Between Classical African and Contemporary Western Philosophies of Nature and of Consciousness : What is Unique? : A Study in Comparative Ecological Metaphysics in Dialogue with the Art of Joseph Eze and Chukzmore Chukz
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The orientation of classical African and perhaps nature centred cosmologies generally, of blossoming in terms of the flowering of perceptions of even the most minuscule characteristics of nature in terms of the most far reaching cosmological associations, as in the example of the evocation of life force, of the capacity for being and growth, of existence and development, in terms of the descent of dew in the Yoruba Ifa poem "Ayajo Asuwada" as shown in the central body of this essay, is projected in this painting in the manner in which, as suggested by the consonance between the title of this poetic visualisation and its central structural motif, the spider's web acts as the central design inspiration for the painting's unity of varied parts in terms of a magically realized configuration of structural and colour relations of organic, plant like, human and abstract forms, suggesting a contemplation of humanity's place in a scheme within which she is embedded as participant and observer.
Image and text : Fisherman's Invocation by Chukzmore Chukz
David Chalmers and Panprotopsychism
Image and text : Joseph Eze's Butterfly Rhythms
David Abram and Animism
David Abram
Image and text : Joseph Eze's Circle, Lizard, Plant and Woman
Animism
Cultural Instantiations of Global Cognitive Rhythms
Image and text : Chukzmore Chukz' The Sea in the Mind
What are African Ecological Metaphysics and African Environmental Ethics?
Thomas Coburn and Tanzania’s 0l Doinyo Lengai, "the Mountain of God"
Image and text : Joseph Eze's Daughter of Fecund Darkness
The Sublime from the Massive to the Diminutive
Image
The Sublime in Images of Living Motion
The Ant as Cosmological Paradigm
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The Contemporary Struggle for Meaning and Livelihood
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"Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth... these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women's empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all."
From UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's 2011 address to the 66th General Assembly: "We the Peoples" quoted by Chukzmore Chukz in relation to his work directly above which he describes as constructed of "Wood fiber, metal wire and acrylic , 48 x 48 inches , 2019."
A sense of divine omniscience is inescapable here, a convergence, through the human form, of ideas of comprehensive cognitive scope, either in mythic terms attributable to humanoid figures whose capacities transcend that of humanity or in terms of human aspiration to encapsulate the totality of possibility, unifying the concrete and the abstract, the animate and the inanimate, as these have occurred across the emergence and development of life on Earth.
Among the sources of environmental ethics that have been assessed, none has been more important than perceptions that environmental systems are sacred, or conversely, desecrated. Those with such perceptions have often also criticized the world’s predominant religions—which consider the sacred as above and beyond this world or as a penultimate place to be transcended—as promoting environmentally destructive attitudes and behaviors.
In contrast, in North America since the mid-nineteenth century, environmental ethics have typically been rooted in scientific worldviews, which in turn typically contribute to affective experiences of belonging and connection to nature, kinship feelings toward non-human organisms, ecocentric values, and expressions of reverence for life. Even among those who have left behind conventional religious beliefs, understanding the biosphere and all those who enliven it as sacred and worthy of reverent care has and will continue to provide a powerful foundation for environmental ethics.
Wow. I had thought the scientific worldview as a dominant structure in Western thought was defined by a perspective on nature that is anything but sacred, pursuing investigations into the unity of material existence in the context of a unification of the laws of physics-Unified Field Theory-but eschewing conceptions of the affective, the emotional, of identification with non-human forms of being, with creatures who do not demonstrate the intellectual possibilities central to science.
Ideas from the life sciences and the physical sciences, particularly the ideas that ecosystems, the planet itself, and even the cosmos are interconnected and ‘organismic’, have influenced the development of sustainability discourse.
Sustainability advocates strategically deploy such scientific concepts through subtly spiritualized language and metaphors to advance their arguments. Even when the language of sustainability advocacy is not explicitly religious, it reflects core values and deep beliefs of particular individuals, communities, or groups. In such cases, sustainability movements derive their power by following a neo-religious narrative, and when deployed in the public sphere, such narratives are performing religious work.
...a growing number of scientists…share a central, common denominator belief in…the sacrality of the evolutionary processes that produce biological diversity. Participants in such scientific professions often view their work as a spiritual practice. Some of these have been influenced by those who, like the religion scholar Thomas Berry, believe that science-grounded cosmological and evolutionary narratives should be understood as sacred narratives, and that so understood, they will promote reverence-for-life ethics.
... scientific discourse [ on nature] employed a model with a continuum of perspectives on how humans value nature: from ‘Nature as Object’ (one extreme) to ‘Nature as Spirit’ (the other extreme). Their most novel suggestion was that this linear continuum was bending into a horseshoe, the ends moving gradually toward one another, as contemporary science evolved in a direction that fostered the emergence of a bridging science capable of integrating these two former extremes. As traditional Western science (on the ‘Nature as Object’ end) gradually adopts the organismic worldview common in deep ecology (which lies at the opposite end of the continuum), the bridge is constructed.
Fisherman's Invocation
by
Chukzmore Chukz
“A poor fisherman who knows the beauties of the misty
mornings is much richer than a wealthy man who sleeps till noon in his palace!”, "sea the water is a color for which there is no name
, ” “Break, break, break, On
thy cold gray stones, O Sea! "
Quotations, left to right, from Mehmet Murat İldan, from an unknown author and from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break", by Chukzmore Chukz in relation to his work directly above which he describes as "Wood fiber, metal wire and acrylic, 48 x 77inches, 2018".
Freya Mathews is an Australian environmental philosopher whose main work has been in the areas of ecological metaphysics and panpsychism.
Her current special interests are in ecological civilization; indigenous (Australian and Chinese) perspectives on "sustainability" and how these perspectives may be adapted to the context of contemporary global society; panpsychism and critique of the metaphysics of modernity; and wildlife ethics and rewilding in the context of the Anthropocene. She is the author of several books and over seventy articles on ecological philosophy and currently holds the post of Adjunct Professor of Environmental Philosophy at La Trobe University.
In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind, or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.
Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism.The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.
Ori is essence, attribute, and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond.
"Two iwakura-a rock where a kami or spirit is said to reside in the [Japanese ] religion of Shinto”
“In the art of the Japanese rock garden, the artist must be aware of the rocks’ ‘ishigokoro’ ( ‘heart’ or ‘mind’)”
Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe. In this entry, we focus on panpsychism as it has been discussed and developed in Western philosophy.
Panpsychism seems to be such an ancient doctrine that its origins long precede any records of systematic philosophy. Some form of animism, which, insofar as it is any kind of doctrine at all, is very closely related to panpsychism, seems to be an almost universal feature of pre-literate societies, and studies of human development suggest that children pass through an animist phase, in which mental states are attributed to a wide variety of objects quite naturally (see Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, 1929). It is tempting to speculate that the basic idea of panpsychism arose in what is a common process of explanatory extension based upon the existence of what is nowadays called “folk psychology”. It would have been difficult for our ancestors, in the face of a perplexing and complex world, to resist applying one of the few systematic, and highly successful, modes of explanation in their possession.
Panpsychism is a philosophical theory which holds that everything in the universe, the inorganic world as well as the organic, has some degree of consciousness.
At the end of the twentieth century, there was a renaissance of panpsychism in analytic philosophy of mind and metaphysics due to the seemingly insurmountable problems of reductive materialism. David Chalmers and Galen Strawson argued that in order for physicalism to allow for the emergence of mind, the nature of physical reality must contain more than what physics describes: human consciousness needs to be grounded in the intrinsic natures of physical reality.
Common to all expressions of panpsychism are two arguments: (1)
The genetic argument, which is based on the philosophical principle ex nihilo,
nihil fit (“nothing comes out of nothing”). If human consciousness is to evolve
from a physical basis [ in the light of evolutionary theory], then rudimentary forms of mental being need to be
present at the very basis of this evolutionary process.
(2) The argument from intrinsic nature... Panpsychists argue that the intrinsic nature of matter is known in the case of human consciousness. Being ontological monists, they claim that the intrinsic nature of matter in general is mental being or proto-mental: “Physics is the knowledge of structural form, and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness” ( Sir Arthur Eddington. Space, Time, and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory. 1920.)
Panpsychism endorses the co-fundamental status of matter and mind in so far as it allows there are features of the world which are non-mental. Panpsychism is also not generally a view in which mentality is taken as ‘substantial’. It is more natural to regard panpsychism as expressing the view that, roughly speaking, everything exemplifies certain mental properties. However, it is an important and distinctive claim of many panpsychists that the ‘object/property’ metaphysics we take for granted is fundamentally mistaken and must be replaced with another metaphysical vision of the basic structure of reality.
In the light of the fact that panpsychism is similar to classical African and some other cultures' conceptions of reality and consciousness, I wonder to what degree these ideas have been critically examined and their rationale either accepted or rejected in non-Western contexts, keeping in mind the long history of the various kinds of rationale provided for such ideas in Western thought.
This concern is important in relation to the politics of knowledge and to efforts to gain a bird's eye view on the state of human conceptions about the character of the cosmos of which they are a part. Observations of convergences between Western expressions of particular ideas and those outside the Western context suggests a global community of related perspectives on the subject. In terms of the politics of knowledge, these observations help to nullify what, in this context, may now be be seen as the significantly erroneous idea of a fundamental gulf between modern Western thought and older world views from different cultures on the relationship between matter and consciousness.
Joseph Eze's distillation of conceptions of harmony between the human being and the external universe in terms of a dialogue between a female face and the abstract rhythms of the Uli and Nsibidi spiral, the beauty of the face reinforcing the abstract rhythms of the geometric forms.
The Nsibidi spiral is described in relation to Victor Ekpuk's Good Morning, Sunrise at the site of the Smithsonian Inscribing Meaning exhibition, as open to interpretation in terms of the sun, journey and eternity. The Uli spiral is depicted in Robin Sanders' The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria : Their Life Stories in Signs, Symbols and Motifs, as evoking wholeness, cosmic unity and transformation.
The symbol is thus rich in associations of generative process at terrestrial and cosmic scales, of human and of cosmological evolution, resonating from within the Nigerian/Igbo Cross River contexts of Uli and Nsbidi to recurrences of this motif across the world, in nature, art and science.
The rhythm of colours within a balance of figural and abstract shapes generates for me a sense of synaesthetic harmony, as if the painting is singing, but at a pitch just beyond my hearing, though faintly glimpsed by the mind.
The painting's internal rhythms are amplified by the rhythm of the circle that encloses its interior harmonies, an inward dynamism paradoxically accentuated by external circumscription, as the circle is itself enclosed in a rectangle the structure of which is further defined by rectangles of gold at each of its four points, structural balance and lyrical harmonies in dialogue.
David Chalmers and Panprotopsychism
Also revelatory for me has been the encounter with panprotopsychism, within which context David Chalmers is described, in the Wikipedia essay on panpsychism, as speculating that "all information-bearing systems may be conscious", recalling for me the claim by Joseph Ohomina, my teacher in the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, that odu ifa, the central information system of Ifa, articulated in terms of correlations between spatial and mathematical symbolism and verbal art, is an expression of sentient entities who are otherwise invisible, a view I discuss in "Cosmological Permutations: Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being". Related explorations in Western thought and contemporary science of the nature of being in terms of ideas on information is conducted in such texts as Paul Davies' edited Information and the Nature of Reality:From Physics to Metaphysics (2014 ).
The Wikipedia essay on Chalmers provides an insightful overview of his contributions to the construction of the network of ideas related to panprotropsychism. Chalmer's essay "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" is an impressively lucid and logically rigorous effort to describe these ideas, their interrelationships and the rationale for them, providing vital clarification of the more subtle aspects of these concepts:
Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind. In practice, people who call themselves panpsychists are not committed to as strong a doctrine. They are not committed to the thesis that the number two has a mind, or that the Eiffel tower has a mind, or that the city of Canberra has a mind, even if they believe in the existence of numbers, towers, and cities.
Instead, we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. For example, if quarks or photons have mental states, that suffices for panpsychism to be true, even if rocks and numbers do not have mental states. Perhaps it would not suffice for just one photon to have mental states. The line here is blurry, but we can read the definition as requiring that all members of some fundamental physical types (all photons, for example) have mental states.
For present purposes, the relevant sorts of mental states are conscious experiences. I will understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities are conscious: that is, that there is something it is like to be a quark or a photon or a member of some other fundamental physical type.
This thesis is sometimes called panexperientialism, to distinguish it from other varieties of panpsychism (varieties on which the relevant entities are required to think or reason, for example), but I will simply call it panpsychism here.
He continues by laying the foundations for his analyses in a self critical manner that might represent the bold reflexivity, adventurous and non-dogmatic, characteristic of analytical philosophy at its best, an approach vital for mapping the contours, boundaries and enabling conditions of one's knowledge, and particularly significant for such perspectives on possibilities of existence that are far from obvious whatever factuality they might demonstrate as the ideas he is presenting are, a strategy useful as a guide in cognitive terrain central to religion, which is not often known for being self critical in its beliefs:
Panpsychism is sometimes dismissed as a crazy view, but this reaction on its own is not a serious objection. While the view is counterintuitive to some, there is good reason to think that any view of consciousness must embrace some counterintuitive conclusions. Furthermore, intuitions about panpsychism seem to vary heavily with culture and with historical period. The view has a long history in both Eastern and Western philosophy, and many of the greatest philosophers have taken it seriously. It is true that we do not have much direct evidence for panpsychism, but we also do not have much direct evidence against it, given the difficulties of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in other systems. And there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously.
In this article I will present an argument for panpsychism. Like most philosophical arguments, this argument is not entirely conclusive, but I think it gives reason to take the view seriously. Speaking for myself, I am by no means confident that panpsychism is true, but I am also not confident that it is not true. This article presents what I take to be perhaps the best reason for believing panpsychism. A companion article, “The Combination Problem for Panpsychism”, presents what I take to be the best reason for disbelieving panpsychism.
He then works out arguments for panpsychism and as a response to challenges to panpsychism, an argument developing "panprotopsychism: roughly, the view that fundamental entities are protoconscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems".
A goddess? A nature mystic? Within colour there is music, within music, light and life, effusions of rhythmic harmony ....Joseph Eze and the tender beauty of the feminine in balance with nature.
David Abram and Animism
David Abram
Another experience that reconfigured my thinking is my lucky discovery on Amazon of David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1997 ), the more than a hundred reviews of which make it clear the book has gripped many people and reading the spellbinding first chapter I can see why.
On going to Abram's Wikipedia page, I observed that he is described as:
... perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview — one which roots human cognition in the dynamic sentience of the body while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the uncanny sentience of other animals, each of which encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective.
A close student of the traditional ecological knowledge systems of diverse indigenous peoples, Abram also articulates the entwinement of human subjectivity with the varied sensitivities of the many plants upon which humans depend, as well as with the agency and dynamism of the particular earthly places — the bioregions or ecosystems — that surround and sustain our communities. In recent years his work has come to be associated with a broad movement loosely termed "New Materialism," due to Abram's espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality.
Striking. So, animism, which I thought was understood in Western scholarship as a misreading of reality by a pre-logical mentality, is now being significantly reassessed as something very different, a perspective a critical, well informed mind may hold?
Majestic rhythms of colour; animistic, terrestrial and celestial alignments within symphonies of order-another glorious visualization by Joseph Eze.
Animism
On going to the Wikipedia essay on animism, I saw that the views I held on the place of animism in Western scholarship are now understood as representing the "old animism", emerging from anthropologist Edward Tylor's work in the 19th century, and now accused, as by Graham Harvey in Animism: Respecting the Living World(2006), of preserving "colonialist and dualist worldviews and rhetoric" . The "new animism", the article states
emerged largely from the publications of the anthropologist Irving Hallowell, beginning from "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World view" in Stanley Diamond (ed.) Culture in History , 1960. Reprinted in Graham Harvey (ed.) 2002. Readings in Indigenous Religions pp. 17–49 [ publications] ...produced on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Ojibwe communities of Canada in the mid-20th century. For the Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood did not require human-likeness, but rather humans were perceived as being like other persons, who for instance included rock persons and bear persons.
The Wikipedia article goes on to discuss how other scholars have built on the possibilities of understanding opened up by Hallowell, represented by variants of critical identification with the article's definition of animism as:
the religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence [a view potentially perceiving] all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive, encompassing the beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans, but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural environment, including thunder, wind and shadows [ and possibly further attributing] souls to abstract concepts such as words,true names or metaphors in mythology.
Distinctive Cultural Instantiations of Global Cognitive Rhythms
A multi-cultural discussion of conceptions of nature and of consciousness, therefore, cannot proceed on the assumption of a fundamental difference between Western and non-Western, particularly classical African thought. A more realistic approach is to seek points of divergence and convergence in what is obviously a web of concepts in which different cultures instantiate in their own ways an international matrix of knowledge, each a segment within a global dynamic.
Palpitations of colour, rhythms of lines, a visualization of sea life in relation to human presence by Chukzmore Chukz.
"Yavanna, the Giver of Life Aquatic. She is the lover of all things that grow in water, and all their countless forms she keeps in her mind, from the mighty whales like moving cities from the beginning of time to the moss upon stones at the sea bottom to the small and secret things hidden under rocks.
Adapted from
"Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits. She is the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she keeps in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould".
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 27.
What are African Ecological Metaphysics and African Environmental Ethics?
In the light of these convergences, what, then, are African ecological metaphysics and African environmental ethics? Do they consist in a distinctive body of ideas? No, as this essay has shown. I see African environmental ethics as best understood as ideas derived from reflections on the African landscape or developed through the inspiration of ideas emerging from such reflections, conceptions cultivated by Africans and non-Africans. This understanding of African environmental ethics focuses on inspirational spatial context, not race. The identifying quality of the relevant ideas is centrality of relationship with the African landscape, as direct or indirect inspiration, to the ideas in question. Through such ideational boundary shaping one could delimit what is distinctively African in a network of ideas that demonstrate more similarities than differences.
In the context of such similarities, what particular value does the African example of ideas that resonate in other cultural contexts contribute to this global configuration?
Some of the richest imagery, some of the boldest and yet imaginatively robust yet ideationally precise conceptions of the nature/humanity convergence I have encountered in my journeys across ideas from various continents come from classical and post-classical African verbal and visual expression.
Thomas Coburn and Tanzania’s 0l Doinyo Lengai, "the Mountain of God"
A particularly remarkable example is Thomas Coburn’s "Climbing the Mountain of God" ( Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 63, No. 1, 1995, 127-140) an account of climbing Tanzania’s active volcano 0l Doinyo Lengai, "the Mountain of God", an experience that launches him into cosmological reflections through his encounter with the awesome power of the volcano. The climbing team camps by a river valley to replan their route to the summit, having been obstructed by lava on their climb. Coburn sits alone by a waterfall, experiencing the serenity of the environment, a calm beauty that foregrounds through contrast the dangerously tumultuous but controlled force he will soon experience on eventually reaching the volcano's summit:
Words cannot describe the crater and its activity. Photographs, too, I have discovered, are inadequate. A flat, nearly colorless moon-like landscape, half a mile in diameter, with dozens of small cones and craters in varying stages of growth and disintegration.
What I am most haunted by in retrospect is the smell of sulphur, seeping out of wide cracks in the earth-and the sounds, as of storm surf crashing on a beach, the sounds of black molten rock hurling itself up from thirty miles below the earth's surface, crashing against the underside of the most active cone, spurting up into the air, flowing across the crater floor. There was for me an unprecedented sense of being in the physical presence of the raw energy that produced the universe.
Coburn reflects on this experience in terms of its temporal contexts, as may be so summarized, largely in his own words:
The ash from some of Lengai's ancient eruptions had preserved some of the more recent archeological strata at Olduvai, site of the Leakeys' discoveries of the prehistory of our species, including human footprints from two million years ago, a temporal scale in which my understanding of the farthest regions of religious history, 5000 years ago in India of the Indus Valley and Shang Dynasty China is rendered absolutely meager and insignificant when viewed in the context of the forces that shaped 0l Doinyo Lengai.
And in terms of space:
The fact that we were camping out brought the night sky to consciousness more readily than usual, as it held both the familiar Big Dipper (with the North Star invisible over the northern horizon) and the unfamiliar Southern Cross.
These contexts bring home to him "the riddle of 0l Doinyo Lengai with a heightened awareness of human finitude in its geological, biological, and astronomical dimensions", opening up for him an appreciation that "religious life does not endeavor to orient human beings in history, but in the universe".
This cosmic thrust, he concludes, is dramatized in a "convergence of a great many religious traditions", of "voices, in a great many very varied contexts, both past and present, in implicit conversation with one another" on the "interconnectedness of all life [ in relation to] the distinctive status of human beings"[ and] the question "what is the role of human beings in this gargantuan process that is the universe?”, perspectives and inquiries resonant in the work of "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit geologist and paleontologist who was involved in the discovery of 'Peking Man' [ a variant of early forms of the human being] and whose speculative writings [interpreted] the universe as an evolutionary process in which the divine unfolds [ and that of ] Sri Aurobindo Ghose [whose] magnum opus, The Life Divine, relates the spiritual evolution of the individual to the process of cosmic evolution, and has often been compared to the work of Teilhard de Chardin".
Idemili, Daughter of the Almighty "came down in a resplendent Pillar of Water [rising "majestically from the bowl of the dark lake, pushing itself upward and erect like the bole of the father of iroko trees, its head commanding, not the forest below but the very firmament of heaven" ], remembered now in legend only, but stumbled upon, some say, by the most fortunate in rare conditions of sunlight......
At first that holy lake was the sole shrine to Idemili. But as people multiplied and spread across the world they built little shrines farther and farther away from the lake wherever they found good land and water and settled.
....how could they carry to the farthest limits of their dispersal adequate memories of the majesty of the Pillar of Water standing in the dark lake?
Man's best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity always crumbles in his hands, and the more ardently he strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better he did not try at all; far better to ritualize that incongruity and by invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness-a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk.
Thus it came about that the indescribable Pillar of Water fusing earth to heaven at the navel of the black lake became in numberless shrine-houses across the country, a dry stick rising erect from the bare, earth floor"
Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah. Harlow: Heinemann, 1987. 102-103.
Chinua Achebe's majestic evocation of the tension between human imagination and the numinous resonates with Joseph Eze's Embodiment, directly above. What better way, for me, to suggest the force of Eze's powerful feminine personage, unifying in herself figural and abstract forms, the tortoise and the spiral, the plant and the lizard, the fish and the horse, within the fecundative darkness from which her visage rises, her expression lofty?
The Sublime from the Massive to the Diminutive and Evanescent
The scope of responses to African environments range from such encounters with the massively awesome as Coburn's account of the ascent of 0l Doinyo Lengai to the powerful image of something tender and fragile, diminutive and delicate, beautiful and evanescent, yet sublime and cosmic, the steady fall of dew at night, imaging the descent of iwa, being, on Earth, in the Yoruba creation poem "Ayajo Asuwada" quoted by Akinsola Akiwowo in "Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an an African Oral Poetry, ( International Sociology 1, 1986 :343-58)., the rhythm of the poem suggesting this gentle but forceful continuity:
Dew pour lightly, pour lightly,
Dew pour heavily, pour heavily,
Dew pour heavily
So that you may pour lightly,
Thus Ifa [divination] was consulted for Olofin Otete
Who would pour myriads of existence upon the earth.
The poem beautifully unfolds, evoking the unity of existence in terms of asuwa, togetherness, a conception of biological, geological and socially socially dynamic ecological wholes:
In several asuwa the termites colonise their mounds,
In asuwa - far as the eyes behold -
We encounter the erimi tree.
In asuwa, we encounter the egbele fish at sea.
In asuwa - far as the eyes behold -
We encounter the crustaceans in the ocean.
The poem goes on to also depict human biology and human society in terms of this principle of dynamic integration, subsuming the entire complex of nature composed of humans and non-humans, animate and inanimate forms, in terms of the emanation of each ori, the essence of each being, its centre of ultimate direction, from a primordial ori, the entire ensemble an expression of the shaping of Earth through asuwa, the capacity for existence in the form of dynamic wholes, descending to the Earth like dew.
A striking picture, along similar lines, of the evanescent and the rhythmic, as a cosmic principle, is John Mbiti’s summation in African Religions and Philosophy, on the image of rain in classical African spiritualities:
rain is seen as the eternal and mystical link between past, present and future generations. It is one of the most concrete and endless rhythms of nature; as it came, it comes and it will come[ the] manifestation of the eternal, in the here and now.
The potent beauty of the little is evident in the celebration of the mystical beauty of fonio in the thought of the Bambara, the Dogon and the Balanta Kanja, as described by Owen Burnham in African Wisdom:
The
importance of plants for humanity began when fonio, the smallest seed, fell to the earth and spread the
consciousness of the creator to all. To
the Bambara and Dogon peoples of Mali the value of fonio is immense. It is at once both the smallest and the
greatest. In fonio we hear the echoes of
the past, and sitting in a field of
these fragile plants, listening to the wind, it is truly possible to understand
the spirituality of plants. Fonio "is all the wisdoms" for the Balanta Kanja
people. It is the embodiment of the
creative spirit, the giver of life, the
gentleness of being, the entwined
fragility of life and death, for it is a
weak, easily broken plant, yet strong enough to bend in the wind without
breaking.
The breadth of interpretation of fonio is correlative with the Akan conception of Benghalensis, "a small, inextirpable, trailing plant’" that is impossible to completely wipe out, a plant, as described by J.B. Danquah in The Akan Concept of God, that is related to the Twi proverb "Nyame nwu na m’awu", "If Nyame [ the ultimate creator and source of all ] could die, I would die".
In that vivid concretisation, divine immortality is imaged by the resilience of a small plant.The biological constitution of the plant is correlated with the divine being that makes its existence possible, a divine identity which shares with the human person a flame that burns perpetually, a flame whose origin is in an unknown depth, where the human essence is rooted in the ground of being, a ground also known as Hye Anyha, the Unburnable, conjunctions between the human and the beyond human evoked in another Twi proverb quoted by Danquah, "Onyankopon nkum wo na odasani kum woa, wunwu da", “Unless you die of Onyankopon [another name for the ultimate creator], let living man kill you, and you will not perish”.
Thus, combinations of the physically epic and awesome as well as of the diminutive, of humble but potent earth and their transcendental radiations are actualized in a true cosmic sweep, from the earthbound ruggedness of the slow moving tortoise to the majesty of the rainbow, as one could say, evoking the line from a classical African poem, “With our feet we walk the goat’s earth, with our hands we touch God’s sky”.
The Sublime in Images of Living Motion
The image of the sky itself resonates with ideas of ideas of spaces of unimpeded motion, of elevation to transcendental heights, as suggested by the perception of Olokun, the intelligence of the world's oceans, in Benin and Yoruba cosmologies, which Norma Rosen depicts in " Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship" as manifest in the ubiquity of water across space, enabling Olokun's swift passage across all barriers in aid of his devotee, and Evan's Pritchard's soaring account of the symbolism of birds in Nuer Religion :
God is Spirit, which, like wind and air, is invisible and ubiquitous. But though God is not these things he is in them in the sense that he reveals himself through them. … he is in the sky, falls in the rain, shines in the sun and moon, and blows in the wind. These divine manifestations are to be understood as modes of God and not as his essence, which is Spirit.
God being above, everything above is associated with him. … Some birds also are spoken about by Nuer as gaat kwoth, especially those which fly high and seem, to us as well as to Nuer, to belong to heaven rather than to earth and therefore to be children of light and symbols of the divine.
The feeling that they are in a measure detached from the earth is enhanced in the case of migratory birds by their disappearances and reappearances. I have heard the idea expressed that in their absence from Nuerland they have gone to visit God's country. This is probably no more than poetic fancy, but we can say that the disappearance of these birds strengthens the allegory of God's children which arises from their ability to do what man cannot do, fly towards heaven and God.
The Ant as Cosmological Paradigm
This scope of sensitivity to the sacred as dramatizing the most profound possibilities inspires an attitude both reverential and pragmatic, as suggested by Ahmadou Hampate Ba's account in "The Living Tradition" from UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol.1 : Methodology and Prehistory, edited by J.Ki-Zerbo, of the classical cultures of the Bambara and the Fulani:
If an old teacher comes upon an ant-hill during a walk in the bush, this gives him an opportunity for dispensing various kinds of knowledge according to the kind of listeners he has at hand.
Either he will speak of the creature itself, the laws governing its life and
the class of being it belongs to, or he will give children a lesson in morality
by showing them how community life depends on solidarity and forgetfulness of
self, or again he may go on to higher things if he feels that his audience can
attain to them.
Thus any incident in life, any trivial happening, can always be developed in many ways, can lead to telling a myth, a tale, a legend. Every phenomenon one encounters can be traced back to the forces from which it issued and suggest the mysteries of the unity of life, which is entirely animated by Se, the primordial sacred Force, itself an aspect of God the Creator.
Through such hermeneutic strategies, the universe is made meaningful rather than resigned to obscurity or to an order with no meaning beyond its self perpetuation. Every phenomenon, concrete or abstract, every experience, may thus be seen as having a meaning as part of the developing story of existence, a story of which one is a part, a story to which one is contributing to working out through one’s life, a story the outcome of which is unknown, but which one can influence through how one lives.
The Contemporary Struggle for Meaning and Livelihood
Contemporary African environmental ethics consists in a tension between the classical ideals, forged and demonstrated in conditions different from the post-classical context, and contemporary practical realities shaped by current living needs, ideological transformations and infrastructural developments.
In the contemporary context, the classical ideals are negotiated with in the face of pressing exigencies, ignored, denigrated or persisted in by various communities, though not at the level of pervasive identification as when they had no ideological competitors as have now emerged with Christianity and Islam.
They are also adapted by artists and writers as means of individual inspiration. They are also related to as seeds for reflection by philosophers in the name of developing contributions to the global ecological crisis through cultivating African environmental ethics, bringing wisdom from the continent's ancient values to the global nexus of efforts to find ways of addressing global ecological disruptions.
Nimi Wariboko
Thanks for sending this. I will dive into it.
Nimi
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