In 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 explicitly acknowledges (page 338, note 54) that he borrowed the aural-visual contrast that he works with throughout the book from the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951).
Now, evidently independently of Lavelle, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) explored the visualist cast of mind in Western philosophy in his 1957 philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed., edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran as volume three of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (University of Toronto Press, 1992).
In the late 1950s, the Canadian Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) slowly and carefully read Lonergan's 1957 philosophical masterpiece. Then when Ong's 1958 book was published, McLuhan also read it carefully. In McLuhan's controversial 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press), McLuhan refers to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramism (pages 104, 129, 146, 159-160, 162-163, 168, and 174-176). But McLuhan does not happen to advert explicitly to Lonergan's 1957 philosophical masterpiece either in his controversial 1962 book or in his famous 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill).
If you can find it online, arguably Eric Norden's lengthy interview with Marshall McLuhan in Playboy Magazine (March 1969) is the most accessible introductory overview of McLuhan's thought in the 1960s.
In Elena Lamberti's 2012 book Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies (University of Toronto Press), she discusses aphorisms on pages 6, 12, 18, 21, 24, 26, 29, 36, 38, 49, 52, 58, 69, 71, 72, 82, 115, 126, 128, 143, 197, 204, 247, and 266.
In any event, McLuhan's discussion of the human sensorium in his two most widely known books in the 1960s influenced the Canadian science-fiction author William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books), which in turn heavily influenced the 1999 movie The Matrix. (I will discuss Gibson further below.)
Now, Hui explicitly claims to be operationally defining and explaining a theory of the aphorism, as the title of his book proclaims. But his explicit use of the term "theory" shows the visualist cast of his mind (in Ong's terminology). See Andrea Wilson Nightingale's 2004 book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press).
Now, for the sake of discussion, let's say that Hui wanted to avoid aligning his thought explicitly with the visualist cast of mind. Instead of claiming that he is expounding a theory, how else might he describe his project? Ong described his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. Of course, Hui might reject Ong's way of describing his own thought and, instead, defend his use of the visualist terminology "theory" perhaps by saying that it is too readily understood to dispense with its use for his purposes.
Because Hui mentions Twitter in the subtitle of his book and briefly discusses Twitter and Tweets in his text (pages 1-2 and 177-180), I should point out here that Tweets strongly reinforce the visualist cast of mind (in Ong's terminology). But nobody should buy Hui's book to see what (little) he says about Twitter and Tweets.
In any event, Ong's 1958 book is his most protracted discussion of the visualist cast of mind in Western philosophy. Subsequently, he continued to discuss the visualist cast of mind in Western culture, but he devoted far more time and attention to aural side of the aural-visual contrast he worked with in his 1958 book -- which he subsequently came to refer to as oral-aural then later simply as orality. Even though Hui is aware of orality, he does not happen to advert explicitly to any of Ong's discussions of orality in his most relevant books.
Now, Thomas D. Zlatic in St. Louis has worked extensively in the Ong archives at Saint Louis University. With Sara van den Berg, he helped arranged the publication of Ong's uncompleted book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization (Cornell University Press, 2017).
At the time when Father Ong abandoned that book project, he was suffering from Parkinson's disease about the same time when Pope John-Paul II was suffering from it. Even though Ong did go on to publish some essays based on material he had worked up for the book project, I imagine that Parkinson's disease may have contributed to his decision to abandon that book project.
In Part II of Ong's posthumously published uncompleted book, Tom Zlatic supplies two lengthy commentaries: (1) "Language as Hermeneutic: The Evolution of the Idea and the Text" (pages 123-146) and (2) "Language as Hermeneutic: An Unresolved Chord" (pages 147-180).
In Tom Zlatic's second lengthy commentary, he refers (page 166) to Richard T. Gray's 2012 book Constructive Deconstruction: Kafka's Aphorisms (Walter de Gruyter), and Tom Zlatic also refers (page 169) to Louis Groarke's lengthy article "Philosophy as Inspiration: Blaise Pascal and the Epistemology of Aphorisms" in Poetics Today, volume 28, number 3 (2007): pages 393-441.
In the second lengthy commentary, Tom Zlatic devotes a subsection to "'Knowledge Broken': Aphorisms, Dialogue, and Conversation as Hermeneutic" (pages 162-168), in which he quotes Father Ong as writing the following in a letter to Randolph F. Lumpp dated June 4, 1974:
"'I am not quite sure that the evolution of the media is at the center of my thinking. As a matter of fact, I don't believe it is. What is at the center? Metaphysics, I suppose, and I am sure that metaphysics somehow ultimately rests on aphoristic statements'" (quoted on page 163).
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