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ABSTRACT
While having a solid foundation in philosophy, Walter J. Ong did not identify with any philosophical school or movement, preferring to interpret philosophy simply as love of wisdom, which is best pursued not by logic and treatise, but by rhetoric and conversation. Beginning during his formative years at Saint Louis University in the 1940s, he integrated metaphysics and communication, suggesting that the focus of philosophy should be not on the idea but on being. It is within these perspectives that Ong probed issues that later became identified with media ecology. Thomism provided a “furniture of mind” to weigh post-Hegelian dialectic and to probe the implications of existentialistic dialogue (Jaspers, Camus-Sartre, Marcel); to phenomenologically explore personalist interiority and encounter (Lavelle, Buber, Hopkins); to interpret human thought within the context of cosmic time and evolution (Teilhard); to consider speech philosophy as an alternative to Ramist and Cartesian methodology (Rosenstock-Huessy); and to promulgate an oral hermeneutic that contextualizes concept within being (Bakhtin, Rosenstock-Huessy). The argument of this essay is supported by substantial quotation of previously unpublished materials from the Walter J. Ong archival collection at Saint Louis University.
Notes
1 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 1.
2 Walter J. Ong, “Review of Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla, by Jerrold E. Seigel,” Manuscripta 15, no. 1 (1971): 43.
3 Walter J. Ong, “Review of The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943–1962,” Criticism 12, no. 3 (1970): 246.
4 Walter J. Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” in Twentieth Century English, ed. William S. Knickerbocker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 345.
5 See Ong, “Review of The Interior Landscape,” 244–51.
6 See Thomas J. Farrell, “An Introduction to Walter Ong’s Work,” in Faith and Contexts: Selected Essays and Studies by Walter J. Ong, S. J., vol. 1, ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), xix–lv; Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I–Thou Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000); Paul A. Soukup, “The Contexts of Faith: The Religious Foundations of Walter Ong’s Literacy and Orality,” Journal of Media and Religion 5, no. 3 (2006): 175–88; Werner H. Kelber, “Walter Ong’s Three Incarnations of the Word: Orality–Literacy–Technology,” Philosophy Today 23, no. 1 (1979): 70–74; Thomas D. Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic: An Unresolved Chord,” in Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, by Walter J. Ong, ed. Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2018).
7 Walter J. Ong, Doc MSS 64, Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, Saint Louis University Library Special Collections. Subsequent references to archival materials will be cited in the text. See also Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic.”
8 Walter J. Ong, Preface to Christian Metaphysics, by Claude Tresmontant, trans. Gerard Slevin (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 7–8.
9 Walter J. Ong, “Finitude and Frustration: Considerations on Brod’s Kafka,” Modern Schoolman 25, no. 3 (1948): 178.
10 Walter J. Ong, “Personalism and the Wilderness,” in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 239.
11 See Thomas D. Zlatic, “Walter Ong as Teacher: The Conversation Continues,” Explorations in Media Ecology 11, no. 3–4 (2012): 273–83.
12 Walter J. Ong, “Psyche and the Geometers: Aspects of Associationist Critical Theory,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 19.
13 Ong, “Finitude and Frustration,” 181.
14 Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 32–34.
15 Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” 62.
16 Soukup, “The Contexts of Faith.”
17 See Gerald A. McCool, “Is Thomas’s Way of Philosophizing Still Viable Today?” in The Future of Thomism: The Maritain Sequence, ed. Deal W. Hudson and Dennis W. Moran (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 51–64; John Knasas, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Wayne John Hankey, “From Metaphysics to History, from Exodus to Neoplatonism, from Scholasticism to Pluralism: The Fate of Gilsonian Thomism in English-Speaking North America,” Dionysius 16 (1998): 157–88.
18 Antonio Spadaro, “A Big Heart Open to God,” America 209, no. 8 (2013): 38.
19 Ong, “Review of The Interior Landscape,” 249.
20 Walter J. Ong, Hopkins, The Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 94.
21 Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” 346.
22 Ong, “Review of The Interior Landscape,” 249.
23 Walter J. Ong, “The Eternal Spring of Thought,” Saturday Review 42 (1959): 26.
24 Ong, “Finitude and Frustration,” 178.
25 Walter J. Ong, “System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism,” in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 77.
26 Soukup, “The Contexts of Faith,” 178. See also Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic.”
27 Walter J. Ong, “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect,” in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 138.
28 Walter J. Ong, “The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic,” Modern Schoolman 19, no. 2 (1942): 24–27.
29 Ibid., 26.
30 Ibid.
31 Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” 345. See also Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic.”
32 Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” 348.
33 Walter J. Ong, “Wit and Mystery: A Revaluation in Mediaeval Latin Hymnody.” In The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 104.
34 Ibid., 104–105.
35 Ong, “Metaphor and the Twinned Vision,” 43.
36 Ong, “Wit and Mystery,” 104.
37 Ibid.
38 Walter J. Ong, “The Human Nature of Professionalism,” PMLA 94, no. 3 (1979): 393.
39 Walter J. Ong, “Review of Time in Literature, by Hans Meyerhoff,” Thought 30, no. 119 (1955–56): 628.
40 Ong, “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism,’” 358.
41 Walter J. Ong, “Ramus and the Transit to the Modern Mind,” Modern Schoolman 32, no. 4 (1955): 301–302.
42 Walter J. Ong, “A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives,” in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 34.
43 Ibid., 31.
44 Walter J. Ong, “Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self,” in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 52.
45 Ibid., 60.
46 “Personalism and the Wilderness,” 239; compare with Walter J. Ong, “Review of The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, by Henry G. Bugbee, Jr.,” Modern Schoolman 37, no. 1 (1959): 69.
47 Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
48 See Walter J. Ong, ed., “Knowledge in Time,” in Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 3–38; Thomas D. Zlatic, “The Articulate Self in a Particulate World: The Ins and Outs of Ong,” in Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., ed. Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010), 7–30.
49 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
50 Walter J. Ong, “Philosophical Sociology,” Modern Schoolman 37, no. 2 (1960): 140.
51 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund, “The Christian Future: Or The Modern Mind,” (promotional piece), erhfund.org, n.d., http://www.erhfund.org/erh_book/the-christian-future/.
52 Harold M. Stahmer Jr., Preface to Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Eugen Resenstock-Huessy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 15.
53 Ong, “Philosophical Sociology,” 140.
54 Walter J. Ong, “Maranatha: Death and Life in the Text of the Book,” in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 244–45.
55 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am an Impure Thinker (Essex, VT: Argo Books, 2001), 1–2.
56 Harold M. Stahmer Jr., “Respondeo Etsi Mutabor! I Respond Although I Will Be Changed! An Essay on the Role of Language in the Writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy”; Clinton C. Gardner, “Radical Religion: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Proposal for a New Science to Replace Theology,” Conference Papers at Miramar Woods Hole, MA, July 12–21, 1965. Ong’s marked copies are in the SLU archives.
57 Alan Sampson, “Models of Historical Interpretation,” Contra Mundum, no. 11 (1994): 19.
58 Stahmer, “Respondeo Etsi Mutabor!” 9.
59 Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2005), 17; compare with 27.
60 Lance Strate, “Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan,” in Korzybski And … , ed. Corey Anton and Lance Strate (Forest Hills, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2012), 202.
61 Neil Postman, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It (New York: Dell, 1976), 256.
62 Neil Postman, “Media Ecology: General Semantics in the Third Millennium,” General Semantics Bulletin 41–43 (1974–1976): 74–76.
63 Postman, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, 256.
64 See Corey Anton and Lance Strate, eds., “Situating Alfred Korzybski,” in Korzybski And … (Forest Hills, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2012), 9–26.
65 Walter J. Ong, “Myth and the Cabala: Adventures in the Unspoken”; reprinted as “The Myth of Myth: Dialogue with the Unspoken,” in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 140–41; see also “Ramus: Rhetoric and the Pre-Newtonian Mind,” in English Institute Essays 1952, ed. Alan S. Downer (Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press, 1954), 149.
66 Ong, “The Myth of Myth,” 140–41.
67 Ong, “Ramus,” 149.
68 Ibid.
69 Bruce I. Kodish, “Korzybski and Gottfried Leibniz,” in Korzybski And … , ed. Corey Anton and Lance Strate (Forest Hills, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2012), 27–40.
70 Bernard K. Duffy and Martin Jacobi, The Politics of Rhetoric: Richard M. Weaver and the Conservative Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 161–64.
71 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 240.
72 This hitherto unpublished manuscript is forthcoming: Walter J. Ong, Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, ed. Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).
73 Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic”; “Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for The Confidence-Man,” in Of Ong and Media Ecology: Essays in Communication, Composition, and Literary Studies, ed. Thomas Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (New York: Hampton Press, 2012), 239–78.
74 Harold M. Stahmer Jr., “Speech Is the Body of the Spirit: The Oral Hermeneutic in the Writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973),” Oral Tradition 2, no. 1 (1987): 320, fn. 5.
75 Ong, Language as Hermeneutic.
76 Ibid.
77 Ong, “Finitude and Frustration,” 178, emphasis added.
78 Aleksander Pigalev, “Bakhtin and Rosenstock-Huessy: ‘Absolute Need of Love’ versus ‘Dative Thinking,’” in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, ed. Carol Adlam et al. (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 124. See also Zlatic, “Language as Hermeneutic.”
79 Pigalev, “Bakhtin and Rosenstock-Huessy,” 127.
80 Walter J. Ong, “Orality-Literacy Studies and the Unity of the Human Race,” Oral Tradition 2, no. 1 (1987): 380.
81 Walter J. Ong, “Review of St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis, by George P. Klubertanz, S.J.,” America 104 (1961): 574–75.
82 McCool, “Is Thomas’s Way of Philosophizing Still Viable Today?” 62–63.
83 Walter J. Ong, “Information and/or Communication: Interactions,” Communication Research Trends 16, no. 3 (1996): 15.
84 Pigalev, “Bakhtin and Rosenstock-Huessy,” 127.