But in the 1970s Ong appropriated systems terminology and worked with the contrast of closed-systems thinking versus open-systems thinking. Cyclic thought is patently closed-systems thinking, because when you've come full circle you've closed the circle. In addition, he works with the contrast of a backward-looking orientation versus a forward-looking orientation. In the most basic sense of the word conservative, conservatives tend toward the backward-looking orientation because they want to conserve what they value in the old ways of thinking and acting. Even though Ong himself never spells out predictions about the future in detail, as certain self-styled futurists do, he was at times described as a futurist because of his positive attitude of hope about the future.
(Arguably, the Christian myth about the supposed Second Coming of the supposed Christ would tend to foster an attitude of hope about the future, provided that you imagined yourself to be on the victorious side. But there are certain Christians who manage not to sound hopeful, especially at times when they are electioneering about political campaigns and issues. At times, the Christian electioneering manage to make it sound like the election results will trigger the supposed Second Coming -- and the Christians electioneering are going to be on the victorious side, but woe betide the other side in the election. Nevertheless, this Christian myth may have been one source of Ong's hope about the future. Another source of his hope about the future was his generally positive and even optimistic attitude toward life.)
Arguably, most famously, Ong works with the contrast of oral-aural versus visual sensory dominance. Later in his life, he expanded this contrast to work with the contrast of world-as-event sense of life versus world-as-view sense of life.
However, Ong also works with a more subtle contrast, except that in this case he has articulated only one of the polar opposites that could be used if he were to work with a contrast of A versus B, which is one of his favorite way of thinking. But he himself has not explicitly articulated the polar opposite of time. Even though he often discusses time and often discusses space and spatialization and even quantification of thought, he does not work explicitly with the contrast of time versus space. But he definitely discusses each of them separately.
However, in his dedication of the collection of his essays titled INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE (Cornell University Press, 1977), Ong reports that William K. Wimsatt, Jr., in English at
Nevertheless, this contrast grows out of what he says about visuality and the interiorization of literacy and literate thought, because he understand the interiorization of literacy and literate thought as giving rise to a concomitant sense of space as static. As a result, we can unpack Wimsatt's twofold contrast by aligning each term ("space man" versus "time man") with Ong's contrast of the world-as-view sense of life versus the world-as-event sense of life, mentioned above.
But this alignment of different points in Ong's admittedly tricky thought paradoxically enough brings us back to ancient orality and cyclic thought, as detailed by Eliade. As noted, cyclic thought represents closed-systems thinking, as distinct from open-systems thinking. Ancient orality did not foster historical-mindedness. But ancient orality embodied the world-as-event sense of life, in which the events were often enough interpreted in mythic terms.
By contrast, the world-as-view sense of life as Ong understands it gravitates toward the static, as distinct from gravitating toward the world-as-event sense of life. However, even though Ong implicitly works with the contrast of a static sense of life versus an event sense of life, I would suggest that the more suitable term to use would be flow: static versus flow.
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