ABSTRACT
Since Walter J.Ong’s Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) and Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), an idea that the grounds of western thinking switched during the Renaissance from verbal to visual and spatial has become a historiographical and philosophical commonplace. McLuhan has Peter Ramus (1515-72) as the first great ‘surf-boarder’ on the ‘Gutenberg wave’ and echoes Ong in seeing him as having devised ‘visual programs’ for new forms of knowledge that resulted directly from the printed book’s rapid spread. The book, he adds, ‘was a new visual aid available to all students and it rendered the older education obsolete. The book was literally a teaching machine where the manuscript was a crude teaching tool only.’1 Ong argues that how Ramus organized and operated this machine ‘forces the pupil to process all his mental possessions through some art or curriculum subject before he puts them to use’, on grounds that ‘it is the “arts” or curriculum subjects which hold the world together. Nothing is accessible for “use”… until it has first been put through the curriculum. The schoolroom is by implication the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway.’2
