Personal and Professional Consideration of Walter ONC

Running head: WALTER ONG
WALTER ONG
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WALTER ONG1
The aim of this report is to discuss the personal and philosophical life of the key thinker
Walter Ong. He was an American Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature. Walter Ong
is mainly reputed for his works on the cultural history and religion guided by philosophy. The
major interest of Walter Ong was in exposing his transition of human consciousness from orality
to literacy. According to this, this process had effectively influenced culture and brought changes
in the human consciousness. His works are so much expanded in the fields of philosophy,
history. Culture, religion and education, that he had been conferred with many awards and
acknowledgements in his life. He was associated with Modern Language Association as
president (Ong 2016).
The main concern of the works of this particular thinker revolves round the impact of
shift from orality to literacy. Contextual studies have shown that these two divisions have very
little function in the analysis of the cultural communities (Buchanan, 2016). As cultures are
structured around the capabilities to read and write many not employ their skills uniformly for
serving a singular end but utilize multiple literacies work simultaneously that require special
vocabulary, technologies and skills. This is also unclear whether literacy maybe adequately
defined by the skills set of reading and writing (Zlatic 2017, p.359). The so called literate
cultures have given up verbal arts linked with speech (Cheung and Hui, 2018, p. 40).
Some of the interests that can be found in the works of Walter Ong are related to the
conservation of culture through literary and orality are
 Visualize tendencies
 Mathematical transformation behind logic
 Oral cyclic thoughts
 Movement of print culture from oral heroic poetry

WALTER ONG2
 Development of manuscript culture
 New dimension of orality fostered by modern communication referred to as secondary
orality (Tawfik and Ali, 2018, p. 120)
 Western educational system
 Learned Latin in the western culture.
Walter Ong through his works have pointed out the historical developments of the visualist
tendency in the western philosophy he has showed interest about the accurate transformation of
though in the medieval as well as early modern logics and its beyond. To Walter Ong, the
primary oral culture has the feature of oral cyclic thoughts (Ouda et al. 2017, p. 350). This
opposes linear and evolutionally thoughts depending upon writing. From the historical times, the
oral tradition of sharing knowledge, expressed through heroic poetry, came to the print cultures
to realist traditions in the literature to the modern introduction of antihero.
To Walter Ong, this shift has affected the education and culture in a great way. To this
thinker, the knowledge of technologies in the early human beings include the knowledge about
fire or for that matter steam engine has the similar process to learn writing (Kartawihardja, Pee
and Zakaria, 2019, p. 559). This technology when was introduced to the primary oral culture had
a wide ranging impact upon them. This impacted all areas of life (Farrell 2017). These had
included the knowledge and recording of culture, politics, art, economy and many more. To this
thinker, a very little knowledge of writing can bring unthinkable changes in the mentality of the
human being and they are transformed from a holistic immersion of orality along with its
individuation as well as interiorization (Camuffo, 2019).
Many of the impacts of technology for writing are connected to the fact that the oral culture
need strategies to preserve evidence in absence of writing. These include a reliance on the