President Obama and the different Republican presidential hopefuls have expressed their views regarding American exceptionalism. Even though I am not running for president, I have decided to set forth my view of American exceptionalism based on the work of the American cultural historian Walter J. Ong, S.J (1912-2003). I do this to challenge President Obama and the Republican presidential hopefuls to match or top my view.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 11, 2011: If you are interested in how and why the world works, then you should be interested in the thought of the American cultural historian and philosopher Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003) of Saint Louis University. Never heard of him, you say? I'm not surprised. With the exception of a few articles, the central body of Ong's work is remarkably irenic in spirit. Typically, he does not set up a real or imagined adversarial position against which he is developing his sweeping account of cultural history. How could the thought of such a studiously irenic writer compete in the marketplace of public intellectuals with famously polemical writers such as Noam Chomsky?

But apart from possibly admiring Ong for being insightful and learned, is his sweeping account of cultural history of any practical value? It depends, I suppose, on what you consider to be of practical value. One practical value that we can draw from Ong's thought is a well-founded sense of American exceptionalism, as distinct from a triumphalistic and bombastic sense of American exceptionalism. In ancient Athens, for example, Pericles expressed a triumphalistic and bombastic sense of Athenian exceptionalism is his famous "Funeral Oration" (as remembered by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War). We Americans would be well advised to avoid such triumphalism and bombast.

The well-founded sense of American exceptionalism that we can draw from Ong's thought can enable us Americans to get our bearings in the world today about who we are and where we come from. But stand forewarned: The sense of American exceptionalism that emerges from Ong's thought will not only enhance American self-esteem but also heighten the challenge that we Americans already have to make our experiment in representative democracy work as well as we can. Briefly, the United States is the culmination and epitome of Western cultural history. American political liberalism and economic liberalism are the twin models for the cultural development of all non-Western cultures in the world today, including China. In our political and economic institutions, we Americans are the light for the world. Figuratively speaking, the United States is the city on a hill that John Winthrop referred to long ago.

But if we Americans collectively are the political and economic model for all non-Western cultures to aspire to emulate, doesn't it follow that adult Americans should conduct themselves as though we are ourselves individually models of upright and just conduct? Taking a hint from the historical Jesus, shouldn't each of us Americans individually be striving to actuate the inbreaking of God's reign of justice in this world? To be sure, freedom is a necessary condition for justice. But there can be freedom without justice. For this reason, we Americans who have such enormous freedom should strive for justice.

Today the Chinese are making significant strides toward American economic liberalism. However, it remains to be seen if they will move toward American political liberalism. Oddly enough, Ong's detailed account of Western cultural history can be understood as in effect providing a set of guidelines for China (and other non-Western countries) to follow in order to move toward modernity, assuming that China wants to move toward modernity. The deep cultural conditioning of the Chinese in Confucian culture is still strong in China today, just as the deep cultural conditioning of rhetorical culture was in the West for centuries before the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press gradually brought about its demise. But I am getting ahead of myself. It is time to back up and discuss Ong's work in greater detail.

Who was Walter Ong? Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., was the oldest child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. The middle name "Jackson" commemorates the family's relationship with President Andrew Jackson. The Ong family's ancestors came from East Anglia to Massachusetts Bay Colony on the same ship that brought Roger Williams here in 1631. The family name "Ong" is English; for centuries it was spelled "Onge"; it is probably related to the English name "Yonge."

East Anglia is where Cambridge University is located, and many of the men who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts Bay Colony had been educated at Cambridge University. In 1636, as is well known, the educated colonists in Massachusetts Bay Colony founded Harvard College. The early educators at Harvard College were self-described Ramists, followers of the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). For centuries, Catholic educators in medieval universities had passed on in Latin the Aristotelian tradition of logic. Because Protestant educators wanted to differentiate themselves from Catholic educators, Protestant educators at Cambridge University and Harvard College and elsewhere in different countries in Europe championed Ramus's work (in Latin). For example, John Milton studied Ramus's work in logic in Latin when he was a student at Cambridge University, and later in his life he wrote a textbook in logic in Latin based on Ramus's work. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger of Saint Louis University translated Milton's textbook as A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus in volume eight of Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1982, pages 206-407), and Ong supplied a lengthy historical introduction (pages 139-205).

Ong's first major claim to scholarly fame was his massively researched Harvard University doctoral dissertation about Ramus's work. His dissertation was published, slightly revised, by Harvard University Press in two volumes in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory. In Ramus and Talon Inventory, Ong lists and briefly describes the more than 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus and Talon and other Ramists and some of Ramus's critics that he (Ong) tracked down by working in more that 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe. (Ong received financial assistance from two Guggenheim fellowships to conduct his research; as a Jesuit priest, he was entitled to live in Jesuit residences when he traveled.)

Ramus and the Protestant educators who championed his work in logic over the Aristotelian tradition of logic were part of the larger educational movement that we today refer to as Renaissance humanism. In a similar way, the proliferating colleges founded by the early Jesuits throughout Europe were also part of the larger educational movement known today as Renaissance humanism. The large educational movement known today as Renaissance humanism supplanted and superceded the older educational movement known as scholasticism that had dominated the arts curriculum of medieval universities for three centuries or more. In Four Cultures of the West (2004), John W. O'Malley, S.J., discusses the medieval university and Renaissance humanism as two of the four cultures mentioned in the title of his book. As O'Malley's discussion of them indicates, both forms of education are still with us today in Western culture.

In any event, Walter Jr. and his younger brother attended Catholic schools in Kansas City, Missouri, and then attended the Jesuit high school and the Jesuit college in Kansas City. Walter Jr. graduate from Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University) in 1933. After working in commercial positions for two years, Walter Jr. entered the two-year novitiate of the Roman Catholic religious order known informally as the Jesuits (known formally as the Society of Jesus; hence, the initials "S.J." after the name of Jesuits). As luck would have it, Ong advanced in his Jesuit training to study philosophy (in Latin) at Saint Louis University (SLU) when the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), fresh from studying English at Cambridge University under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, was teaching English at SLU. In addition to completing a licentiate degree in philosophy (roughly equivalent to a Master's degree), Ong completed a Master's degree in English, with McLuhan serving as the director of his Master's thesis on sprung rhythm in the poetry of the Victorian Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. During the years when McLuhan was teaching at SLU (1938-1944), he was working on two big projects: (1) a very creative study of popular culture, which eventually culminated in the publication of his experimental book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) and (2) his Cambridge University dissertation about the history of the verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (2006). McLuhan has called Ong's attention to the work of Ramus. As a result, Ong dedicated Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958) to "Herbert Marshall McLuhan who started all this." The publication of Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) prompted McLuhan to borrow Ong's thesis and amplify it with material of his own choosing in his experimental book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). Next, McLuhan his most conventional-looking book Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (1964). But it is filled with rather unconventional ways of thinking, to put it mildly. But taken together, McLuhan's two books in the early 1960s catapulted him to extraordinary fame (or infamy, depending on how you think of McLuhan). McLuhan received extraordinary media attention. He was a celebrity. However, in time, his extraordinary celebrity was followed by extraordinary criticism, to put it mildly.

When his former teacher and life-long friend Marshall McLuhan was receiving such extraordinary attention in the 1960s and the 1970s, Ong kept producing his growing body of irenic studies in cultural history: The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (1962); In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (1967); The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), the published version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University; Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (1971); Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (1977); Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University; Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Ong's most widely known book; and Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

The books by Ong that I have mentioned thus far constitute the core works in his multivariate account of cultural history. But Ong's understanding of our American culture is best expressed in his two early short collections of essays addressed to his fellow American Catholics: Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (1957), which is dedicated to the memory of his father and mother, and American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World (1959), which is dedicated to his brother and his brother's family. In Frontiers in American Catholicism, Ong describes the United States as "the nation whose genius seems to be adaptability and change" (page 3). We Americans today may feel more deeply challenged than Americans in the 1950s did to adapt and change in response to the expanding economic globalization, but adaptability and change are part of our American heritage, as Ong says. He also refers to our "peculiar American personalism" and "the forward-looking habits endemic in the American state of mind" (pages 124, 125). In American Catholic Crossroads, Ong points out that "our loyalty in a democracy is, in some ways or other, actually a commitment to all of the millions of persons who make up our democratic society much more than it is loyalty to any "principles.'" He explains, "There is thus a sense in which democracy encourages love, for commitment [to other persons] is a form of love" (pages 43, 44). In his reflections on Isaac Hecker, Ong observes that "the [American] ideals of growth and progress are among the most powerful religious forces, if not the most powerful, characteristic of our age" (page 63).

Ong's own reflections on personalist thought can be found in two essays in The Barbarian Within (1962, pages 233-241, 242-259) and in Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986). Recently Gary Dorrien has enriched our understanding of American personalist thought in volume two of his three-volume study titled The Making of American Liberal Theology (2003, pages 286-355), and so has Rufus Burrow, Jr., in Personalism: A Critical Introduction (1999) and in God and Human Dignity: The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2006).

Ong's Sweeping Account of Western Cultural History

            For Ong, the Christian Bible and the Homeric epics contain transcribed forms of oral thought and expression. In the world today, an estimated one billion people do not know how to read and write any language. In the United States today, millions of American adults have not attained what reading teachers refer to as functional literacy. For all practical purposes, people who have not attained functional literacy live in effect in a residual form of oral culture. Before the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, all cultures in the West were to one degree or another oral cultures, including the English culture out of which emerged Shakespeare and the learned translators of the King James Version of the Christian Bible. However, with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, powerful social forces were set in motion, which included both the Protestant emphasis on formal education, mentioned above, and the Catholic emphasis on formal education exemplified by the colleges founded by the early Jesuits throughout Europe, also mentioned above. Out of these powerful social forces in the early modern period, modernity will in time emerge, as I will explain momentarily.

For Ong, distinctively literate thought emerged in ancient Greek philosophy, most notably in Aristotle's treatises in formal logic. In short, formal logic represents distinctively literate thought. Ong's major work in the history of formal logic is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), mentioned above. As we noted above, formal logic dominated the arts curriculum in medieval universities for some three centuries or more. Ramus and his followers in Europe and in the American colonies carried forward the tradition of the study of logic, but in the ameliorated way that we refer to as Renaissance humanism. For their part, the early Jesuits also advanced Renaissance humanism, along with advancing the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophy and theology. (This tradition of thought came in time to be known as scholasticism, but Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology is considerably removed from the arts scholasticism of the medieval university with its emphasis on the Aristotelian tradition of logic.)

To understand the emergence modernity in print culture (i.e., the culture of the West after the Gutenberg printing press began to influence the culture), we next need to turn to Ong's account of agonistic structures (formed from the Greek word "agon," meaning contest, struggle). Briefly, agonistic structures are going to undergo three big-time transformations in print culture: (1) modern capitalism, (2) modern science, and (3) modern democracy as exemplified in the United States.

Figuratively speaking, we could say that the Homeric epic the Iliad inculcates the sense that life is like a seemingly never-ending war (the Greek word "polemos" means war, struggle) and that the Odyssey inculcates the sense that life is like a seemingly never-ending contest (the Greek word "agon," mentioned above. In the Western tradition of imaginative literature, the hero and the heroic are characterized by agonistic striving. Think of Achilles and Beowulf and Othello.

In his lengthy introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad, Bernard Knox claims that "the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war [in the Iliad is] that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force" (1990, page 37). In other words, We Americans today would be well advised to maintain a big defense department.

At first blush, the portrayal of Jesus in the four canonical gospels seems to make him heroic in a new way that is different from the way in which Achilles is heroic by deciding to fight even though it means certain death. However, I would argue that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark was himself deeply motivated by the agonistic spirit when he deliberately constructed three scenes in which he portrays Jesus as knowing in advance that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem. But knowing that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem, he walks heroically forward to meet his death in Jerusalem. Why did the author construct those three scenes? Because Achilles's goddess-mother told him that if he returned to the war against the Trojans he would die. But in the end Achilles returns to the war, knowing that he will die. So the anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark portrayed Jesus as being a hero like Achilles by knowing about his death in advance and choosing to go forward. By doing this, the anonymous author engaged his agonistic spirit and constructed a story that topped the Homeric epic the Iliad. As is well known, Christians came in time to embrace the ridiculous idea of dying a martyr's death as a witness to one's Christian faith, as though what one thinks and holds is worth dying for. Later on, Muslims also embraced this ridiculous practice of martyrdom. Through the ridiculous inculcation of the idea of dying a martyr's death as a witness to one's faith, Christians and Muslims engage their agonistic spirits and cultivate their courage. I do not recommend martyrdom. But I do recommend courage.

Both Plato and Aristotle refer to the part of the human psyche (soul) that underlies the agonistic spirit as "thumos" (which is rendered as the spirited part of the psyche). Both Plato and Aristotle thought that we need to cultivate the virtue of courage to help us learn how to use the power of thumos in socially constructive ways. In her recent book Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (2000), Barbara Koziak has insightfully studied Aristotle's thought about thumos.

When we turn to Aristotle's view of dialectic, we note that dialectic involves back-and-forth pro-and-con exchanges to clarify conceptual constructs and predications. Thus for Aristotle, dialectic is agonistic in spirit. For Aristotle, the form of civic rhetoric used in legislative assemblies, known as deliberative rhetoric, is also agonistic in spirit, as is the form of civic rhetoric used in the law courts, forensic rhetoric. For centuries, Western education devoted an enormous amount of time to teaching dialectic and rhetoric, as both McLuhan and Ong learned through their historical studies of the verbal arts.

            In his thought-provoking book Manliness (2006), Harvey C. Mansfield of Harvard University plays with the Greek word "andreia" that means both manliness and courage. But the Greek usage makes it seem like women cannot have courage. However, women can have courage. So if you want to annoy feminists, as Mansfield evidently wants to, tell them that when they manifest courage they are showing manliness and being manly. In any event, Mansfield makes one extremely important observation: "The entire enterprise of modernity . . . could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed" (page 230). In short, the manliness of warrior training represented by Achilles and Beowulf and Othello will be unemployed culturally as new expectations emerge in modernity for cultural leadership. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Greek word "andreia" means both manliness and courage, I think that people still need to cultivate courage in modernity. But the emphasis on manliness will be transformed in modernity through the three big-time transformations of modern capitalism and modern science and modern democracy.

            At least to a certain degree, the three big-time transformations of agonistic structures (modern capitalism, modern science, and modern democracy as exemplified in the United States) helped advance the inward turn of consciousness that Ong writes about. But the inward turn of consciousness that Ong writes about can be traced back to ancient and medieval precedents. However, the inward turn of consciousness was decidedly advanced by the influence of the Gutenberg printing. For studies of the gradual historical development of the inward turn of consciousness, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) Phillip Cary's Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (2000), David Brakke's Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (2006), Ineke van 't Spijker's Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (2004), Denis Renevy's Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolfe and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (2001), Anthony Low's Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (2003), Katharine Eisaman Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1995), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse's The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992), Dror Wahrman's The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), and Ong's Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986).

            In addition to the three big-time transformations of agonistic structures in print culture, and in addition to the inward turn of consciousness that print culture decidedly advanced, Ong would have us take note of how the visualist tendencies that trace back to ancient Greek and medieval philosophy were further advanced in print culture, especially by Ramus and his bookish followers. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, mentioned above, Ong works with the contrast between oral-aural sensory processing and visual sensory processing. In a discussion note in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (page 338n53), Ong generously credits the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951) for "a discerning and profound treatment of the visual-aural opposition" with which Ong himself works so productively is this book. Later, Ong came to characterize the term "viewpoint" as expressing the visualist dominance of sensory processing. In his article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647, Ong suggests that people in oral cultures (and people in residually oral forms of culture who have not studied Western philosophy) have a world-as-event sense of life, not a worldview. He associates having a worldview with distinctively literate thought in ancient Greek and medieval and modern philosophy and more generally with print culture.

Recent studies from different fields have focused on visuality. For example, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) Andrea Wilson Nightingale's Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (2004), Jas Elsner's Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text (2007), Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert's Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2005), Mary J. Carruthers' The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), Carruthers' The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (1998), Marielle Hageman and Marco Mostert's Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication (2005), Suzannah Biernoff's Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (2002), Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel's Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (2005), Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman's Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (2002), Emily Steiner's Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (2003), Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1994), Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image (2004), Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America (1999), Bailey's Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610 (2003), Alison Thorne's Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (2000), W. B. Gerard's Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (2006), Janine Barchas's Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2003), Richard Yeo's Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (2001), David Michael Levin's The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (1999), Patricia Anderson's The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (1991), Catherine Phillips' Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (2007), Jonathan Smith's Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (2009), and Gary Shapiro's Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003). These studies of various aspects of visuality, especially Nightingale's study, strengthen Lavelle's and Ong's discussion of visuality when each of them works with the visual-aural contrast.

Next, I want to turn to another point in Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) to elucidate further the visual-aural contrast with which Ong works in this book. As Ong grappled with the challenge of articulating the import of the visual dominance in cognitive processing that he was detailing, he did not settle on only one way to characterize the import of what he was detailing. As a result, he used a few different expressions: the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology. In the index he combines these terms this way: "Corpuscular view of reality (corpuscular epistemology, corpuscular psychology" (pages 397-398). These different terms appear on pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, and 210. To sum up these different expressions, Ong is drawing our attention to the corpuscular sense of life.

As I have explained, Ong works with the visual-aural contrast in this book, but in a later article he came to refer to the oral-aural sense of life as the world-as-event sense of life, which he contrasts with world-as-view sense of life, mentioned above. Both the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life are examples of the corpuscular sense of life. But so what? This is an important question. To answer it, we need to step back a bit and raise a different question: What would a non-corpuscular orientation toward life be life?

The non-corpuscular orientation toward life would involve a deeply reflective orientation not only toward sensory data but also toward our cognitive processing of sensory data as we construct conceptual constructs and make predications about them. The conservative Catholic writer Michael Novak, who gives no evidence of being familiar with Ong's thought about the corpuscular sense of life, has carefully studied the key work of the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), Insight: a Study of Human Understanding (1957). In this work Lonergan distinguishes what he refers to as four levels of human consciousness: (1) the empirical level of sensory data and imagination, (2) the intelligent level of constructing adequate conceptual constructs, (3) the rational level of judging the adequacy of conceptual constructs and predications, and (4) the responsible level of positing adequate conceptual constructs and predications. In his introduction to the 1994 reprinting of his 1965 book, Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge, Novak draws on Lonergan's way of thinking in order to critique Richard Rorty's thought:

Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [see Ong on visualist tendencies]. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction. (Novak, 1994, page xv)

As my interpolations in brackets show, Ong has in effect set forth a critique of "confusing the activities of the mind with any (or all) the bodily senses." As noted, Ong refers to this kind of confusion in various terms: the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology. (It is beyond the scope of this essay to undertake a careful comparison and contrast of Ong's critique of corpuscular epistemology, including of course both the oral-aural sense of life as event and the visualist sense of life as view, on the one hand, and, on the other, Jacques Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and logocentrism.)

Just as the various studies of visuality mentioned above support and strengthen the visual-aural contrast with which both Lavelle and Ong work, so too recent studies from different fields have centered on various aspects of orality that Ong discusses in Orality and Literacy (1982, pages 1-76). For example, see (ordered here roughly chronologically by period studied) John Miles Foley's Homer's Traditional Art (1999), M. L. West's The Making of the Iliad (2011), Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000), Mark W. Edwards' Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (2002), D. H. Green's Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800-1300 (1994), David Robey's Sound and Structure in the Divine Comedy (2000), Adam Fox's Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000), Alexis Tadie's Sterne's Whimsical Theatres of Language: Orality, Gesture, Literacy (2003), Paul Goetsch's The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2003), James I. Wimsatt's Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (2006), Adeleke Adeeko's The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (2005), Gerd Hurm's Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain: The Aesthetics and Politics of Orality in Samuel Clemens's Fictions (2003), Willi Erzgraber's James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art (2002), and Jeff Opland's Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (1983). These studies of various aspects of orality, especially Walker's study, strengthen Lavelle's and Ong's discussion of aurality when each of them works with the visual-aural contrast.

Thus far, I have been discussing individual themes from Ong's work. But of course he has interwoven these themes in his sweeping thesis about Western cultural development (Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 1977, pages 9-10). In his thesis he focuses on shifts in the media and how these shifts influence the cognitive processing of sensory data (the visual-aural contrast that later becomes the orality-literacy contrast). From the account of shifts in the media, he is able to identify four cultural permutations: (1) oral culture, (2) chirographic culture (aka manuscript culture), (3) typographic culture (aka print culture), and (4) secondary oral culture, in which communication media that accentuate sound have unprecedented influence. Modernity emerges gradually in print culture, but not overnight as the result of Gutenberg's printing press (c. 1450).

            Ong himself characterizes his thesis about shifts in the media as relationist, not reductionist, in spirit. More recently, others have aptly characterized Ong's relationist approach to studying cultural developments as ecological in spirit. As a result, they see his work as involving media ecology.

            Ong never tired of championing Eric A. Havelock's breakthrough work about the role of vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy in the emergence of ancient Greek philosophic thought as exemplified in Plato (and also in Aristotle). Havelock sees ancient Greek philosophic thought as exemplified in Plato as distinctively literate thought. In other words, no vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, no Plato (and mutatis mutandis, no Aristotle).

For understandable reasons, Ong centers his attention more on Aristotle than on Plato. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), Ong traces the history of the formal study of logic back to Aristotle's treatises on logic, which Ong sees as exemplifying distinctively literate thought (i.e., no literacy, no treatises on logic by Aristotle).

But Plato and Aristotle did not emerge out of blue as it were. They represent the culmination of cognitive developments in conceptual constructs that developed gradually over a considerable period of time, as Havelock shows in Preface to Plato (1963) and elsewhere. But "the great divide," as critics of Havelock and Ong have characterized it, that emerged most decidedly with Plato and Aristotle is the result of the gradual cumulative influence of literacy, not something that happened overnight with the introduction of literacy in ancient Greek culture.

For noteworthy studies of pre-philosophic thought (aka oral) and the emergence of Greek philosophic thought (aka distinctively literate), see Eric Voegelin's three most important books: Israel and Revelation (1956), The World of the Polis (1957), and Plato and Aristotle (1957). Voegelin distinguishes compact consciousness from differentiated consciousness as exemplified in Plato and Aristotle. Compact consciousness characterizes primary orality. By comparison, differentiated consciousness characterizes the distinctively literate thought exemplified in Plato and Aristotle. Thus independently of Havelock's Preface to Plato (1963) and Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), Voegelin also identifies and works with the kind of distinction that critics of Havelock and Ong characterize as "the great divide."

However, Ong identifies a new state of mind that emerged with the quantification of thought in medieval logic and was advanced further in print culture, most notably modern science, but in other ways as well (Ong, The Barbarian Within, 1962, page 72). Because Ong's critics have already characterized the emergence of distinctively literate thought in Plato and Aristotle as "the great divide," how should Ong's critics negatively characterize his account of the emergence of a new state of mind in the quantification of thought in medieval logic, which has been further advanced in modern science and in other ways in modernity?

To this day, we speak of the pre-modern world, because many parts of the world today are comparatively under-developed. For example, there are an estimated one billion people in the world today who do not know how to read and write any language. Those people will not be using computers or the Internet.

Ong sees modernity emerging in Western culture after the development of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450. To this day, modernity represents the great cultural divide, so print culture contributed decidedly to the development of the great cultural divide between the modern world and the pre-modern world.

            For Ong, Western culture is a juggernaut of different contributing factors, one of which is the Gutenberg printing press. Another is the enhanced visualist cognitive processing that the unprecedented spread of reading and writing helped advance in print culture. Another factor that contributed to the emergence of modernity is the quantification of thought in medieval logic that Ong details in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958, pages 53-91), which emerged before the development of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450, but was further spread with the aid of print as well as the aid of expanding formal education.

            Next, I want to discuss how the various factors I've discussed above interacted with one another in the emergence of modernity in print culture. Ong sees these factors as contributing to the emergence of modern capitalism, modern science, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement. Ong's thesis is that the factors that he has discussed in Orality and Literacy (1982) and elsewhere, mentioned above, contributed to the emergence of modernity in Western culture, as manifested in these five large cultural developments.

Because Ong works with a relationist approach, we need to understand that he is not referring to straightforward efficient causality (i.e., cause and effect). As an example of efficient causality, I would mention turning a light on and off. Electric current is the efficient cause that causes the light to go on. The light switch is the instrumental efficient cause. But Ong is not discussing such straightforward efficient causality, but contributing factors that culturally condition our consciousness. These cultural factors are no doubt determinative factors. But Ong is not a determinist, as certain critics have claimed. He is not a determinist because he understands the role of free choice and of human creativity. James Joyce famously referred to the smithy of his soul. Yes, the artist's soul is a smithy. But so is the soul of each and every human person.

In the following five statements, I have paraphrased Ong's relationist thesis to accentuate the idea of how a contributing factor (the Gutenberg printing press) works: (1) No print culture, no modern capitalism as we know it in Western culture. (2) No print culture, no modern science as we know it in Western culture. (3) No print culture, no modern democracy as we know it in Western culture. (4) No print culture, no Industrial Revolution as we know it in Western culture. (5) No print culture, no Romantic Movement in literature and the arts as we know it in Western culture. For Ong, the great cultural divide is the divide between modernity and pre-modern cultures, and this divide emerges in print culture in the West.

Ong himself rose to a non-corpuscular orientation toward life as he studied the media and literature. By his example, he in effect challenges us to rise to a non-corpuscular orientation toward life as we study the media and literature. Literacy in print culture has an especially strong visualist orientation that is part of our Western cultural conditioning. To reflect on our own individual cultural conditioning requires us to reflect carefully on our own individual consciousness.

In conclusion, Ong's multivariate account of Western cultural history enables us to understand not only the exceptionalism of Western culture as a cultural juggernaut but also the exceptionalism of American culture as a cultural juggernaut, because American liberal culture is the culmination and epitome of Western culture. Moreover, American liberal culture (i.e., our civic freedom under the rule of law in our experiment with representative democratic government and our economic freedom in our capitalist economic system), however imperfect, is the model that all non-Western cultures around the world today should aspire to. The catch is that the key features that Ong singles out for attention in Western cultural history can all be transplanted to any non-Western culture in the world today, primarily through Western education and Western languages such as English. During a recent visit to China, Diane Sawyer of ABC News learned that there are more people in China today who speak English than there are in the United States. Ong has told the world not only how American exceptionalism came into existence historically but also how any non-Western culture in the world today can emulate American exceptionalism if they want to go to the trouble of doing so.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview