Toyin Falola and the Orunmila Paradigm: Transdisciplinary Aspirations in African Bodies of Thought
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
An interpretation of the work and professional life of scholar and writer Toyin Falola in terms of the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge and divination and in relation to an individualistic selection of some of the world's greatest creatives across history.
It is represented by the circular structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic form and instrument of the Ifa system of knowledge particularly vigorously developed in Nigeria's Yorubaland, in which the opon's circularity evokes the aspiration to comprehensive understanding and the face at the top and perhaps sides of the structure stands for the indeterminate, the unexpected and the unknown, primary qualities in the quest for knowledge, qualities symbolized by the Yoruba Orisha cosmology deity Eshu.
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Ifa operates through the convergence of these possibilities. It organises its knowledge in terms of the intellectual order represented by mathematics but encodes this knowledge in the imaginative form of literature, evokes the senses, through the visual symbolism of its instruments, such as the opon ifa, and through the visual and auditory force of its oral performance, seeking knowledge beyond the intellect and the senses, aspiring to mobilize intuition and revelation in responding to the perplexities of human existence.
Seekers of Infinity
These intersectors range from the great 20th century US science fiction writer and scholar in various disciplines, Isaac Asimov, to the ancient Greek scholar Aristotle, creator of disciplines or a constructor of them into definitive forms, integrating them in terms of their methods and place within a cohesive understanding of the universe, Ibn Sina, Arab medical scholar and philosopher, among other creativities, and Ibn Arabi, Arab poet and thinker.
Beyond these masters of verbal thought, within the firmament of human achievement in all fields across time and space, are such figures as the Florentine Renaissance multidisciplinary genius Michelangelo Buonarotti, famous for his many awesome sculptures, paintings, and architecture and Leonardo da Vinci, renowned for his paintings, regarded as highlights of Western art, and his amazing and futuristic scientific work, these figures provoking questions of correlative configurations of creative possibility in other disciplines, defining uniquely what others have also done, as with Michelangelo's and Leonardo's art, and demonstrating what others are not able to do, as with Leonardo's science.
Falola in Context
Falola is best compared with the most prolific writers and thinkers in history in all fields.
Nimi Wariboko
Akinwumi Ogundiran
Abiola Irele and Olabiyi Yai
These scholars are uniquely powerful multidisciplinary thinkers, their originality and power of ideational construction perhaps unmatched by Falola's work I've read so far, and even if so matched, unsuperseded by Falola's creativities. However, Falola's greater disciplinary range and more expansive engagement with the various angles of approach to African Studies makes his work into a framework subsuming and helping to better appreciate the work of other scholars in the field.
His work demonstrates a combination of possibilities most scholars in the field have not explored, a distintinctive conjunction of engagements with the most current issues in the humanities and social sciences as these relate to African Studies.
Isaac Asimov
Aristotle
Such an achievement would require thinking through issues of epistemology in relation to methods in research and expression, in the context of metaphysics. Such an accomplishment is possible with patience and time, but would imply the equivalent of developing another level of cognitive identity beyond what Falola has generated so far, awesome as that is.
So, while one concedes Aristotle's prolificity and novelty in developing systems of knowledge, creating or consolidating disciplines foundational to the Western intellectual tradition and it's impact across the world, one may observe Falola's greater expressive and cultural range, since Aristotle was neither poet nor autobiographer, and though Falola's disciplinary scope does not cross over from the humanities and the social sciences he broadly shares with Aristotle, into science, where Aristotle's achievement is historic, from physics to biology, though at times superseded or corrected, one could reference Falola's greater cultural range, across African and Western cultures, while Aristotle is focused on Western thought.
One could model, in one's own way, the approaches through which Falola, the man from Ibadan, the war camp turned metropolis, scion of the man from Igeti hill, Orunmila, the small man with a head full of wisdom, transmutes raw materials into a universe:
Time management. He organizes his work life in terms of projects in progress, completed projects and projects to be published. The books for publication next year are already with the publishers. Those for the years after are either being composed now or are incubating after completion, awaiting reworking with freshly enlightened eyes.
He has worked out the optimal conditions for his creativity,
avoiding situations that won't help it. He has resolved, he once stated, to do
no other job apart from academia. Hence he migrated
to the US from Nigeria, where he was shaped but whose society could not sustain him after the emergence of escalating economic and social inadequacies in the 80s.
From the then University of Ife, where he built his foundations, but which may have become too limited for him after the decline of the university from its role as a global centre in African Studies, he moved to the University of Texas, that university and its country being socio-economic and academic environments that can adequately empower him, though, ironically, at some distance from the continent where he was formed and which is the subject of his work, a distance partly bridged through human, textual and technological mediation and regular visits to the continent.
An eagle can't fly high if it has weights on its feet. To create the conditions
that will facilitate the emergence of a Falola in any socio-economic system, certain
structural configurations must be achieved. If those conditions don’t exist in
the larger environment, an aspirant has to create the necessary conditions for
themselves.
He is constantly writing and is not afraid of not being at his best always, preferring to keep working, polishing what emerges and expanding it, up to a point of readiness for publication, readiness which is not to be equated with absolute perfection, perfection being understood as more of a process than a destination.
Hence an adequately informed reader could see how some of Falola's books could be better if the subject were approached differently and the work incubated over a longer period of time, but the author has demonstrated his capacity at the time of writing, laying seeds for later possibilities from others or even himself, rather than trying to actualize something he might not be ready to do at the time of writing.
He has a stable home and stable finances. Through fiscal discipline, investment planning and a family oriented existence within an intercontinentally mobile academic schedule, he not only avoids disruptions in his financial and domestic zones but partners with his family in cultivating the family's interpersonal harmony.
He cuts out distractions to his vision of being an unelected or unappointed academic institution builder, staying away from such academic responsibilities as head of department, Dean or President or VC at UTexas, the university where he works, preferring to focus on his self-initiated efforts in working with collaborators in constructing a continent spanning academic network existing largely in virtual space but also marked by points of physical concentration in Africa and the United States.
He works very well with teams that facilitate his work. He is good at getting stimulation from others through asking them to give feedback on his writing, to edit his work or to comment on his ideas.
He is a great collaborator. He excels in bringing people together to work on projects, particularly book projects. Thus, without using conventional institutional structures, he has built a virtual institution of collaborative productions.
He studies and promotes the work of other scholars and creatives. Falola's work can be divided, among other possible categorizations, into those focusing on people and those centred on other issues.Those directed at studying people's work can be further split into those exploring himself and those projecting others.
Those concentrating on himself are his autobiographies and hybrid texts which zone in on himself within the context of a larger body of study, such as his essay "From Stroke to Stone!" and his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies.
The productions primarily directed at studying others' work are essays, books and the Toyin Falola Interviews series, such as
his essay with Uyilawa Usuanlele on the Benin historian Jacob Egharevba, sole
written books on such scholars as Ogbu Kalu and Farooq Kperogi and edited books
on others, as on Nimi Wariboko and the artist Victor Ekpuk, along with such a
sole written essay collection as In Praise of Greatness.
The Toyin Falola Interviews, internationally attended video events, are conducted and archived online as open access material, extending Falola's scholarly media from written texts to online video productions, thereby significantly expanding the audience for his work.
Falola is constantly generating book projects and approaching publishers with them. Publishers need books to publish. Falola recurrently conceives long running book project ideas and pitches them to publishers.
Hence he edits book series from Palgrave to Cambridge and he makes sure he delivers them, also contributing his own books, at times sole written and other times co-edited and sole edited. A lot of organizational capacity is deployed to enable this to happen.
In sum, his achievement and those of other creatives represents a Webster's dictionary description of ''vocation'' as ''the orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission''.
That balance between work, income, passion and ultimate purpose is one of humanity's supreme challenges, no system being developed yet to enable it for everyone, the greatest achievers being some of those who have reached this convergence of possibilities.
What may be deduced and perhaps confirmed by Falola about his style of working is a system of creativity that people can be guided to adapt to themselves in various fields of endeavour. It can perhaps even be used as the basis of a university educational system emphasising multi-disciplinarity of subject exploration, multi-expressive competence in intellectual and artistic expression and a balance between individual and collaborative work.
Such an ideal of multi-disciplinary exploration and multi-expressive competence is represented particularly by Plato in the Western tradition, in Nigeria by Odia Ofeimun, Wole Soyinka, the scholars of the Nsukka school of art such as Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, Olu Oguibe, and others beyond Nsukka such as Dele Jegede and Moyo Okediji.
Also published on
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
.jpg?part=0.3&view=1)
The scholar and the
master, knowledge system and interlocutors, Toyin Falola, bottom, and Moyo
Okediji, top, creator of the image shown here of the visual symbols of the 256 odu ifa,
the organizational forms and active agents of the Yoruba Ifa system of
knowledge and divination.
The odu ifa evoke engagement with a theoretically infinite possibility of ideas, a scope suggested by Falola's work.
Okediji is used here in symbolizing Orunmila, described as
creator of the ancient system which is here identified with two Yoruba scholars and
artists at the University of Texas for whom Ifa represents the peaks of their ancestors' achievements.
Picture of artwork and artist by Moyo Okediji. Picture of Falola from an online source. Collage by myself.
An interpretation of the work and professional life of scholar and writer Toyin Falola in terms of the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge and divination and in relation to an individualistic selection of some of the world's greatest creatives across history.
It is represented by the circular structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic form and instrument of the Ifa system of knowledge particularly vigorously developed in Nigeria's Yorubaland, in which the opon's circularity evokes the aspiration to comprehensive understanding and the face at the top and perhaps sides of the structure stands for the indeterminate, the unexpected and the unknown, primary qualities in the quest for knowledge, qualities symbolized by the Yoruba Orisha cosmology deity Eshu.
%20ED.png?part=0.1&view=1)
Ifa operates through the convergence of these cognitive possibilities. It organises its knowledge in terms of the intellectual order represented by mathematics but encodes this knowledge in the imaginative form of literature, evokes the senses, through the visual symbolism of its instruments, such as the opon ifa, and through the visual and auditory force of its oral performance, seeking knowledge beyond the intellect and the senses, aspiring toactivate intuition and revelation in responding to the perplexities of human existence.
Seekers of Infinity
These intersectors range from the US science fiction writer and multidisciplinary scholar, Isaac Asimov, to the ancient Greek scholar Aristotle, creator of disciplines or a constructor of them into definitive forms, integrating them in terms of their methods and place within a cohesive understanding of the universe, Ibn Sina, Arab medical scholar and philosopher, among other creativities, and Ibn Arabi, Arab poet and thinker.
Beyond these masters of verbal thought, within the firmament of human achievement in all fields across time and space, are such figures as the Florentine Renaissance multidisciplinary genius Michelangelo Buonarotti, famous for his many awesome sculptures, paintings, and architecture and Leonardo da Vinci, renowned for his paintings, regarded as highlights of Western art, and his amazing and futuristic scientific work, these figures provoking questions of correlative configurations of creative possibility in other disciplines, defining uniquely what others have also done, as with Michelangelo's and Leonardo's art, and demonstrating what others are not able to do, as with Leonardo's science.
Falola in Context
Falola is best compared with the most prolific writers and thinkers in history in all fields.
Nimi Wariboko
Akinwumi Ogundiran
Abiola Irele and Olabiyi Yai
These scholars are uniquely powerful multidisciplinary thinkers, their originality and power of ideational construction perhaps unmatched by Falola's work I've read so far, and even if so matched, unsuperseded by Falola's creativities. However, Falola's greater disciplinary range and more expansive engagement with the various angles of approach to African Studies makes his work into a framework subsuming and helping to better appreciate the work of other scholars in the field.
His work demonstrates a combination of possibilities most scholars in the field have not explored, a distintinctive conjunction of engagements with the most current issues in the humanities and social sciences as these relate to African Studies.
Isaac Asimov
Aristotle
Such an achievement would require thinking through issues of epistemology in relation to methods in research and expression, in the context of metaphysics. Such an accomplishment is possible with patience and time, but would imply the equivalent of developing another level of cognitive identity beyond what Falola has generated so far, awesome as that is.
So, while one concedes Aristotle's prolificity and novelty in developing systems of knowledge, creating or consolidating disciplines foundational to the Western intellectual tradition and it's impact across the world, one may observe Falola's greater expressive and cultural range, since Aristotle was neither poet nor autobiographer, and though Falola's disciplinary scope does not cross over from the humanities and the social sciences he broadly shares with Aristotle, into science, where Aristotle's achievement is historic, from physics to biology, though at times superseded or corrected, one could reference Falola's greater cultural range, across African and Western cultures, while Aristotle is focused on Western thought.
One could model, in one's own way, the approaches through which Falola, the man from Ibadan, the war camp turned metropolis, scion of the man from Igeti hill, Orunmila, the small man with a head full of wisdom, transmutes raw materials into a universe:
Time management. He organizes his work life in terms of projects in progress, completed projects and projects to be published. The books for publication next year are already with the publishers. Those for the years after are either being composed now or are incubating after completion, awaiting reworking with freshly enlightened eyes.
He has worked out the optimal conditions for his creativity,
avoiding situations that won't help it. He has resolved, he once stated, to do
no other job apart from academia. Hence he migrated
to the US from Nigeria, where he was shaped but whose society could not sustain him after the emergence of escalating economic and social inadequacies in the 80s.
From the then University of Ife, where he built his foundations, but which may have become too limited for him after the decline of the university from its role as a global centre in African Studies, he moved to the University of Texas, that university and its country being socio-economic and academic environments that can adequately empower him, though, ironically, at some distance from the continent where he was formed and which is the subject of his work, a distance partly bridged through human, textual and technological mediation and regular visits to the continent.
An eagle can't fly high if it has weights on its feet. To create the conditions
that will facilitate the emergence of a Falola in any socio-economic system, certain
structural configurations must be achieved. If those conditions don’t exist in
the larger environment, an aspirant has to create the necessary conditions for
themselves.
He is constantly writing and is not afraid of not being at his best always, preferring to keep working, polishing what emerges and expanding it, up to a point of readiness for publication, readiness which is not to be equated with absolute perfection, perfection being understood as more of a process than a destination.
Hence an adequately informed reader could see how some of Falola's books could be better if the subject were approached differently and the work incubated over a longer period of time, but the author has demonstrated his capacity at the time of writing, laying seeds for later possibilities from others or even himself, rather than trying to actualize something he might not be ready to do at the time of writing.
He has a stable home and stable finances. Through fiscal discipline, investment planning and a family oriented existence within an intercontinentally mobile academic schedule, he not only avoids disruptions in his financial and domestic zones but partners with his family in cultivating the family's interpersonal harmony.
He cuts out distractions to his vision of being an unelected or unappointed academic institution builder, staying away from such academic responsibilities as head of department or faculty dean at UTexas, the university where he is employed, possibly turning down offers of heading universities elsewhere, preferring to focus on his self-initiated efforts in working with collaborators in constructing a continent spanning academic network existing largely in virtual space but also marked by points of physical concentration in Africa and the United States.
He works very well with teams that facilitate his work. He is good at getting stimulation from others through asking them to give feedback on his writing, to edit his work or to comment on his ideas.
He is a great collaborator. He excels in bringing
people together to work on projects, particularly book projects. Thus,
without using conventional institutional structures, he has built a virtual institution of
collaborative productions.
In the publication driven world of academia, Falola's collaborations imply that many people's careers have been fueled by such initiatives, at times expanding into full fledged sole written books inspired by his encouragement and guidance.
This mutuality of growth dramatizes Falola's belief in scholarship as a race that is both communal and individual, in which the whole and the part, the community and the individual, empower each other, galvanizing each person to take the torch forward in whatever ways they deem fit.
He studies and promotes the work of other scholars and creatives. Among books on Ogbu Kalu, Issac Delano and others, I find particularly remarkable his massive edited book on the artist Victor Ekpuk, the first print book on that artist, magnificently bound and gloriously illustrated in lavish colour, and the edited book and conference on Nimi Wariboko, out of which conference, another book emerged, edited by Abimbola Adelakun, the first books on Wariboko.
Falola's work can be divided, among other possible categorizations,
into those focusing on people and those centred on other issues.Those directed at studying people's work can be further split into those exploring himself and those
projecting others.
Those concentrating on himself are his autobiographies and hybrid texts which zone in on himself within the context of a larger body of study, such as his essay "From Stroke to Stone!" and his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies.
The productions primarily directed at studying others' work are essays, books and the Toyin Falola Interviews series, such as
his essay with Uyilawa Usuanlele on the Benin historian Jacob Egharevba, sole
written books on such scholars as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Farooq Kperogi and edited books
on others, as on Nimi Wariboko and the artist Victor Ekpuk, along with such a
sole written essay collection as In Praise of Greatness.
The Toyin Falola Interviews, internationally attended video events, are conducted and archived online as open access material, extending Falola's scholarly media from written texts to online video productions, thereby significantly expanding the audience for his work.
He is constantly generating book projects and approaching publishers with them. Publishers need books to publish. Falola recurrently conceives long running book project ideas and pitches them to publishers.
Hence he edits book series from Palgrave to Cambridge and he
makes sure he delivers them, also contributing his own books, at times sole
written and other times co-edited and sole edited. A lot of organizational
capacity is deployed to enable this to happen.
According to one scholar, Falola's efforts are unprecedented in giving visibility to African Studies within the Western dominated global academic world.
The universe of texts he has written, helped construct or inspired others to compose has uniquely expanded the structures of knowledge in terms of which Africa may be engaged with, rapidly escalating those native to the continent speaking critically about their own world, in dialogue with others engaged in African Studies, Falola's collaborations and guidance cutting across scholars in Africa and the West, at all stages of their academic careers or even outside the academic context.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
.jpg?part=0.3&view=1)
The scholar and the
master, knowledge system and interlocutors, Toyin Falola, bottom, and Moyo
Okediji, top, the latter the creator of the image shown here of the visual symbols of the 256 odu ifa,
the organizational forms and active agents of the Yoruba Ifa system of
knowledge and divination.
The odu ifa evoke engagement with a theoretically infinite possibility of ideas, a scope suggested by Falola's work.
Okediji is used here in symbolizing Orunmila, described as
founder of the ancient system which is here identified with two Yoruba scholars and
artists, formerly students and academics of the then University of Ife, Ife being the Yoruba spiritual centre, now academics at the University of Texas, scholars and artists for whom Ifa represents the peak of their ancestors' cognitive achievements.
Picture of artwork and artist by Moyo Okediji. Picture of Falola from an online source. Collage by myself.
An interpretation of the work and professional life of scholar and writer Toyin Falola in terms of the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge and divination, correlated with African and Western bodies of thought, in relation to an individualistic selection of some of the world's greatest creatives across history.
It is represented by the circular structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic form and instrument of the Ifa system of knowledge particularly vigorously developed in Nigeria's Yorubaland. In the context of this paradigm, the opon's circularity evokes the aspiration to comprehensive understanding in relation to the infinite and its finite manifestations.
The face at the top and perhaps sides of the opon stands for the Yoruba Orisha cosmology deity Eshu, representing relationships between consciousness and the quest for understanding at the intersection of the determinate and the indeterminate, the expected and the unexpected, the known, the knowable, the unknown and the unknowable, primary qualities in the quest for knowledge, particularly in exploring what factors shape human life and how they may be navigated at the intersection of fate and free will, the unchangeable circumstances of the individual and the choice making capacities of the self, in the context of the cosmic scope of existence.
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The Chameleon Principle
It represents the employment of various cognitive faculties, from sensory perception to intellect to imagination, and more, as described of Yoruba epistemology by Babatunde Lawal in ''Ejiwapo: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art'' as well as the engagement with different forms of knowledge, diverse bodies of thought privileging various combinations between the use of the cognitive faculties, from the humanities to the sciences, an idea adapting the concept of ''forms of knowledge'' from British philosopher Paul Hirst in ''Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge''.
The chameleon image gives rise to this integration of ideas through the chameleon's ability to blend with various kinds of environment while retaining its essential identity, suggesting, for me, identification with various cognitive contexts even as the self moves across various possibilities of awareness.
This cognitive mobility ultimately points to the aspiration to correlate these diverse perceptions, as the chameleon's eyes rotate in a three sixty degree movement, suggesting the unification of various cognitive domains, an image adapting Mazisi Kunene in Anthem of the Decades on the chameleon as suggesting the ability to grasp the totality of life at once through the convergence of individualizing and universalising forms of knowing, as understood in Zulu cosmology.
These are ideas of cognitive possibility emerging from the chameleon's distinctive manner of navigating the forest, the ecological scope of which evokes the multifarious nature of existence, as Abiola Irele describes of Yoruba thought in ''Tradition and the Yoruba Writer'' and as dramatized in the Susanne Wenger art school's Chameleon Gate at the Oshun forest in Nigeria, in which the sculpture/nature harmony in the mapping of Yoruba cosmology in the forest, evoking cosmic dynamism and structure, is penetrated through the sculptural evocation of the vagina of a chameleon, evoking a process of cognitive and spiritual rebirth the forest/sculptural/navigation may enable.
The chameleon may be associated with Eshu, on account of Eshu's multivalent personality, his spanning various realms of existence as messenger between humans and spirits, mediating between various possibilities of experience as well as between diverse possibilities of knowing, between multiple forms of being and multifarious forms of knowledge, the presence of his face on the opon ifa suggesting the diverse but unified navigatations represented by Ifa, ideas adaptable beyond the traditional methods of Ifa as a divinatory system.
These intersectors range from the US science fiction writer and multidisciplinary scholar, Isaac Asimov, to the ancient Greek scholar Aristotle, creator of disciplines or a constructor of them into definitive forms, integrating them in terms of their methods and place within a cohesive understanding of the universe, Ibn Sina, Arab medical scholar and philosopher, among other creativities, and Ibn Arabi, Arab poet and thinker.
Beyond these masters of verbal thought, within the firmament of human achievement in all fields across time and space, are such figures as the Florentine Renaissance multidisciplinary geniuses, Michelangelo Buonarroti, famous for his many awesome sculptures, paintings, and architecture and Leonardo da Vinci, renowned for his paintings, regarded as highlights of Western art, and his amazing and futuristic scientific work, these figures provoking questions of correlative configurations of creative possibility in other disciplines, defining uniquely what others have also done, as with Michelangelo's and Leonardo's art, and demonstrating what others are not able to do, as with Leonardo's science.
Falola is best compared with the most prolific writers and thinkers in history in all fields.
Nimi Wariboko
Akinwumi Ogundiran
The productions primarily directed at studying others' work are essays, books and the Toyin Falola Interviews series, such as
his essay with Uyilawa Usuanlele on the Benin historian Jacob Egharevba, sole
written books on such scholars as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Farooq Kperogi and edited books
of essays on other scholars, as on Nimi Wariboko and the artist Victor Ekpuk, along with edited collected writings of such scholars as Adu Boahen, and such a
sole written essay collection as In Praise of Greatness.
The Toyin Falola Interviews, internationally attended video events, are conducted and archived online as open access material, extending Falola's scholarly media from written texts to online video productions, thereby significantly expanding the audience for his work.
He is constantly generating book projects and approaching publishers with them. Publishers need books to publish. Falola recurrently conceives long running book project ideas and pitches them to publishers.
Hence he edits book series from Palgrave to Cambridge and he
makes sure he delivers them, also contributing his own books, at times sole
written and other times co-written, co-edited or sole edited. A lot of organizational
capacity is deployed to enable this to happen.
According to one scholar, Falola's efforts are unprecedented in giving visibility to African Studies within the Western dominated global academic world.
The universe of texts he has written, helped construct or inspired others to compose has uniquely expanded the structures of knowledge in terms of which Africa may be engaged with, rapidly escalating those native to the continent speaking critically about their own world, in dialogue with others engaged in African Studies, Falola's collaborations and guidance cutting across scholars in Africa and the West, at all stages of their academic careers or even outside the academic context.
In sum, his achievement and those of other creatives represents a Webster's dictionary description of ''vocation'' as ''the orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission''.
That balance between work, income, passion and ultimate purpose is one of humanity's supreme challenges, no system being developed yet to enable it for everyone, the greatest achievers being some of those who have reached this convergence of possibilities.
What may be deduced and perhaps confirmed by Falola about his style of working is a system of creativity that people can be guided to adapt to themselves in various fields of endeavour. It can perhaps even be used as the basis of an educational system emphasising multi-disciplinarity of subject exploration, multi-expressive competence in intellectual and artistic expression and a balance between individual and collaborative work.