Regarding Ong's chapters "Hermenutics, Textual and Other" (pages 25-35) and "Affiliations of Hermeneutics with Texts" (pages 36-39), I would call the attention of the interested reader to Ong's book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), mentioned above.
Regarding Ong chapter "The Interpersonalism of Hermeneutics, Oral and Other" (pages 40-49), I would call the attention of the interested reader to my essay "Writing, the Writer, and Lonergan: Authenticity and Intersubjectivity" in the book Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (Sheed & Ward, 1993, pages 23-47).
Regarding Ong's chapter on "Hermeneutic, Print, and 'Facts'" (pages 50-54), I would call the attention of interested readers to William Rehg's book Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas (MIT Press, 2009). Also see my 5,000-word review essay "Rehg Admirably Takes the Science Wars to a New Level" in the print and online journal On the Horizon, volume 18, number 4 (2010): pages 337-346.
Regarding both Ong's chapter on "Meaning, Hermeneutic, and Interpersonal Trust" (pages 58-60) and his chapter on "Hermeneutics in Children's Learning to Speak" (pages 85-89), I would call the attention of interested readers to Pete Walker's book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, mentioned above.
Because Ong in the subtitle of his posthumously published book once again refers to "the Word," perhaps we should also note here that he refers to "the Word" in the main title or subtitle of three earlier books, all mentioned above: (1) The Presence of the Word (1967), (2) Interfaces of the Word (1977), and (3) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). As noted above, his massively researched doctoral dissertation (published in 1958, slightly revised) involved a study of the history of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, or logic.
Now, in the Christian tradition of thought, which Ong was deeply familiar with, the wording in the prologue of the Gospel According to John (1:1-18) eventually gave rise to the Christian tradition of referring to the Christ, the Second Person of the supposed divine trinity, the Son (as distinct from the father, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Holy Spirit), as the Word (capitalized; Greek, Logos; Latin, Verbum). In Ong's book The Presence of the Word (1967), mentioned above, he refers to both "the word" (lowercase) and "the Word" (capitalized; see the index for specific page references).
For further discussion of the historical controversies involved in the emergence of the Christian tradition of thought about the supposed divinity of the Christ (the Greek-based term for the Messiah, the Anointed One) of Christian scripture, see my article "Early Christian Creeds and Controversies in the light of the Orality-Literacy Hypothesis" in the journal Oral Tradition, volume 2 (1987): pages 132-149. Briefly, the conventionally capitalized Word in the prologue of the Gospel According to John strikes me and certain biblical scholars as a term borrowed from the literate tradition of thought in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. However, apart from the Greek term Logos, everything else in Greek in the prologue involves extraordinary word-plays and plays on sound that are far more reminiscent of primary oral thought and expression than of ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophical thought and expression.
In the book Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul (Oxford University Press, 2010), Troels Engberg-Pedersen, professor of New Testament at the University of Copenhagen, points out that ancient Greek and Roman Stoic thought represents a materialist philosophical position, as distinct from the non-materialist philosophical position of Plato. As noted above, Ong holds a non-materialist philosophical position, and so do I, even though I do not hold all of Ong's religious views.
For further discussion of the early Christian creeds and controversies, see Philip Jenkins' accessible book Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (HarperOne, 2010).
Recently, David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion at the University of Notre Dame, has published a provocative literal translation of The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2017). In the postscript, he points out that "one standard Chinese version of the Bible renders logos in the prologue of John's Gospel as [the Chinese symbol meaning tao], which is about as near as any translation could come to capturing the scope and depth of the word's religious, philosophical, and metaphoric associations in those verses, while also carrying the additional meaning of 'speech' or 'discourse.' To be clear, in most contexts in the New Testament, logos can be correctly and satisfactorily rendered as 'word,' 'utterance,' 'teaching,' 'story,' 'message,' 'speech,' or 'communication.' In the very special case of the prologue to John's Gospel, however, any such translation is so inadequate as to produce nothing but a cipher without a key" (page 550).
In the spirit of 2 + 2 = 4, we may put David Bentley Hart's characterization of "a cipher without a key" together with his report of the Chinese translation using the symbol meaning tao. Tao is also a cipher without a key.
In conclusion, I commend Professors Zlatic and van den Berg for getting Ong's incomplete manuscript published by a prestigious university press. As noted, it is an accessible primer in his thought. Consequently, I hope that Ong's posthumously published book sparks new interest in his "fresh and startlingly relevant" thought.
(Article changed on December 31, 2017 at 14:19)
(Article changed on January 4, 2018 at 14:37)
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