What is W.J.Ong really saying

Really Trying to Mean

I will speak , therefore , of a letter - of the first letter , if the alphabet , and most of the speculations which have ventured into it , are to be believed

- Jacques Derrida Differance

It is no accident that the best tend to be amongst the most voracious and most thoughtful of readers . To be called into meaningful existence a text cannot stand by itself that is , it cannot live outside of culture . When we say that a particular text means something , we are incorporating our own ideas as readers

into what we think the author meant , ultimately producing another version of what the text really means . This is a significant delineation that brings forth the notion of reading , writing , and interpretation in the realm of discourse

Worlds collide in the act of interiorizing alphabetic literacy . Truth and meaning become contingent upon the heterogeneity of thought that is necessary to determine how a text relates to the reality of the reader In Ong 's words , The text has no meaning until someone reads it , and to make sense it must be interpreted , which is to say related to the reader 's world ' Following this lead we can say that we create meaning but we are not the original creator because the reading from which we base our conceptions has been in existence since before Socrates himself

To build from this past , Jaspers locates the reality and the implications of historical thought when he writes , It is impossible...