Now, Ong is not everybody's cup of tea, figuratively speaking. Consider, for example, Ong's own modesty in the subtitle of his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), 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 in as much 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.
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S TESTIMONY
Now, in 2021, the English translation of Michel Foucault's unfinished posthumous book was published: Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality: Volume 4, translated by Robert Hurley; edited and with a "Foreword" by Frederic Gros (New York: Pantheon Books; orig. French ed., 2018). In it, the scholar, public intellectual, and political activist Michel Foucault (1926-1984), who completed graduate studies in both philosophy and psychology, and who subsequently taught both philosophy and psychology, closely details in ancient Western Christian texts what Ong refers to in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, mentioned above, as the inward turn of consciousness (esp. pages 178-179).
Arguably Ong's deepest discussion of the inward turn of consciousness can be found in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Now, Foucault's discussion in Confessions of the Flesh of spiritual direction in the context of early Christian monasticism is detailed. Consequently, I want to point out here that the spiritual direction that Ong received in the Jesuit order no doubt differed in certain ways from what Foucault describes. The American Jesuit Joseph A. Tetlow discusses Jesuit spiritual direction in his new book Handing on the Fire: Making Spiritual Direction Ignatian (Boston: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2021).
Now, in Frederic Gros' "Foreword" to Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh (pages vii-xiii), Gros notes that Foucault's 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality in French was subtitled The Will to Know (page vii), a subtitle that does not appear on the title page of the 1978 English translation - which is subtitled An Introduction.
In 1970-1971, Foucault presented Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the College de France 1970-1971, edited by Daniel Defert; translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
For a relevant historical study of the conceptualization of the will in Western culture, see Vernon J. Bourke's book Will in Western Thought: An Historico-Critical Survey (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964).
However, with respect to Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh, it strikes me that his 1981 lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain are most relevant. See the 2014 English translation of them as the book Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer; edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (University of Chicago Press; orig. French ed., 2012). In their helpful essay "The Louvain Lectures in Context" (pages 271-321), Brion and Harcourt repeatedly refer to Foucault's five May 1973 lectures on "Truth and Juridical Forms" at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (pages 272, 281, 284, and 301).
Now, in the 750-page 2014 book The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, edited by Leonard Lawlor and John Nale, the American Jesuit James W. Bernauer (born in 1944) in philosophy at Boston College contributed entries for understanding Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh on "Christianity" (pages 61-63), "Confession" (pages 75-79), and "Religion" (pages 429-431).
Bernauer is the author of the comprehensive 1990 book Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press). Bernauer studied under Foucault in Paris, and he started writing his comprehensive book before Foucault's death in 1984. In Bernauer's chapter "Ecstatic Thinking" (pages 158-184), he says, "The last experience of thought that Foucault elaborated as an escape from the prison of [Enlightenment] humanism [also known as rationalism] was an ecstatic thinking, a characterization that may be understood provisionally as a designation for two transitions. . . . The first section of this chapter, 'On Christian Experience' [pages 161-165], focuses on the context and the content of this study [Foucault's study of the classical and early Christian eras], which would have been the substance of the announced fourth volume in his history of sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Respecting Foucault's own wishes, this unfinished volume will never appear" (pages 159-160). However, contrary to Foucault's own expressed wishes that no posthumous books be published, this unfinished but well-developed book has now been published.
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