During the years when McLuhan was teaching English at St. LouisUniversity and working on his doctoral dissertation, Ong was in graduate studies there in English and philosophy as part of his Jesuit training -- from 1938-1939 to 1940-1941. McLuhan called Ong's attention to Perry Miller's recently published 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press). In this classic study Miller discusses the work of the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Miller reports that he had found only one college-educated New Englander who was a self-described Aristotelian -- everybody else was a self-described Ramist. Ramist logic dominated the undergraduate curriculum at CambridgeUniversity, where most of the college-educated New England Puritans had studied it. After HarvardCollege was founded in 1636, Ramist logic also dominated the undergraduate curriculum there. Now, even though Miller's study was ambitious and massive, he called for somebody to undertake a study of the European origins and antecedents of Ramist logic. About a decade after the publication of Miller's book, Ong stepped forward to undertake just such a study. When Ong's book Ramus and Talon Inventory was published by Harvard University Press in 1958, it carried the dedication "For Herbert Marshall McLuhan who started all this." McLuhan had indeed started Ong's interest in the history of dialectic (or logic) and rhetoric.
In McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, mentioned above, McLuhan frequently quotes Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press).
Ong's 1962 review of McLuhan's 1962 book is reprinted in An Ong Reader, mentioned above, pages 307-308. It is instructive to note the following statements that Ong makes: "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 into a new interiority, which will have to include studies of communication not merely as an adjunct or sequel to human knowledge, but as this knowledge's form and condition" (page 308). Of course Ong's body of work aids another such breakthrough into a new interiority.
At the time when Ong wrote those sentences, St. Thomas Aquinas was generally regarded among Roman Catholics as having worked out a wonderful synthesis. So without explicitly adverting to Aquinas's much vaunted synthesis, Ong is here calling for a synthesis of a new order -- which is to say not the same synthesis of old-fashioned Thomistic philosophy and theology.
Timeline: 1944
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Victorian Jesuit poet Garard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). McLuhan published an article titled "The Analogical Mirrors" in the Kenyon Review 6.3 (Summer 1944): pages 322-332. It's about the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This article by McLuhan is reprinted in the book The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, edited by Eugene McNamara (McGraw-Hill, 1969). McNamara clusters this article with five other pieces by McLuhan under the caption in the table of contents "Part One: The Nets of Analogy" (xi). As this caption indicates, McNamara finds McLuhan working with the nets of analogy in the six pieces grouped together in this section of the book.
Incidentally, Ong's 1969 review essay about McLuhan's 1969 book is reprinted in An Ong Reader, mentioned above, pages 69-77.
So let's discuss analogy. G. E. R. Lloyd has published a perceptive book titled Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1966). George P. Klubertanz, S.J., in philosophy at St. LouisUniversity published the book Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis (Loyola University Press, 1960). Ralph McInerny in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame published by the book The Logic of Analogy: An Interpretation of St. Thomas [Aquinas] (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961). The Catholic priest and theologian David Tracy at the University of Chicago Divinity School published the book The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroad Publishing, 1987). The Jesuit priest and theologian Donald L. Gelpi at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley published the book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Michael Glazer Book/ Liturgical Press, 2000), in which he regularly contrasts the Protestant dialectical imagination and the Catholic analogical imagination (pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, 282). As Lloyd's study shows, argumentation by analogy was used in early Greek thought. Later on, the analogical imagination became central to medieval Catholic thought -- for example, in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
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