Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
As noted, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched 1958 book RMDD.
Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast" (page 10).
Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. To the best of my ability, I have honored the phenomenological and personalist cast of his thought in my introductory book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, second revised edition (New York: Hampton Press, 2015; first edition, 2000).
Concerning the phenomenological cast of Ong's philosophical thought, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, as I like to say, Ong is not everybody's cup of tea, figuratively speaking. Consider, for example, Ong's own modesty in the subtitle of his book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded published version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. His wording "Some Prolegomena" clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 "Preface" does "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause -- but that the shifts he points out are "sweeping."
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.
Finally, because Dr. Rothenberg's 2015 book is about scientific creativity, I should also mention here Ong's 1982 plenary address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association titled "The Agonistic Base of Scientifically Abstract Thought: Issues in [Ong's 1981 Book] Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness" that is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 479-495).
Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press) is the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
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