Even if Ong did subsequently change his mind a bit about the "aphoristic statements" part of his June 4th statement (see Zlatic's note 13 on page 206 about Ong's letter to Lumpp dated June 10, 1974), Ong's earlier statement about "aphoristic statements" is thought provoking.
In the second lengthy commentary, Tom Zlatic also says, "The use of aphorisms in philosophical thinking, wisdom literature, and even medicine has a long history, extending from Hippocrates through figures such as Jesus and Francis Bacon, to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Though Ong's colleague Marshall McLuhan was more renowned for such pithy, oracular statements, both men as scholars of Renaissance literature and rhetoric were intrigued by the aphorism, a verbal art form straddling the borders between literature and philosophy that substitutes for argument and demonstration such literary/rhetorical devices as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, oxymoron, paradox, juxtaposition, and wit" (page 163).
On page 164, Tom Zlatic says that Ong's book "Language as Hermeneutic reaffirms the 'is-but' structure of asymmetric opposition in aphorisms as an alternative to the flat [antithetical] contradiction, 'is-is not'" that Ramus and his followers stressed in their emphasis on logic (also known as dialectic). Tom Zlatic says "reaffirms" here because he has previously quoted a passage in which Ong affirms that "The opposition between the two statements [he has given to illustrate his point] is not symmetrical (is-is not) but asymmetrical (is-but)" in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Now, as evidence that Ong was "intrigued by the aphorism" (page 163), Tom Zlatic refers briefly in passing to a six-double-spaced-page 1968 paper that Ong wrote titled "Aphorisms Regarding the Media and the Senses" (page 206, note 14). Ong wrote the paper to deliver at the 1968 Modern Language Association meeting. But he did not deliver it because he subsequently developed another paper along other lines. (I have no information about that other paper.)
In "Aphorisms Regarding the Media and the Senses," Ong begins with a short quotation from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon about the Greek word aphorismos as involving "delimitation, assignment of boundaries."
The body of Ong's 1968 paper includes ten unnumbered subsections, two of which I will now quote in their entirety:
"Prophecy is an oral genre. The written books of the prophets in the Old [T]estament [i.e., the Hebrew Bible] are records are records of what the prophets had to say aloud. The Apocalypse or Revelation [in the New Testament], on the other hand, is a work composed in writing (though with strong oral residue, as always in earlier composition). It is likewise prophetic, the written extension of the prophetic genre, but, as writing, already a somewhat different genre, more sequential, its symbolism more tightly compressed, more 'literary'" (I have added the material in square brackets).
That's the end of one subsection. Here's the next subsection:
"McLuhan's remarks are prophetic, and, as prophecy, they are not infrequently responses to what others say or ask him. His writings are apocalyptic. Both prophecy and apocalypse throw together past, pres[e]nt, and future, projecting them on top of one another, an operation which is essential to McLuhan's performance, which is the opposite of antiquarian even when concerned with the past. Much of McLuhan's appeal lies in his use of prediction directed toward technological and other current phenomena. He predicts how long one or another phenomenon will last the automobile as an institution has ten years to go (as of 1968). Appetite for prophecy is growing, partly because of the futuristic pitch of all technological culture, its planning proclivities. McLuhan has been one of the first to apply the prophetic genre to technological paraphernalia. Such application transmutes the prose of technological, industrial banality into the realm of sheer poetry." (I have added the correct letter in square brackets.)
I will further discuss Ong's claim regarding "the futuristic pitch of all technological culture" below.
Now, I was never much interested in McLuhan's oracular "prediction[s] directed toward technological and other current phenomena" in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, I was interested in his claim that the new orality might possibly engender what he refers to in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy as "retribalization." It strikes me that President Donald J. Trump in the United States is the advocate of retribalization (in McLuhan's terminology).
For a cogent discussion of Trump and reality TV, see James Poniewozik's 2019 book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (New York: Liveright Publishing/ Norton).
For a perceptive psychological analysis of Trump, see Justin A. Frank's 2018 book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (New York: Avery/ Penguin Random House).
Now, Tom Zlatic has further developed some of Ong's points in his essay "Metaphysics and media: Walter J. Ong's philosophical milieu" in the online journal Review of Communication, volume 17, number 4 (2017): pages 357-376. Here's the link:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2017.1367827
David M. Smith in anthropology at the University of Minnesota Duluth (now retired) explores the metaphysics of primary oral thought among the Chipewyan people in Canada in his 1997 essay "World as Event: Aspects of Chipewyan Ontology" that we reprinted in the ambition anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (New York: Hampton Press, 2012, pages 117-141).
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