Ong (page 338, note 54) acknowledges that he is borrowing the visual-aural contrast from the lay French Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle's discerning and profound 1942 book.
Now, like Foucault, Ong does not happen to advert explicitly to the key passage in Aristotle that Lonergan considers to be so crucial. But Lonergan's discussion of knowing and looking (pages 278, 344, 345, 396, 431, 437-441, 450, 519-520, 603-606, 657-658, and 669) is related to Ong's discussion of the aural to visual shift.
In Ong's mature thought from the early 1950s onward, he variously refers to the aural to visual shift in different iterations. For example, in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen), his most widely translated book, he works with the orality/literacy contrast suggested in the book's main title.
Let me mention here in the context of Foucault's 1970-1971 lecture series at the College de France, Hamid Yeganeh's perceptive new forthcoming article "Orality, Literacy, and the 'Great Divide' in Cultural Values" in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (Emerald Publishing). No doubt the cultural values that Professor Yeganeh discusses are more extensive than the cultural values that Foucault discusses in his 1970-1971 lecture series at the College de France. Nevertheless, Professor Yeganeh's characterization of the "Great Divide" in cultural values strikes me as relevant to understanding Foucault's characterization of the interiority of knowledge-connaissance and recovering the prior exterior knowledge-savoir that Foucault proposes to undertake, as I will explain below momentarily.
For further discussion of Professor Yeganeh's exciting new forthcoming article, see my review essay "Hamid Yeganeh's 2021 Article 'Orality, Literacy, and the 'Great Divide' in Cultural Values" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/220349
For further discussion of the orality/literacy contrast in ancient Greek culture, see the following three books by the classicist Eric A. Havelock (1903-1988):
(1) Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), a book that Ong never tired of referring to;
(2) The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Harvard University Press, 1978);
(3) The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1982).
Now, in fairness to Foucault, he turns to the nineteenth-century German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1901) in his inaugural lecture course (see the "Index of Names" [pages 292-293] for specific page references to Nietzsche) - a source that neither Lonergan nor Ong happens to advert to explicitly as Foucault does in his 1970-1971 lecture series.
For example, in Foucault's lecture on December 9, 1970, he says, "Next week, I would like to show how Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know [discussed by Aristotle] from the sovereignty of knowledge (connaissance) itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled, a cancellation that has been maintained by all [Western] philosophy" (page 5).
In addition, Foucault says, "In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance that system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connassance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle" (page 17). Got that, eh?
Now, Ong thematizes what Foucault here refers to as "the stake of a struggle" in two of his books: (1) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, and (2) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. Nevertheless, Ong does not explicitly take up the challenge that Foucault here announces of "drag[ging] from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance" the desire and knowledge-savoir of the exterior representations of "the stake of a struggle."
Now, in Ong's various iterations in his mature thought from the early 1950s onward, he refers various to inner-directed persons (David Riesman's 1950 terminology), the interiorization of literacy and literate modes of thought (Ong credits Marshall McLuhan with using the term interiorization), and the inward turn of consciousness. Ong also uses the contrasting term outer-directed persons (Riesman's terminology) to refer to what Foucault is here referring to as the exterior representations of "the stake of a struggle."
Now, to simplify Foucault's thought here a bit, let me now quote the conclusion that he himself states as follows: "The old millennial theme of 'everyone is more or less a philosopher' has a precise and ascribable function in Western history; it is a matter of no more or less than sealing up the desire to know in knowledge itself" (page 18).
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