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Some Reflections on the Work of Robert Moore and Walter Ong (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Robert Moore also briefly discusses the Homeric epic The Odyssey as an example of the theme of homeland (p. 196).

Now, what Robert Moore refers to as "Modern" in the titles of chapters 4 and 8 is the equivalent to what the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong of Saint Louis University, and others, refer to as the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s in Europe.

Ong's pioneering study of print culture is his massively researched 1958 scholarly masterpiece book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift, see the "Index" [p. 396), mentioned above - which is also his pioneering work in media ecology theory. Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr whose works in logic were very popular for a time. Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is also a history of the formal study of logic in our Western cultural history from Aristotle down to Ramus and beyond.

In addition to Ong's pioneering study of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, here are four other pioneering studies of print culture in our western cultural history:

(1) Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957);

(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated from the French by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (Verso (1976; original French edition, 1958);

(3) Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated from the German by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press, 1991; original German edition, 1962);

(4) Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic) (University of Toronto Press, 1962; for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramist logic, see McLuhan's "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]).

Ong's generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 307-308).

In any event, today there are so many other studies of print culture in our Western cultural history that nobody would undertake to compile a bibliography of all of them!

In any event, in Ong's Chapter IV: "The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought" in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong draws on recent research about late medieval logic to discuss the quantification of thought in our Western cultural history.

In addition, Ong further discusses the quantification of thought in our Western cultural history in his article "System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism" in Bibliotheque et d'Humanisme (Geneeva), volume 18 (May 1956): pp. 222-239. Ong subsequently reprinted it in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, pp. 68-87). It was also later reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1995, pp. 9-27).

After Ong's 1958 book about Peter Ramus and Ramism was published, he reflected further on his own work and then wrote the following statement regarding the quantification of thought in medieval logic:

"In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place - not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies" (Ong, 1962, p. 72; boldface emphasis here added by me).

Now, Ong's most widely known and most translated book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), published in the New Accents series, contains not only a chapter titled "Writing restructures consciousness" (pages 78-116) but also a chapter titled "Print, space and closure" (pages 117-138). The latter chapter includes a subsection titled "More diffuse effects" (pages 130-132). In that subsection, Ong claims that print "encouraged and mad possible on a large scale the quantification of knowledge, both through the use of mathematical analysis and through the use of diagrams and charts [spatialization of knowledge]" (p. 130).

Now, years after Ong formulated his account of the aural-to-visual account of cognitive processing in our Western cultural history in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong formulated his media ecology thesis about our Western cultural history in the "Preface" to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pp. 9-10):

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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