Considering the transition from orality to literacy (accumulating and recording
data), what was the impact on time and space? Arithmetic and geometry?
Theorems and laws? Philosophy and science? A dungeon or a Eleusinian spring?
And what of the transition to a world-wide-web? Indra's net of jewels? Who's
to say?
On Dec 28, 2012, at 2:37 AM, MarshaV <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> "So far as I know, philosophy, and, intellectual history, has done little
> with orality studies. Philosophy and all the sciences and 'arts' (analytic
> studies, such as _Art of Rhetoric_) depend for their existence on writing,
> which is to say they are produced not by the unaided human mind but by the
> mind making use of a technology that has been deeply interiorized,
> incorporated into mental processes themselves. The mind interacts with the
> material world around it more profoundly and creatively than has hitherto
> been thought. Philosophy, it seems, should be reflectively aware of itself
> as a technological product --- which is to say a special kind of very human
> product. Logic itself emerges from the technology of writing.
>
> "Analytic explicatory thought has grown out of the oral wisdom only
> gradually, and perhaps is still divesting itself of oral residue as we
> accommodate our conceptualizations to the computer age. Haveloch (1978a) has
> shown how a concept such as Platonic justice develops under the influence of
> writing out of archaic evaluation accounts of human operations (oral
> 'situational thinking') innocent of the concept of 'justice' as such.
> Further comparative --- literacy studies would be illuminating in philosophy.
>
> "In sum, if philosophy is reflective about its own nature, what is it to make
> of the fact that philosophical thinking cannot be carried on by the unaided
> human mind but only by the human mind that has familiarized itself with and
> deeply interiorized the technology of writing? What does this precisely
> intellectual need for technology have to say about the relationship of
> consciousness to the external universe? ..."
>
> (Ong, Walter J., 'Orality and Literacy', pp. 169-170)
>
>
>
>
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