Here are some quotes and some of my thoughts as I read Chapter 1 of Fighting for Life by Walter Ong.
“The biological side of our nature is nothing to be ashamed of.” (10)
“Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human lfie, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hositilites and to build friendship and cooperation.” (15)
At first, I didn’t understand what Ong meant by contests that can be helpful to society or to interpersonal relationships, but he gave examples later that made sense. For example, we define ourselves against our parents; this contest is part of our development, and without it, we wouldn’t become individuals.
Charles Sanders Peirce says, “A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist.” (17)
G.E.R. Lloyd in Polarity and Analogy (1966) shows that adversativeness in Greek thought was essential. (20)
“Alvin W. Gouldner has shown that the ancient Greek way of life was marked by (1) the quest for fame…through (2) personal action in (3) a contest system of operation setting person against person.” (21)
“[T]he Greeks seem to have made more careful use of adversativeness than did other cultures, both as an analytic tool and as an operational intellectual procedure.” (21)
Greek fame “grew out of reflection on disputation, on verbal and intellectual contest, on the question, ‘How is it that what you say demolishes what I say?'” (21-22).
This is highly agonistic, in my opinion, and very aggressive (which Ong will discuss later). This definitely eliminates the feminine, the cooperative, from public discourse and seeking fame. Wow.
“With logic, ancient Greece formalized adversativeness as no other culture had done.” (22)
“Rhetoric, out of which formal logic grew, proceeds also by opposition, but by contrast with formal logic, rhetoric deals typically with soft oppositions. Rhetorical oppositions are negotiable.” (22)
Modern academics have become “unabashed irenicists” (24). This is very interesting to me, because do we try to mask conflict now too much? Is it to be avoided at all costs? I feel that we too often mask conflict with consensus, voting, and compromise, which usually don’t actually remove conflict, but mask its existence. Something to ponder.
Ancient Greece: “…the totally male population of academia, the vigorous and often brutal disciplining of pupils, the dominantly agonistic teaching procedures, the constant recycling of knowledge, even that acquired by reading, through the agora of public oral disputation, the programmatically combative oral testing of knowledge…” (25)
On page 36 Ong takes a moment to note that agonistic is not our only structure. Indeed, there are other structures that are very common. In fact, we all first learn language from our mothers, thus the term “Mother tongue,” a nearly ubiquitous term across cultures, and this is not agonistic. (36)
“Contest” has most recently been linked to “aggression” (38).
John Dollard writes “Aggression is always a consequence of frustration” (39).
“With or without this hypothesis, aggression does appear always to involve volunteer impingement on another’s person or possessions, intrusional initiative, physical or psychological.” Aggression is an action, into someone else’s territory. (39)
Aggression can be a sign of weakness and insecurity. (41)
Greek word agonia is akin to “contest.” agon is an assembly or arena. (43) “In the litigious Greek world…an assembly, getting together to discourse, was rather essentially a mobilization for contest.” (43-44)
Huizingo states, “All knowledge—and this includes philosophy—is polemical by nature.” (45)
I wonder if this last fact is true. I agree that all knowledge is socially constructed, but is it, according to dictionary.com, “Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation”? That’s an interesting question. I suppose it’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t all knowledge growing out of some conflict, some contest? I suppose then, that the real question should become what kind of contest should this be? Should it be an aggressive one? Can there be contests that are not aggressive? I have so much to ponder on this, and so little time. I’m gonna walk home and read Ong’s next chapter, and then, I swear, I’ll write my paper.
