The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History

by Walter J. Ong

Terry Lectures. A religious philosopher's exploration of the nature and history of the word argues that the word is initially and always sound, that it cannot be reduced to any other category, and that sound is essentially an event manifesting power and personal presence. His analysis of the development of verbal expression, from oral sources through the transfer to the visual world and to contemporary means of electronic communication, shows that the predicament of the human word is the predicament of man himself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Language, Linguistics, Religion, Anthropology

374 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Naum · Rating 5 out of 5]

The single review on Amazon.com is titled "Please make sure your trays are in the upright and locked..."… …and I must concur, this book is a portent, a wondrous ride, into an examination of orality v. literacy. Things you thought you knew you question and other bits dent the cranium, with a foreboding of realms hitherto un-conjured.

Must add more to this, as this blurb may strike as cryptic, but I need to reread to even wrestle with the content -- how spoken word manifests, the cultural manifestations, and yet, each technological advance bears the legacy of previous media.

[Rishabh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central theme of this book is the radical difference between the nature of experience of the oral (pre-scientific) and the modern literate society.

Different eras of human civilization gives varied emphasis on different senses - like touch, vision, hearing etc. For the oral-aural society, the sense of hearing (or sound) was of primordial importance. The 'word' of god held a special place in their consciousness, which was mostly unaffected by other senses such as vision. This not only created a sense of personal relation with God but also fostered a sense of harmony in the communities. In contrast, the modern man's reality is primarily visual (and somewhat tactile). What is real for him is mostly determined by what he can see and touch, and very little emphasis is given to sounds. This drastic shift has created a heightened sense of individuality in the mind of the modern man.

Walter's analysis stresses the primacy of sounds in the phenomenonal experience of man - since it is sound alone, which reveals the 'interior' of the phenomenon in its wholeness, whereas vision only reveals the surface and cannot reveals the interior without breaking it into fragments - which has become the hallmark of modern reductionist science.