The American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) is my favorite scholar. I have written about his thought previously in my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020). In the present review essay, which nicely complements my lengthy OEN article, I write a more comprehensive account of Ong's thought.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 19, 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) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri.

There in the fall semester of 1964, I took Father Walter J. Ong's course on Practical Criticism: Poetry. In addition to reading certain assigned chapters in Ong's 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan), I took it upon myself to read some of the other chapters in his interesting book. Over the years, I took five courses from Ong at SLU.

I have written about Ong's philosophical thought in my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

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In the present review essay, I want to expand my horizons beyond my lengthy OEN article and set forth a broader overview of Ong's about our Western cultural history.

WALTER J. ONG'S TESTIMONY

Ong's first major account of Western cultural history can be found in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958). In it, Ong traces the history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle down to and beyond the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).

In it, among other themes, Ong devotes a chapter to discussing the quantification of thought in medieval logic (pages 53-91). I will discuss the quantification of thought in medieval logic a bit further momentarily.

In it, among other themes, Ong works with the aural to visual shift in cognitive processing (see the "Index" for specific references to the aural to visual shift [pages 396]). He graciously acknowledges (page 338, note 54) that he borrowed the theme of the aural to visual shift from the lay Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle's "discerning and profound" 1942 book.

In my estimate, the enormous breakthrough insight(s?) that Ong experienced after he digested Lavelle's "discerning and profound" 1942 book was comparable to Nietzsche's experience that he came to refer to as the emergence of the will to power in his psyche/soul. In addition, Ong's various iterations over the years of his enormous breakthrough insight(s?) resembles the spirit of what Nietzsche came to refer to as the pattern of eternal return.

In any event, Ong's massively researched 1958 book is a pioneering study of print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. Other pioneering studies of print culture in Western culture include the following four books:

(1) Richard D. Altick's book The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957);

(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's book The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated from the French by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 1976; orig. French ed., 1958);

(3) Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962);

(4) Jurgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated from the German by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press, 1989; orig. German ed., 1962).

Now, after Ong had reflected further on the quantification of thought in medieval logic, he made the following statements in his book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962, page 72);

"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 para-university 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).

However, even though the quoted passage is an important passage, the most important essay in Ong's 1962 book, in my estimate, is "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self" (pages 49-67). In it, Ong works with Gabriel Marcel's distinction between "belief-that" a propositional statement is true and "belief-in" a person such as a human person or God (pages 55-56).

Now, Ong reprinted his perceptive discussion of Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead as "Post-Christian or Not?" in his next book, In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1967, pages 147-164).

In Nietzsche's The Gay Science, translated and with a commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1974), Nietzsche states the parable of the madman in Book Three, section 125. The text says, in part, "'Whither is God?' he cried. 'I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are murderers. But how did we do this? . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him'" (page 181; italics in the text; I added the ellipsis here).

Ong perceptively suggests that Nietzsche's perception/conception/sense of the death of God involves the hyper-visualist shift in print culture in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s - hyper-visualist shift, that is, from the more moderate visualist shift in ancient and medieval manuscript culture in Western cultural history - the more moderate visualist shift representing the significant shift associated phonetic alphabetic literacy.

But Ronald Inglehart is now reporting a worldwide decline in religion that may be aligned with Ong's hyper-visualist explanation of Nietzsche's sense that God is dead. See Inglehart's new 2021 book Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing It, and What Comes Next? (Oxford University Press).

Hamid Yeganeh of Winona State University in Minnesota explores certain other reports of cultural values published by Inglehart, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain aspects of Ong's thought, in his exciting new article "Orality, Literacy, and the 'Great Divide' in Cultural Values" in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (Emerald Publishing).

However, in Ong's 1967 book In the Human Grain, he also reprinted the following three of essays about evolutionary thought:

(1) "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time" (pages 61-82);

(2) "Nationalism and Darwin" (pages 83-98);

(3) "Evolution, Myth, and Poetic Vision" (pages 99-126).

Now, Ong's second major account of Western cultural history can be found in his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.

Now, Ong borrows Erich Neumann's Jungian account of the history of consciousness in his (Ong's) book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971, pages 10-12).

"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with it tail in its mouth, as well as be other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [including Nietzsche's overman/overmen] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])."

Ong also sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981, pages 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [page 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

For the record, I see not only Nietzsche but also Ong as well as most adult canonized saints in the Roman Catholic Church as exemplars of overmen. In other words, I see overmen as a spectrum of highly individualized human persons.

Now, the Jungian author Edward C. Whitmont (1912-1998) uses a broad Jungian framework in his book Return of the Goddess (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982). What Whitmont refers to as the return of the goddess in the human psyche aligns with what Ong refers to as secondary orality.

As Ong operationally defines and explains what he means by secondary orality, he implies that it will somehow initiate a deep revaluation of values (in Nietzsche's terminology) in Western culture - that is, most conspicuously a revaluation of values of the print culture in Western culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. Nevertheless, Ong's own account of secondary orality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the historical psychodynamics in Western culture before the Gutenberg printing press implies that the revaluation of values in Western culture could be far-reaching.

In addition, what Whitmont refers to as the return of the goddess in the human psyche aligns with what Ong summarizes in Neumann's account of the stages of consciousness as "(2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again)," on the one hand, and, on the other, as "(7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness)."

Also see my online essay "Whitmont Identifies the Next Evolutionary Step for Western Culture" that is available through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:

http://hdl.handle.net/11299/185771

Now, within the broad Jungian framework that Whitmont discusses, we should see the work of the American Jungian psychotherapist and theorist Robert L. Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in psychology and religion, University of Chicago, 1975) as further extending what Ong summarizes in Neumann's account of the stages of consciousness as "(8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [including Nietzsche's overman/overmen] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern men [sic])."

In my estimate, the most accessible overview of Moore's Jungian thought can be found in the book he co-authored with Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990).

But Moore was also fascinated with what Carl Jung refers to as the "double quaternio" in the human psyche (see page xi). For Moore, the so-called "double quaternio" in the human psyche refers to two sets of archetypes in the human psyche: (1) the masculine archetypes of maturity (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover); and (2) the feminine archetypes of maturity (Queen, Warrior, Magician, Lover). That is, each human psyche comes equipped with both sets of archetypes. Consequently, in theory, the optimal human person would activate the optimal forms of all eight archetypes of maturity. However, each archetype includes not only an optimal form, but two "shadow" forms.

Now, Ong's thesis about Western cultural history can be found, explicitly stated, in his "Preface" to his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977, pages 9-13 at 9-10). In it, he says the following in the first sentence: "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)." He 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" (page 9-10).

Thus Ong himself claims (1) that his 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" but (4) that the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish."

Major cultural developments in print culture in Western culture include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.

In effect, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958) - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Fr. Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press).

Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast" (page 10). Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.

However, Ong is not everybody's cup of tea, figuratively speaking. Consider, for example, Ong's own modesty in the subtitle of his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, mentioned above. His wording "Some Prolegomena" clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 "Preface" does "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause -- but that the shifts he points out are "sweeping."

Now, please note just how careful and cagey Ong's wording is when he says that his account of the evolution of certain changes does not "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause.

On the one hand, Ong's terminology about primary oral culture (and primary orality, for short; and his earlier terminology about primarily oral culture) is sweeping inasmuch as it refers to all of our pre-historic human ancestors.

On the other hand, his cagey remark about sorting out cause and effect does not automatically rule out the possibility that certain changes somehow contributed to the eventual historical development of writing systems and specifically phonetic alphabetic writing (= literacy) as well as to the historical development of human settlement in agriculture (or agrarian) societies and economies.

Now, also in Ong's 1977 book Interfaces of the Word, he includes his essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" (pages 305-341). In it, Ong holds out for what he refers to as open closure. What he refers to as open closure resembles what Nietzsche refers to as eternal return. What Ong aligns closed-systems thought with is print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. But what Ong refers to as open closure in secondary orality somewhat resembles residually oral cultures in the ancient and medieval world of manuscript culture in Western culture.

For a 650-page bibliography of orality-literacy studies pertaining to medieval manuscript culture in Western culture, see Marco Mostert's A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication (Turhout: Brepols, 2012).

Now, in the 1980s, Ong published the following three streamlined books:

(1) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University;

(2) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and Methuen, 1982), Ong's most widely translated book;

(3) Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

Subsequently, five collections of Ong's essays were published: (1-4) volumes one through four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992a, 1992b, 1995, and 1999); and (5) An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002).

For Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting reprintings or translations 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).

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