shift in his 1958 book to discussing the human sensorium in his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; for specific page references, see the "Index" [p. 356]), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
Subsequently, Ong postulated what he refers to as the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life in his 1969 article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal American Anthropologist, 71(4), August 1969: pp. 634-647. It is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pp. 69-90).
I would suggest that the world-as-event sense of life presupposes an oral-aural hermeneutic (or simply an oral hermeneutic, for short) and that the world-as-view sense of life presupposes a visual hermeneutic.
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