A escrita como uma tecnologia que reestrutura a mente - Parte III

por Leandro Oliveira

Retomando as citações sobre o assunto para seguir em frente no início do ano que vem:

As Havelock’s recent monograph, “The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics” (1983), has painstakingly shown, before writing had taken possession of the Greek consciousness, the central question of metaphysics, the nature of being, Aristotle’s to ti ēn einai, could not effectively suggest itself to the human mind. All science needs writing in order to achieve the tight, sequential, linear, “logical” organization that science requires. But metaphysics needs writing not only to organize itself analytically as a science but also to become aware of its quarry, being or existence as such. Oral cultures concern themselves with doings, with happenings, not with being as such: they narrativize their own existence and their environment. Metaphysics is not fond of narrative. It wants to know what a thing is, and ultimately what is or being or existence itself is. To oral peoples, such questions appear trivializing. What does all this say about the intimate relationship of the deepest interior of the human mind to technology? Without the technology of writing, it appears, the mind cannot fi nd, or even take an interest in, the subject-matter of metaphysics. (...)

It seems a far cry from the relatively simple technology of writing or even from print to the vast technologies whose products we know today—an automobile, an airplane, a spacecraft, an automated automobile manufacturing plant. The line from writing to print to the computer is really a direct line, as earlier suggested, moving toward greater and greater linear, quantified, analysis achieved by more and more refined management of local motion. Yet writing, print, and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. The other gargantuan technologies have mostly to do with the creation of machines or other products for physical use—high-rise buildings, for example—that themselves have nothing to do with technologies for the management of thought and expression.

Walter J. Ong in "Orality-Literacy Studies and the Unity of the Human Race"