{"id":1032,"date":"2009-10-04T10:37:44","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T17:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2009-10-04T10:37:44","modified_gmt":"2009-10-04T17:37:44","slug":"orality-and-mythology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/2009\/10\/04\/orality-and-mythology\/","title":{"rendered":"Orality and Mythology"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Orality and Literacy<\/em>, Walter Ong (2002) drew a distinction between cultures characterized by literacy and cultures characterized by \u201cprimary orality\u201d, the latter being comprised of \u201cpersons totally unfamiliar with writing\u201d (p. 6). By accepting a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the view that a culture\u2019s language determines the way in which its members experience the world, Ong also considered these two types of culture to be two types of consciousness, or \u201cmodes of thought\u201d (Ibid, p. 6). While Ong attempted to address how literate culture developed from \u201coral cultures\u201d\u2013 i.e. cultures characterized by primary orality (Ibid, p. 31) – the sharp distinction he drew between the two respective types of consciousness involved in these types of culture makes the question of how this development would have been possible particularly troublesome (Dobson, Lamb, & Miller, 2009).<\/p>\n

Ong \u00a0evidently recognized that there can be what might be called \u201ctransitional forms\u201d between primary orality and literacy. He noted that oral cultures in the strict sense hardly existed anymore (Ong, 2002, p. 11), suggesting that cultures may be oral to a large degree even when they have been somewhat influenced by literate cultures. Furthermore, he granted that literate cultures may still bear some of the characteristics of the oral cultures from which they developed, possessing what he called \u201coral residue\u201d (Ibid, p. 40-1). However, by characterizing literate and oral modes of thought as he did, it is not clear how it could even be possible for the former to arise out of the latter– although it is clear that they must have done so.<\/p>\n

One of the main difficulties lies in Ong\u2019s characterization of oral modes of thought as less \u201cabstract\u201d than literate modes. He asserted that all conceptual thought is abstract to some degree, meaning that concepts are capable of referring to many individual objects but are not themselves individual objects (Ibid, p. 49). According to this view, concepts can be abstract to varying degrees depending on how many individual objects they are capable of referring to. The concept \u201cvegetation\u201d is able to refer to all the objects the concept \u201ctree\u201d can and still more, and thus it is a more abstract concept. The oral mode of thought, Ong asserted, utilizes concepts that are less abstract and this makes it closer to \u201cconcrete\u201d individual objects.<\/p>\n

This notion of concepts being \u201cabstract\u201d is relatively recent, being developed mainly by the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). In ancient and mediaeval thought, the distinction between the concept \u201ctree\u201d and this<\/em> tree or that<\/em> tree would be described as a distinction between a universal and a particular. Locke\u2019s view that universals are \u201cabstract\u201d ideas was based on the theory that they are formed by the mind\u2019s taking away or \u201cabstracting\u201d that which is common to many particulars (Locke, 1991, p. 147). For example, the concept \u201cred\u201d is formed by noticing many red objects and then \u201cabstracting\u201d the common characteristic of redness from all of the other characteristics the objects possess.<\/p>\n

A problem with this theory of abstraction as a general explanation of how concepts are formed was pointed out by Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945). Cassirer noted that the theory first of all claims that it is necessary to possess abstract concepts in order to apprehend the world as consisting of kinds<\/em> of things, and that without them we would only have what William James – and Ong after him (Ong, 2002, p. 102) – called the \u201cbig, blooming, buzzing confusion\u201d of sense perception. The theory also claims that to form an abstract concept in the first place it is necessary to notice a common property shared by a number of particular objects. Yet according to the first claim we couldn\u2019t notice this common property if we didn\u2019t already have an abstract concept. We wouldn\u2019t notice that several objects share the property of redness if we didn\u2019t already have the concept \u201cred\u201d (Cassirer, 1946, p. 24-5).<\/p>\n

Cassirer\u2019s criticism of abstraction as a theory of concept formation could serve as a particularly valuable corrective to Ong\u2019s account of the distinction between orality and literacy. Cassirer himself offered a similar account of two modes of thinking which he called \u201cmythological\u201d and \u201cdiscursive\u201d. The \u201cmythological\u201d mode of thought resembled Ong\u2019s \u201coral\u201d mode in many ways. Like Ong\u2019s oral mode of thought it was a mode of thought closely linked to the apprehension of objects as they stood in relation to practical activity (Ong, 2002, p. 49; Cassirer, 1946, p. 37-8). Also like the oral mode of thought it was associated with the notion that words held magical power, as opposed to the view of words as mere arbitrary signs (Ong, 2002, p. 32-3; Cassirer, 1946, p. 44-5, 61-2).<\/p>\n

If Walter Ong\u2019s account of orality and literacy could be synthesized with Cassirer\u2019s distinction between the mythological and the discursive, it would benefit in that the latter is capable of describing a development from one mode of thought to the other without posing the problematic view that this involves increasing degrees of abstraction. The development of the mythological mode into the discursive mode is not the move away from a concrete world of perception to an abstract world of conception, but the move from the use of one kind of symbolic form to the use of another type. Furthermore, as the mythological mode of thought is already fully symbolic it is possible to study this mode of thought by studying the symbolism used in mythological cultures. While the stages of development from the mythological to the discursive described by Cassirer (e.g. perceiving objects as possessing \u201cmana\u201d, seeing objects as appearances of \u201cmomentary gods\u201d, polytheistic forms of thinking, and so on) may not be supported by empirical evidence, the kind of analysis that is offered by his theory of \u201csymbolic forms\u201d makes the type of development in question conceivable and provides us with a program for studying it.<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cassirer, E. (1946). Language and Myth<\/em>. (S.K. Langer, Trans.). New York: Dover. (Original work published 1925).<\/p>\n

Dobson, T., Lamb, B., & Miller, J. (2009). Module 2: From Orality to Literacy Critiquing Ong: The Problem with Technological Determinism<\/em>. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.vista.ubc.ca\/webct\/urw\/lc5116011.tp0\/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct<\/p>\n

Locke, John (1991). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding<\/em>. In M. Adler (Ed.), Great Books of the Western World <\/em>(Vol. 33). Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Original work published 1698).<\/p>\n

Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy<\/em>. New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong (2002) drew a distinction between cultures characterized by literacy and cultures characterized by \u201cprimary orality\u201d, the latter being comprised of \u201cpersons totally unfamiliar with writing\u201d (p. 6). By accepting a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the view that a culture\u2019s language determines the way in which its members experience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":888,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4973],"tags":[2138,5790,5791,562,423,5789,5706,4912],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary-1","tag-abstract","tag-cassirer","tag-concept","tag-culture","tag-literacy","tag-mythology","tag-ong","tag-orality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/888"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1048,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}