Abstract: In my wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal 7,572-word “Probe: Tom Cooper’s Ambitious 660-Page 2025 Book Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought,” I succinctly highlight Tom Cooper’s ambitious and admirably accessible new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers – which is the revised and updated version of Tom Cooper’s 1979 doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, where both Harold Innis (1894-1952; Ph.D. in history, University of Chicago, 1920) and Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) taught for years. Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan are the co-founders of the so-called Toronto School of Media Ecology within the field of communications studies. At times, certain people also consider the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University to be an adjunct member of the Toronto School of Media Ecology. In any event, I also succinctly highlight Ong’s pertinent thought in the present “Probe” essay. In the present “Probe” essay, I occasionally offer certain personal applications of something I am discussing to myself and my life to concretize and illustrate what I am discussing. In the present “Probe” essay, Ong’s name appears 77 times; Cooper’s, 40 times; Innis’s, 67 times; McLuhan’s 78 times; Jung’s, 33 times; Moore’s, 20 times; Neumann’s, 10 times. These numbers should give you a sense of what you can expect to find in the present “Probe” essay.
Thomas J. Farrell
University of Minnesota Duluth
Are the Canadians Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) and Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), of the University of Toronto, the co-founders of the fabled Toronto School of Media Ecology, relevant to North American readers today?
Is the founding of media ecology studies relevant to North American readers today?
Now, in recent months, in many of my OEN articles, I have explored the meaning of become a fan of another person – as I myself became an Ong fan in the fall semester of 1964 when, at the age of 20, I took my first of five courses from him. As I have noted in certain OEN article, being the fan of a certain person involves being infatuated with that person and that person’s work. From the fall semester of 1964, when I took my first course from Father Ong at Saint Louis University, I have been infatuated with him and his media ecology work. For his part, Father Ong was supportive and encouraged my various efforts over the years to write about his media ecology work. For example, when I published a review of his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture in the weekend edition of now-defunct St. Louis Globe Democrat newspaper in 1971, Father Ong sent me a kind thank-you note.
Now, Tom Cooper is clearly a fan of both Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and each man’s media ecology work. Becoming a fan of another person and his or her work involves falling in love with that other person. Tom Cooper is clearly in love with both Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and with each man’s media ecology work.
Ah, but are North American readers today ready to fall in love with Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and each man’s media ecology work, as Tom Cooper has?
Now, if Innis and McLuhan and the founding of media ecology studies are relevant to North American readers today, then North American readers today should welcome Tom Cooper’s ambitious and admirably accessible new2025 book Wisdom weavers: The lives and thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
Cooper explains the title Wisdom Weavers: “The title ‘Wisdom Weavers” refers to their method of synthesizing or weaving quotes, ideas, authors, and knowledge from a wide range of disciplines into fresh patterns of insight upon their editorial looms” (p. 12).
Well, OK. But Cooper’s title calls to mind Queen Penelope in the Homeric epic The Odyssey weaving with her loom and unweaving as her way of distracting the suitors that she doesn’t want as she waits patiently (patient Penelope) for her husband King Odysseus to return to Ithaca from the ten-year Trojan War.
Now, Cooper’s ambitious and admirably accessible new 660-page book is the revised and updated version of Cooper’s ambitious 1979 doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto – where both Innis and McLuhan taught for years.
In Cooper’s ambitious admirably accessible new 660-page 2025 book, he says, “No one knows who first said it [i.e., the term media ecology]” (p. 462).
When Cooper turns his attention to operationally defining and explaining the term media ecology, he turns to the prolific Lance Strate’s “Foreword” in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. ix-xiv). Cooper quotes Strate as saying, “‘Media ecology is a term used to refer to the kind of perspective associated with Ong, his former teacher [at Saint Louis University] Marshall McLuhan, and orality-literacy scholars such as Eric Havelock, Dorothy Lee, and Jack Goody. Media ecology also incorporates the work of language-oriented critics such as Suzanne Langer and Neil Postmen, technology theorists such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, and media researchers such as Harold Innis, Joshua Meyrowitz, and Jay David Bolter’” (Cooper, 2025, p. 464; quoting Strate from Ong, 2002, p. x).
Subsequently, Cooper says, “By 2006, Strate could look back and chart the media ecology trajectory in a book entitled Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study [2006; with Cooper referencing the table of contents]. He [Strate] would devote an entire chapter to the Toronto School, another to the New York School, six to leading [media] ecologists – Innis, McLuhan, Mumford, Ellul, Ong, and Postman – with still others assigned to germane issues and contexts’” (p. 464).
Oh, Cooper also says, “I was McLuhan’s graduate student for five years, three of which I was also one of his informal, unpaid assistants” (p. 55).
In any event, at the University of Toronto, Innis taught economics, but he published three significant books in communication studies in the early 1950s. McLuhan taught English at St. Mike’s, the Catholic college at the University of Toronto.
McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic) (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (sic) (1964) – the two books that catapulted McLuhan to unprecedented international fame – and controversy.
Two substantial biographers of McLuhan have been published: (1) Philip Marchand’s Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989); and (2) W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography (1997).
The most substantial biography of Innis is Alexander John Watson’s Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (2006).
So does Professor Cooper of Emerson College supersede those respective major biographies of Innis and McLuhan? No, in Cooper’s new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers about Innis and McLuhan, he does not supersede those respective biographies of Innis and McLuhan – basically because Cooper is not writing a biography of either Innis or McLuhan. Rather, Copper incorporates salient biographical information about Innis and McLuhan to help us better understand the two men and where they are coming from in their formulations and contributions.
Aah, but in their formulations and contributions about what? About communication studies writ large – and about the founding of media ecology studies.
Now, in my adult life (I turned 81 on March 17, 2025), I have written a lot about the media ecology studies of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the city of St. Louis, Missouri (USA) – where, over the years, I took five courses from Father Ong.
In my award-winning book Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000), I survey Ong’s life and eleven of his books and selected articles. My book about Ong received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association on June 15, 2001. (I have the framed award citation on display in my home in Duluth, Minnesota.)
Because young Marshall McLuhan was one of young Walter Ong’s teachers in English at Saint Louis University, when Ong was working on his Master’s degree in English, I discuss McLuhan extensively in my book (for specific page references, see the “Index,” p. 297). I also briefly discuss Innis in a note (pp. 200-201n.5).
Disclosure: When I was in the Jesuits (1979-1987), I did my theological studies at the Jesuit theologate at the University of Toronto – where both Innis and McLuhan had taught years earlier.
In any event, I have also written bout Ong’s media ecology thought in my somewhat lengthy OEN article “Walter J. Ong’s Philosophical Thought” (dated September 20, 2020; viewed 3,155 times as of June 19, 2025).
Now, when young McLuhan was teaching English at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), he was working on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) and the history of the verbal arts in our Western cultural history. McLuhan’s 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the book titled The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (2006). In Cooper’s “Bibliography” (pp. 587-658), he lists McLuhan’s 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation by its original titled The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Cooper, 2025, p. 602). In Cooper’s various endnotes and in his “Bibliography,” he does not seem to be aware that McLuhan’s 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was posthumously published in 2006.
In Cooper’s “Bibliography, he lists Edward A. Comor’s book titled W. T. Easterbrook: Harold Innis’s Final Course as “(in press)” (p. 590), However, Comor’s edited new 2025 book has now been published by Peter Lang.
In Cooper’s Chapter 4: “Of Education, English, and Economics,)) he mentions Comor’s book about Innis (p. 215).
I discuss Comor’s new 2025 book in my new wide-ranging 7,174-word review essay titled “Edward A. Comor’s 2025 Book W. T. Easterbrook: Harold Innis’s Final Course, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought” that is available online through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy.
Now, the young Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan taught English at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the city of St. Louis, Missouri (USA), from 1937 to 1944. At that time, the young Walter Ong, as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation, was sent to study philosophy in Latin and English at Saint Louis University, where he did his Master’s thesis under young Marchall McLuhan’s direction on sprung rhythm in the Victorian Jesuit poet recently posthumously published poetry.
part of his lengthy Jesuit formation to study philosophy and English there. Young Ong took at least one course from young McLuhan, and then young McLuhan served as the director of Ong’s Master’s thesis on sprung In my book, I discuss Marshal McLuhan extensively, because the young Canadian taught English at Saint Louis University for several years (1937-1944) when the young Walter Ong was sent to Saint Louis University as rhythm in the posthumously published poetry of the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).
Ong’s 1941 Master’s thesis under McLuhan was published in 1949, slightly revised, as “Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry.” The slightly revised 1949 version of Ong’s essay was reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 111-174).
However, for a cogent critique of and correction of Ong’s account of Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, see James I. Wimsatt’s Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (2006).
However, some of my research about McLuhan took me into researching later years in life when he taught English at St. Mike’s at the University of Toronto – at a time when Harold Innis was an intellectual giant at the University of Toronto. Consequently, I had to learn something about Harold Innis.
My research on Harold Innis at the time led me to list my research results in the “Bibliography” on my book (Farrell, 2000, pp. 229-287) as follows (in alphabetical order):
Carey, J. W. (1965). Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
Creighton, D. (1957). Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a scholar.
Havelock, E. A. (1982). Harold A. Innis: A memoir [pp. 13-43; “Preface” by Marshall McLuhan (pp. 9-10)].
Havelock, E. A. (1986). After words: A post script [A transcribed interview conducted by C. J. Swearingen].
McLuhan, M. (1953). The later Innis.
Now, Ong published an essay titled “Space and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism” in Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications, the print journal co-edited by Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter. Subsequently, Ong expanded that essay and published the expanded version as “System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism” in the journal Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva), (May 1956). Subsequently, Ong reprinted the May 1956 version in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (pp. 68-87). Subsequently, it was reprinted in volume three of Ong’s Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1995, pp. 9-27).
Now, in Comor’s “Index” in his new 2025 book (pp. 151-173), I find listings for each of these four authors that I listed in my 2000 book (Carey, Creighton, Havelock, and McLuhan), with specific page references to Comor’s “Introduction” (pp. xi-lvi).
Now, in an annotation after the bibliographic entry on Havelock (1982), I say the following: “Harold Innis (1894-1952), who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was a remarkably prolific and rightly famous faculty member at the University of Toronto (some of his books are listed below). Havelock a faculty member at Victoria College at the University of Toronto from 1929 to 1947. After he had become familiar with Harvard’s Milman Parry’s work on oral composition (see Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited by Adam Parry [1971]), Havelock delivered some public lectures at the University of Toronto on oral composition in the 1940s, which Innis evidently attended (Havelock 1986a, p. 17).
Now, in addition, in one of my lengthy notes in the “Notes” in my book (Farrell, 2000, pp. 197-228), I say the following: “In a 30-page memoir of Harold Adams Innis, whose Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951) impressed Marshall McLuhan (1953, 1962), Havelock comments of the role of technology rather explicitly, because technology was a strong focus in Innis’s work:
“As [Innis] reviews the varieties of material means by which men [sic] communicate, and the economic effects that various means produce, communication itself becomes the master of men [sic], not their servant. But latent in this analysis, never far below the surface, one detects the recurrent notion, or belief, that it is not technology but content that is important. Communication is not a matter of mere gadgetry, nor, on the other hand, is it an activity which is self-justifying, pursued only for its own sake, with no end beyond that. Accepting the premise, as I think he does, that the content still remains the fruit of human thought, which for Innis is the paramount reality. The importance of studying different technologies is that it reveals varying methods by which minds communicate with each other, in pursuit of given ends, some of which are more worthy than others, and the technologies of communication have some effect on the choices made. I am aware that is saying I go beyond anything Innis explicitly say. But as one reads him, one senses a note of humanism, a sense of values which, to be sure, he assumed could be compromised by technology, but which are not created by it’ (Havelock 1982a, p. 38)” (Farrell, 2000, pp. 200-201).
Finally, I should also note here that Ong refers to Innis twice and lists three of Innis’s books in the bibliography in his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (pp. 7, 99, and 334), the expanded version of Ong’s 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. In his bibliography, Ong lists the following three books by Innis:
(1) The Bias of Communication (1951);
(2) Changing Concepts of Time (1952);
(3) Empire and Communications (1950).
Now, after Marshall McLuhan died in 1980, in the summer of 1981, Ong published “McLuhan as Teacher” The Future is a Thing of the Past” in the Journal of Communication. It is reprinted in volume one of Ong’s Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1992b, pp. 11-18).
Whew! For me, this brief review of my own research from more than twenty-five years ago now for my book has been a welcome trip down memory lane. But more to the point, my research from more than twenty-five years ago now shows you why I decided to write a review of Comor’s new 2025 book. Even so, I want to stress here that I am not an expert in Innis’s thought. But Comor is an expert in Innis’s thought.
In any event, my observations in the present “Probe” essay of Comor’s new 2025 book are based on my free associations that were prompted by certain prompts made by Comor in his long “Introduction” of Easterbrook’s account of Innis’s thought or by Innis’s thought as recounted and/or quoted by either Easterbrook — or by Comor.
Because I am not an expert on Innis’s thought or on Easterbrook’s thought or on Comor’s work, I offer my observations here to you as the reader of the present “Probe” essay for your consideration in great humility. Of course, you are free to consider my observations here and then dismiss them as not important to you as a media ecologist.
Now, in looking over Comor’s “Index,” I spotted a book title that, figuratively speaking, jumped off the page and got me to turn immediately to read about in in the text of Comor’s new 2025 book. In Comor’s “Index,” I learned that Lord Macmillan published a book titled Two Ways of Thinking (1934) (Comor, “Index,” 2025, p. 171; also, p. 163 – where I learned that I should see pp. 48 and 49 of text of Easterbrook’s account of Innis’s thought – pp. 48-51).
Wow! In recent months, I have been writing about the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist Carl Gustav Jung’s chapter titled “Two Kinds of Thinking” in various articles that I have published online at the website known as OEN (the acronym stands for OpEdNews; the website’s URL is https://www.opednes.com).
See, for example, my wide-ranging and somewhat lengthy OEN article titled “About J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fantasy Novel, The Lord of the Rings” (dated February 15, 2025; viewed 1,108 times as of June 19, 2025).
In addition, see my earlier OEN article titled “Some Reflections on the Work of C. G. Jung and Walter J. Ong” (dated December 28, 2024; viewed 1,230 times as of June 19, 2025).
Now, in my various OEN articles about Jung’s account of “Two Kinds of Thinking,” I have succinctly characterized Jung’s thought about the two kinds of thinking: (1) fantasy thinking involving image and associative thinking, on the one hand, and on the other, (2) directed thinking involving logic.
Ong’s massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, mentioned above, is a history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle down to Ramus and beyond in our Western cultural history.
Now, I read Jung’s chapter titled “Two Kinds of Thinking” in his extensively revised and re-titled 1952 book titled Symbols of Transformation, second revised edition, translated by R. F. C. Hull (1967, pp. 7-33).
But Jung’s important chapter “Two Kinds of Thinking” in his extensively revised and re-titled 1953 book Symbols of Transformation was first published in Jung’s 1912 book in German that the American psychologist Beatrice M. Hinkle of Cornell University translated into English as Psychology of the Unconscious (Moffat, Yard, and Company, 1916; “Concerning the Two Kinds of Thinking,” pp. 3-41).
Now, I have no reason to suspect from Easterbrook’s account of Lord Hugh Pattison Macmillan’s 1934 book Two Ways of Thinking that Lord Macmillan was familiar with Jung’s chapter titled “Concerning the Two Kinds of Thinking” in Hinkle’s 1916 English translation of Jung’s 1912 book in German.
Now, a word is also in order here about the title of Jung’s extensively revised and re-re-titled 1952 book Symbols of Transformation. You see, in it, Jung is primarily concerned with what he regarded as significant psychological transformation in a person.
Because the term transformation is not widely used, I want to say here that Walter Ong’s lengthy Jesuit formation, between the time when he entered the Jesuit novitiate in September 1939 and the time when he was ordained a Jesuit priest in June 1946, was designed precisely to produce in him in his life a significant psychological transformation.
Lengthy Jesuit formation = psychological transformation over time.
Ah, but what about my own personal experience and my own personal psychological transformation? At the present time, as a result of the recent death of Pope Francis (1936-2025), about whom I wrote many OEN articles, am I now undergoing a further psychological transformation in my own life? Yes, I am. That is, I am presently undergoing more than the experience of grief that I would expect to undergo as a result of the pope’s death. However else I might describe what I am presently undergoing – besides grief – I am still too close to my own present experience to put my experience into further words. Yes, the words psychological transformation are undoubtedly very general words for me to use here in the present deeply personal review essay – which now further advances my other recent deeply personal OEN articles.
You see, because I was in the Jesuits (1979-1987), I took a special interest in the first Jesuit pope. I read books and articles about him, and I kept up with the news about his current actions and words. In a word, I became a Pope Francis fan. I fell in love with him. I identified with him as a late-in-life-for-me new father figure in my life.
In any event, Pope Francis is now deceased – as Father Ong also is. And on May 8, 2025, the cardinal-electors elected Cardinal Robert Prevost as the new Pope Leo XIV.
Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903; pope 1878-1903) is famous for his encyclicals that started what is known as Catholic social teaching. Pope Francis’ widely read 2015 eco-encyclical is by far the most widely read encyclical in the tradition of Catholic social teaching.
For further information about Catholic social teaching, see the lay English Catholic theologian Anna Rowlands’ book Toward a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (2021).
I hope that the name Leo XIV signals that the new American pope is deeply committed to the tradition of Catholic social teaching.
Now, starting in the fall semester of 1964, I fell in love with and had identified with the Jesuit Father Walter J. Ong and his media ecology work – a lifelong love affair that did not end with his death in 2003 and the profound experience of grief that his death brought into my life at that time. (My Dad was born in 1916. Father Ong was born in 1912. So, Father Ong was about four years older than my Dad.)
Yes, in addition to having an early childhood image of our moms (or mother-figures) in our psyches, we also have an early childhood image of our dads (or father-figures) in our psyches. So, in addition to the liberation of endogamous kinship libido “married within” our psyches to our early childhood image of our moms (or mother-figures), we also need to experience the liberation of endogamous kinship libido “married within” our psyches to our early childhood image of our dads (or father-figures).
I borrow the expression endogamous kinship libido from Ong’s succinctly summary of the Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann’s Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull (1954; original edition, 1949). Ong’s succinct summary of Neumann’s Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in The Origins and History of Consciousness appears in Ong’s previously unpublished essay titled “Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness” in his 1971 book titled Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (pp. 1-22):
“The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche’s imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., “married” within one’s psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche’s overman?] – or, more properly, personalism – of modern man [sic]).”
Ong also sums up Neumann’s Jungian account of the stages of consciousness in his (Ong’s) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981, pp. 18-19; but also see the “Index” for further references to Neumann [p. 228]), the published version of Ong’s 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
I have quoted and discussed Ong’s succinct summary of Neumann’s Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his (Ong’s) 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology in my 1991 essay “Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today” in the well-organized anthology titled Media Consciousness, and culture: Explorations of Walter Ong’s Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (pp. 194-209).
In any event, Ong’s chapter titled “Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness” in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (pp. 1-22) is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1999, pp. 93-102).
Now, for the sake of discussion, we may ask, “What, exactly, is supposed to happen to a man who experiences the liberation of endogamous kinship libido that is “married within” his psyche, on the one hand, to his early childhood image of his mom (or mother-figure) and, on the other hand, to his early childhood image of his dad (or father-figure)?”
For an answer to this crucial question, I turn to the late Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in religion and psychology, University of Chicago, 1975) of the Chicago Theological Seminary. With Douglas Gillette as his co-author, Robert Moore wrote the revised and expanded second edition of the book titled The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (2007; original edition, 1992a). Robert Moore says that the optimal personality achieves “a conscious, respectful, ongoing, and carefully-tended relationship between the Ego and [the archetypal] Self. The envisioned relationship between Ego and Self supercedes the high performance personality’s capacity to become aware of, differentiate from, respect, and achieve basic regulation and balance of the archetypal forces characteristic of the four archetypal quadrants” (p. 246).
I equate what Robert Moore here refers to as the high performance personality with stage seven of the eight stages of consciousness that Neumann describes, and I equate what Robert Moore here refers to as the optimal performance personality with stage eight of the eight stages of consciousness that Neuman describes.
When Robert Moore here refers to “the four archetypal quadrants” (p. 246), he is referring to the four masculine archetypes of maturity in the human psyche: (1) the King archetype of maturity; (2) the masculine Warrior/Knight archetype of maturity; (3) the masculine Magician/Shaman archetype of maturity; and (4) the masculine Lover archetype of maturity.
With Douglas Gillette as his co-author, Robert Moore published a series of four books about the four masculine archetypes of maturity in the early 1990s:
(1) The king within: Accessing the king [archetype of maturity] in the male psyche (1992a);
(2) The warrior within: Accessing the knight [archetype of maturity] in the male psyche (1992b);
(3) The magician within: Accessing the shaman [archetype of maturity] in the male psyche (1993a);
(4) The lover within: Accessing the lover [archetype of maturity] in the male psyche (1993b).
Now, evidently, with the death of Pope Francis, the time has now come in my life for me to experience the liberation of endogamous kinship libido “married within” my psyche to my early childhood image of my Dad in my psyche – and consequently the further psychological transformation of my adult life at the age of 81. Just what this may mean for my life going forward remains to be seen. But it certainly means that I need to develop what Robert Moore refers to as my Ego-Self axis in my psyche.
I interpret the liberation of endogamous kinship libido “married within” our psyches to our early childhood image of our moms (or mother-figures) as accessing the optimal and positive form of the Queen archetype in our psyches.
Similarly, I interpret the liberation of endogamous kinship libido “married within” our psyches to our early childhood image of our dads (or father-figures) as accessing the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in our psyches.
In the revised and expanded second edition of Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s important book The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (Exploration Press, 2006, pp. 53 and 70; orig. ed., 1992a), Moore and Gillette associate the optimal and positive form of the King archetype of maturity in the human psyche with dynamic calm – which surely sounds like a quality I would welcome.
On page 53 of The King Within, Moore and Gillette write of “the dynamic calm that is a hallmark of the King energy.”
On page 70, Moore and Gillette say, “All pairs of psychologically dynamic opposites [i.e., all the “shadow” forms of the eight archetypes of maturity in the human psyche] are reconciled in the tranquil by dynamic Self at the psyche’s Center.” (The tranquil but dynamic Self at the psyche’s Center” is a conceptual construct that Moore and Gillete are here borrowing from Jung.)
For further information about Jung’s conceptualization of the archetype of the Self (capitalized), see (1) the entry on the Self in Daryl Sharp’s book Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts (1991, pp.119-122) and (2) the entry on the Self in the book titled A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis by Andrew Samuels, Boni Shorter, and Fred Plaut (1986, pp. 135-137).
Extrapolating from Moore and Gillette’s associating dynamic calm with the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in the human psyche, I also associate dynamic claim with the optimal and positive form of the Queen archetype of maturity in the human psyche.
Now, if my two interpretations of liberation from endogamous kinship libido “married within” our psyches to our early childhood image of our mom (or mother-figure), on the one hand, and, on the other, of our own dad (or father-figure) are correct, your guess is as good as mine as to what exactly these two psychological transformations in my life will mean in the practical order of my life. Stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, I will just have to be patient and wait and see what unfolds now over time.
Now, even though I refer to myself here, I also want to say here that Ong identifies stage eight in Neumann’s Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness with the development of personalist thought in the twentieth century. Ong characterized his own work as phenomenological and personalist in cast, and I have honored these two aspects of his thought in the subtitle of my award-winning book Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000).
Now, as you might expect, in my various OEN articles in which I discuss Jung’s account of “The Two Ways of Thinking,” I align what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking with what Ong refers to as primary oral thought and expression (also known as primary orality, for short). In his account of orally based thought and expression in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (pp. 36-57).
I have discussed Ong’s 1982 account of characteristics of orally based thought and expression on my article “Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible” in Explorations in Media Ecology, 11(3&4), (2012), pp. 255-272.
Now, in my various OEN articles in which I discuss Jung’s two kinds of thinking, fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, on the one hand, and, on the other, directed thinking involving logic, I then also align what Jung refers to as directed thinking with what Ong refers to as literate alphabetic thought (known as literacy, for short).
Now, the most efficient way for me to provide you with an overview of the contents of Cooper’s new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers is to tell you the contents of his book set forth in the table of contents:
Title Page (p. i).
Copyright [Page] (p. ii).
Dedication [Page] (p. iii).
“Preface: The Incredible and Unlikely Lives [of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan by T. C. McLuhan]” (pp. 1-4).
“Foreword [by Robert K. Logan]” (pp. 5-9).
“Introduction” (pp. 10-20).
Chapter 1: “The Unknown Innis” (pp. 21-39).
Chapter 2: “The Unknown McLuhan” (pp. 40-71).
Chapter 3: “Of Canada, City, and Country” (pp. 72-109).
Chapter 4: “Of Education, English, and Economics” (pp. 110-165).
Chapter 5: “Two Men on a Collision Course” (pp. 166-191).
Chapter 6: “Toronto: ‘The Meeting Place’” (pp. 192-220).
Chapter 7: “From Innis to McLuhan” (pp. 221-292).
Chapter 8: “The Thought of Harold Innis” (pp. 293-339).
Chapter 9: “The Art and Thought of Marshall McLuhan” (pp. 340-438).
Chapter 10: “The Legacy Lives On” (pp. 439-495).
Chapter 11: “Of Bias, Balance, and Beacons” (pp. 496-586).
“Bibliography” (pp. 587-658).
“About the Author” (p. 659).
“Praise for the Author” (p. 660).
“Books by the Author” (p. 661).
Now, Tom Cooper’s new 660-page illustrated 2025 book Wisdom Weavers does not have an “Index.”
Now, In Cooper’s Chapter 2: “The Unknown McLuhan,” Cooper singles out a certain quality of McLuhan’s for our attention and appreciation: McLuhan’s Appreciation (esp. pp. 43-44). At first blush, McLuhan’s appreciation for whatever he is writing or taking about may not strike you as a particularly praiseworthy quality for him to have had. However, subsequently, Cooper singles out another McLuhan quality for us to notice: McLuhan’s “seeing all things new” (p. 45). Cooper says, “Thus McLuhan’s ‘appreciation’ inclined toward observation from an unprecedented angle of viewing” (p. 45).
Oh my God, what a wonderful gift to have in life – to wake up each day “seeing all things anew”! Wow! You are indeed waking up refreshed each day if you can “see all things anew” each day! You are blessed!
And we the readers of Tom Cooper’s new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers are blessed that he knew McLuhan well enough to know that he woke up each day “seeing all things anew.”
Now, in Cooper’s Chapter 4: “Of Education, English, and Economics,” he mentions Ong in connection with the quantification of thought (p. 142). Cooper says, “Quantification [of thought] meant that dialectics was not so much an important discipline in and of itself but rather the pedagogical rotisserie by which all other disciplines would be turned over, carved into slices, and served for discussion” (pp. 142-143).
However, Cooper only makes a broad reference to Ong’s massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of discourse to the Art of Reason, mentioned above. So I would like to note here that Ong discusses the quantification of thought in late medieval logic in Chapter IV: “The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought” in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (pp. 53-91).
Now, Ong finished writing his massively researched doctoral dissertation about Ramus and Ramist logic and turned it in at Harvard by the end of the summer 1954.
However, Ong reflected further on the quantification of thought in late medieval logic, and he wrote about it further in his article “System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism” in Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva), 18 (May 1956): pp. 222-239. Subsequently, Ong reprinted his 1956 article in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (pp. 68-87). Subsequently, Ong’s 1956 article was also reprinted in volume three of Ong’s Faith and Context, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1995, pp. 239-245).
In any event, in Ong’s 1956 article, here is what further he had to say about the quantification of thought in late medieval logic:
“In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place – not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies” (boldface emphasis here added by me; quoted from Ong, 1962, p. 72).
Now, McLuhan’s literary criticism has been gathered together in the book titled The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan: 1943-1962, edited by Eugene McNamara (McGraw-Hill, 1969).
Ong’s somewhat lengthy review of The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan is reprinted in An Ong Reader (2002, pp. 69-78), mentioned above.
In conclusion, if North American readers today are interested in learning more about the two Canadians Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, they might want to start your further investigation by reading Tom Cooper’s ambitious and admirably accessible new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers.
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