For further discussion of Ong's philosophical thought, see my essay "Understanding Ong's Philosophical Thought" online at the following URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/10792/2696
Overall, Ong's 400 or so publications are wide-ranging and multidimensional -- and carefully nuanced and precise (just the right words). In his publications, he characteristically writes as though a word to the wise is sufficient. Yes, to be sure, there are certain recurring themes in his publications. However, even in discussing recurring themes, he characteristically writes as though a word to the wise is sufficient. Consequently, each reiteration of a recurring theme is expressed as precisely as he can express himself (just the right words each time). Naturally it is not hard to relate certain Ong publications to one another based on these recurring themes in them. The recurring themes in Ong's mature work include the names and works of certain scholars such as Eric A. Havelock, Albert B. Lord, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., and certain other prominent people such as Martin Buber, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. and St. Ignatius Loyola, S.J., the founder of the Jesuits. But the catch with all of Ong's mature works (from the early 1950s onward -- for about half a century) is that they are virtually all related to one another conceptually -- that is, above and beyond the recurring themes and recurring names. However, most scholars tend to be specialists who prefer to read primarily works in their fields of specialization. Ong himself was a Renaissance specialist. Renaissance humanists aspired to know the ancient classical languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. In England, for example, certain Renaissance humanists produced the widely influential Protestant translation of the Christian Bible known as the King James Bible (1611; also known as the King James Version and as the Authorized Version). Just to be clear, the Christian Bible incorporates the Hebrew Bible, written in ancient Hebrew, and the Christian New Testament, written in ancient Greek. In the Latin West, the Latin translation of the Christian Bible was known as the Vulgate, largely the work of St. Jerome. Vernacular translations such as the King James Bible were a novelty at the time. (At the time, vernacular literatures [e.g., Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare] did not enjoy the kind of prestige that they later came to enjoy.) Consequently, Renaissance specialists such as Ong had to be conversant with the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts as well as the vernacular literatures of the time. But most academics today tend to be interested only in certain pieces of Ong's work that they can readily relate to their own specialties. However, his work cries out to be read holistically by well-educated people in the English-speaking world today because of its import for understanding our Western cultural heritage.
Concerning Renaissance humanism, see Ong's encyclopedia entry on "Humanism" in volume seven of The New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by William J. McDonald and others (McGraw-Hill, 1967, pages 215b-224b; reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Scholars Press, 1999, pages 69-92).
Figuratively speaking, we can liken Ong in his mature work to a bee visiting the flowers in bloom in many fields of study. The fields that Ong-the-bee visits repeatedly include literary studies, biblical studies, religious studies and theology, classical studies, medieval studies, Renaissance studies (e.g., Peter Ramus, St. Ignatius Loyola), seventeenth-century studies (e.g., John Milton), eighteenth-century studies, nineteenth-century studies (e.g., Gerard Manley Hopkins), twentieth-century studies, the history of formal education in Western culture, the history and theory of the verbal arts (of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, or logic), the history of philosophy, the history of technology, American studies, anthropology, evolutionary theory, Jungian psychology, and Freudian psychology, among others.
But we can also liken Ong to a spider spinning a web of inter-connected lines of thought. He characterizes his way of proceeding to make connections as relationist in spirit, not reductionist. Broadly speaking, the web of lines of thought that Ong-the-spider creates can be characterized as cultural studies. (Ong's discussion of his relationist way of proceeding to make connections appears in his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture [Cornell University Press, 1977, pages 9-10].)
However, despite the importance of Ong's thought, I would describe him as an uncharismatic speaker -- you know, like Hillary Rodham Clinton was an uncharismatic speaker in the 2016 presidential campaign. Nevertheless, his vitality was impressive -- and so was his tact. However, Ong's thought just doesn't sound sexy, as they say. Consequently, I do not expect to see his thought become fashionable in philosophy or literary studies. On the one hand, certain explicit cognitive biases may limit the cognitive openness of scholars in philosophy and literary studies and others to Ong's thought. On the other hand, certain implicit affective biases may also limit the openness of many people to his thought. Nevertheless, scholars in philosophy and literary studies, and well-educated people in general could still benefit from carefully studying his thought. For well-educated people in general, Ong's new book is an accessible primer in his thought.
But we have to be in the right kind of mood to try to follow Ong's thought -- a kind of contemplative mood, I would say. Naturally as part of our own efforts to understand his thought, we may interrogate his thought and argue with his thought and question his thought in various ways. But first, and foremost, we need to pay close attention to his thought and try to understand what he is saying. His thought does repay careful consideration. Nevertheless, I want to reiterate that I do not expect to see a critical mass of people who understand Ong's thought to emerge in the near future, because the psychological and practical forces of resistance to his thought are far too strong today for this to happen. For example, a massive number of studies of print culture and book history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s have now been studied. In theory, they could be used as evidence to support Ong's claims about the influence of the Gutenberg printing press in Western cultural history. However, in practice, the authors of those studies seldom make a connection between their studies and Ong's thought. But this sad situation does not dampen my own enthusiasm for Ong's thought -- and its potential applications.
Ong once noted in a published interview that his Jesuit training in philosophy gave him a permanent edge over most other scholars. Like all Jesuits of his generation, Ong studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy as part of his Jesuit training -- in his case, at SLU. However, Ong himself characterized his own philosophical thought as personalist and phenomenological in cast. In any event, his deeply original philosophical thought can be daunting to study because of its nuance. Consequently, he is a tough act to follow.
Nevertheless, Ong's former teacher at SLU in the late 1930s and early 1940s and life-long friend the Canadian literary scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) did indeed follow his former student's lead in the latter's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958) by publishing his own book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962). In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan explicitly discusses Ong's publications on pages 104, 129, 146, 159-160, 162-163, and 168.
For Ong's most positive statement of McLuhan's ambitious project in his 1962 book, see Ong's review of McLuhan's 1962 book in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 107 (September 15, 1962): pages 743 and 747; reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002, pages 307-308). Among other things, Ong says, "If the human community is to retain meaningful possession of the knowledge it is accumulating, breakthroughs to syntheses of a new order are absolutely essential. McLuhan aids one such breakthrough" (page 308). Ong's body of work aids another such breakthrough. But is Ong right in claiming that the human community needs such breakthroughs? If he is right about this, then his work and McLuhan's work are important. However, if Ong is not right about this, then his work and McLuhan's work are not especially important.
For Ong's most positive extended discussion of McLuhan's 1962 book, see Ong's article "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance" in the journal Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, volume 4, number 2 (December 1964): pages 63-94 (esp. 193-194).
For Ong's carefully targeted but brief critique of McLuhan's 1962 book, see Ong's encyclopedia entry "Literature, Written Transmission of" in volume eight of The New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by William J. McDonald and other (McGraw-Hill, 1967, pages 833a-838b); reprinted as "Written Transmission of Literature: in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002, pages 331-344). In the relevant passage, Ong says, "McLuhan [in his 1962 book] gives a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond" (page 343).
Now, in addition to reading Ong's publications, McLuhan also read, in the late 1950s, the Canadian
Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan's philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957; 5th ed., University of Toronto Press, 1992). In the course I took from Ong at SLU in the summer of 1971, he noted that Lonergan "suggests that when knowing is equated unquestioningly with vision [Lonergan's "taking a good look"] this is because the latter is invested with symbolic or mythological qualities." (In my class-notes, I recorded Ong's statement in quotation marks. By 1971, I may have heard of Lonergan. However, I did not study his book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding until about a decade or so later.) Thus, Ong himself explicitly acknowledged that Lonergan's critique of equating knowing with "taking a good look" in his 1957 masterpiece is compatible with his own critique of visualist cognitive tendencies in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue -- and McLuhan had read and digested both Lonergan's 1957 book and Ong's 1958 book before he wrote his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy. On page 338, in note 54 of his 1958 book, Ong explicitly acknowledges that his critique of visualist cognitive tendencies in Western philosophical thought is indebted to French philosopher Louis Lavelle's pioneering critique of visualist cognitive tendencies in Western philosophical thought. However, I have no reason to think that Lonergan ever read Lavelle's pioneering critique -- or Ong's critique or McLuhan's critique.
At this juncture, I want to return to my incomplete quote of a sentence from Ong's review of McLuhan's 1962 book and quote the complete sentence here: "McLuhan aids one such breakthrough into a new interiority, which will have to include studies of communications not merely as an adjunct or sequel to human knowledge, but as this knowledge's form and condition" (page 308). No doubt Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding aids a breakthrough into a new interiority. However, Lonergan does not explicitly thematize communications as providing the form and condition of this new interior knowledge, as Ong and McLuhan do. But is it really important to explicitly thematize communications as providing the form and condition of the new interior knowledge that working through Lonergan's book carefully aids readers in doing? If Lonergan has done enough without doing this, then Ong and McLuhan are going off on a tangent of their own. But if Ong and McLuhan are going off on the right track, then Lonergan and his followers should take Ong's and McLuhan's aids to new breakthroughs in syntheses seriously.
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