African Epistemic Metaphors : From the Mask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge 2
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
Nommo Imploring Rain
Some of the most moving images of prayer for me are sculptures of Nommo from the art of the Dogon of Mali. They show a naked figure, hands outstretched, reaching towards the sky, the figure’s streamlined body giving the entire gesture a sense of poignant force arising from total dedication of self to the upward focus represented by the body’s thrust.
The last time I read the description of one of these figures at the site where I saw it, it stated, “Nommo, imploring rain.” Really? Only rain? But as I compose this, I recall what John Mbiti writes about rain in classical African cultures:
rain is seen as the eternal and mystical link between past, present and future generations. …one of the most concrete and endless rhythms of nature: as it came, it comes and it will come [a] vital rhythm of creation [that knows no end, linking humanity] with the divine…a manifestation of the eternal, in the here and now [symbolizing humanity’s ] contact with the blessings of time and eternity.[1]
What have these beautiful ideas got to do with Falola scholarship? Nommo implores rain, so one may call upon knowledge, in its varied manifestations, knowledge as a demonstration of human creativity, houses of knowledge whose corridors reverberate as rain, adapting Yoruba oriki chanter Sangowemi,[2] houses built by each person in explicit or implicit collaboration with others, configurations organized around varied ways of knowing, diverse subjects of enquiry.
Can these be unified, perhaps in infinity?
Forms of Infinity in Yoruba and Akan Thought
Infinity as an unending expansion of possibilities, as depicted by Ogundiran? Or infinity as deathlessness, as indicated by the Yoruba expression, “aiku pari iwa,”[3] “deathlessness consummates existence,” or as a state beyond time and suffering, as Orisa philosopher Susanne Wenger puts it in Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hötter’s Adunni : A Portrait of Susanne Wenger?
Or in terms of the Akan Adinkra visual symbol Gye Nyame, enigmatic and abstract, perhaps suggesting the distance of identity, the ontological remoteness, between the divine subject the abstractions evoke and the total field of existence, a transcendence of being and cognitive possibility correlative with the Akan understanding of an ultimate creator, the eternal witness of existence, who subsumes the transformations of being into themself?
Within this context the universe is conceived in terms of a transformative process perceived in its totality only from a central point of consciousness which constitutes its origin, as expressed in the Twi proverb “Abode santann yi firi tete;obi nte ase a onim ahyease, na obi ntena ae nkosi ne awie, Gye Nyame” “This great panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial; no one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see its end, except Nyame.”[4]
A tantalizing idea, which, with its elevated sweep and inspiring loftiness, may provoke aspirations to participate in such an intelligence, to the degree that the human mind is capable of that.
Epistemic Images
Philosophy enables us understand our time in thought, Falola thus references German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel,[5] incidentally evoking Hegel’s project of comprehending the development of history in terms of patterns of human thought ( The Philosophy of History) and understanding the development of human cognitive potential in terms of patterns unifying reflective thought and cosmic development ( The Phenomenology of Mind and The History of Philosophy). A speculative aspiration, though yielding rich insights and profound social consequences.
The multi-perspectival windows of Ogundiran on Orisa as constellations of human experience multiplying into infinity and of Ulli Beier on these cosmological figures as windows for viewing the unity of reality from particular perspectives, partial insights subsumed in an ultimate harmony, the ecosystemic complexity and ungraspable breadth of the baobab, the calabash of totality, Falola’s pluriversalistic modes of enquiry within multidisciplinary frameworks.
May these cognitive matrices be adaptable to another project that aspires to achieve what a commentator on the Greek philosopher Aristotle states the pioneering thinker had to concede after a lifetime laying foundations of thought in general, and in specific disciplines in particular, “the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being”?[6]
The Paradoxical Old Man: The Fulani Kaidara
A bent and dirty old man, clothes infested with lice, demands to see the king. The palace guards try to drive away the impudent figure but are stopped by the monarch, who invites the destitute person to his table. Amidst the convivial feast, the unlikely figure reveals to the king mysteries to which he had long sought answers in vain. The king tries to embrace him in joy, but the figure withdraws and departs, transformed into a creature of light who blasts off into space.
Kaidara, a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, the creator of the universe, assuming the form of a decrepit old man to test who is ready to learn what he has to offer, a knowledge that is reached only by discerning the real from the apparent, sensing the treasure hidden in the unlikely figure of the old man.
Kaidara, near yet distant, embodiment of the scope, the limits and the reach of human knowledge, terrestrial and cosmic, as Ahmadu Hampate Ba tells and explains this gripping story in Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.
I love the Kaidara image for its integration of the abstract and the concrete, the abstract idea of human cognitive possiblity and the concrete picture of a human being.
I am thrilled by its striking paradoxical
conjunctions, between enfeebled old age and destitution, on one hand, and concealed
divine majesty and power, on the other.
I find deeply memorable its fusing of human cognitive limitations, the circle of possible knowledge, ever expanding to an unknown scope even as it strains against circumscriptions at every stage of this advance, on one hand, and explosive, expansive opening to knowledge, on the other.
Even more compelling is
the actualization of these ideas through a focus on human sensitivity and
humility, within the dynamic image of a figure, moving from place to place, meeting
different people in various circumstances, assessing them for their readiness
for the cognitive illumination of a lifetime which he embodies, an image
evoking the wonder of every moment of human existence, the nondescript and the wonderful, the ordinary and the sublime.
The Nakedness of Òrò : A Yoruba Theory of Discourse
“Kólóḿbó ni Òròń rìn, ‘Òrò moves around naked,’, but it is forbidden to see it with… naked eyes,”[7] the Yoruba expression goes, another image of the opportunity for insight about the wonderful in the midst of the everyday that I find compelling.
Òrò, the unified complex of potential for awareness and expression emerging from the creator of the cosmos and accessible to humanity, roams the world naked, its luminous empowerment accessible to all, but, like the blaze of fire whose intense white heat is dangerous to eyes gazing directly at it, Òrò may not be safely engaged with directly but only through the indirection of òwe, imaginative expressions which mediate this luminosity, as majestically elaborated by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
Òrò is more broadly understood as an issue under discussion, a point of reference, or more learnedly, as discourse. It is depicted, however, in the cosmogonic myth from which the description above comes, as representing cognitive and expressive potential in general. This cognitive and expressive capacity of humanity is itself grounded in the cognitive and expressive powers of the creator of the cosmos who created existence through these potencies and hurled them to Earth, where they became empowerments for humanity, enabling human cognitive and communicative capacity, from the mundane to the sublime.
At its core, this perspective suggests, human capacities for understanding and expression, even at their most mundane or lofty, from gossip to elevated thought, embody, deeply hidden under layers of thought and conventional expression, the force through which the universe was created, a core too potent for unmediated human encounter.
The cosmogonic roots of this image are resonant with the global complex of ideas correlating language and divine creativity.[8] The picture of Òrò moving around in a nakedness it is forbidden to see with naked eyes may further evoke human reliance on symbols to mediate the world. It may suggest the use of symbols, represented by òwe, to negotiate relationships with reality. These engagements are encapsulated within a sensitivity to the universe in general and human cognitive and expressive capacity in particular as embodying possibilities beyond the conventionally accessible, possibilities related to the core from which existence derives as an expression of ultimate meaning and value.
[1] African Religions and Philosophy, 1976,181.
[2] In Karin Baber’s I Could Speak Until Tomorrow ( 1991, 17)
[3] Quoted by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language ( 2014, ),
[4] From my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos.
[5] “Nimi Wariboko in the World of Philosophy,” The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, 2021, 3-20, 3.
[6] “Aristotle,” Encyclopedia Britannica, edition unrecalled).
[7] Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, 31-2.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
3
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
Entering the Falola Network
I am knocking on the door of
the Falola Network, the constellation of knowledge generated by this individual
and collaborative initiative.
Where do I begin?
From Falola’s The Humanities in Africa, developing a vision of the nature of the humanities and its place in Africa? An overarching vision resonating as the foundations of engagements with other explorations of the humanities, as in Falola’s edited The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko and The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy edited with Adeshina Afolayan, looking towards such strategic essays as “Pluriversalism” and “Ritual Archives,” on investigative methods and goals, both from The Toyin Falola Reader?
Methods. Goals. Hegel also begins there in his famous introduction to Phenomenology of Mind. Perhaps I could organize Falola’s essays and books beginning with an examination of views expressed in them about goals and methods in humanities and social sciences scholarship, using that as a pivot for comparison with other masters of thought around the world, Hegel to Aristotle and those I admire among the Indian thinkers because the Falola example resonates with them all at one point or another, one essay or book or another.
What would be your goal on this journey, brother? Learning for the satisfaction of learning or seeking that which calls you, but which you do not fully understand, invisible but compelling, a palpitation that resonates with the idea of infinity?
The Universe in One’s Hand : The Luba Lukasa
One of the world’s great expressions of the aspiration to organize the complexity of the universe in a manner that is readily understandable by the human mind is the lukasa of the Bumbudye esoteric order of the Luba of Zaire.[1]
The lukasa is a small, handheld device, at times constructed in terms of the shape of a woman, its surface covered by patterns of colored dots. These patterns symbolize relationships between geography and social order, between historical and mythic time, mapping the universe as understood by the Bumbudye.
This small object enables those trained in its symbolism to interpret the significance of the broad scope of Luba physical territory in terms of Luba social order and the relationship of this to social, lived history and to mythic history, embracing cosmogenesis to the present.
Geographical maps of different physical regions and countries, economic maps, indicating resource management in different physical regions, cosmographic maps such as the visualization of the structure and dynamism of the cosmos in terms of a tree, as the Norde Yggdrasil and the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life, Stephen Hawking’s provocative image in his A Brief History of Time, of a few principles of cosmological physics that would describe the structure, dynamism and rationale for existence of the cosmos, enabling understanding of the mind of God, are other examples of the human need to encapsulate reality through symbols, from language to objects, to maps of space, time and society, and of patterns of relationship between matter and energy, the building blocks of reality as understood in physics, an aspiration represented for me in a unique way by the lukasa.
Is it possible to not only represent patterns integrating a vast span of information, as the lukasa does for the Luba cosmos, as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life does for its own cosmos and as cosmological physics does for the universe, but to experience the reality so symbolized, experiencing cosmic totality from the perspective of an ultimate intelligence, for example, rather than simply studying this reality as one of its components?
Oscillations of the Universe: The Yoruba Origin Odu Ifa
Both compact and expansive, potentially capable of presentation in terms of the handheld convenience of the lukasa, is the odu ifa, the organizational system of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, one of the world’s richest effort’s to organize breadth of information in terms of relationships between contraction and expansion of symbolic expression, and suggestive of relationships between the most recondite ideas of cosmic origin and the most basic of human issues, within the context of framing by the natural universe.
Binary graphic forms, organised in a sequence from 2 to 256, all derivable from the original 2, depict a broad range of situations through a rich corpus of poetry and stories.
The Humanities as the Unity of the Investigator and the Investigated
‘’…the Humanities are distinct because the object of study is also the subject. There is no distance between subject and object. The Humanities concern intimate knowledge of ourselves and the lives we live as humans, not the natural world of things and animals,’’[2] Falola states of his understanding of the humanities while arguing for the correlation of the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences in the name of mutual enrichment between disciplines and the empowerment of the learner.
The Convergence of the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Sciences
Along these lines, the description of the humanities as concerned with humanity as different from nature is better understood as heuristic rather than absolute. Human perception of and relationship with nature is grounded in the capacities that define humanity, powers of perception and interpretation running across aesthetic relationships with nature to scientific study of nature, from the humanities to the sciences.
These continuities validate Falola’s recommendation of academic courses, for example, that conjoin physics and philosophy, computer engineering and art, computer engineering and philosophy, history and medicine, art and medicine,[3] adding my examples to Falola’s in terms of disciplines whose correlations are clear to me at the level of the history of knowledge and the internal structures of those disciplines.
Understanding the physical character of the universe in terms of relationship between matter and energy, as is pursued in physics, is undertaken in the context of ideas about how such investigations are best pursued in terms of the relationships between the perceiver and the perceived, philosophical questions increasingly foregrounded in post-classical physics.
What is the scope of what may be known through the tools of physics and how does this scope impinge on related areas beyond it, represents other issues strategic to the history and philosophy of science that could be integrated in the study of philosophy and physics.
Natural computing, developing computing applications from the study of nature, may integrate aesthetics, an aspect of philosophy, and computing because beauty, the zone of aesthetics, and functionality, related to technology, work together in nature.
This perspective is related to the field of aesthetic computing, which correlates ‘’art, mathematics, and computing’’ in exploring the ‘’impact and effects of aesthetics on the field of computing,’’ as described by Paul Fishwick in “An Introduction to Aesthetic Computing” and amplified in his edited book Aesthetic Computing, a book published by MIT Press, the publishing arm of an institution whose MIT Media Lab integrates artistic and technological strategies in daring ways.
Computing and philosophy converge in terms of such issues as the relationship of information to reality, a subject explored across such iconic science fiction films as the Matrix series and Inception, science fiction literature and scholarly texts such as Paul Davies’ edited Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, exploring the question of how foundational information is to the nature of reality, as compared to mass and energy, the standard conceptions of physical substrata in physics.
Though not discussed in Davies’ book, its subject relates to efforts to map cosmic structure and dynamism in relation to human experience using what may be described as patterns of information in divination systems, a particularly rich organization of such information structures being the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and the structurally correlative Chinese I Ching divination.
The more highly developed philosophical reflections on the I Ching complement the emerging philosophical reflections on Ifa as Ifa brings its massive information structures into play within this comparison, in relation to the understanding of these information structures as constituting identities of all possibilities of existence, as babalawo, adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, Joseph Ohomina states of Ifa’s organizational system, the odu ifa.
Ohomina’s understanding of odu ifa is correlative with Greek philosopher Plato’s famous Theory of Forms and ideas of the independent existence of mathematical entities by such mathematicians as Kurt Godel, odu ifa being organized in terms of both mathematical structures and their literary associations.
Thus, Falola’s suggestion of a course Ifa and Computing could be expanded to Computing and Divination or computing and Ancient Information Systems, facilitating such comparisons as between Ifa and the I Ching and computer science and between these and the mathematics of German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which references the I Ching binary system, along with explorations of related ideas in the literary, cinematic and visual arts.[4]
The Journey So Far
This essay began with the image of
watching a dancing mask from various positions in order to better appreciate
its visual and kinetic complexity. The image was then associated with the
dynamism and complexity of life as also requiring varied vantage points,
different perspectives, a range of modes of enquiry and of organizing and
expressing knowledge, to adequately understand.
This multidisciplinary orientation
was then correlated with the multidisciplinary scholarship and writing of Toyin
Falola, which inspired the image of the dancing mask.
The essay built upon the motif of the dancing mask in developing other images of knowledge from classical African thought, the mask motif coming from Igbo thought. The various images were chosen for their evocation of the ideal of multiplicity of vantage points in gaining comprehensiveness of understanding, and even, as with the baobab image, suggesting the impossibility of cultivating such comprehensive knowledge, evoking the ever-receding horizon of the knowable.
The Journey Infinite
“Aghasa se Edo, Edo ree,” “When you arrive in Edo, Edo is distant,” it is stated of the distance between physical and cognitive arrival in relation to the Edo city of Benin, between physical presence in the city and arrival at understanding of its significance.
“When you arrive in Edo, Edo is distant” in terms of a grasp of the cultural constellation the city represents, of the cosmological mobilization demonstrated by its integration of cityscape and cosmological order though city wide placement of natural and human made shrines, an appreciation enabled by physical acquaintance with these locations, experiencing the force of their physical presence, a force enhanced by understanding their historical and spiritual significance, a dynamic mode of cosmological understanding, physical and mental, dramatized by the coronation trek undertaken by the prospective Oba of Benin from the outskirts of Benin to its centre in order to be crowned.
Know Thyself
What is the range of possibilities enabled by knowledge of myself as representative of humanity, within the unity of subject and object, the perceiving subject and the object of perception, the human being studying themself within the framework of the Humanities, a unity described by Falola as the defining character of this body of disciplines?
“Who among you deities can follow his devotee on a distant journey over the seas?,” Orunmila asks of his fellow deities in an Ifa story.[5] Each declares their commitment to such loyalty, but, on being presented with a scenario, in which, for example, “after travelling for a long distance/Walking and walking/You arrive at Igeti hill/The home of your fathers… they offer you two fast-moving rats/Two fish that swim gracefully… two hundred snails/Seasoned with vegetable and melon soup …well-brewed guinea-corn beer…/And good kola nuts?”
The typical response is that by Ogun, “I will chant Ijala [poetry of hunters, to whom Ogun is patron] loudly and joyously/Back to my home” and of Osun, “After eating to my satisfaction/I will ride upon small pieces of brass back to my home,” delightfully witty descriptions of temptation and response that frame the climax of the suspenseful questioning and answers leading to the declaration of the self, Orí, the self as symbolized by the head, the self in its correlative mortal and immortal dimensions, as the only deity who can “follow his own devotee to a distant journey over the seas without turning back.”
I am fascinated by the view of some
schools of thought that the ultimate
knowledge one can have is knowledge of oneself and that the climax of this knowledge is unity of one’s daily awareness and the immortal awareness at the core of the self.
This unity of consciousness is described as an expansion of awareness into the unity between the core of the self and the self-awareness of the source of the cosmos.
This idea of individual and cosmic unity is evoked by the Orisa cosmology conception of “the only-and-only-one Origun in Orun [the world of ultimate origins] [from which] each earthly Ori branches.”[6]
This insight is depicted, from one perspective, as a unity of subject and object in which the cosmos is perceived as one with the self.
“The leaves [ the constituents of existence] dispersed throughout the universe perceived as one simple flame” within the unity of origin, process and expression, three circles occupying one space within which is poised the human form, as Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s depiction of a similar vision could be presented.
Being Human in Africa
“What are African humanities?,” Falola enquires.[7]
How has the nature of the human and approaches to understanding humanity been
conceived in the various stages of development of African thought, thought
grounded in African experience even if constructed outside Africa and by non-Africans?
An explicit example of this is the following creation myth narrated by Hampate Ba. Clues in the story lead me to conclude it is at least partly composed by Ba although he attributes it to the “Bambara tradition of the Komo, one of the great initiation schools of the Mande group of peoples of Mali.” These are extracts, almost fully in the writer’s words:
Maa Ngala, infinite Force, Unknowable , Uncreated,
unplaceable in time or space, a living Emptiness, brooding potentially over
contingent existences, wishing to be known, created a wondrous Egg with nine
divisions integrating the nine fundamental States of existence.
When it hatched, it gave birth to twenty marvellous beings that made up the
whole of the universe, the sum total of existing forces and possible knowledge,
but none of which proved fit to become the interlocutor that Maa Ngala craved.
Hence Maa Ngala took a bit of each of
those twenty existing creatures and mixed them; and then, blowing a spark of
his own fiery breath into the mixture, he created a new Being [ the human
person] to whom he gave a part of his own name: Maa. And so this new being,
through his name and through the divine spark introduced into him, contained something
of Maa Ngala himself.
Synthesis of all that exists, pre-eminent receptacle of the supreme Force and confluence of all existing forces [ the human person] received as a legacy a part of the divine creative power, the gift of Mind and the Word.[8]
Interlocutor with the divine, synthesis of all that exists.
To what degree is this true of the human being?
[1] John Studstill, “Education in a Luba Secret Society,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1979, 67-79;Thomas Reefe, “Lukasa: A Luba Memory Device,” African Arts, Vol. 10, No. 4,1977), 48-50+88; Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, “Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, ”African Arts, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1996, 22-35+101-103; Jean Ho Chu and Ali Mazalek, “ Embodied Engagement with Narrative: A Design Framework for Presenting Cultural Heritage Artifacts,” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2019, 3, 1, 1-23.
[2] The Humanities in Africa, xi.
[3] Ibid.xi.
[4] Leibniz’ relationship with the I Ching as illuminating for him the significance of binary numbers is represented by a rich bibliography, from the scholarly to the general. The scholarly includes Frank J. Swetz “Leibniz, the Yijing, and the Religious Conversion of the Chinese,” Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 276-291. The general may be represented by Damien Walter’s Fri 21 Mar 2014 Guardian UK article, “The Ancient Book of Wisdom at the Heart of Every Computer : The I-Ching Predates Binary Code by as Much as 5,000 Years, and Gives Us Reason to Question Our Faith in Digital Technology,”
[6] In the Ifa poem ‘’Ayajo Asuwada’’
[7] in The Humanities in Africa.
[8] ‘’Tongues that Span the Centuries : The Faithful Guardians of Africa's Oral Tradition,’’ The Unesco Courier, August-September 1979. 17-23. 18.
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[1] John Studstill, “Education in a Luba Secret Society,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1979, 67-79;Thomas Reefe, “Lukasa: A Luba Memory Device,” African Arts, Vol. 10, No. 4,1977), 48-50+88; Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, “Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, ”African Arts, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1996, 22-35+101-103; Jean Ho Chu and Ali Mazalek, “ Embodied Engagement with Narrative: A Design Framework for Presenting Cultural Heritage Artifacts,” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2019, 3, 1, 1-23.
[2] The Humanities in Africa, xi.
[3] Ibid.xi.
[5] In the Ifa poem ‘’Ayajo Asuwada’’
[6] in The Humanities in Africa.
[7] ‘’Tongues that Span the Centuries : The Faithful Guardians of Africa's Oral Tradition,’’ The Unesco Courier, August-September 1979. 17-23. 18,