(4) Jurgen Habermas' 1962 book in German titled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1991);
(5) Marshall McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic), mentioned above.
I refer to these five books as pioneering studies of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, because today there are too many studies of print culture for anyone to undertake a thorough bibliographic listing of them.
However, for a classified bibliography of studies in various languages of ancient and medieval literacy, see Marco Mostert's 2012 book titled A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication.
Now, in any event, my point here is that American conservatives today hearken back to their idealized imaginary sense of print culture in American culture in the 1950s.
Now, Ong published a generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America (September 15, 1962).
Ong's generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 307-308; but also see Ong's 1967 comment about McLuhan's 1962 book on p. 343 ["McLuhan gives a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond," Ong, 2002, p. 343]).
Thus, Ong in 1967 characterizes McLuhan's 1962 book as "racy" and as "indifferent to some scholarly detail" but still "uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print" after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in Europe in the mid-1450s in our Western cultural history.
In any event, when I took Father Ong's course Practical Criticism: Prose in the spring semester of 1966 at Saint Louis University, he put McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy on the assigned reading list for one of our quizzes in the course. Ong told us to read it "with a grain of salt." That's good advice - if you have not read McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy but are planning to read it to better understand the tendencies of American conservative today to hearken back to their idealized version of print culture in American culture in the 1950s.
Now, in Ong's Chapter IV: "The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought" in his 1958 massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (pp. 53-91), he discusses the un-self-conscious quantification of thought in late medieval logic. Subsequently, Ong reflected further on the quantification of thought in late medieval logic in his article "System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism" in the journal Bibliotheque et Humanisme (Geneva), volume 18 (May 1956): pp. 222-239. Subsequently, Ong reprinted his 1956 article in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, 1962, pp. 68-87).
In any event, in Ong's essay "System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism," he says the following:
"In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place - not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and parauniversity schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies" (boldface emphasis here added by me; quoted from Ong, The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies [Macmillan, 1962, p.72]).
Now, in Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pp. 9-13), mentioned above, Ong says the following:
"The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)." Ong then discusses these two earlier volumes.
Then he says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (pp. 9-10).
Thus, Father Ong himself claims (1) that his media-ecology thesis is "sweeping" but (2) that the shifts do not "cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness" and (3) that the shifts are related to "major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness."
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