Next, I should spell out explicitly here that Ong regularly works with what is known in philosophy as the body/soul distinction (also known as the mind/body distinction), which Mortimer J. Adler lucidly explains in his accessible book Intellect: Mind over Matter. Thus he embraces a non-materialist philosophical position, not a materialist philosophical position. I will return to this point below in my discussion of Ong's use of the term "corpuscular."
For Ong in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, the Art of Reason is exemplified in Descartes (7, 115, 121, 125, 198, 229, 230, 251, and 307) and Kant (54, 121, and 315). But Ong centers his attention on their ancient, medieval, and early modern (also known as Renaissance) predecessors. As noted above, for Ong, written words involve sight - both to write them and to see them. In addition, written words are written in space. For Ong, the spatialization of thought expressed implicitly in written words in space on parchment or another substance, and the quantification of thought expressed explicitly in certain words in logic combine to make a heady brew, especially in print culture in Western culture. For centuries in the history of formal logic, the quantification of thought in medieval logic was expressed in words. As Ong explains, certain genuine developments in medieval logic were anonymously incorporated into the Aristotelian tradition of logic. Eventually however, as Ong explains, the quantification of thought became expressed in symbols - in modern symbolic logic. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong discusses spatialization in connection with the aural-to-visual shift on pages 92-3, 104-12, 128, 151-6, 244-5, 273, 277-9, 284-92, and 307-14, and quantification on pages 53-91, 184, 262, and 263.
After Ong's 1958 book about Peter Ramus and Ramism was published, Ong reflected further on his research 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" (quoted from Ong's 1962 collection of his essays titled The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies [72]; boldface emphasis here added by me).
The key sentence in the above quotation: "It [the real mathematical transformation of thinking] represents a new state of mind" - the state of mind advanced by print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s. As Ong shows, this state of mind was present in medieval culture and contributed to significant developments in the Aristotelian tradition of logic, developments that went significantly beyond Aristotle's own contribution to logic - developments that moved toward modern symbolic logic, but developments in which words were used, not symbols. As I say, this new state of mind was advanced by print culture in Western culture, in which unprecedented numbers of people were educated enough that they learned to read and write.
But here we should note a difference between ancient and medieval culture in Western culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, print culture in Western culture. In ancient and medieval culture in Western culture, this new state of mind co-existed in certain educated people in the prestige culture alongside the current-traditional culture of ordinary people. Woolf's essay "Anon" about the medieval vernacular English culture is about the current-traditional culture of ordinary people in medieval England. But in print culture in Western culture, the educated people in the prestige culture extended the values and orientation of this new state of mind to unprecedented scope, largely because unprecedented numbers of ordinary people had learned how to read and write. To be sure, people who did not known how to read and write continued to exist in Western culture. But they tended to be excluded from the ascendant prestige culture, in which this new state of mind was in the ascendency.
According to Ong, this new state of mind was advanced by print culture in Western culture. It contributed to the development of modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy as exemplified in our American experiment in democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement in literature and philosophy and the arts - in short, modernity. In other words, Ong sees Western liberalism (economic and political) and individualism, and much else as fueled by the infrastructures involved in print culture in Western culture, as he has detailed those infrastructures in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue and elsewhere. To this day, Ong's perceptive account of the philosophical infrastructures involved in Western cultural history is a radical one.
Ong's most widely known and most widely translated book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), published in Methuen's New Accents series in literary studies, contains not only a chapter titled "Writing restructures consciousness" (78-116) but also a chapter titled "Print, space and closure" (117-38). The latter chapter includes a subsection titled "More diffuse effects" (130-2). In that subsection, Ong claims that print "encouraged and made possible on a large scale the quantification of knowledge, both through the use of mathematical analysis and through the use of diagrams and charts [involving spatialization of knowledge]" (130).
Now, in his groundbreaking philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan mocks the tendency in Western philosophical thought to equate knowing with "taking a good look." According to him, that tendency produces naà ¯ve realism. Over against and in contradistinction to naà ¯ve realism, Lonergan advocates critical realism. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong makes a point comparable to Lonergan's point about "taking a good look," but also somewhat different from Lonergan's critique, when he (Ong) refers to the "unwary": "[T]he constant traffic in the visible and tangible maintained by [medieval] suppositional theory [in logic] reinforced the tendency of the unwary to consider objects as somehow lifted into the mind by conceptualization and as being equipped with their accidental modifications in a fashion only too crudely analogous with processes observable in the external world. . . . This tendency is reinforced by the notion of supposition itself when one examines the elementary metaphor it involves. In Cicero and others, supponere meant to substitute, so that the unwary easily came to think of terms not as 'signifying' things or reality, not as affording an insight into reality, but as surrogates or substitutes for things. . . . This substitution view lends itself readily to visualist conceptualization: a term is not seen in its relation to a word, a cry, but rather one imagines the thing the thing as whisked away in space and a term as set in its place. The psychological complexities and mysteries of the actual semantic situation can never be completely reduced thus visually or spatially, since the situation involves an irreducible analogy with auditory activity, the calling of the 'names' of things" (69-70; also see 107-08 and 109). In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong uses various expressions to characterize the corpuscular view of reality -- also referred to as the corpuscular epistemology and corpuscular psychology (65-6, 72, 146, 171, 203, and 210). In effect, what Ong refers to as the corpuscular view of reality is comparable to what Lonergan refers to as naà ¯ve realism in Insight.
In the 1994 introduction to the second edition of his 1965 book, Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge, based on Lonergan's philosophical masterpiece Insight, Michael Novak in effect critiques the world-as-view sense of life expressed in Richard Rorty's philosophy:
"Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not 'the mirror of nature' he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [as Novak knows, both Ong and Lonergan would agree with him about this critique of Rorty]. We do not know simply through 'looking at' reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's repeated critique of corpuscular, or bodily, epistemology]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their [our minds'] activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, 'Oh, I see!' But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than 'seeing,' and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, 'Look!' Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and 'looking for' the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction" (xv; material in square brackets added by me). Thus far, however, Novak himself has not yet gotten to the point at which the evidence supporting Ong's sweeping claim about communications media hits him. Perhaps Novak's imagination is ill-arranged for the purposes of grasping Ong's thought.
It is not especially hard for someone who has read Ong, as Novak has, to paraphrase Ong's key points in his or her own words.
Nevertheless, it is not easy for people to grasp the import of Ong's sweeping thought.
If we were to take a hint from Novak, we might attribute the difficulty to certain people having ill-equipped imaginations. But this way of explaining their difficulty in grasping the import of Ong's sweeping thought might prompt us to wonder what exactly is ill-equipped about their imaginations. For example, are their imaginations ill-equipped in the sense of being already equipped with something that makes it difficult for them to grasp the import of Ong's sweeping thought, or are their imaginations ill-equipped in the sense of their not having something that they would presumably need to have in order to grasp the import of Ong's sweeping thought?
In any event, Ong's imagination was not ill-equipped for grasping the import of Lavelle's thought about the aural-visual opposition. No doubt the imagination plays a big role in how we cognitively process sensory information. No doubt Ong's and Lavelle's and Lonergan's claim about the uncritical visual tendency of Western philosophic thought is greatly strengthened by Nightingale's 2004 book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. But Ong and McLuhan also claim that after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s, printed books and pamphlets somehow worked to expand the visual sense of life among ordinary educated people generally, not just among people who had studied Western philosophy and Christian theology (based on Greek philosophical thought).
Now, Ong includes a certain number of illustrations in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue that are reproduced from printed books by Ramus and his followers (31, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90,181, 202, 261, 296, 300, 301, and 317). Regarding Figure IV titled "Logic in Space" (80), Ong comments in his annotation about it that it expresses the common human urge to construct mandalas such as those mandalas studied by C. G. Jung (xvi).
No doubt Ramus and his followers delighted in constructing arrays of dichotomized philosophical terms in charts in their printed books. American fans of college basketball today enjoy the elaborate bracketed match-ups of teams leading up to the championship game. Ramus and his followers enjoyed constructing bracketed schema of philosophical terminology - as a kind of outline proceeding from the most general term to ways in which to break it down further and further for discussion.
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