Now, Bellah also says, "Donald sees Greek culture in the first millennium BCE as the place where theoretic culture first clearly emerged, and the efficient external memory systems provided by a fully alphabetic writing system as an aspect (not a cause [but how could it possibly NOT be a cause, in the sense of some kind of efficient cause?]) of that emergence" (page 273).
In addition, Bellah says, "But graphic invention and the external memory system it makes possible are only the essential prerequisites for the development of theoretic culture, which is the ability to think analytically rather than narratively, to construct theories that can be criticized logically and empirically. . . . So analytic thinking or theoretic thinking does not displace, but is added to, narrative thinking, a point essential to our understanding of the axial age" (page 274).
In a discussion note, Bellah says, "Modern education, to which tribal peoples are increasingly exposed, is also a conduit for theoretic culture" (page 640, note 179). Similarly, modern Western education is available to Chinese and other non-Western people today.
Now, in Bellah's Chapter 10: "Conclusion" (pages 567-606), he discusses in detail (pages 577-582) Andrea Wilson Nightingale's book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004). I have no quarrel with Bellah's discussion of specific points from her book. However, it strikes me that his discussion of her book should have been part of his Chapter 7: "The Axial Age II: Ancient Greece" (pages 324-398).
In any event, Nightingale's book about visuality and theory in ancient Greek philosophy dovetails nicely with what Ong says about visuality, for example, in his account of the world-as-view sense of life - and with what he says about the aural-to-visual shift in the history of the formal study of logic in Western culture in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, mentioned above.
For further discussion of Ong's theme of visuality, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
For bibliographic references to Ong's theme of visuality, see my online resource document "A Concise Guide to Five Themes in Walter J. Ong's Thought and Selected Related Works" (2017) that is available through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/189129
For an introductory survey of Ong's life and eleven of his books and selected articles, see my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, revised and expanded second edition (New York: Hampton Press, 2015; first edition, 2000).
For a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the anthology Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).
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