“The term 'catholic' (katholikos, a Greek word adopted by the Latin Church) does not mean universal (that is, 'inclusive,' 'encompassing,' and hence by implication to some degree bounding) but rather, in its Greek etymology, kata + holos, through-the-whole, outgoing, expansive.”— Walter Ong, amazon.comTagged: Italian Pagan Catholicism, Etymology, Word Origins, Catholic
“Total explicitness is impossible. The effort of formal logic to make thought entirely explicit, while an admirable and in many ways indispensable and fantastically productive effort, is ultimately doomed to failure and entails deep psychological strain because of its unreality. Thought can only be m…”— Walter Ong, amazon.comTagged: Logic Against Logic, Against Objectivity, Open Closure
“Hypervisualism tends to neglect this truth and even sets out to reduce sound itself, and for that matter all the other senses, to vision through devices such as charts and wave measurements, mathematical or oscillographic, forgetting that none of these make any noise and that hence, however informat…”— Walter Ong, amazon.comTagged: Hypervisualism, Reductionism
“The terms in mathematical definitions or axioms can never be fully defined, but at one point or another must be resolved on grounds other than those of formal mathematics, grounds where persons have some general agreement regarding the meaning of words in real life, as the foundations of mathematics…”— Walter J Ong, amazon.comTagged: Against Math, Mathematics, Objectivity, Problems of Objectivity
“Openness does not mean lack of organization, lack of principle, or lack of all resistance. For the human being, at least, it means quite the contrary: the strengthening of organization, principles, and resistance where needed, so that interaction with the outside can be strong and real. Indeed, para…”— Walter Ong, amazon.comTagged: Openness, Organization