What Can an African Philosopher Gain from Hegel, Abhinavagupta and Ramana Maharshi? : Developing African Philosophy through the Inspiration of German Idealism and Indian Philosophy in Relation to Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning in Akinwumi Ogunduriran's The Yoruba : A New History
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This is a commentary on aspects of Akinwumi Ogundiran's exploration of the development of Yoruba thought in the larger context of Yoruba social, economic and political history in The Yoruba : A New History, 2020. The commentary is conducted in relation to German Idealism, primarily represented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, secondarily by Immanuel Kant and Indian Hindu philosophy exemplified by Abhinavagupta and Ramana Maharshi at their points of intersection with Yoruba thought.
Each of these points of reference implies an ocean of knowledge and the concern of this short essay is with very brief but ideationally rich summations rather than an effort at breadth of examination of any aspect of the oeuvre of these colossi of thought, or of the breadth of Ogundiran's magnificent tapestry.
This commentary is developed in terms of a main text and a complementary text. The main text is purely verbal. The complementary text is both visual and verbal.
In the main text, ideas are developed through sequential unfolding of a perspective. The complementary text is visual and poetic, evocative rather than elaborated. It is based on the aesthetic and symbolizing power of opon ifa, the divination platform and a central cosmological symbol of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge.
I highlight this evocative force by conjoining the opon ifa with images, in white on a black background, placed in the centre of the opon ifa. The images suggest the numerical progression of the structure of odu ifa, the organizational system of Ifa, in its movement from a binary to a quaternary, from two to four, from four to eight and from eight to sixteen, eventually developing into two hundred and fifty six distinctive but related categories.
The images conjoined with the opon ifa images in a visual collage by myself move from two to four to eight to sixteen. They come from a now defunct website that describes them as symbols from the Diaspora African religion Voodoo although they are structurally related to but different from Voodoo symbols known to me.
The development of a poetic response to the evocative force of visual art aligns with the idea that philosophy is richer if open to construction through dialogue between different styles of expression, expressive forms foregrounded by different philosophical cultures and by different thinkers within the same culture. The poetic accompaniments to the opon ifa images are further developed in at the conclusion of the essay under "In the Beginning was Emptiness."
Through visual stimulation and poetic response to this evocative force, the complementary text abstracts the ideas of the main text in developing a conception of the self in relation to the cosmos. The goal is that of constructing a philosophy of the self in its cosmic context that is foundational for a historiography, a style of approaching history developed from Yoruba thought, through the inspiration of Hegel, complemented by Abhinavagupta and Ramana Maharshi. The inspiration of these thinkers, through incidental convergences with Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, facilitates my appreciation of possibilities inherent to Yoruba ideas.
The philosophy thus developed is both theoretical and practical. It is theoretical in interpreting its subject in terms of a structure of ideas. It is practical in constructing this interpretation through a process of self examination by the individual as well as in being directed towards a style of interpreting history. This practical orientation is therefore focused on the self as well as looking beyond the self.
Contents
Image and Text: Generative Emptiness
The Paradox of Hegel
Between Racism and Sublime Philosophy
Penetrating to the Absolute through Linear Logic
Image and Text : The Depths of the Self
Transposing Religion through Philosophy in the Quest for the Absolute
Using Hegel to go
Beyond Hegel
Kantian Paradoxes Between Misogyny and Humanism, Spirituality and Intellect
Image and Text: The Self Gazing at Itself
The Example of Abhinavagupta
The Inspiration of Ramana Maharshi
Relationships Between Questions of Consciousness and Historiography, the Theory and Practice of Writing History, in Relation to Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Further
Possibilities in Building on Ogundiran's Work on the History of
Yoruba Thought
Thought Within and Beyond Immediate Social
Contexts
On Being
and Time, Mortality and Immortality
Image and Text : Context, Perception, Action in the Circle of
Becoming
The Hunger for the Beyond
Landscape and Thought
On Ultimate Reality and Ultimate Causation
On the Essence of Identity
Image and Text : The Flowering of the Totality
Between Materialist and Other Interpretive Strategies
In the Beginning was Emptiness
Donate to Compcros
My Exploratory Journey with Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
In engaging with the recently published masterpiece on Yoruba history and thought, Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History, 2020, I made a suggestion on an approach to further advancing the book's mission.
This ideas was presented in "Developing a Historiographic Method Inspired by Yoruba Thought 1 : Motivated by Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba : A New History, on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning," the immediately preceding essay in my series of essays on the book.
I argued that the interpretation of the development of Yoruba philosophy, spirituality and knowledge systems in relation to Yoruba history in general represented by that book may be further taken forward through an approach to history writing inspired by the example of the 18th century German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I stated this as the case in spite of negativities towards African civilizations demonstrated by Hegel. For their inspirational value in this context, I referenced particularly Hegel's Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Geist (Spirit/Mind).
One of these other texts is Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, 1997, a foundational work on the contradictions between the aspiration to human elevation through reason represented by the deeply influential European philosophical movement, the Enlightenment, and the racism thinkers in the movement, such as Hegel and Immanuel Kant, powerfully promoted.
The ignoble also coexists with the sublime thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, an alliance with evil demonstrated by his collaboration with the Nazis, particularly in their anti-Semitism.
Such negative depths also coalesce with epic imaginative beauty and power as in the person of the great writer of mystical horror, Howard Philips Lovecraft, described as a rabid racist. Lovecraft's racism is depicted by one view as foundational to his writing, transposing racism in terms of horror at identities beyond the human. Hegel's racism is perceived as intimately interwoven with his philosophy.
Lovecraft remains a great writer, however, in spite of his racism and its possible foundationality for his art. Hegel remains a great philosopher whose cognitive limitations can be demonstrated as one takes advantage of his creative force. The poetic power of Heidegger's wrestling with the nature of being in Being and Time is forever luminous, an ironic contrast to his ethical failure with Nazism.
Even then, he was generally a very ambitious thinker, aspiring to demonstrate how one of the most profound of human aspirations may be realized.
He was determined, using sequential, linear logic alone, as different from the associative and indirect logic of imagination, the emotive power of religious devotion or the inexplicable expansions of intuition, to penetrate to the integration of the cosmos in a germinative synthesis.
He aspired, through the power of his mind, using clearly demonstrable procedures of thought, to reach a unity of possibilities that is the synthesis from which the cosmos emerges.
He understood this as a realization within which the cosmos is united and from which it arises. He describes this core as reason, understood as the identity of the Absolute, but also evident in the human mind and the development of history.
Visions of cosmic unity are central to human thought. They underlie myth and religion and are strategic for philosophy across the world as well as being a central goal of science.
The Western philosophical and cognitive traditions are distinctive, to the best of my knowledge, in terms of the level of ambition they have pursued through the intellect, those cognitive tools of which the human being is most in command, most amenable to shaping, as one shapes and uses an object.
An appreciation of the creativity of that tradition, however, is better gained through consideration of the syntheses of faculties of which intellect has been the dominant force. Hegel transposes religious faith in intellectual terms. His achievement is itself a continuity from 17th century scientist Isaac Newton's religious faith that inspired his work but which he perceived as not amenable to the intellectual treatment he developed to understand the material universe created and sustained by the God he believed in and whose activity he tried to comprehend through his scientific activity ( "The General Scholium," in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
Hegel took further this effort to grasp cosmic structure and dynamism through the intellect. Looking back to ancient Greece, where this vision had first been articulated in the Western tradition, and galvanized by the scientific achievements of succeeding centuries, further fired by European philosophy, particularly the towering achievements of his German predecessors and contemporaries, he aspired to replicate in philosophy what had been achieved in science and even go beyond the scientific achievement.
He would use his mind to reason his way to an understanding of cosmic essence, structure and dynamism as it is demonstrated in human thinking and human history as these reflect the orientation of the cosmos.
The study of thinking along these lines is his The Phenomenology of Geist. That of history his The Philosophy of History. His exploration of how the global development of philosophy demonstrates these directions is The History of Philosophy. He also studied the arts in Lectures on Aesthetics along with other major areas of human endeavour in works of encyclopedic range.
Using Hegel in Going Beyond Hegel
Various scholars reinterpret Hegel for their own purposes, bracketing the inadequacies of his thought as they draw upon its inexhaustible fertility. Out of a large literature on the subject of adapting Hegel's thought, I am finding inspiring discussions about this in the context of comparative philosophy and comparative history.
What I find most motivating about these engagements is the appreciation of the validity of global intellectual exploration represented by Hegel’s philosophical project, allied with a keen awareness of its inhumane limitations in relation to race, as well as taking forward his project, purged of the blindness emerging from its biased race centredness.
Along these lines, Patrick Kane outlines the validity of the project of comparative world history in the context of comparative forms of knowledge and their distinctive and complementary validities for exploring history in “Eurocentrism in World History : Eurocentric Claims about the Humanities.” His "Hegel's Eurocentrism," provides a rich, critical survey of the relevant bibliography deconstructing Hegel’s Eurocentric drive. They are posts at his blog Issues in World History
Joseph Mark McLellan's 2013 PhD dissertation, “Poisoned Ground: The Roots of Eurocentrism: Teleology, Hierarchy, and Anthropocentrism,”
is powerful in his sensitivity to
the potency of Hegel’s metaphysics, comparing it favourably with the force of Asian
philosophies and spiritualities. He foregrounds Hegel’s metaphysics as a means
of demonstrating the inadequacies of the racist perspectives in Hegel’s philosophy
of history. He concludes in advocating the need to go beyond the currently
dominant forms of philosophical writing in the Western academy, exemplified by
the argumentative
monograph and journal article, in order to better integrate examples from the
history of non-Western philosophy into Western
studies of philosophy.
This aspiration aligns his thinking with that of such a figure as Toyin Falola,
who develops a similar advocacy in two essays from his The Toyin Falola Reader. In “Pluriversalism,” he argues for a plurality of approaches to developing
and expressing knowledge. In “Ritual Archives,” he presents an example of such an
approach, using ritual forms as means of knowing through a combination of
contemplative reflection, critical engagement and varied ways of expressing
these processes and their outcomes within the context of the academy.
Kant is also another thinker described as openly racist, justifying his racism in philosophical terms, along with being misogynistic, again developing his bias in terms of philosophical arguments, reactions to which are core to feminist readings of Kant, such as Inder S. Marwah's "What Nature Makes of Her: Kant's Gendered Metaphysics" (Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting Paper, 2010).
Testifying to the multifaceted power of his thought, however, even
feminists have been able to use Kant's ideas even as they acknowledge his
negativities, as Carol Hay does in "A Feminist Defence of Kant," ( Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression, 2013, 50-88), an
approach she explains for a general audience in "A Feminist Kant,"
( The New York Times, Dec.8, 2013).
Dilek Huseyinzadegan describes as "
constructive complicity" this strategy of feminists using an
anti-feminist thinker in pursuing their own ends, not
stopping at criticizing the inadequacies of his thought but also using the
larger goals of that thought as positive values adaptable to feminism (
" For What can the Kantian Feminists Hope?: Constructive
Complicity in Appropriations of the Canon, Feminist
Philosophy Quarterly, Vol.4. Issue 1. 2018).
A similar reconstructive
approach is developed by Kurt Mosser in "Kant
and Feminism" ( Philosophy Faculty Publications, University of
Dayton, 1999, 321-353). A range of feminist orientations on Kant, from the purely critical to the appropriative, is
represented by Robin Schott's Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (
2007).
This inspirational power, however, is filtered through intellectual and imaginative categories in Kant's formulation, even as the spiritual resonance of the inspirational context shines through, central to giving the formulation its enduring power.
In meditating on space, time and infinity, he describes himself as ''an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere point in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how.''
He may be seen, in those lines, even if interpreted in scientific terms, as adapting a Biblical image from the book of Genesis, that of the human body returning to the earth out of which it was made. In relation to this explicit reference, his subsequent reflections on surviving physical dissolution as he enters into infinity through the power of his moral intelligence is best correlated with Christian orientations on morality in relation to eternal life.
The tone of the meditation evokes the spirit of the Biblical Psalm 139 in which divine grace penetrates the believer's life regardless of the person's location in the depths and heights of space.
This evocative range is realized in Kant's meditation without direct reference to the faith culture that feeds his sensitivities to the numinous dimension of human existence, its sense of mystery and power.
These sensitivities are instead filtered in his philosophy through intellectual engagement. They are radiant in his account of the philosophical quest in his prefaces and introductions to his Critique of Practical Reason, in his discussion of the Sublime in The Critique of Judgement and palpable in the meditation on mortality and immortality in The Critique of Practical Reason.
Paul Guyer opens the introduction to his book, Kant (2006, 2), the introduction to his edited Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (2006,1), the introduction, with Allen Wood, of their translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
( 1998,1) with the Kantian lines
referenced above on space, time and infinity.
He explains the dramatic lines
beginning, ''Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe, the more often and more
steadily they are reflected upon : the
starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,''
as alluding ''to the two great problems and accomplishments of [
Kant's] philosophical career'' relating to knowledge of the physical universe and
the power of moral will.
Patrick Frierson's ‘’Kant and
the End of Wonder’’ locates the essence of those lines in the emotion of
wonder. He describes the outcome of that emotion as the exploration of
those realities that inspire the wonder and reverential awe in the explorer. He
depicts Kant's thought as beginning and ending in wonder. Across the
investigation of the foundations of knowledge, the principles of conduct and
responses to the beautiful and the Sublime, summations of Kant's three central
works, wonder permeates, Frierson argues.
Martin
Schönfeld and Michael Thompson trace the roots of this orientation to Kant's
relationship with his mother in the context of the inspiring character of the
natural environment in which he spent his childhood years ( ''Kant's Philosophical Development," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Accessed 4/3/2021).
This relationship is described as nurturing his orientations towards profound
moral values, love and nature and love of thought, defining qualities of his work. This account, derived from what
are understood as Kant's own testimony, is paradoxical in relation to the problematic opinion he eventually developed of women. The account, however, is
humanizing for the great creator of great sequences of reflection, of mountains
of thought.
Thus, a central figure in the construction of the ratiocinative centre of Western thought may be understood as deriving his inspiration from a sensitivity that may be adequately explored only in terms of a confluence of cognitive approaches, in which emotion and intellect, awe and reflection, reverence and analysis, cohere.
The idea of human consciousness as deriving from divine consciousness is a fundamental conception in Hinduism. It is correlative with the Hegelian understanding of the Absolute as defined by reason, reason also characteristic of the human being.
Abhinavagupta exemplifies, par excellence, the Hindu genius for correlating abstract ideas of the nature of consciousness with the human being, and these two with mythic images, images of deities, humanized expressions of cosmological ideas.
This essay represents one answer to that question in the sequence of visual text and its complementary verbal text interjected within the main text. This interjectionary sequence develops the Yoruba ori concept in a manner inspired by Abhinavagupta's depiction of possibilities of consciousness in his Kali Krama-stotra as summed up in Ajit Mookerjee's Kali: The Feminine Force
The Kali krama-stotra conflates ideas of human possibility and cosmic development in terms of the unfolding of consciousness. I adapt these conceptions in developing an interpretation of ori theory that evokes the cosmological while grounded in the human.
Christopher Wallis' translation and explanation of Abhinavagupta's Kali krama-stotra at Wallis' site may help understanding of Abhinavagupta's interpretation of deities in terms of ideas of consciousness.
( An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy: The Paramathasara of Abhinavagupta with the Commentary of Yogaraja. Trans by Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Kamaleshadatta Tripathi. Introduction, notes, critically revised Sanskrit text, appendix, indices by Lyne Bansat-Boudon, 2011, 59-61).
A glorious play of paradoxes, the abstraction that is consciousness and the concreteness that is the universe, the unity of an ultimate self with the multiplicity that is the world, visible in its expression as the cosmos yet concealed in its essence, unborn yet manifest, a dialectic described as play.
A similar idea is visualized in terms of the relationship between the God Shiva and his consort, the Goddess Shakti, in the Soundaryalahri, The Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, the authorship of which is uncertain, though it is attributed to Shankara. Shiva is the source of existence, beyond space and time, but without Shakti, who enables his manifestation as the cosmos, he is powerless to act.
The Soundaryalahari is a magnificently beautiful work, in which the integration of the transcendent and the immediate, the divine and the human, the spiritual and the everyday, are realized through imagery celebrating the beauty and power of Shakti, in a unity of possibilities akin to the expanse of the sky flowing like the blue waters of the river Yamuna, into the navel of Shakti, into which space hairs from her head and hair from below converge in an aesthetic and erotic synthesis, an adaption of a wonderful image from that book.
(Available in different translation through various free online sources. Norman Brown's translation is uniformly powerful and beautiful while such versions as S.S. Sastri and T.R.S. Ayyangar's translation, with the commentary of Laksmidhara, edited by N.C. Panda, demonstrate the wealth of the commentarial tradition the work has inspired).
Shakti is to Shiva as the heat of the flame to the flame, power to the possessor of power, the reflection to the mirror, as Abhinavagupta develops this train of ideas in the first chapter of his Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras.
The passion of Shiva and Shakti though which they generate the universe is as that between my father, Simhagupta and my mother Vimala, through which they gave birth to me, my heart beating in rhythm with the Absolute, he concludes in the opening lines of that book, thereby summing up the philosophy of his Trika school, as described by Mark Dyczkowski in a personal communication, a view reinforced by reworkings of the same lines in the openings of other works of Abhinavagupta's such as the Tantrasara and the Paratrisika Vivarana.
Dyczkowski's translation of Tantraloka chapter one is both powerful and lucid. Christopher Wallis, at his site, provides an illustrated written translation, commentary and vocal rendering in their original language, Sanskrit, and in English, of the first twenty one lines of the first chapter.
Bettina Baumer in Abhinavagupta's Hermeneutics of the Absolute: Anuttaraprakriya: An Interpretation of His Paratrisika Vivarana , beautifully explains those opening lines, while Jaideva Singh's variant renderings of them in his translation of the Paratriska bring them alive. Alexis Sanderson provides a comprehensive explanation in ''A Commentary on the Opening Lines of the Tantrasara of Abhinavagupta.''
The divine/human synthesis of those opening lines is further dramatized by Abhinavagupta in his description of the sacred erotic Kula ritual in chapter twenty-nine of the Tantraloka.
In the Kula ritual, lovemaking becomes an act of worship, the sexual organs the means of devotion, the sounds of passion the sacred evocations.
The resulting sensory intensification and their climatic synthesis are described in terms of the realisation of Shiva, individual identity at its most profound, where the senses lead to their source beyond the universe and yet expressed as the universe, demonstrated by human awareness from its most concrete to its most abstract.
John Dupuche, Abhinavagupta :The Kula Ritual as Elaborated in Chapter 29 of the Tantraloka, 2003, 256, presents those lines in the context of a translation and interpretation of this otherwise deeply esoteric chapter.
This erotic metaphysics and practice is discussed at length by Kerry Martin Skora. Beginning with his PhD dissertation, "Consciousness of Consciousness: Reflexive Awareness in Trika Saivism of Abhinavagupta,'' he examines relationships between consciousness and embodied life in Abhinvavagupta's thought, in such works as "Abhinavagupta's Erotic Mysticism: The Reconciliation of Spirit and Flesh," 2007, "The Pulsating Heart and Its Divine Sense Energies: Body and Touch in Abhinavagupta's Trika Śaivism," 2007 and "The Hermeneutics of Touch: Uncovering Abhinavagupta's Tactile Terrain," 2009.
Ramana Maharshi was a 20th century Hindu mystic. His mysticism centred on aspiration to union of self with ultimate reality. He emphasized knowledge of the unity of self and cosmos through reflection on the sense of self consciousness.
Look within and notice your thoughts. Go beyond your thoughts and focus on your sense of self awareness. Concentrate on that core. With time, it will open up into a greater awareness, the awareness that underlies the cosmos, he is described as urging, in Paul Brunton's in A Search in Secret India, where I first read about him and where Brunton provides his account of going through the experience described by Maharshi.
I adapt Maharshi's contemplative method in the meditation sequence complementing the opon ifa images interjected within the body of this essay. I aspire, through this method, to correlate the human mind and the cosmos through Ifa symbolism.
This correlation resonates with the unity in duality of the self in Yoruba thought, in which one aspect of the self is a mortal identity actively relating with the world and the other aspect is an immortal personality emerging from the source of existence. This source of existence is orun. Within orun, according to the poem "Ayajo Asuwada," is an ultimate identity, "the one and only Origun in Orun," that enables all other identities.
The focus on consciousness in these correlations may also be related with the centrality of consciousness in both a human and cosmic sense in the thought of Hegel and Abhinavagupta.
Relationships Between Questions of Consciousness and Historiography, the Theory and Practice of Writing History, in Relation to Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Do these philosophical conjunctions and their spiritual correlations have anything to do with history, Ogundiran's book on Yoruba history being the inspiration for these reflections?
Ogundiran's focus is on the relationship between thought and action in Yoruba history. How did people behave and think, and what made them behave and think that way? What were the outcomes of their thought and behavior? Such questions may be seen as summing up the narrative drive of Ogundiran's book.
This might be the first large scale, book length effort in Yoruba history writing that integrates an exploration of the development of Yoruba spirituality and philosophy. I am inspired by the possibility of taking further an account of the early development of Yoruba thought beyond the often memorable descriptions of this history in this book.
Ogundiran
excavates the development of Yoruba systems of thought, from a point of view.
The overarching theoretical framework he employs and concludes with, the perspectives on ways of knowing he employs, though they draw on Yoruba
orality, as in the use of proverbs, may be further enriched by drawing from even more foundational examples of systemic thought in Yoruba philosophy.
The book's investigative foundations, the structure of ideas and the body of
techniques through which it explores Yoruba history, may
be further empowered through the historiographic potential of
Yoruba thought, thus further actualizing Ogundiran's
stated intention to centralize Yoruba thought in the book and his largely
impressive efforts in doing so.
Such interpretive methods could foreground reflections in Yoruba thought on questions of the nature of human awareness in its unfolding through responses to situations in shaping the course of human life, a theme that, in the Yoruba context, may be described as the thrust of Ogundiran's book.
I am not aware of the development, so far, of such a historiography but the raw materials for its development are luminous in the literature. Ogundiran may not have not have referenced them in such a context, much less developed their potential along such lines, but the horizon of possibilities his work opens up, the aspiration he dramatizes, may stimulate sensitivity to these possibilities, enabling his work to birth epistemic constructs beyond itself.
May what may be described as Yoruba ori theory, an
exploration of the foundations of human identity and its relationship to the
course of human life within the ambit of time and eternity, mortality and
immortality, space and infinity, serve as a useful guide in
exploring the development of human thought and behavior across time and space?
This view depicts the human being as oriented towards both the imperatives of
terrestrial existence and a pull beyond such concrete immediacies,
a pull represented by the sensitivity to the inexorable
movement towards the unknown beyond death, an unknown Yoruba thought understands
as orun, the ultimate home from which the cosmic traveler sets out
on the journey that is life on earth.
What could such an investigation gain from Hegel's making human consciousness in its location between immediate experience and an ultimate destination the driver of his philosophy of history, even if the idea of an ultimate destination of history is taken in a speculative and tentative rather than a definitive sense?
Further Possibilities in Building on Ogundiran's Work on the History of Yoruba Thought
Thought Within and Beyond Immediate Social Contexts
I also look forward to a more pervasive development of Ogundiran's accounts of Yoruba spirituality in its striking descriptions of the primal spirituality of the peoples who were ancestors of the Yoruba as well as his memorable account of the multidimensionality of the concept of immortality in Yoruba thought.
In contrast to those stirring depictions, the book's sensitivity to the Yoruba systems of thought and action, Orisa spirituality, Ifa and Ogboni, though richly insightful and powerfully articulated, are at times limited to purely intellectualist and materialist explanations, centred in social action and social organization, with philosophy and spirituality engaged primarily as tools of political struggle and economic aspiration.
Ogundiran's book depicts its subjects as also demonstrating orientations to issues that are not wholly grounded in purely social contexts, political efforts or economic goals. These are aspirations which may have social significance but are not limited to them. I look forward to discussions of the historical development of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality that further emphasize this robust range of motivations.
Ogundiran's discussion of immortality as a central aspiration in the Yoruba community of practice facilitates appreciation of the culture's sensitivity to various kinds of immortality, that of memory, that of children, that of rebirth and that of continuity of ideas and practices across generations.
Ogundiran's analysis facilitates appreciation of the development of forms of immortality in Yoruba philosophy as summed up magnificently by babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa-Kolawole Ositola, through an Ifa story which he relates to Ogboni in terms of inspirational continuity within his own family lineage, in its composition by people, like himself, who are both babalawo and ogboni, a story narrated in "The Ontological Journey," a particularly memorable chapter of Margaret Thompson Drewal's Yoruba Ritual : Performers, Play, Agency ( 1992, 33-37).
Within that context, I am keen on answers to these issues as explored by Africans, my immediate genetic ancestors within the human family and the accounts of whose search for foundational and ultimate meanings are nowhere near as extensive as those of cultures with widespread writing, a culture of broadly adopted writing which these endogenous cultures did not develop.
It is this resolve to find out what Africans have to say about the quest for ultimate meaning that inspires and challenges me about Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History.
I look forward to an examination of the history of Yoruba thought that integrates and goes beyond Ogundiran's interpretive strategies in emphasizing this thought as a dramatization of humanity's quest for answers to the meaning of
existence.
Landscape and Thought
Building on Ogundiran's superb account of the inspirational power of landscape in shaping the early spiritual consciousness of the ancestors of the Yoruba, I anticipate explorations of this cognitive history that take further the possibility that these thought worlds are responses to the inexplicable, dramatizations of sensitivity to aspects of
the cosmos beyond full cognition, from deification of natural
forces to encounters with the awe-inspiring and mysterious in
nature.
On Ultimate Reality and Ultimate Causation
Expanding Ogundiran's descriptions of Orisa cosmology as distillations of broad ranging zones of experience, it would be wonderful to encounter treatments of the history of Yoruba thought as speculations on ultimate reality and ultimate causation, as
evidenced in the concepts of Olodumare and ase.
On the Essence of Identity
Ogundiran discuses memorably the rise to dominance in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology, of the ori concept, an exploration of the foundations of human identity and its relationship to the
course of human life within the ambit of time and eternity, mortality and
immortality.
The Yoruba ori image, on the other hand, depicts the two aspects of the self as both engaged in the daily business of living, with ori inu, the spiritual self, also embracing the entire course of the person's life from before birth and beyond death. In this context, the individual's earthly life is understood as the unfolding of the potential the self brings with it from orun, the zone of ultimate origins.
The force of the materialist aspects of Ogundiran's analysis emerges from its anchoring in material contexts, using physical forms as platforms for speculations unifying Yoruba philosophy, spirituality, politics and economics. This is exemplified by his account of the ascendancy to dominance among other deities, of ori, the principle of individual identity in Yoruba thought.
The power of his careful analyses of the intersection of the material, the economic, the political and the philosophical is also evident in his exploration of the development of the Ife centred school of Ifa in relation to Orisa cosmology, in his compelling section on the rise to ascendancy of Ife.
The factual components of his analyses seem clear to me. The speculative aspects also seem clear. The most clearly speculative are his efforts to demonstrate the historical development of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality. The power of that speculation arises from its deft integration into the historical narrative, itself shaped of factors of varying degrees of established fact.
A close analysis of his otherwise superb integrations of philosophy and spirituality within social and economic history and its implications within physical forms could lead, however, to the question of whether or not he privileges materialist and quite limited intellectualist explanations when other interpretive possibilities may be reasonably deduced or speculated upon from an informed standpoint that enriches the tapestry of explanations, enabling a broader interpretive range, perhaps even as pointed to by clear material evidence, material evidence being one of Ogundiran's central platforms for enabling historical reconstruction.
In the Beginning was Emptiness
In the beginning was emptiness
the depth from which the sense of "I" emerges
the calabash of possibility from which each moment is born
within the circle of infinity.
Focus attention on yourself.
Note yourself as different
from what you see, hear or feel that is not you.
Locate the core of yourself in the sense that ''I am.''
This generative centre of the self
is as Shloma Rosenberg's description of the odu in Ol-odu-mare
the Yoruba conception of ultimate reality, identity and power
odu, the calabash of possibility from which each moment is born.
The emergence of the two in one
the self gazing at itself
within the context of eternity.
Calm, you focus on yourself.
You withdraw from what you can see, hear or feel
and focus on what you are thinking,
which you can neither see, hear or feel.
You go further
and locate a sense beyond thinking
that enables thinking.
The sense that you exist.
The sense that ''I am''
the primary thought that underlies all other thoughts
all emotions, all sensations.
You are therefore gazing at yourself.
You have become the Eji in Ogbe
the Meji in Oyeku
symbols of two in one
of complementary duality in Yoruba origin Ifa symbolism
Eji Ogbe and Oyeku Meji of odu ifa
dramatizing the permutations of
being and becoming.
Within you is a mysterious core
represented by your sense of self
the associations of that sense of self with the source of the cosmos
and the integration of these ideas
with the empty centre of the opon ifa
on which emerge the odu configurations
representing possibilities of being and becoming
spatial patterns understood as the
Ifa oracle's answers to queries directed at it
through the casting of the
divinatory instruments
the carvings on the circumference of the opon ifa
evoking these possibilities
through abstract and realistic forms.
The blossoming of possibilities
situations, perceptions, responses in the circle of becoming.
The flowering of the totality
the sixteen petaled radiation.
What is the ultimate source of human and cosmic possibility?
Infinity?
The circle of the unending
of the beyond time of the circular opon ifa
on the empty centre
on which the odu permutations emerge
as the eyes of understanding look on.
Seated in his study in his native town of Konigsberg
coming and going with such regularity
it was said the women managing their homes
used his movements in setting their clocks
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant hardly travelled
but his mind traversed time and space.
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My Exploratory Journey with Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Inspirational book description from Call For Papers from Yoruba Studies Review journal that led me to Ogundiran's book.
General Summations
On Specific Themes
" Convergence and Divergence of Politics and Spirituality in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge: A Dilemma Emerging from Conflicts Between Akin Ogundiran as Scholarly Book Author and Social Media Contributor"
"Ifa Divination as Historiographic Paradigm: Between the Sacred and the Secular, Politics and Spirit in Akin Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning : Part 2 : Very Short Reflection" [ With a discussion at this link]
"Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative: Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History: Yorùbá History as a Quest for Meaning" ( Parts One, Two and Three).
"Developing a Historiographic Method Inspired by Yoruba Thought 1 : Motivated by Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba : A New History, on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning."
Close Reading