Walter J. Ong - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003), was an American Jesuit priest

Priest

A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...

, professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

of English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

, cultural and religious historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality

Orality

Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...

to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 Ong served as elected president of the Modern Language Association of America.

Biography

Ong was born in Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

, to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother; he was raised as a Roman Catholic. In 1929 he graduated from Rockhurst High School. In 1933 he received a bachelor of arts

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

degree from Rockhurst College

Rockhurst University

Rockhurst University is a private, coeducational Jesuit university located in Kansas City, Missouri, founded in 1910 as Rockhurst College. The school adheres to the motto etched into the stone of the campus bell tower: "Learning, Leadership, and Service in the Jesuit Tradition." It is one of 28...

, where he majored in Latin. During his time at Rockhurst College, he founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity, Alpha Delta Gamma

Alpha Delta Gamma

Alpha Delta Gamma National Fraternity is an American Greek-letter social fraternity and one of 74 members of the North-American Interfraternity Conference...

. He worked in printing and publishing prior to entering the Society of Jesus

Society of Jesus

The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

in 1935, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946.

In 1941 Ong earned a master's degree

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

in English at Saint Louis University

Saint Louis University

Saint Louis University is a private, co-educational Jesuit university located in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Founded in 1818 by the Most Reverend Louis Guillaume Valentin Dubourg SLU is the oldest university west of the Mississippi River. It is one of 28 member institutions of the...

. His thesis on sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables...

in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

(see An Ong Reader, 2002: 111-74) was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...

. Ong also received the degrees Licentiate

Licentiate

Licentiate is the title of a person who holds an academic degree called a licence. The term may derive from the Latin licentia docendi, meaning permission to teach. The term may also derive from the Latin licentia ad practicandum, which signified someone who held a certificate of competence to...

of Philosophy and Licentiate of Sacred Theology from Saint Louis University

Saint Louis University

.

After completing his dissertation on the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Ramism

Ramism

Ramism was a collection of theories on rhetoric, logic and pedagogy based on the teachings of Petrus Ramus, a French academic, philosopher and Huguenot convert who was murdered in 1572.According to Jonathan Israel, Ramism-Development:...

under the supervision of Perry Miller

Perry Miller

Perry G. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history"...

at Harvard University in 1954, Ong returned to Saint Louis University, where he would teach for the next 30 years. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University.

In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on Ramus by dubbing Ong a knight, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques. In 1966-1967 Ong served on the 14-member White House Task Force on Education that reported to President Lyndon Johnson. In 1971 Ong was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In April and May 1974, he served as Lincoln Lecturer, presenting lectures in French in Cameroun, Zaire, and Senegal and in English in Nigeria. In 1967 Ong served as president of the Milton Society of America. In 1978 Ong served as elected president of the Modern Language Association of America. He was very active on the lecture circuit as well as in professional organizations.

Summary of Ong's works and interests

Ong's major concern in his works is the impact on culture and education of the shift from orality to literacy. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation.

Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.

Because cultures at any given time vary along a continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have "residual orality".

Some of Ong's interests:

the historical development of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought
the mathematical transformation of thought in medieval and early modern logic and beyond
oral cyclic thought, which is characteristic of primary oral cultures, versus linear or historical or evolutionary thought, which depends on writing
the movement from oral heroic poetry to mock-heroic poetry in print culture
Print culture
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press , to scribal culture...

to the realist tradition in literature to the modern antihero
the historical development in manuscript culture and print culture
Print culture
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press , to scribal culture...

of the inward turn of personalized ego-consciousness, or individuality
the new dimensions of orality
Orality
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...

fostered by modern communication media that accentuate sound, which Ong calls secondary orality
Secondary orality
In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982 , Walter J. Ong works with the contrast between oral and literate cultures. In this book, he used the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based...

as it succeeds from, relies on, and coexists with writing
the origins and development of the Western educational system
the role and effects of Learned Latin
Medieval Latin
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

in Western culture

Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958)

According to Adrian Johns

Adrian Johns

Vice Admiral Sir Adrian James Johns KCB, CBE, KStJ, ADC is the current Governor of Gibraltar and a former senior officer in the Royal Navy. His most senior naval posting was as Second Sea Lord from 2005 to 2008.-Career:...

' foreword to the 2004 edition, Ong was urged to research Ramus after his graduate mentor, Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...

had no particular interest in Ong's original subject, Gerard Manly Hopkins. McLuhan vigorously encouraged Ong's work, and eventually drew upon his former student's perspective on Ramism to write his own pivotal work, ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy.’

Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958) elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that Ong found in Louis Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (1942). Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled "a new state of mind" to emerge in print culture

Print culture

Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press , to scribal culture...

, which is associated with the emergence of modern science.

The companion volume, Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958) is a notable work that contributes to the field known today as book history. Therein, Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in Europe.

Peter Ramus

Petrus Ramus

Petrus Ramus was an influential French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.-Early life:...

(1515-1572), was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer whose textbook method of analyzing subjects

Ramism

was very widely adopted in many academic fields. In "Ramist Classroom Procedure and the Nature of Reality" (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 1, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1961), pp. 31-47), Ong discusses Ramism as a transition phase between the Classical style of education and the modern one. He writes, "...Ramism might seem merely quaint, perhaps artistically lethal, but of no great importance. Yet its great spread will hardly allow us to regard it as educationally insignificant. As a matter of fact, it has educational significance of the headiest sort, for it implies no less than that it is the "arts" or curriculum subjects which hold the world together. Nothing is accessible for "use," that is, for active intussusception by the human being, until it has first been put through the curriculum. The schoolroom is by implication the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway." (p. 47)

The Presence of the Word (1967)

The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967) is an expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. It is a pioneering work in cultural studies and media ecology

Media ecology

Media ecology is a contested term within media studies having different meanings within European and North American contexts. The North American definition refers to aninterdisciplinary field of media theory and media design involving the study of "symbolic environment, or the socially constructed,...

.

He writes, "[my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] 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" (Interfaces of the Word, 1977: 9-10).

Fighting for Life (1981)

Ong subsequently developed his observations regarding polemic in The Presence of the Word (192-286) in his book length study Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures

Messenger Lectures

The Messenger Lectures are a prestigious series of talks given by leading scholars and public figures at Cornell University. They were founded in 1924 by a gift from Hiram Messenger and are regarded as one of the most important of Cornell's extracurricular activities.There were initially "twelve...

at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

Orality and Literacy (1982)

In Ong's most widely known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), he attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality

Orality

: thought

Thought

"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...

and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy

Literacy

Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...

(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.

Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock

Eric A. Havelock

Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at...

, who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

. Ong describes writing

Writing

Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...

as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

, deconstruction

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and females, social studies

Social studies

Social studies is the "integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence," as defined by the American National Council for the Social Studies...

, biblical studies

Biblical studies

Biblical studies is the academic study of the Judeo-Christian Bible and related texts. For Christianity, the Bible traditionally comprises the New Testament and Old Testament, which together are sometimes called the "Scriptures." Judaism recognizes as scripture only the Hebrew Bible, also known as...

, philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, and cultural history

Cultural history

The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...

generally.

An Ong Reader (2002)

This 600-page selection of Ong's works is organized on the themes of orality and rhetoric. It includes his 1967 encyclopedia article on the "Written Transmission of Literature" (331-44); his most frequently cited article, his 1975 PMLA article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (405-27); and his most frequently reprinted article, his 1978 ADE Bulletin article "Literacy and Orality in Our Times" (465-78). Taken together, these three essays make up a coherent approach to the study of written literature against the background of oral tradition.

Significance and Critical Response

The back cover of the 2004 University of Chicago Press reissue of Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, states that Ong today "enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles."

Lectures

1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967).
1979 Cornell University Messenger Lectures
Messenger Lectures
The Messenger Lectures are a prestigious series of talks given by leading scholars and public figures at Cornell University. They were founded in 1924 by a gift from Hiram Messenger and are regarded as one of the most important of Cornell's extracurricular activities.There were initially "twelve...

on the Evolution of Civilization, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981).
1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986).
1985 Wolfson College Lectures at Oxford University, Opening Lecture, "Writing Is a Technology That Transforms Thought." In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986).

Books

Frontiers in American Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1957).
Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
American Catholic Crossroads (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
The Barbarian Within (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
In the Human Grain (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971).
Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977).
Faith and Contexts, 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992-1999).
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002) has been translated into 11 languages.
An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002).

External links

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