For Ong, the Christian Bible and the Homeric epics contain transcribed forms of oral thought and expression. In the world today, an estimated one billion people do not know how to read and write any language. In the United States today, millions of American adults have not attained what reading teachers refer to as functional literacy. For all practical purposes, people who have not attained functional literacy live in effect in a residual form of oral culture. Before the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, all cultures in the West were to one degree or another oral cultures, including the English culture out of which emerged Shakespeare and the learned translators of the King James Version of the Christian Bible. However, with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, powerful social forces were set in motion, which included both the Protestant emphasis on formal education, mentioned above, and the Catholic emphasis on formal education exemplified by the colleges founded by the early Jesuits throughout Europe, also mentioned above. Out of these powerful social forces in the early modern period, modernity will in time emerge, as I will explain momentarily.
For Ong, distinctively literate thought emerged in ancient Greek philosophy, most notably in Aristotle's treatises in formal logic. In short, formal logic represents distinctively literate thought. Ong's major work in the history of formal logic is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), mentioned above. As we noted above, formal logic dominated the arts curriculum in medieval universities for some three centuries or more. Ramus and his followers in Europe and in the American colonies carried forward the tradition of the study of logic, but in the ameliorated way that we refer to as Renaissance humanism. For their part, the early Jesuits also advanced Renaissance humanism, along with advancing the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophy and theology. (This tradition of thought came in time to be known as scholasticism, but Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology is considerably removed from the arts scholasticism of the medieval university with its emphasis on the Aristotelian tradition of logic.)
To understand the emergence modernity in print culture (i.e., the culture of the West after the Gutenberg printing press began to influence the culture), we next need to turn to Ong's account of agonistic structures (formed from the Greek word "agon," meaning contest, struggle). Briefly, agonistic structures are going to undergo three big-time transformations in print culture: (1) modern capitalism, (2) modern science, and (3) modern democracy as exemplified in the United States.
Figuratively speaking, we could say that the Homeric epic the Iliad inculcates the sense that life is like a seemingly never-ending war (the Greek word "polemos" means war, struggle) and that the Odyssey inculcates the sense that life is like a seemingly never-ending contest (the Greek word "agon," mentioned above. In the Western tradition of imaginative literature, the hero and the heroic are characterized by agonistic striving. Think of Achilles and Beowulf and Othello.
In his lengthy introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad, Bernard Knox claims that "the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war [in the Iliad is] that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force" (1990, page 37). In other words, We Americans today would be well advised to maintain a big defense department.
At first blush, the portrayal of Jesus in the four canonical gospels seems to make him heroic in a new way that is different from the way in which Achilles is heroic by deciding to fight even though it means certain death. However, I would argue that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark was himself deeply motivated by the agonistic spirit when he deliberately constructed three scenes in which he portrays Jesus as knowing in advance that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem. But knowing that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem, he walks heroically forward to meet his death in Jerusalem. Why did the author construct those three scenes? Because Achilles's goddess-mother told him that if he returned to the war against the Trojans he would die. But in the end Achilles returns to the war, knowing that he will die. So the anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark portrayed Jesus as being a hero like Achilles by knowing about his death in advance and choosing to go forward. By doing this, the anonymous author engaged his agonistic spirit and constructed a story that topped the Homeric epic the Iliad. As is well known, Christians came in time to embrace the ridiculous idea of dying a martyr's death as a witness to one's Christian faith, as though what one thinks and holds is worth dying for. Later on, Muslims also embraced this ridiculous practice of martyrdom. Through the ridiculous inculcation of the idea of dying a martyr's death as a witness to one's faith, Christians and Muslims engage their agonistic spirits and cultivate their courage. I do not recommend martyrdom. But I do recommend courage.
Both Plato and Aristotle refer to the part of the human psyche (soul) that underlies the agonistic spirit as "thumos" (which is rendered as the spirited part of the psyche). Both Plato and Aristotle thought that we need to cultivate the virtue of courage to help us learn how to use the power of thumos in socially constructive ways. In her recent book Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos , Aristotle, and Gender (2000), Barbara Koziak has insightfully studied Aristotle's thought about thumos.
When we turn to Aristotle's view of dialectic, we note that dialectic involves back-and-forth pro-and-con exchanges to clarify conceptual constructs and predications. Thus for Aristotle, dialectic is agonistic in spirit. For Aristotle, the form of civic rhetoric used in legislative assemblies, known as deliberative rhetoric, is also agonistic in spirit, as is the form of civic rhetoric used in the law courts, forensic rhetoric. For centuries, Western education devoted an enormous amount of time to teaching dialectic and rhetoric, as both McLuhan and Ong learned through their historical studies of the verbal arts.
In his thought-provoking book Manliness (2006), Harvey C. Mansfield of Harvard University plays with the Greek word "andreia" that means both manliness and courage. But the Greek usage makes it seem like women cannot have courage. However, women can have courage. So if you want to annoy feminists, as Mansfield evidently wants to, tell them that when they manifest courage they are showing manliness and being manly. In any event, Mansfield makes one extremely important observation: "The entire enterprise of modernity . . . could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed" (page 230). In short, the manliness of warrior training represented by Achilles and Beowulf and Othello will be unemployed culturally as new expectations emerge in modernity for cultural leadership. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Greek word "andreia" means both manliness and courage, I think that people still need to cultivate courage in modernity. But the emphasis on manliness will be transformed in modernity through the three big-time transformations of modern capitalism and modern science and modern democracy.
At least to a certain degree, the three big-time transformations of agonistic structures (modern capitalism, modern science, and modern democracy as exemplified in the United States) helped advance the inward turn of consciousness that Ong writes about. But the inward turn of consciousness that Ong writes about can be traced back to ancient and medieval precedents. However, the inward turn of consciousness was decidedly advanced by the influence of the Gutenberg printing. For studies of the gradual historical development of the inward turn of consciousness, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) Phillip Cary's Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (2000), David Brakke's Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (2006), Ineke van 't Spijker's Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (2004), Denis Renevy's Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolfe and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (2001), Anthony Low's Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (2003), Katharine Eisaman Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1995), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse's The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992), Dror Wahrman's The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), and Ong's Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986).
In addition to the three big-time transformations of agonistic structures in print culture, and in addition to the inward turn of consciousness that print culture decidedly advanced, Ong would have us take note of how the visualist tendencies that trace back to ancient Greek and medieval philosophy were further advanced in print culture, especially by Ramus and his bookish followers. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, mentioned above, Ong works with the contrast between oral-aural sensory processing and visual sensory processing. In a discussion note in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (page 338n53), Ong generously credits the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951) for "a discerning and profound treatment of the visual-aural opposition" with which Ong himself works so productively is this book. Later, Ong came to characterize the term "viewpoint" as expressing the visualist dominance of sensory processing. In his article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647, Ong suggests that people in oral cultures (and people in residually oral forms of culture who have not studied Western philosophy) have a world-as-event sense of life, not a worldview. He associates having a worldview with distinctively literate thought in ancient Greek and medieval and modern philosophy and more generally with print culture.
Recent studies from different fields have focused on visuality. For example, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) Andrea Wilson Nightingale's Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (2004), Jas Elsner's Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text (2007), Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert's Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2005), Mary J. Carruthers' The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), Carruthers' The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (1998), Marielle Hageman and Marco Mostert's Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication (2005), Suzannah Biernoff's Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (2002), Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel's Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (2005), Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman's Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (2002), Emily Steiner's Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (2003), Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1994), Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image (2004), Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America (1999), Bailey's Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610 (2003), Alison Thorne's Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (2000), W. B. Gerard's Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (2006), Janine Barchas's Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2003), Richard Yeo's Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (2001), David Michael Levin's The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (1999), Patricia Anderson's The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (1991), Catherine Phillips' Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (2007), Jonathan Smith's Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (2009), and Gary Shapiro's Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003). These studies of various aspects of visuality, especially Nightingale's study, strengthen Lavelle's and Ong's discussion of visuality when each of them works with the visual-aural contrast.
Next, I want to turn to another point in Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) to elucidate further the visual-aural contrast with which Ong works in this book. As Ong grappled with the challenge of articulating the import of the visual dominance in cognitive processing that he was detailing, he did not settle on only one way to characterize the import of what he was detailing. As a result, he used a few different expressions: the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology. In the index he combines these terms this way: "Corpuscular view of reality (corpuscular epistemology, corpuscular psychology" (pages 397-398). These different terms appear on pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, and 210. To sum up these different expressions, Ong is drawing our attention to the corpuscular sense of life.
As I have explained, Ong works with the visual-aural contrast in this book, but in a later article he came to refer to the oral-aural sense of life as the world-as-event sense of life, which he contrasts with world-as-view sense of life, mentioned above. Both the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life are examples of the corpuscular sense of life. But so what? This is an important question. To answer it, we need to step back a bit and raise a different question: What would a non-corpuscular orientation toward life be life?
The non-corpuscular orientation toward life would involve a deeply reflective orientation not only toward sensory data but also toward our cognitive processing of sensory data as we construct conceptual constructs and make predications about them. The conservative Catholic writer Michael Novak, who gives no evidence of being familiar with Ong's thought about the corpuscular sense of life, has carefully studied the key work of the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), Insight: a Study of Human Understanding (1957). In this work Lonergan distinguishes what he refers to as four levels of human consciousness: (1) the empirical level of sensory data and imagination, (2) the intelligent level of constructing adequate conceptual constructs, (3) the rational level of judging the adequacy of conceptual constructs and predications, and (4) the responsible level of positing adequate conceptual constructs and predications. In his introduction to the 1994 reprinting of his 1965 book, Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge, Novak draws on Lonergan's way of thinking in order to critique Richard Rorty's thought:
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