Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason

Previous reviews certainly hold true about the importance of Ong's effort (see the one below and there is also a review for an edition that shows a 1983 date).Adrian Johns' forward in this edition, asks "Why study Ramus?" and indicates the cultural phenomenon that occurred when Ramus's charts went viral in the mid to late 16th century. He summarizes Ong's explanation regarding this translation of thought into visually oriented branching diagrams printed on a page. The summary addresses Ramus contribution to "eye" oriented approaches (vs. verbal / auditory or "ear"), attention to steps or methods in arriving at a conclusions or outcomes, and foundation for many succeeding educators and thinkers such as Descartes and Newton.In addition to Johns' forward, the inclusions of Ong's preface for an earlier paperback edition and his original forward are very helpful. In the former, Ong mentions that had he done this work later he would have included attention to the resemblance of Ramus' binary dichotomized charts with those of digital computer diagrams. For Ong, this subterranean parallel was as if Ramus was writing programs 400 years before computers with similar consequences to what is occurring today in the modern world.Although quite dense and detailed, reading Ong's Ramus yields many rewards and insights into the transition to the modern mind.

Walter J. Ong.s massively researched 1954 Harvard University doctoral dissertation was published, slightly revised, by Harvard University Press in two volumes in 1958.Basically, the second volume, RAMUS AND TALON INVENTORY, is an annotated bibliography of the more than 750 printed volumes by Peter Ramus and his followers and critics that Ong had tracked down in more than 100 different libraries -- almost all of the volumes in Latin.The year after Ong died in 2003 at the age of 90, the University of Chicago Press reissued his landmark 1958 book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON in a paperback edition with a new foreword by Adrian Johns. It is a book that still repays careful study.In it Ong works with the aural-visual contrast that he acknowledges he borrowed from the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), most notably from his book LA PAROLE ET L'ECRITURE, 2nd ed. (1942). The aural-visual contrast is also known as the sound-sight contrast.For Ong, words are basically sound.But written words involve sight.In addition, written words are written in space.For Ong, the spatialization of thought expressed implicitly in written words in space on parchment or another substance, and the quantification of thought expressed in certain words in logic combine to make the world-as-view sense of life a heady brew, especially in print culture in Western culture.For centuries in the history of formal logic, the quantification of thought was expressed in words. Eventually however, as Ong explains the quantification of thought became expressed in symbols - in symbolic logic.In the book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE, Ong discusses spatialization in connection with the aural-to-visual shift on pages 92-93, 104-112, 128, 151-156, 244-245, 273, 277-279, 284-292, 307-314, and quantification on pages 53-91, 184, 262, 263.After Ong's 1958 book about Peter Ramus and Ramism was published, he reflected further on his own work and then wrote the following statement regarding the quantification of thought in medieval logic:"In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of premathemics, 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 parauniversity 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" (Ong's collection of his essays titled THE BARBARIAN WITHIN: AND OTHER FUGITIVE ESSAYS AND STUDIES [1962, page 72]).The key sentence in the above quotation: "It [the real mathematical transformation of thinking] represents a new state of mind" -- the state of mind advanced in the print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s.Ong's most widely known and most widely translated book ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (1982), published in Methuen's New Accents series in literary studies, contains not only a chapter titled "Writing restructures consciousness" (pages 78-116) but also a chapter titled "Print, space and closure" (pages 117-138). The latter chapter includes a subsection titled "More diffuse effects" (pages 130-132). In that subsection, Ong claims that print "encouraged and made possible on a large scale the quantification of knowledge, both through the use of mathematical analysis and through the use of diagrams and charts [involving spatialization of knowledge]" (page 130).Now, in his philosophical masterpiece INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957), the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) mocks the tendency in Western philosophical thought to equate knowing with "taking a good look." According to him, that tendency produces naïve realism. Over against and in contradistinction to naïve realism, Lonergan advocates critical realism.In the book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE, Ong uses various expressions to characterize the corpuscular view of reality (also referred to as the corpuscular epistemology and corpuscular psychology; pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, 210).In effect, what Ong refers to as the corpuscular view of reality is virtually identical with what Lonergan refers to as naïve realism in INSIGHT.In the 1994 introduction to the second edition of his 1965 book, BELIEF AND UNBELIEF: A PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, based on Lonergan's philosophical masterpiece, Michael Novak in effect critiques the world-as-view sense of life expressed in Richard Rorty's philosophy:"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 [as Novak knows, both Ong and Lonergan would agree with him about this critique of Rorty]. 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 repeated critique of corpuscular, or bodily, epistemology]. 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 [our minds'] 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' [Or by following the biblical imperative, `Hear, O Israel!'] 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" (page xv; material in square brackets added by me).Thus far, however, Novak himself has not yet gotten to the point at which the evidence supporting Ong's sweeping claim about communications media hits him. Perhaps Novak's imagination is ill-arranged for the purposes of grasping Ong's thought.In any event, Ong's and Lavelle's and Lonergan's claim about the uncritical visual tendency of Western philosophic thought is greatly strengthened by Andrea Wilson Nightingale's book SPECTACLES OF TRUTH IN CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THEORIA IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT (2004). (However, she does not happen to advert explicitly to the relevant books by Lavelle and Ong and Lonergan.)But Ong also claims that after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s, printed books and pamphlets somehow worked to expand the world-as-view sense of life among educated people generally, not just among people who had studied Western philosophy and Christian theology (based on Greek philosophical thought).However, print culture is not the end of the story, as it were. According to Ong, our contemporary communications media that accentuate sound had reached a certain critical mass by 1960 and were deeply impacting Western cultural conditioning over against the visual cultural conditioning in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s.James Collins (1917-1985) in philosophy at St. Louis University, where Ong taught English, perceptively reviewed Ong's two 1958 book in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine AMERICA, volume 101 (1959): pages 37-39.At an earlier time, Collins had published an article about Lavelle's philosophy: "Louis Lavelle on Human Participation" in THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, volume 56, number 2 (March 1947): pages 156-183.At a later time, in his annual review of books in philosophy in the journal CROSS CURRENTS, volume 18 (1968): pages 175-202, Collins briefly but incisively reviewed Ong's book THE PRESENCE OF THE WORD: SOME PROLEGOMENA FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY (1967), the expanded version of Ong's Terry Lectures at Yale's Divinity School.NEWSWEEK magazine dated November 13, 1967, featured a cover story titled "Anything Goes: Taboos in Twilight" (pages 74-78), in which Ong is pictured and quoted extensively and described as "the brilliant Jesuit theologian and author NEWSWEEK of `The Presence of the Word'" (page 74).Subsequently, in his annual review of books in philosophy in CROSS CURRENTS, volume 33 (1983): pages 34-51, Collins briefly but incisively reviewed Ong's book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981), Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.Ong himself delivered a plenary address about certain aspects of that book at the annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1982, which was published in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION, volume 56 (1982): pages 109-124.On the occasion of the 100th anniversary in 2012 of Ong's birth in 1912, Cornell University Press reissued the three books by Ong that were originally published by Cornell University Press, using print-on-demand technology:(1) RHETORIC, ROMANCE, AND TECHNOLOGY: STUDIES IN THE INTERACTION OF EXPRESSION AND CULTURE (1971);(2) INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE (1977);(3) FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981).In my estimate, Ong's massively researched book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE is of crucial importance for understanding his mature thought about our Western cultural history.

A must for every university teacher/professor. It explains the consequences of the printing machine to education. Also a rich understanding of dialectics in the Middle Ages.