Walter Ong Text

Anna Hemphill

Compared to the other reading, I have had a difficult time understanding the concepts of Walter Ong. The discussion on situational versus abstract thought is something I can get; it reminds me of Jacque Derrida and deconstruction - kind of undoing a word based on personal experience and unfettered thought. According to Ong, a specific tree is not just a concrete tree, but an abstraction, a concept which applies to any tree. I guess this could mean: what first comes to mind when you think of 'tree'?

Oral peoples apply concepts to situational terms, and relate things to that which is "close to the human life world." It takes me a while to wrap my mind around that. "Close to the human life world" - we can divid our thoughts into what is close and what is not close to the human life world. Things we DO - eating, for example - are close to the human life world. I like the examples Ong uses of the field research: (1) oral peoples categorize shapes not as the abstract terms we use (circle, square, etc.) but as actual objects that are shaped like that. This is because they don't have visual words. They know shapes by physical objects that resemble that shape (a circle is a plate, a wheel, a bead), because the word circle is only a label associated with writing. Oral people have no use of that word because physical things do not exist as shapes alone. (2) When presented with four objects and expected to categorize the three that fit together, oral peoples categorized them in terhms of a practical situation. A hammer, saw, log, and hatchet would be categorized by them as the things involved in cutting wood: saw, log, hatchet. Whereas, literate people would probably categorize them as three tools and one non-tool (log).

Writing creates a whole other world. It's strange to think of the things that are existent and true, but some people have no knowledge of their existence. Oral peoples do not know the word circle, but toddlers of literate societies do. What are the things that oral peoples know exist that we do not? Do they? Or does writing swallow up everything that could possibly exist? I don't think it does. Eskimos have 20-something words for love, right? They recognize the differences, but we have one all-purpose word. It's impossible to separate ourselves from the abstract notions associated with printed words (objects made real by ink), but what if we could live as oral peoples do. I wonder how we would change!