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 [see Ong on visualist tendencies]. 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 critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. 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 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. (Novak, 1994, page xv)
As my interpolations in brackets show, Ong has in effect set forth a critique of "confusing the activities of the mind with any (or all) the bodily senses." As noted, Ong refers to this kind of confusion in various terms: the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology. (It is beyond the scope of this essay to undertake a careful comparison and contrast of Ong's critique of corpuscular epistemology, including of course both the oral-aural sense of life as event and the visualist sense of life as view, on the one hand, and, on the other, Jacques Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and logocentrism.)
Just as the various studies of visuality mentioned above support and strengthen the visual-aural contrast with which both Lavelle and Ong work, so too recent studies from different fields have centered on various aspects of orality that Ong discusses in Orality and Literacy (1982, pages 1-76). For example, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) John Miles Foley's Homer's Traditional Art (1999), M. L. West's The Making of the Iliad (2011), Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000), Mark W. Edwards' Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (2002), D. H. Green's Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800-1300 (1994), David Robey's Sound and Structure in the Divine Comedy (2000), Adam Fox's Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000), Alexis Tadie's Sterne's Whimsical Theatres of Language: Orality, Gesture, Literacy (2003), Paul Goetsch's The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2003), James I. Wimsatt's Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (2006), Adeleke Adeeko's The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (2005), Gerd Hurm's Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain: The Aesthetics and Politics of Orality in Samuel Clemens's Fictions (2003), Willi Erzgraber's James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art (2002), and Jeff Opland's Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (1983). These studies of various aspects of orality, especially Walker's study, strengthen Lavelle's and Ong's discussion of aurality when each of them works with the visual-aural contrast.
Thus far, I have been discussing individual themes from Ong's work. But of course he has interwoven these themes in his sweeping thesis about Western cultural development (Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 1977, pages 9-10). In his thesis he focuses on shifts in the media and how these shifts influence the cognitive processing of sensory data (the visual-aural contrast that later becomes the orality-literacy contrast). From the account of shifts in the media, he is able to identify four cultural permutations: (1) oral culture, (2) chirographic culture (aka manuscript culture), (3) typographic culture (aka print culture), and (4) secondary oral culture, in which communication media that accentuate sound have unprecedented influence. Modernity emerges gradually in print culture, but not overnight as the result of Gutenberg's printing press (c. 1450).
Ong himself characterizes his thesis about shifts in the media as relationist, not reductionist, in spirit. More recently, others have aptly characterized Ong's relationist approach to studying cultural developments as ecological in spirit. As a result, they see his work as involving media ecology.
Ong never tired of championing Eric A. Havelock's breakthrough work about the role of vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy in the emergence of ancient Greek philosophic thought as exemplified in Plato (and also in Aristotle). Havelock sees ancient Greek philosophic thought as exemplified in Plato as distinctively literate thought. In other words, no vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, no Plato (and mutatis mutandis, no Aristotle).
For understandable reasons, Ong centers his attention more on Aristotle than on Plato. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), Ong traces the history of the formal study of logic back to Aristotle's treatises on logic, which Ong sees as exemplifying distinctively literate thought (i.e., no literacy, no treatises on logic by Aristotle).
But Plato and Aristotle did not emerge out of blue as it were. They represent the culmination of cognitive developments in conceptual constructs that developed gradually over a considerable period of time, as Havelock shows in Preface to Plato (1963) and elsewhere. But "the great divide," as critics of Havelock and Ong have characterized it, that emerged most decidedly with Plato and Aristotle is the result of the gradual cumulative influence of literacy, not something that happened overnight with the introduction of literacy in ancient Greek culture.
For noteworthy studies of pre-philosophic thought (aka oral) and the emergence of Greek philosophic thought (aka distinctively literate), see Eric Voegelin's three most important books: Israel and Revelation (1956), The World of the Polis (1957), and Plato and Aristotle (1957). Voegelin distinguishes compact consciousness from differentiated consciousness as exemplified in Plato and Aristotle. Compact consciousness characterizes primary orality. By comparison, differentiated consciousness characterizes the distinctively literate thought exemplified in Plato and Aristotle. Thus independently of Havelock's Preface to Plato (1963) and Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), Voegelin also identifies and works with the kind of distinction that critics of Havelock and Ong characterize as "the great divide."
However, Ong identifies a new state of mind that emerged with the quantification of thought in medieval logic and was advanced further in print culture, most notably modern science, but in other ways as well (Ong, The Barbarian Within, 1962, page 72). Because Ong's critics have already characterized the emergence of distinctively literate thought in Plato and Aristotle as "the great divide," how should Ong's critics negatively characterize his account of the emergence of a new state of mind in the quantification of thought in medieval logic, which has been further advanced in modern science and in other ways in modernity?
To this day, we speak of the pre-modern world, because many parts of the world today are comparatively under-developed. For example, there are an estimated one billion people in the world today who do not know how to read and write any language. Those people will not be using computers or the Internet.
Ong sees modernity emerging in Western culture after the development of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450. To this day, modernity represents the great cultural divide, so print culture contributed decidedly to the development of the great cultural divide between the modern world and the pre-modern world.
For Ong, Western culture is a juggernaut of different contributing factors, one of which is the Gutenberg printing press. Another is the enhanced visualist cognitive processing that the unprecedented spread of reading and writing helped advance in print culture. Another factor that contributed to the emergence of modernity is the quantification of thought in medieval logic that Ong details in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958, pages 53-91), which emerged before the development of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450, but was further spread with the aid of print as well as the aid of expanding formal education.
Next, I want to discuss how the various factors I've discussed above interacted with one another in the emergence of modernity in print culture. Ong sees these factors as contributing to the emergence of modern capitalism, modern science, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement. Ong's thesis is that the factors that he has discussed in Orality and Literacy (1982) and elsewhere, mentioned above, contributed to the emergence of modernity in Western culture, as manifested in these five large cultural developments.
Because Ong works with a relationist approach, we need to understand that he is not referring to straightforward efficient causality (i.e., cause and effect). As an example of efficient causality, I would mention turning a light on and off. Electric current is the efficient cause that causes the light to go on. The light switch is the instrumental efficient cause. But Ong is not discussing such straightforward efficient causality, but contributing factors that culturally condition our consciousness. These cultural factors are no doubt determinative factors. But Ong is not a determinist, as certain critics have claimed. He is not a determinist because he understands the role of free choice and of human creativity. James Joyce famously referred to the smithy of his soul. Yes, the artist's soul is a smithy. But so is the soul of each and every human person.
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