Language as Hermeneutic

A Primer on the Word and Digitization

Walter J. Ong, Thomas D. Zlatic, Sara van den Berg, Thomas D. Zlatic, Sara van den Berg

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501714498
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language in all its modes—oral, written, print, electronic—claims the central role in Walter J. Ong's acclaimed speculations on human culture. After his death, his archives were found to contain unpublished drafts of a final book manuscript that Ong envisioned as a distillation of his life's work. This first publication of Language as Hermeneutic, reconstructed from Ong's various drafts by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg, is more than a summation of his thinking. It develops new arguments around issues of cognition, interpretation, and language. Digitization, he writes, is inherent in all forms of "writing, " from its early beginnings in clay tablets. As digitization increases in print and now electronic culture, there is a corresponding need to counter the fractioning of digitization with the unitive attempts of hermeneutics, particularly hermeneutics that are modeled on oral rather than written paradigms.

In addition to the edited text of Language as Hermeneutic, this volume includes essays on the reconstruction of Ong's work and its significance within Ong's intellectual project, as well as a previously unpublished article by Ong, "Time, Digitization, and Dalí's Memory, " which further explores language's role in preserving and enhancing our humanity in the digital age.

Part I

Language as Hermeneutic

A Primer on the Word and Digitization

Walter J. Ong

Prologue

Total verbal explicitness is impossible.

Language, Hermeneutics, and Digitization

A thesis of these reflections is that there are two encompassing and complementary movements significantly dominating the development of world culture today, digitization and hermeneutics—which is to say (as will be explained more fully throughout the work)—a fractioning movement and a holistic movement, and that these movements explain something of what has been going on in the development of human beings’ intellectual relationship and concomitant relationships to the world around them, chiefly in highly technologized societies but indirectly through all the world.

Everyone is aware of how deeply digitization influences modes of thought and action in our electronic world, most pervasively through the use of the digital computer. Digitization refers to division into numerically distinct units and to operations carried on by means of such units. Digitization proceeds always by division into distinct units, and thus is based on fractioning, although the digital units can be made so exquisitely tiny that results appear not fractioned at all but virtually continuous, and are indeed capable of reproducing what is continuous more accurately than nondigitized reproduction can manage. No matter what wonderful unities digitization can effect, it effects unity only by making division so minuscule that, humanly speaking, it leaves in effect no trace of its divisiveness.

But in our present culture, there is another development, less widely known and very little reflected on, that relates to digitization, namely hermeneutics (or hermeneutic—the plural and the singular can often be used interchangeably). “Hermeneutics” is the Greek-based English word corresponding pretty closely to the Latin-based English word “interpretation.” Both words refer to explanation. But “hermeneutics” (or “hermeneutic”) usually refers to intensive, scholarly, more or less systematized verbal interpretation (as against dramatic or other interpretation) of textual material. Hermeneutics is interpretation grown self-conscious. In its intensified form, it can become a hermeneutic of suspicion, based on the presumption that the text is saying something other than, or even contradictory to, what it seems at first blush to be saying. As will be seen, the growth of hermeneutics or interpretation is a function of the growth of information in world cultures—most spectacularly in high-technology cultures, but to some extent in all the cultures of the world.

In the past couple of centuries—roughly, since the Enlightenment—hermeneutics, labeled as such and thought of as learned and more or less systematic explanation, first made its way into Western thought as referring to the interpretation of biblical texts. But today it is growing beyond all bounds, enveloping innumerable subjects in academia (as it will, more and more, in the rest of the world). In a university library with only one-third of its holdings thus far in its computerized catalog, in this computerized catalogue under the subject heading of “hermeneutics” I find listings of “literary hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics and analysis,” “science, hermeneutics and praxis,” “Buddhist hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics as method, philosophy, and critique,” “context and hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics, tradition, and reason,” “hermeneutics and deconstruction,” “hermeneutics and social science,” “hermeneutics as politics,” “hermeneutics of postmodernity,” “hermeneutics of postmodernism,” “hermeneutics of intimacy,” “hermeneutics versus science” (sometimes hermeneutics is opposed to science, sometimes allied with science, sometimes used to explain science), “the hermeneutics of the subject,” “postmodern literary hermeneutics,” “religions, literature, and hermeneutics,” “feminist hermeneutics,” “phenomenological hermeneutics,” “philosophical hermeneutics” (is hermeneutics allied with philosophy, opposed to philosophy, interwoven with philosophy?), “transcendence and hermeneutics,” “T. S. Eliot and hermeneutics,” “Yeats’s autobiography and hermeneutics,” “energetics and hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics and critical theory,” “Jung’s challenge to biblical hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics and personal structure of language,” “hermeneutics and poetizing,” and so on.

Let us forget hermeneutics for the moment and turn to the more commonplace concept of interpretation. There is no end to interpretation. In its quite ordinary and simple sense, to interpret means to bring out what is concealed in a given manifestation, that is, in a given phenomenon or state of affairs providing information. We can interpret not only verbalized expression, but anything that provides information: a sunset, a roll of thunder, a gesture, a person’s attitude shown in various ways, an utterance. We do not interpret what is unconcealed or evident in a manifestation, only what is concealed. And something is always concealed. For no manifestation reveals everything, and interpretation, no matter how carefully formulated, can never be total in its verbal formulation. In context, verbalization can achieve truth, but the context is never totally verbalized (see Tyler, The Said and the Unsaid) so that it thus both reveals and conceals, as we shall see, and hence calls for further interpretation. Heidegger’s aletheia or “disclosure” is never complete in words alone, as is clear in the ongoing discussion of what Heidegger’s full meaning of aletheia was—one can always ask one more question to disclose more. Interpretation itself is a manifestation, and interpretation both reveals and conceals, and hence calls for further interpretation as occasion demands. The definition and discussion of interpretation just provided here itself calls for interpretation.

Interpretation floods present-day consciousness, most notably in high-technology cultures but to a degree everywhere. The vast float of printed and electronically processed and delivered information that chokes our mailboxes, our radios and television sets, and our minds has provided more than good reason to style world culture today an information culture. In our electronic age, information thrusts itself upon us all day long via radio and television as well as telephone and print and other communication devices in such quantity that we cannot absorb any but a tiny fraction of what we are wallowing in. Speaking recently to a person with a position in one of our largest copying machine companies, I ventured to estimate that not one tenth of the photocopied pages in the United States was ever even glanced over by any human being. The copying machine company representative did not need to stop for any reflection at all but shot back immediately and with utter confidence, “That is far too high an estimate.” But we need the choking float of information, he maintained: “The question is whether you want to do something or nothing.” We all know that the more efficient systems often if not always operate with a huge amount of waste: of the millions or billions of acorns dropped from the oaks in Missouri, how many grow into trees? Very few do or ever did. But there are still a lot of oaks in Missouri.

Much of what we think of at first blush as “information” contains a lot of interpretation or explanation. Not only the editorial pages of our newspapers but also the news columns deliver an interpretation of the news, not only by evaluating one item as newsworthy and publishable and another not so, but also by the tone or slant they give to the information they deliver. This slant is not necessarily despicable, for one or another slant is inevitable—there has never been an ahistorical reporter without an inevitably historical point of view, although the slant given can be despicable or outright dishonest and false. Newspapers are more interpretive today than they used to be. A strange memory here haunts me. When I was in college in the early 1930s, I recall distinctly an observation of one of the speakers at the annual Missouri College Newspaper Association meeting at the University of Missouri at Columbia (where the first course in the world in journalism had been given in 1879–84). This speaker stated that in the future news stories as such in United States newspapers would become more interpretive than they were at the time (the early 1930s). How the speaker was able to make this prophecy still puzzles me and fills me with awe. But you have only to compare newspapers from his day with those of our day now to see how right he was. The increase of information has made us not more interested in simple “facts” (more about “facts” later) but in understanding the “facts”—which means interpretation. By the same token that it is an information age, our age is an interpretation age.

Language as Hermeneutic

Interpretation can apply to any sort of thing and it can be realized in all sorts of ways, verbal or nonverbal—raised eyebrows, a gesture, a refusal of a proffered gift, a knowing grin. One can interpret a nonverbal situation or a verbal remark by a wordless mime. Yet words have special relevance to interpretation. Verbal interpretation always involves more than words, as thinking and words themselves always do, yet, like much human communication activity, interpretation reaches a certain special focus in verbal explanation, in words formulated either externally for others or internally for oneself.

As infants, our first appropriation of language as language is an encounter with language as interpretation. The acquisition of a first word or clusters of words interprets, brings out what was previously concealed—but not concealed in words the infant has possession of, for being an infant means precisely being without words (infant is the anglicization of the Latin infans, from in-, not, and fans, fantis, present participle of fari, to speak). Infant thus means precisely a nonspeaker, someone not yet familiar with any words. The first word or words of an infant must thus be an interpretation of the nonverbal context, in William James’s well-known description, “the big, blooming, buzzing confusion” in which the infant is embedded. An infant’s acquisition of language comes about in a context of all kinds of other activities and awarenesses. First words are overburdened with context, out of which their meanings have to be carved. And context is never fully escaped from. Another way to note this is to say that total verbal explicitness is impossible. Words always exist in a context which at some point or points includes the nonverbalized.

Interpretation not only is implemented by verbalization, verbal explanation, but also tends to be called for by verbal utterance more readily than by other matters. Paradoxically, verbal utterance often cries for interpretation more than do other phenomena because verbalization is fundamentally interaction between persons who can constantly look for verbal or other explanation or clarification from one another and because the interpretation provided from either side is never totally conclusive in every way. For practical purposes, persons can and do bring explanation to an end and arrive at a truth adequate for the current situation, but there always remains more that could be asked and responded to if one wanted to go further. In this sense, verbalization is always a kind of unfinished business. The meeting of minds, the understanding, in a given situation involves not only words but also the nonverbal existential context, which could be subject to further verbalization.

The reflections in the present work, however, focus basically on verbal interpretation and often, though not exclusively, on verbal interpretation of verbal utterance—which does, of course, always have a nonverbal context, with which we may at times be concerned. But, unless otherwise specified, these reflections focus primarily, then, on verbalized interpretation of verbalized expression.

The Greek-based term “hermeneutics” or “hermeneutic” commonly means much the same as “interpretation,” namely explanation, the bringing out of what is concealed in a given state of affairs. But it more commonly refers more explicitly to verbalized interpretation of verbal texts rather than of oral utterance or other phenomena. And hermeneutics commonly refers to such verbalized interpretation which proceeds on more or less formalized methodological principles, as in interpreting the Bible. Hermeneutics is interpretation (in the sense of verbalized explanation) grown self-conscious. But, as Gadamer has so thoroughly shown in his Truth and Method (see also Neil Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method), the concept of formalized methodology is not entirely clear-cut. The terms “interpretation” and “hermeneutics” can never be totally “scientific.” Moreover, other extensions of hermeneutics to nonverbal aesthetic material, such as Gadamer discusses, are not to be denied. But they are not our chief focus here. As with interpretation, our chief concern here with hermeneutic or hermeneutics focuses on verbalized explanation of verbal expression, often, but not always, verbal expression in textual form.

However, with allowance, where called for, of the tendency of “hermeneutic” or “hermeneutics” to refer to interpretation of texts, the terms will often be used here in the more general sense as synonymous with “interpretation,” in a way in which they are commonly used today and a way which context should make clear.

All sorts of special hermeneutics, or more or less methodical interpretive procedures and theories, have been developed for different sorts of texts—literary, poetic, political, religious, philosophical, scientific, and so on. Elaborate, often deeply insightful procedures for textual hermeneutics have been devised, notably by theologians such as Friedrich Schleier-macher, Rudolph Bultmann, and Jürgen Moltmann, by philosophers such as...