Walter J. Ong - Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness

Ong, Walter J

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Also by Walter J. Ong

Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture Why Talk?

Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

Petrus Ramus, Scholae in liberales artes (editor)

Petrus Ramus and Audomarus Talaeus, Collectaneaepraefationes, epistolae, orationes (editor)

Knowledge and the Euture of Man (editor and contributor)

The Presence of the Word In the Human Grain The Barbarian Within

Darwins Vision and Christian Perspectives (editor and contributor)

American Catholic Crossroads Ramus and Talon Inventory Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue Erontiers in American Catholicism

CONTEST, SEXUALITY,

AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright (c) 1981 by Cornell University Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1981 by Cornell University Press.

Published in the United Kingdom by Cornell University Press Ltd.,

2-4 Brook Street, London WiY lAA.

The lines facing the contents page and quoted on page 206 are from Burnt Norton in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot; copyright 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber & Faber, Ltd.

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-1342-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 80-66968 Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

For Kathleen Kemp Forrest and William Craig Forrest and their children,

Ted, Kathryn, and Sara

The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars. T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Preface ^

PART ONE. BACKGROUNDS

1. Contest and Other Adversatives /j

Adversativeness 15

Origins of the Present Work 24

Procedures: Understanding and Asymmetric Opposition 29

Contest, Language, and Thought 34

Some Differentiations: Contest and Alternative Concepts 37

PART TWO. PATTERNS OF ADVERSATIVENESS

2. Contest and Sexual Identity 57

The Sexes and the Adversative 51

The Expendable Sex 52

Combat between Conspecific Males 56

Ritual Combat 59

Combat, Stress, and Masculine Identity 64

Male Fights Male 76

Bonding Patterns and Loners 80

All-Male Secrets and Womans Secret 89

Vicarious Contest 91

3. Separation and Self-Giving: Pieta and Quixote 97

Externality of Masculinity 97

Self-Giving, Feminine and Masculine 99

Maximizing Male Risk 103

Vocal and Physical Bravado 107

Masculinity, Contest, Differentiation 112

Contents

PART THREE. PAST, PRESENT, AND EUTURE

4- Academic and Intellectual Arenas ii8

The Agonistic Heritage of Academia 118

The Oral Roots of Agonistic Noetic 122

Residual Orality in Academia 125

The Latin Connection 129

From Agonistic to Coeducation: The In-Depth Revolution 134

Realignment of Agonistic Structures 139

The New Setting 144

5. Some Present Issues i4g

Spectator Sports 152

Politics 158

Business 163

Christian Life and Worship 167

6. Contest and Interiorization 184

The Variable Settings of Contest 184

From Violence to Inwardness in Narrative 187

Contest and the Inward Turn of Scholarship 190

Contest, Consciousness, and the Self 193

Adversativeness in the Service of the Person 199

References 211

Index 223

From antiquity the human being has been considered the microcosm, the little world in which all of the forces and all of the reality of the entire great world, the universe or macrocosm, are represented. Sometimes the human being was thought of as a kind of mirror of all else in the universe. Today we are even more taken by the connections between the human being and the rest of the cosmos than the ancients were, but we cannot be content with such a simplified representation of the connections. Earlier views of the individual as a microcosm tended to be atemporal and generalized. Our present understanding of our complex relationship to the rest of the universe is largely temporal, based on a knowledge of the evolutionary and historical past in relation to the present, and it tends to be quite circumstantial and concerned with details of human behavior.

Humankind has a long past, and it is all present, for, like all beings in history, we are where we are, inevitably, because of where we came from. Even though free choice is partly responsible for our present situation, free choice itself cannot be exercised groundlessly. Any choice is made at a given time in a given situation and thus depends on the options that the time and situation provide, that is, the options that the past has brought into being.