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 - see, for example, James C. Scott's contribution to Big History, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017).
Now, recently I have written about the American psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg's studies of human creativity in my OEN articles (1) "Dr. Albert Rothenberg on Creativity" (dated October 29, 2021); and (2) "Childhood Memories: A Fourfold Heuristic Exercise" (dated October 31, 2021):
It remains now for me to discuss what Dr. Rothenberg refers to as homospatial thinking in the creative process in the context of Ong's account of Big History. To review briefly, Dr. Rothenberg himself aligns homospatial thinking in the creative process with space, and he himself aligns what he refers to as janusian thinking in the creative process with time.
Ong's central claim about the aural-to-visual shift that he writes about in his massively researched 1958 book, mentioned above, and elsewhere in his mature work from the early 1950s onward is that phonetic alphabetic writing systems reduced the time-bound oral-aural spoken and sung language to the space-bound visual symbolic representations of written language - and centuries later of printed language.
Consequently, it appears likely that what Dr. Rothenberg refers to as homospatial thinking in the creative process was not prominent in pre-literate cultures - which Ong refers to as primary oral cultures (and, by extension, as residually oral cultures that co-existing alongside the emerging writing cultures in ancient and medieval manuscript cultures).
Perhaps we can think of the full flowering of homospatial thinking as emerging in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
As noted above, Ong discusses the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing most extensively in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, mentioned above (for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift, see the "Index" [page 396]). But what Ong refers to as the spatialization of the written and later printed word also involves what he refers to as the quantification of thought in medieval logic (see pages 53-91).
After Ong's massively researched 1958 book about the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Ramist logic was published, Ong 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" (boldface emphasis here added by me; page 72 of Ong's 1962 essay collection titled The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies [New York: Macmillan]).
For further discussion of Ong's account of Big History, see my article "The West Versus the Rest: Getting Our Cultural Bearings from Walter J. Ong" in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 7, number 4 (2008): pages 271-281.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
