Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 28, 2022: I'd like to share with you some new reflections about the American Jesuit Renaissance scholar and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) liked to characterize his mature thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. For him, personalist thought in philosophy included the French Christian existentialists Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), and Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) -- and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965). As odd as it may sound, Ong's favorite sparring partner over the years was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (born 428/427 or 424/423 BCE; died 348/347 BCE).
At Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, where Ong taught for years in the Department of English, James D. Collins (1917-1985; Ph.D. in philosophy, Catholic University of America, 1944) taught in the Department of Philosophy (1945-1985) - and even served as the department head for a time. Dr. Collins' books include The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Henry Regnery, 1952) and The Mind of Kierkegaard (Henry Regnery, 1953).
Now, recently, I connected Pope Francis' new 2022 apostolic letter about the liturgical formation of practicing Catholics with Ong's 1969 article "World as View and World as Event" in the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pp. 634-647.
See my 2,000-word review essay "Pope Francis' 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Liturgical Formation, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/228208
Ong's 1969 article is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1995, pp. 69-90).
I have amplified Ong's 1969 account of the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life in my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom can help us understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4 (2012): pp. 255-272.
In Western cultural history, Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle onward embodies the world-as-view sense of life that Ong writes about. Concerning Western philosophy, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock's classic study Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963). Ong never tired of calling attention to Havelock's 1963 book. See Ong's "Review of Preface to Plato (1964)" in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 309-312).
Now, in Ong's 1958 massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press), Ong acknowledges (p. 338, note 54) that he is borrowing his account of the aural-to-visual shift in Western consciousness from the French Christian existentialist philosopher Louis Lavelle. Ong says, "For a discerning and profound treatment of the visual-aural opposition on which the present discussion turns, the reader is referred to the works of Louis Lavelle, especially La parole er l'ecriture (Paris, 1942), and Jean Nogue, Esquisse d'un systeme des qualities sensible (Paris, 1943)."
Now, on September 20, 2020, I published my 7,500-word OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought":
In it, I call attention to Ong's account of the aural-to-visual shift in Western consciousness in his massively researched 1958 book RMDD (for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift, see the "Index" [p. 396]).
In any event, the American Catholic philosopher James Collins perceptively reviewed Ong's two 1958 books about the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 101 (April 4, 1959): pp. 37-39.
Now, James Collins had previously published the article "Louis Lavelle on Human Participation" in the Philosophical Review, volume 56, number 2 (March 1947): pp. 156-183.
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