Following in the first sentence, Ong says, "The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)." He then discusses these two earlier volumes.
Then Ong says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (Ong, 1977, pp. 9-10).
Thus, Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is "sweeping" but (2) that the shifts do not "cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness" and (3) that the shifts are related to "major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness."
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
In effect, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958) - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Fr. Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press).
Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast" (page 10). Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.
However, as I say, Ong is not everybody's cup of tea, figuratively speaking. Consider, for example, Ong's own modesty in the subtitle of his book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded published version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. His wording "Some Prolegomena" clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 "Preface" does "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause -- but that the shifts he points out are "sweeping."
Now, please note just how careful and cagey Ong's wording is when he says that his account of the evolution of certain changes does not "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause.
On the one hand, Ong's terminology about primary oral culture (and primary orality, for short; and his earlier terminology about primarily oral culture) is sweeping inasmuch as it refers to all of our pre-historic human ancestors.
On the other hand, his cagey remark about sorting out cause and effect does not automatically rule out the possibility that certain changes somehow contributed to the eventual historical development of writing systems and specifically phonetic alphabetic writing (= literacy) as well as to the historical development of human settlement in agriculture (or agrarian) societies and economies.
Now, unfortunately, Ong's groundbreaking account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is not widely known to this day. The Biblical scholar James L. Kugel certainly is not familiar with Ong's account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. In any event, Kugel's book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) is best understood as a study of what Ong refers to as the aural-to-visual shift in ancient Hebrew culture under the impact of phonetic alphabetic literacy as oral traditions were eventually written down in the form that we now have them in the Hebrew Bible.
I have discussed the Hebrew Bible in my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3 & $ (2012); pp. 255-272.
In any event, in Robert Moore's Chapter 10: "Resources for Facing the Dragon" in his 2003 book Facing the Dragon, he discusses Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 1977). About it, Robert Moore says, "His theory was that there once was a time in history when people talked directly to a God, and people actually heard God's voice. Then we came to a period of evolution in which human beings lost the capacity to talk to God directly. He thinks the change resulted from a change in brain structure" (p. 183).
Ong discusses Julian Jaynes' 1977 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in his most accessible and most widely read book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982, pp. 29-30):
"However, if attention to sophisticated orality-literacy contrasts is growing in some circles, it is still relatively rare in many fields where it could be helpful. For example, the early and late stages of consciousness which Julian Jaynes (1977) describes and relates to neurophysiological changes in the bicameral mind would also appear to lend themselves largely in terms of a shift from orality to literacy [the shift that Ong referred to in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue as the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, mentioned above]. Jaynes discerns a primitive stage of consciousness [Ong's "primitive" here = Robert Moore's premodern in his 2003 book Facing the Dragon] in which the brain was strongly 'bicameral,' with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable 'voices' attributed to the gods, which the left hemisphere processed into speech. The 'voices' began to lose their effectiveness between 2000 and 1000 BCE. This period, it will be noted, is neatly bisected by the invention of the alphabet around 1500 BCE, and Jaynes indeed believes that writing helped bring about the breakdown of the original bicamerality. The Iliad provides him with examples of bicamerality in its unselfconscious characters. Jaynes dates the Odyssey a hundred years later than the Iliad and believes that wily Odysseus marks a breakthrough into the modern self-conscious mind, no longer under the rule of 'voices.' Whatever one makes of Jaynes' theories, one cannot be struck by the resemblance between characteristics of the early or 'bicameral' ' psyche as Jaynes describes it - lack of introspectivity, of analytic prowess, of concern with the will as such, of a sense of difference between past and future - and the characteristics of the psyche in oral cultures not only in the past but even today. The effects of oral states of consciousness are bizarre to the literate mind, and they can invite elaborate explanations which may turn out to be needless. Bicamerality may mean simply orality. The question of orality and bicamerality perhaps needs further investigation."
As Ong himself here indicates, he first explored the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history is his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), mentioned above.
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