In the spirit of celebrating the Fourth of July 2021, I celebrate certain aspects of the thought of the French philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003), and the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984).

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 3, 2021: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).

See my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

Click Here

When Ong was researching his Harvard University doctoral dissertation on the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and the history of logic, he lived at a Jesuit residence in Paris for three years (from November 17, 1950, to November 16, 1953).

On February 22, 1963, M. Jean Beliard, Consul General of France, acting on behalf of the French Ministre de l'Education Nationale dubbed Ong a knight for his "services rendered to French culture" in a ceremony at Saint Louis University.

Now, the French philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was elected to the prestigious College de France in 1969; he designated himself as concerned with the history of systems of thought. No doubt Foucault's works tend to be historical studies. His appointment in the prestigious College de France obliged him to present a course of public lectures once a year on his recent and ongoing research - in other words, work in progress.

Now, Alfred North Whitehead famously referred to Western philosophy as footnotes to Plato. Consequently, perhaps Western philosophy is one system of thought that Foucault may undertake to review as part of his promised program of examining the history of systems of thought. In effect, this is what Foucault begins to do in his inaugural lecture series represented in English translation in the 2013 book Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the College de France 1970-1971 and "Oedipal Knowledge" edited by Daniel Defert; translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

The scope of what Foucault has in mind by the expression the history systems of thought is indicated here by the inclusion of his essay "Oedipal Knowledge" (pages 229-261). For my present purposes, I should say here that Foucault's detailed discussion of Aristotle is admirably lucid (esp. pages 6-13; see the "Index of Names" [pages 292-293] for specific page references to Aristotle).

In addition to Foucault's admirably lucid lectures about Western philosophy (pages 1-228) and his essay on Sophocles' famous play, the 2013 book in English also includes an "Index of Notions" (pages 287-291) and an "Index of Names" (pages 292-293). Daniel Defert (born in 1937), Foucault's partner in life, provides an excellent essay titled "Course Context" (pages 262-286).

Defert (page 269) notes that the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality is also titled in French The Will to Know. However, the English translation is titled The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Defert (pages 267-268) also discusses Foucault's thematizing the will to know in earlier lectures at different times and places.

Defert (page 264) also helpfully notes how Foucault draws on the thought of the German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1901). Defert says, "If we put together the aphorisms on which Foucault relies [from Nietzsche's various writings], we notice that Nietzsche actually placed genealogy at the heart of knowledge (connaissance), treating it as the 'knowledge (savoir) of science,' and did not make it merely a matter of the subversion of moral values. The real theme of this course [by Foucault in 1970-1971] would therefore be less the possibility of such a genealogy, than its effects on the theory of the subject and object at the foundation of the theory of knowledge, on our conception of truth since Plato [and Aristotle?], in a word, on philosophy itself."

Now, in effect, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) also considers Western philosophy as a system of thought to be examined and interrogated in his 1957 philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. See the critical edition that is volume three of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1992). On the title page, Lonergan quotes in Greek a certain key passage from Aristotle's De anima, III, 7, 431b 2 (page iii), which he discusses on pages 699-700. Even though Foucault examines numerous key passages in Aristotle's works, he does not happen to advert explicitly to this key passage that Lonergan considers to be so crucial.

In effect, Ong also considers Western philosophy as a system of thought to be examined and interrogated in his 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 sees Ramus as pivotal in spreading aural to visual shift that spread in print culture in Western culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s.

But Ong traces the aural to visual shift (pages 92-93, 104-112, 128, 151-156, 244-245, 273, 277-292, 307-314) and to the quantification of thought (pages 53-91, 184, 262, and 263) in the formal study of logic from Aristotle onward in Western philosophy. But it is also important to note that Ong does not himself subscribe to what he refers to variously as the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 196, 203, 210, and 286) - and neither does Lonergan, who refers to such a view as naïve realism.

Ong (page 338, note 54) acknowledges that he is borrowing the visual-aural contrast from the lay French Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle's discerning and profound 1942 book.

Now, like Foucault, Ong does not happen to advert explicitly to the key passage in Aristotle that Lonergan considers to be so crucial. But Lonergan's discussion of knowing and looking (pages 278, 344, 345, 396, 431, 437-441, 450, 519-520, 603-606, 657-658, and 669) is related to Ong's discussion of the aural to visual shift.

In Ong's mature thought from the early 1950s onward, he variously refers to the aural to visual shift in different iterations. For example, in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen), his most widely translated book, he works with the orality/literacy contrast suggested in the book's main title.

Let me mention here in the context of Foucault's 1970-1971 lecture series at the College de France, Hamid Yeganeh's perceptive new forthcoming article "Orality, Literacy, and the 'Great Divide' in Cultural Values" in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (Emerald Publishing). No doubt the cultural values that Professor Yeganeh discusses are more extensive than the cultural values that Foucault discusses in his 1970-1971 lecture series at the College de France. Nevertheless, Professor Yeganeh's characterization of the "Great Divide" in cultural values strikes me as relevant to understanding Foucault's characterization of the interiority of knowledge-connaissance and recovering the prior exterior knowledge-savoir that Foucault proposes to undertake, as I will explain below momentarily.

For further discussion of Professor Yeganeh's exciting new forthcoming article, see my review essay "Hamid Yeganeh's 2021 Article 'Orality, Literacy, and the 'Great Divide' in Cultural Values" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/220349

For further discussion of the orality/literacy contrast in ancient Greek culture, see the following three books by the classicist Eric A. Havelock (1903-1988):

(1) Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), a book that Ong never tired of referring to;

(2) The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Harvard University Press, 1978);

(3) The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1982).

Now, in fairness to Foucault, he turns to the nineteenth-century German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1901) in his inaugural lecture course (see the "Index of Names" [pages 292-293] for specific page references to Nietzsche) - a source that neither Lonergan nor Ong happens to advert to explicitly as Foucault does in his 1970-1971 lecture series.

For example, in Foucault's lecture on December 9, 1970, he says, "Next week, I would like to show how Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know [discussed by Aristotle] from the sovereignty of knowledge (connaissance) itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled, a cancellation that has been maintained by all [Western] philosophy" (page 5).

In addition, Foucault says, "In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance that system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connassance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle" (page 17). Got that, eh?

Now, Ong thematizes what Foucault here refers to as "the stake of a struggle" in two of his books: (1) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, and (2) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. Nevertheless, Ong does not explicitly take up the challenge that Foucault here announces of "drag[ging] from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance" the desire and knowledge-savoir of the exterior representations of "the stake of a struggle."

Now, in Ong's various iterations in his mature thought from the early 1950s onward, he refers various to inner-directed persons (David Riesman's 1950 terminology), the interiorization of literacy and literate modes of thought (Ong credits Marshall McLuhan with using the term interiorization), and the inward turn of consciousness. Ong also uses the contrasting term outer-directed persons (Riesman's terminology) to refer to what Foucault is here referring to as the exterior representations of "the stake of a struggle."

Now, to simplify Foucault's thought here a bit, let me now quote the conclusion that he himself states as follows: "The old millennial theme of 'everyone is more or less a philosopher' has a precise and ascribable function in Western history; it is a matter of no more or less than sealing up the desire to know in knowledge itself" (page 18).

Let me now go back a bit in Foucault's text and quote the reasoning by which he reaches that conclusion. He says, "Let's stand back a bit again. For centuries there existed a theme the banality of which induces weariness, which is that ultimately everyone is a bit of a philosopher.

"It is a theme immediately dismissed by philosophical discourse in order to develop the theme that philosophy is a specific task, set back and at a distance from all others, and irreducible to any other. But it is a theme no less regularly taken up again by philosophical discourse in order to assert that philosophy is nothing other than the movement of truth itself, that it is consciousness becoming aware of itself - or that the person who wakes up to the world is already a philosopher.

"But we should note that this theme, ever dismissed and taken up again, of a philosophy linked to the first movement of knowledge in general, is a theme which would have appeared very foreign to the first Greek philosophers. But more importantly we can see the function it performs: there is already contemplation in the crudest and most physical knowledge; it is this contemplation, then, that will lead to the whole movement of knowledge according to its specific logic or the necessity of the object it contemplates. As a result, desire is elided along with its effectiveness. Desire is no longer cause, but knowledge that becomes cause of itself (on the basis of the idea, or of the sensation of obviousness, or of the impression, no matter) - cause of itself and of the desire directed towards it.

"And as a consequence, the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge are one and the same. The sophistical problem (the person who does not yet know and desire cannot be the person who knows and no longer desires) is erased. The strange discussion of the Euthydemus in which the Sophist says: 'If you want your friend to learn, he must no longer be the same, he must die,' this ironic irruption of death between the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge, can be erased, for desire is no more than the scarcely perceptible quivering of the subject of knowledge around what he knows. The old millennial theme of 'everyone is more or less a philosopher' has a precise and ascribable function in Western history; it is a matter of no more or less than sealing up the desire to know in knowledge itself" (page 18).

Happy Fourth of July!

For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and reprinting as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book 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).

(Article changed on Jul 04, 2021 at 10:12 AM EDT)

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