Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964

"Intellect and Voice"

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Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
author_facet Ong, Walter J.
author_sort Ong, Walter J.
title Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
title_short Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
title_full Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
title_fullStr Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
title_full_unstemmed Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964
title_sort folder 6: personal bibliography. texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present, 1964
description "Intellect and Voice"
publisher Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center
publishDate 1964
url http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1345
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spelling sluoai_ong-1345 Folder 6: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1964 Ong, Walter J. Ong, Walter J.; Thought and thinking; Cognition; Intellect; Mind and body "Intellect and Voice" 1964 2011 text/PDF 64 1 1 5 6_Item 0001.pdf Series 1: Scholarship, 1926-2001 Items in this folder are from Sub-sub-Series 5: Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present. This sub-sub-series contains texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present. In addition to these, in Father Ong's "General Files" series there are copies of dozens of addresses and/or papers that have never been published, plus notes for still other unpublished addresses, lectures, etc. Many of these were eventually published in one form or another -- many, however, were not. 64 1 1 5 6 Permission to copy or publish must be obtained from the Saint Louis University, Pius XII Memorial Library, Special Collections Department Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center text/image eng Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections INTELLECT AND VOICE r-/L£ (YOf?Y (;i.;; »ta~ /ffJk~ M5rJ..~~ 'tY~ .£aU-£. ) A transcription of a talk by the Rev. Walter J. Ong, S.J., taped at the meeting of the St. Louis University Philosophers' Club in the Knights' Room, Pius XII Memorial Library, St. Louis University, March 10, 1964. Copyright 1964 by Walter J. Ong Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author. The question to which we address ourselves tonight in considering our subject "Intellect and Voice," is something like this: Why is it that the natural immediate correlative of our thinking in the sensory world happens to be sound? vfuy isn't it something visible or tangible? Why is it that the natural correlative of our intellectual activity in the first instance is, or at least appears to b ej apoken wor d ? Fbr hundreds of years, despite a good deal of concern with words, it has been Known that in some way the sense 01' vision is a kind 01' paradigm or the other senses. Sensus maxime cognoscitivus is the expression which St. Thomas Aquinas retails from the Western philosophical tradition. In this the tradition, I should like to suggest,~presence of other beings to man has been thought of all too exclusively by analogy ,lith the presence of an object to the eye. vie can wonder whether taking vision as the most cognoscitive sense is not after a fashion to move in a most vicious circle? Vision we feel is the most cognoscitive sense because it fUrnishes sensory knowledge most like intellectual knowledge. But intellectual knowledge itself has been thought of in the vlest chiefly, if not exclusively, by analogy with vision. So where are we here? Need it be thought of chiefly by analogy ,lith vision? This analogy has been overexploited at least from the time of Plato's Timaeus. If you restore the initial digamma to Plato's word "idea" to reestablish its connection wi th the Latin videre, (the vid- and the id- are really the same), we could retailor the Nord "ideas" in present-day English as INTELLECTANDVOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S. J. page 2 something like "videos": intellectual prototypes conceived by analogy with visually perceived models. Now to some extent, of course, I run aware, in Plato's thought the ideas are cor-rected by his concern with logos. We all-lays have his assurance in the "Seventh Letter" and the Phaedrus that you don't really put the best part of philosophy down in \vri ting where the eye can get, because that would debase it and make it hardly philosophy at all. Nevertheless the fact remains that PIa to's concern with the ideas evinces a definite tendency to associate intellect with vision by analogy. The Hebrew and, even more, Christian emphasis on the Word of God was in early Christian history reprocessed in ex-planation largely in terms of light, of forms, and of "objects" of knowledge, and in terms of other concepts of strong visualist basis which run from ancient philosophy through Scholasticism and reach a kind of apogee in the works of Locke, for whom the knowing mind becomes a kind of warehouse threaded with a system of pneumatic tubes. (We have provided for you this evening a copy of some excerpts from Locke to show you just how far the tendency to consider int ellec tual knoul edge as something in a visual field can go.) Let us take a look at the excerpts. Note in the first excerpt from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ••hat Locke says. First of all, the heading, vlhich is Locke 1 sown: "Dark Room." He is thinking of the mind as a camera obscura, .hich was a new little gimmick in his day. IN'TELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S. J. -- page 3 A ~ obscura is a little chamber with a pinhole opening through which light comes, so that the pinhole acts as a lens and projects the image from outside on the inside ~1all of the box opposite the hole. "I pretend, II he says, "not to teach but inquire and therefore cannot but confess here again that external and internal sensation are the only passage that I can find of knowledge to the understanding." How note how metaphorical that is: the "passage." There is really no "passage" to the understanding. "These alone ,as far as I can discover are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. Fbr methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut off from light and only some little openings left to let in external visible resemblances that are ideas of things without. Would the pictures but coming in such a dark room but stay and lie so orderly as to be found on occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man •. lith reference to all objects of sight and the ideas of them." Now you can imagine your visual images in some sort of vJay as pictures, but it takes a little doing to imagine your tactual images or your gustatory or olfactory images, much more your auditory images, as pictures, doesn't it? But Locke seems to take the whole of the cognoscitive process by analogy with vision, which is quite alright of course, but only if you realize that it is only an analogy. Locke goes ahead todevelop the next section: "Simple ideas the material of all our knowledge." "These [1. e. ideas of pleasure and pain and existence and unity and power and succession], if they are not all, or least, as I think, the INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, 3.J. -- page 4 most ronsiderable of those simple ideas which the mind has and out of which is made all of its other knowledge, all of which it received only by the two forementioned ways of sensation and reflection." I've underlined words which are m~e or less indicative of a disposition to think of knowledge by analogy with vision. "Nor let anyone think that takes as too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate [note the pre-occupation with space here. Mind is still a kind of box, isn't it? And apparently stretching itself, too.] which takes its flight farther than the stars and cannot be con-fined by the limits of the wrld and extends its thought [have you ever done it, "extended" your thought?], even beyond the utmost expansion of matter and makes excursions into that incomprehensible inane [emptiness, that is]. I grant all this, but desire anyone to assign any simple idea which is not received from one of these inlets before mentioned. [This'is the concept of "simples" which so fascinated the minds of philo sophers and physicists at this\time. Every reality was taken to be made up of "simples" or unfracturable units, and you explained things by combining units into agglomerates.] Nor will it be so strange to think these few simple ideas sufficient to employ the quickest thought or largest capacity and furnish the materials of all that various knowledge, or more various fancy and opinions of all mankind. If we consider how many words may be made out of the various compositions of 24 letters [notice words here are thought of as spatial existents, not as they really are, as sounds which IN'l'ELLECTAND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong , 3:.J. -- page 5 cannot be made out of compositions of twenty-four letters-- marks on a surface--or out of any number of such marks] or if going one step farther we will but reflect on the variety of combinations that may be made barely with one of the above mentioned ideas, vld. number, whose stock is inexhaustible and truly infinite. And what a large and immense field doth the extensi-on alone afford the mathematician. It I simply offer that as an instance of the kind of preoccupation with space and more or less visually perceived actuality whLch can possess a man conceiving of "hat the in-tellect or mind may be. This is the sort of thinking satirized by Jonathan Swift in The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. We do not wish to say that the practice of regarding intellect by analogy with sight,to the more or less complete exclusion of the other senses, was w Lthou t fruit. Far from it. It was very productive. The achievements of philosophy in antiquity, throught the Middle Ages, during the period of'the Enlightenment, were great. They were, moreover, associated with extra-philosophical results of overwhelming Etature: namely, the emergence of modern physical science "hich developed when stress was placed on another v LsuaLly based objective, namely, observation, and "ben this st.r-ses was complemented by the intense application of methematics to the study of what "as observed. Mathematics bas an obviously strong visualist basis in its involvement "ith space, although, notably among the Greeks, its concern "ith space probably takes off from INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 6 tactual and kinesthetic experience even more than it does from visual, as l';illiamM. Irvins, Jr., has gone to some pains to point out. Nevertheless, with all its success, visualist oriented psychology and epistemology has decided limitations. It is rather helpless in the face of human relations, that is, of the knowledge man has of man in direct encounter. To reduce what we have come to know as an I-thou relat ionship in terms of my "idea" of you or of you as the "object" of my knowledge is little better than caricature. An object is conceived of as something passive, and has to be. It is the antithesis of a person. It is acceptable and helpful to think of knowledge of objects in terms of "clear and distinct ideas, II making our aims those which dominate the field of vision, because in the field of v ision clarity and distinctnes s are decidedly virtues. But clarity and distinctness are not aLways virtues in cog-nition. Sometimes they are simply irrelevant. I do not ambition knowing a person, knowf ng my father or mother or friend, clearly and distinctly. A husband does not know his wife or his son best if he has a clear or distinct idea of him or her. These are not the terms in which you evaluate this sort of knowledge--knowledge which is in the last analysis the most profound and overpowering of knowledge, providing the drive for even our most abstract achievements. As depth psychology today has made us well aware of, if we didn I t kno w it before, knowledge •••.rh Lch one person has of another must INTELLECT ANDVOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 7 be described in other terms, among which/as we shall see, are those based on auditory and in a certain way tactile sensations. Having underexploited the possibilities of conceiving intellectual knowledge by analogy with the sense of hearing, earlier philosophers were weak in their ability to account for the human person. In Christian theology, where the doc-trine of the three Persons in the Godhead made absolutely imperative a philosophical account of personality, heroic efforts were made and some success was achieved. By com-parison, howev er, with what can be done today to make explicit the reality of person and personality lvhich man has always encountered in this daily life, the most sophisticated attempts of brilliant thinkers of late antiquity as of the middle ages remain certainly underdeveloped. Experience of person and personality in the past was real enough--there is ample evidence of t h Ls-o-but explanation of this experience was very little elaborated. To pre-Copernican man-e-and to all intents and pur-pes es man's psyche was pre-Copernican for nearly two hundred years after Copernicus' De Revolutionibus in 1543--the universe itself was animistic. And since the human person is tpe paradigm of living material things, the universe, Has vaguely personalized. The Greek word physis and its Latin equivalent natura both mean, at root, birth. The investigation of "nature" began as the investigation of a universe felt as somehow or other "born." Even inanimate things having a nature, in other words, were in some sense considered to be born. A. H. Armstrong and INTELLECT AND VOICE -- \:lalterJ. Ong, s,.J. <Hi- page 8 R.A. Markus in their new little book, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, have pointed this out very clearly: for the Greeks the universe and everything in it was vaguely infused with life. The spheres in the Aristotelian and ptolemaic universe were certainly living beings, animalia of a higher sort than man himself, and they transmitted motion to ope another not at all by mechanical means but by what we today would style psychological and social means. This doctrine o4the personalized universe lingered fo r a long time but never gave rise to a developed theory of person-to-person encounter. Whatever problems or possibilities were enfolded in the wor Ld outlook projected in this doctrine were simply not fully articulated. And by the time of Newton the projection itself had disappeared. The stress was now on observation and thus on sight, not on listening to heavenly music--the "mu sf.c of the spheres" by which the old universe was held together and which was not just decoration, but a natural accompaniment of the vaguely animistic world vt ew , The pre-Copernican or pre-Galilean spheres communed with one another in tones too fine for our sUblunary ears. After Galileo and Newton, the stress was on observation and thus on sight, not on listening to heavenly music--nor was it upon listening to the heavenly muses either because the muses themselves in effect vanish with the Aristotelian cosmos. The Newtonian cosmos is made up of heavenly bodies which are objects forever mute. INTELLEC'l'ANDVOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S. J. -- pa ge 9 Natural philosophy has yielded to the new physics. Man himself becomes more and more an object and the terms "object" and "subject" become for the first time t-lidely encouraged operative. The individual person iShKa~NXKg~ to consider himself as a "sub j ect," not as in the earlier c onmo n sense of the subject of an assertion or predication, but as an object among other objects--only an object which somehow he occupies from the inside and which thereby is a "subject." This is more or less wher-e a great deal of discussion about "Objectivity" and sub jec t t vt t y'' still lodges. Let us move then from here to the Horld of sound itself. The world of sound,we must remember, for man is not purely aural or auditory. It is auditory-tactile, and apparently just about a Lways so. \fuat you think you hear, you often feel-- for example, degrees of loudness Hhich you identify as accent are felt often as much as they are heard. It is not easy to say what we mean by accented syllables, but we can be quite certain the. t syllables which "Ie consider accent ed as against unaccented are not always louder, don't all-lays make more physical noise than unaccented syllables. For example, in the "lord "seesaH" I suppose everyone Hould agree that if you were asked to put an accent mark on that wor-d, you wcuLd accent the first syllable, see-~. But if you pick up t he sound on an oscillograph or other instrument to measure the actual volume of sound in the tHO syllables you will find that "saH" makes considerable more noise than "see." \fuy is it that you think" see" is louder? The reason is, as you "Iill see (if you have not already saw) that when you make the sound "see" IN'rELLECT AND VOICE -- Halter J. Ong , S.J. -- page 10 you contract the muscles of your mouth very notably and make a very small opening for the breath to emerge through. On the other hand, when you say "saw" you have your mouth more or less wide open and there is a large opening for the breath to emerge from ...You actually put a great deal more energy into saying" see" than you do into saying "saw." And although a speaker makes more noise when he says "saw" than when he says "see," you translate the muscular energy which you feel is used for" see" into sound perception and thus hear more noise in "see" than in "saw." In other words, you hear what you hear in part because you kno w what it feels like to speak it. Thus, as linguists know, if you cannot sp eak a language you also fail to hear many of the phonemes which make it up: you Simply fail to register them. This kind of phenomenon illustrates how our auditory sensations, like our visual, too, are infiltrated with kinesthetic, tactile sensations. The war'ld of SJ und , and by this it should now be clear, I mean a world which is associated hcith the tactile, more or less, is more natural for communication insofar as the spoken word is the more mediate, a more natural coefficient of thought. From the earliest individual experience, t rought and vror-d are quite inseparable. It is fatuous to suppose that we first marshall our thoughts, and that after we get them all lined up, we go out and get the words with wh ich we "clothe" the thoughts. AlthoL~h a great deal of loose thought about the connection between words and thoughts would seem to hint that some such condition obtains, we have only to look at the way in which a child begins to speak and think in order INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, 3.J. -- page 11 to see the actual state of affairs. (If you are interested in reading about this, I can refer you to Otto Jespersen's book Language: Its Nature, Origin and Development. This discussion here is carried on without any particular reference to that book. It is more or less my own. But Jespersen has a lot of this type 0 f thing in it.) Children do not start thinking by themselves. This fact is strikingly hinted at by the way in which deaf children grow up always mentally retarded if they are not by special techni~es integrated closely, if indirectly, into the world of welt'dsaround them. Until the techniques which we have now for integrating deaf-mutes into the oral-aural wo rld were perfected, as you well know, deaf~mutes always grew up intellectually subnormal. The child has a potential of his own for thinking, but he must be coaxed into realizing it. A lalling stage is typical of human infants, and apparently of human infants alone-- not even found among higher anthropoids. You remember Katherine F~yes' report in her little book The Ape in Our House R.t- P:BdItT the young ch tmpan'['eeraised as an infant. She notes that, although they were watching for something like the lalling stage in him, they could not find it. The most they found was that for a period of a fe,J days he made a few cries which) it seemed, he didn't have to make. A human infant is definitely a different thing. During the lalling stage, an infant surrounds himself with a bubble of sound which includes, of course, the kinesthetic sensations we have been sp eaking of, s ince wor ds are "mouthed," after all. He burbles and gurgles and crOHS and often plays with INTELLEC1' AND VOICE -- 'tlalterJ. Ong , S'.J. -- page 12 his lips at the same time as he is doing this. Parents and others are intrigued by the process. When the child chances on a sound approximating the sound "mama, II they often go ecstatic. For the child this means that his world from here on unexpectedly blooms. He is made over, fondled, caressed, and he soon learns that saying "mama" is a highly rewarding diversion, especially given a certain state of affairs in the world around him, this "big, booming, buzzing confusion" that James talks about. It is not long before associations begin to form under repeated and even frantic encouragement from adults. Between this sound which he makes and a persistent portion of this big, booming, buzzing confusion which the adult recognizes as the child's mother, an associ-ation grows. The child's own mental activities are in some mysterious way engaged in and activated by this process and before long he gradually forms the budding concept of "mama" which goes with the spoken sound and applies this to someone he has been coached into cutting out from this big, booming, bu zzing confus ion, and coached into identifying as some sort of unified being. ~~ich did the child learn first? Did he learn to think "mama" first or to say "mama" first? It'i33 really quite impossible to answer. If anything, the word first and the concept after. Only the word was not really a word till the thought accompanied it, you see. It was still just a sound. Of course in the process, as we have indicated, other senses were active, touch, kinesthetic and sight, but also smell and even taste. But the process terminated in this close assoc iation b et wee n thought and sound. Why? INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page13 This elic iting of thought and word shows not only the close interrelation between thought and sound but also the essentially social character of man's thought. In the ab-sence of such a situation of a going language, access to the world of sound, and adults eager to initiate an infant into the linguistic world, it appears difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how an individual could ever begin to think. Where would he start, in the big, booming, b~zzing confusion? What would be the units he would find there whIch would be usable, which could be cut out as stepping stones from which he could move on to other units? Instead of forming the conc ept of "mama" or "man" he might wa st e his time forming fruitless and relatively unreal categories. He might form a category, for example, for all upright, brown, smoothish things, putting in one group doors, chair legs, trees, brown painted oars leaning against houses, etc. Or he might form another, of small, fuzzy, yellolV things: dandelions, certain caterpillars (but only certain ones), pieces of fluff from his mother's dress, etc. Even when they are being inducted actively into the linguistic usage and into the use of thought, children do temporarily construct such fruitless categories. (See Jespersen, e.g., pp. 113, 127.) But experience in the language a child is le3rning soon pressures him into abandoning these culs de sac. Late~ on, when the mild grows up and becomes a basic research scientist INTELLECT AND VOICE -- ltEalterJ. Ong, S. J. -- page 14 or a philosopher, he can experiment again in novel and un-usual concepts and see where they lead. But at this point he will do so much more knowingly. Were there not help from language the individual child lvouldhave to work through the experience of hundreds and thousands of years, which he can learn from the linguistic world from which he gains his consciousness. If he did not have this linguistic world, if he had to work it out all for himself, it is hard to see how he could effectively come to any thinking at all, or to thinking which would be viable in this present day. The child needs the social setting not incidentally because it is pleasant and congenial, but absolutely to get his own private interior potential under way. He can not do this by himself. Social settings vary, although they also penetrate one another and the particular social setting in which the individual learns to think will leave its mark on the individual for good. If you learn to thi~in Chinese you go about it differently than the !'layin whLch a person who learns to think in English goes about it. This does not mean, however, that we are here caught in conceptual or linguistic relativism. It does not mean that the Chinese think this l,myand we think that !'layand never the twain shall meet. By no means. Languages and the economies of thought they encourage are not disjoined. Rather, all languages translate into one another--although when they do so they also annex one another. You can move from anyone to INT£LL.':CTAND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong , S,.J. -- page 15 any other one, and incorporate the awareness of the other language into your own, as English has done with much of Latin, French, and other tongues. These considerations show the irrelevance of the question as to whether onj:me occaseion or another, an individual Can have war'dless thoughts, at least so far as the present problems are concerned. Such thoughts would come into being in an individual who in one way or another knew at least some words. They would be framed or bound, if not in words, at least in a universe of consciousness actualized through verbal exper'Lence. Fbr a thought to be purely war'dless it would have to originate in an individual who had never known any words. Whether such a human being, completely unaffected by speech in himself or others, could have a wordless thought is a purely speculative question, by definition unanswerable. It appears impossible that such a being could even become refJectively aware of his own existence. lte need a social setting to induct us into t he awar-eness of self and other and to get thinking under way. Needing the social setting to get under way, means, 1n effect, to need sound. The close connection between the intellect and oral-aural, seen in the fact that'the effective coefficient of mental processes are primarily sounds, words, not projections in space, is due to the'time-bound conditions of human knowledge. Other than words, the human productions most commonly associated closely with thought are gestures. And these move through time in a way approximating that of sound itself. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, 3.J. -- page 16 Sound itself, you see, 1s time-bound. It has to exi.st by moving through time. Words and other sounds come into existence only at the time they are also passing out of existence. 1tlhenI say the word "exist," by. the time I get "-1st" the "ex-" has to be gone. There~s not any way of stopping sound and having sound. If you stop sound, you have sot only silence. Sound moves through and .lith time. The objects of our other senses do not do this at all in the same way. Vision seeks to fix its object. \~e can, of course, see moving things. But if He wan t to apply our vision closely we try, if we possibly can, to stop it. And the effective way to see movement is to see it against an un-moving background. If you are in a condition where absolutely everything around you is moving, your sense of vision does not help you much. You become dizzy and cannot use it effecti vel y. Vis ion, then, tri es to freeze things and wants things to be still, to be immobilized. How about the other senses? Touch? Touch does not move through time in the way in which sound moves through time. Touch can be deadened eventually by the passing of time. If we put our hand into a warm basin of Hater and leave it there a while He can no longer tell how warm the Hater is. This 1s likewise true Hith taste and ·pmell. They linger in time, but they are also deadened by time. Sound alone moves through time in such~way that it actually lives in it. INTBLLECT AND VGICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 17 Kno w'l cdg e, then, is connected >lith voice in sound because in the human being it too is time-bound. Looking to knowledge itself we see why this should be. If knowledge is taken as that wh Lch is true, the point at which He really possess knowledge in act, the point at Hhich the question "Is it true?" applies, is the point at which we form a judgement which is externally manifest as a statement or utterance, an event in the world of sound. This judgement is resolv-able into tHO parts which in English and Standard Average European generally can be described as subject and predicate. The intellectual act which corresponds to the statement, the externally worded statement, is the only one about which it is relevant to ask "Is it true or false?" We cannot ask this about an isolated term. It means nothing to say, "Is this true or fals e: 'grey overcoat,' or 'six 0' clock' ?" One can, however, ask meaningfully "Is this true: 'The sky is blue,' or 'This is a grey overcoat,' or 'It is not yet six o'clock'?" I am saying what is commonplace to most of you here, namely, that one cannot ask the question "true or false" about anything except a judgement, a statement, a union of subject and predicate. In the case of the reasoning process as such, the question to ask concerns not its truth but its correctness. Moreover, the question of truth and falsehood even with regard to knowledge Hhich is not externally communicated arises insofar as a judgment, the equivalent of a statement, INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 18 is present to me in J'Tloywn mind. Ny memory may be charged Hith all sorts of potential but I must activate this store of kno,Jledge in order actually to possess it as knowledge. That is to say, I must in my consciousness effect the juncture of subject and predicate, must project my thought into the time that it takes to effect to ls judgment, saying, "The sky is blue, 11 or~IThis is a grey overcoat." Like the external statement which is its coefficient, the judgment exists in a sense while it is passing out of existence. We have to "join" the predicate over to the subject, as it were, bring it into "contact" with the subject in time, in order to possess the truth in our minds. I can, of rourse, revive the statement, the judgment over and over again, "This is a grey overcoat," etc., etc., realizing it, actuating it again. Or I can keep it at the focus of my attention, the imaginative construct on which the knowledge bears, a geometrical figure, or the image of this grey overcoat, so that the judgment can be revived instantaneously at any time I want. Nevertheless, the question of truth, the crucial test of actual knowledge arises only when the judgment is being produced, only when I am actually saying it within myself, "This is a grey overcoat." We can see here why it is that thought finds its shadow, its alter ego, its Dopp eLgange r , not in wha t is seen or smelt or tasted or touched, but in what is heard. Thought actuated by this movement through time finds its proper coef-ficient in sound which moves pari passu through time. Thus the primary expression of thought turns out quite naturally to be words. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 19 But I can see you have an objection. It is possible to say that the causaUty works the other way. Human thought does not simply ally itself with words because it is necessarily time-bound; rather it is the way it is, time-bound, because it is allied with words. nd this is true, too.,.,It is merely another way of saying that we learn to talk and think simul-taneously. There appears t4be no way for human thought to come into exi stence without some assoc iation Hi th words. We remember that nature, natu~, refers to birth. Human thought is born in association with words. This is its nature. ~ffin's thought is the kind of thought it is because it gro1Vs out of a sound situation. We can speculate if we wish as to what other thought unconnected to time and sound wo uLd be. St. Thomas, at least, is quite sure that such thought would have no juncture of subject and predicate and that it is also quite unthinkable by ourselves. How under these circumstances, then, does kno w.Ledge abideZ What does it mean to say that I have known a theorem of Euclid's twenty years when I have not actually thought of it except at rare intervals during this period? This means quite obviously that I can call the knowledge into my con-sciousness at will, and it means no more. The old distlnctim between habitual and actual knowledge is meaningful here. I have the knowledge as a kind of possession, a habitus, even when I am not thinking about it, and thus ",hen I cannot be said to experience it as actual or fully activated knowledge. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 20 For kno w Ledge to be fully activated, it should be conscious, of course. And this activation I cannot have permanently. I have known the theorem constantly over this long period of years in the sense that it has been stored permanently as a possibility to be re-activated, and that is all. As an actuality, the knowledge oomes into being by passing into and out of time. And of course, unless it is made actual from time to time, the habitual knowledee I have is likely soon to be non-existent even as habitual. There is a scandal here for those who think of know-ledge in terms of space and the quiescence and quasi-permanence of space. For you see, human knowledge does not have thts qu~escence or quasi-permanence. The fact is, only derivatively and at second hand can knowledge as man experiences it be endowed with these spatial qualities, quiescence, quasi-as permanence. ~ ~ KnowledgeAhad by man belongs in the first instance with the word and thus in time. This is its habitat, this is its home. In a certain sense, nevertheless, it is true that actual knowledge seems in a way to escape time or transcend it. As we have seen, I possess the truth, "This is a grey over;oat," not simply when the concepts. represented by these words pass through my co~sciousness, but more proper y at the instant, the moment of truth, when I experience the juncture of subject and predicate; when I can test the state-ment aga Lnst actuality; wh en I experience its truth, "This is a grey overcoat"; the moment when (after scenting the INTELLECTANDVOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 21 meaning, if you want, in advance), I actually taste its meaning; Wl en the statement comes alive and flashes into sight and when I sense that it means that it says something. Now this moment of truth is hard to put your finger on. :~hat is the instant at which I really do put together subject and pr edlca t e , "This is a grey overcoat"? The moment of truth seems to be here in a real sense outside tine in that insofar as it is some kind of indlvisiblemoment, as in a way it ap~ars to be in experience, it is timeless. It cannot be measured. It is a kind of indivisible, quasi-non-temporal moment, though framed in time; that is to say, it appears that we do not experience the juncture of subject and pr'edicate as a duration. At least it appears to me that we do not. Maybe other of you have other experiences. "This is a watch." For how long does the living juncture as such take place? The questio~ appears meaningless or unanswerable. The juncture as such, effected when subject and predicate are in a sense tasted as united, certainly has a quasi-instantaneous, timeless air. But the Hay to it, its milieu, its surrounding, its environment and ground, the words themselves which pass briefly tlrough time and the concepts with them, the progression itself from "this" to "watch," all this is in time. It is very obviously in time. "Only through time, time is conquered," says T.S. Eliot in "Burnt Norton." And he is echoing a vast tradition Wl ich in various ways incorporates the kind of awareness I am trying to get across here. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S. J. -- page 22 However, thi~escape from time and truth at the quasi-extratemporal instant, when the juncture of subject and ~edicate is realized in My consciousness, is not an escape into the kind of permanence represented by motionless objects in space. It is not something that rests there, that lies there. It is an escape into a kind of luminous present, or into a luminous presence, not into a quasi-stable field of relations. When we think of knowledge, as we do quite legitimately and productively and meaningfully as being like vision, supported again by touch, dealing with objects in a sIR tial field, we must not forget the looseness of the analogies we are using. When we say that a certain truth or theorem is an "object" of knowledge, this object of knowledge is not by any means entirely like an Object in its initial sense as an object in space, that you can see or touch. It is only something like such an object. The distinctness of objects of knowledge is not entirely like the distinctness of Objects in space, nor is the clarity of knowledge entirely like the clarity in a field of vision. To define a term is not exactly what the concept at its metaphorical root wou Ld indicate. Define, definere in Latin, means to establish limits, to set borders, to mark off, to draw a line around. But When we define in terms of genus and species we do not quite do this, only something like this aone what, and really not very much like this at all. Terms do not have borders or limts, therefore they are not the sort of thing that can be seen, they are not beings in space. We can be deceived by terms such as "Object," I'distinct," IN'fELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong , S. J. -- page 23 "clear," or "define,iI which link the operations of thought with operations in a spatial field apprehended through vision, supported to varying degrees by touch. And such terms are countless. It has become a kind of commonplace today that the ancient Greek concept of knowing in the very gignosko is a concept formed by considering knowledge pretty much by analogy with sight) whereas the Hebrew concept of knowledge,pada, takes knowledge more by analogy with hearing. The Greek proclivities for sight-oriented thought are already well marked in Plato's ideas. But 0 ther terms such as "for m'' are connected with this same tradition. Forma in Latin designates a figure or shape. Species is another word for appearance, built from the same root as"spectator," "spectacle," and so on. It is a visually grounded term. So are other terms designating operations and connitions of thought, too numerous to detail here, familiar to all of us: terms such as "analysis," which means an untying or unloosening, or "synopsis," which means Mt:l!!II: ~ ft a general v i ew, "system," which means a setup, "demonstration," which means some kind of visual show. Accompanying such visual images are the sun and light images already marked in ancient Greek ways of thinking. From the world of sound we have few terms expressing the aims or ideals of know Ledge and we use those we have very charily. Harmony is the acoustic or auditory equivalent of synthesis. Synthesis is a putting together. Har-mony is simply 8n auditory unity. Harmony appears in science much less urgent than synthesis does, or it so appeared until recent times. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 24 'Ebereis one final question we want to take up before we close. Does our habit of visual or visual-tactile synthesis as applied to thought, the habit which assoc iates thought or intellectual knowledge with space, rather than with sound or time, really offer a way of making thought less perishable? I am aware that when ,,,e think of thought itself, of our in-tellectual activity, by analogy with sound as involved with time, we seem to be operating from a rather precarious base. Isn't it much nicer, much more comforting, to think of in-tellectual activity in terms of objects, by means of the visually grounded apparatus that I have been instancing here? Does not our habit of associating thought with these visually grounded concepts conceived of by analogy with space give us some way of making thought !B rmanent? Does the kind of stability, permanence, "solidity," we sometimes call it, achieved by thinking of know.l edge in terms of "forms" or "objects," which by analogy with physical objects are con-ceived of as stable and as of themselves unchanging, really remedy the 8ituation which the association of thought Hith sound and thus with time appears to advertise? It appears not, for the spatially grounded concepts must alHays be valid for thought at one remove. ~uch con-cepts are of course warranted, but secondary by comparison with the oral-aural concepts which apply directly to thought. The primary sensory accompaniment of thought remains in the first instance sound, the voice, the word. And this ac-companiment as He have seen is not merely a kind of ex post facto manifestation of thought but a condition for it. INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 25 This fact may be uncomfortable. It may seem to make thought unstable, although it does not, for it only makes it his-torical, Hhich means very stable--but Hith ailstabili ty" for wbich it is hard to find a satisfactory spatial analogue. Some may feel that the association of thought with sound makes it relativistic, that this association makes it somehow rootless, since each moment of time is unique and cannot be returned to. Here again we are faced Hith his-toricism, not relativism. Each moment of time is unique not because it is disjointed from other moments. Indeed, you only think it is "dLs jcInt.ed" because you refuse to cons ider it as tine, and think of it in a v isual field, for only thus could it be "disjointed," since a moment of time is not really disjointed from any other moment. Only spatial analogues of time can be imagined this way. Each moment of time is unique because it is connected in a unique way Hith each other moment, and if we are uncomfortable about associating thought with sound and time, there is simply nothing we can do about the fact that the association is real and true. Human thought comes into being in time, and has no other natural dwelling, although it reaches towards eternity. The permanence associated Hith spatial representation is, after,all, deceptive. In fact, as we know, everything in space moves and even if it did not local quiescence is not permanence. All that is mortal decays. The paintine in the museum may be centuries old but it has been and still is changing slowly. By contrast with the living word moving INTELLECT AND VOICE -- Walter J. Ong, S.J. -- page 26 through this present instant of time, it appears unchanging. But the contrast is, in the last analysis here, a relative one. Only God is unchangJ.ng , And if we think of His changelessness in terms of immobility in space (as we must confess we are pretty much condemned to do), we must alHays remind ourselves that while it is in one ,laY like such spatial changelessness, it is in another Hay not like it at all. Fbr God lives, and to comprehend life human beings must somehow or other think of motion too. http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1345

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