The Scholar as Disciple? Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Part 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Scholar as Disciple?
Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics
Part 1
Abstract
This essay explores the author's initial engagement with Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality, situating it within Falola's broader oeuvre on Yoruba and African thought.
Drawing from the book's preliminary sections, it examines Falola's methodical approach to unpacking Yoruba cosmology, emphasizing themes of mystery, human-spiritual interaction, and the universe as an ultimately incomprehensible yet engageable realm.
The piece compares Falola's work to other spiritual traditions, highlights a mapping of his writings on Yoruba thought in a movement from narrative-driven autobiographies to summative scholarship, examines challenges with the conceptualizations in the Author's Notes and outlines plans for deeper analysis in subsequent essays.
All pictures are by me.
Anticipation and Contextualization
I got my long awaited copy of Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality on the 20th of September 2025, courtesy of the author, before its official September 23 release date.
I have been eager to read the book because I want to see if I can learn something new from it in a field in which I have some exposure.
Situating the Work: A Continuum in Yoruba Discourse
Could Falola package a topic already deeply discussed by Wande Abimbola, Ulli Beier, Wole Soyinka and others in a way that could validate a new book on a broad overview of classical Yoruba thought, an approach that has been so significantly outlined in previous discourse, validation in terms of saying something unique or saying what is already known in a distinctive manner?
Contextualizing Falola's Cognitive Project
The Evolution of a Cognitive and Expressive Process
I am also interested in the book as a landmark in Falola's progression towards building a comprehensive Yoruba discursive universe, within the matrix of African Studies.
How will this book complement his discussion of Yoruba thought in "Ritual Archives", in African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms, in Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, in Esu: Yoruba God, Power and the Imaginative Frontiers, and his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, among other works of his exploring diverse aspects of Yoruba spiritual and philosophical thought and practice?
Writing as Thinking
Having reading the Author's Note, the preface and acknowledgements, I want to respond to those sections now rather than wait till I complete the book
Those segments are vital for appreciating the author's relationship with his subject, as he speaks there in more intimate and personalistic terms than I have seen him doing so far in his entry into his main text as represented by the introduction, a little of which I have read.
I am impatient to commence the scribal dialogue with Falola's work, particularly since the act of writing represents a process of thinking things through, to adapt Anthony Appiah's perspective on philosophy.
Situating the Work: Walking, Flying and Running in Falola's Methodological Universe
Walking: Systematic Exposition
"Thinking it through", the title of Appiah's book on philosophical method, is actually the central exploratory technique of Falola's book.
His goal is to painstakingly assemble the building blocks of his understanding of Yoruba metaphysics, stating its fundamental premises, describing their logic, their rationale, presenting his grasp of the views about the universe held by the knowledge community whose ideas he is describing, and possibly, in the core of the book, examine the validity of those ideas.
In focusing on painstaking ideational organization, he may be described as walking, walking the reader linearly through his ideas.
Flying: Narrative Mastery
That approach is different from the experiential narrative of growing up in close encounter with a representative of Yoruba metaphysics in its spiritual and supernaturalistic dimensions and observing how this complex of belief and action plays out in a time of crisis in a Yoruba community, the Agbekoya Revolt, this being Falola's progression in his accounts of his mentor Iya Lekuleja in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, a person who, most likely did not have the Western education to read what her young protege later wrote about her but who embodied, par excellence, the endogenous Yoruba knowledge system he would grapple with in essay after essay, book after book, trying to map its contours, delineate its flesh and approach it's mystery.
The Iya Lekuleja sections of those autobiographies may be described as Falola flying, at the height of his conjunction of narrative skill and poetic evocation, imaginative concretization vivifying a linear narrative, stamping an indelible, embodied journey on the mind of the reader, in a manner rich with ideational force, providing food for scholarship.
Running: Intellectual and
Imagistic Synthesis
Falola "running" is evident in "Ritual Archives", in its fusion of the ratiocinative and the imaginative, the intellectual and the imagistic, as he shapes a vision of the essence of African sacred space as a physical and cognitive construct, in a manner, that, incidentally demonstrates universal illuminative force, piercing to the heart of the spiritual imagination.
Yoruba Metaphysics as an Exploratory Walk
In Yoruba Metaphysics the author seeks to make a summative statement of his relationship with the field, not in an account of an individual and her communal network and role in an epochal historical event, as with Iya Lekuleja, or a study of an aspect of the field, the field as perceived through a particular abstract concept, as with " Ritual Archives", or examining a deity, as with his essay on Esu in Esu: Yoruba God, Power and the Imaginative Frontiers or a particular institution of the knowledge system, as his chapter on the Ifa knowledge system in Sacred Words and Holy Realms, but to map the entire field, fleshing out its strategic ideational configurations and their interrelationships in shaping a unified world picture, addressing metaphysical ideas alone, without embedding them in a historical narrative examining the complex of social forces critical for the development of those ideas, as he does in Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks.
The Scholar as Disciple: Embodying and Interpreting Tradition
Reading those opening reflections in the Author's Notes, the preface and the acknowledgements, I am reminded of Falola’s ongoing tension between the scholar and the disciple represented by his various engagements with Yoruba spirituality and philosophy.
The scholar dissects, maps, and theorizes; the disciple lives, remembers, and embodies.
This dual orientation—between embodied knowledge and intellectual explication— gives his multi-volumed project a particular richness.
Core Philosophical Framework
Sensitivity to the Universe as an Explorable Mystery: The Heart of Endogenous Yoruba Thought
What strikes me most in the opening sections of the book is Falola’s articulation of endogenous Yoruba thought as a sensitivity to mystery.
He describes a universe that eludes full comprehension, yet invites engagement through the senses and the mind—where consciousness is both sensory and cognitive.
The idea of mystery suggests both a sense of helplessness within the embrace of the powers shaping the cosmos, as Falola puts it, as well as a sense of wonder at finding oneself within an immensity beyond the farthest reach of human exploratory powers but which nevertheless may invite exploration.
Such a sensitivity is both humbling and inspiring, evoking the littleness of the self yet energising its aspirational powers, a complex of attitudes that is one pf the richest responses to cosmic complexity and dynamism, as richly described by Wole Soyinka on the origins of drama in Myth, Literature and the African World, by Rudolph Otto on the numinous in The Idea of the Holy and Immanuel Kant on the Sublime in Critique of Judgement.
Yoruba metaphysics "serves as a framework for viewing the world, aclnowledging the existence of energies, forces, beings and other phenomena beyond human comprehension.
It evokes a sense of helplessness in the face of the powerful and unknown yet brings comfort in the understanding that there are methods and mindsets to comprehend and engage with these aspects" Falola declares ( xii ).
Responding to Mystery
In the face of this immensity that sorrounds the human being, what does he do?
He reaches out to it. He organises his understanding of it in relation to his grasp of the universe he is aware of, including his knowledge of himself and his fellow humans.
Falola takes us into that organizational realm. Making a strategic contribution to the various ways of organizing the range of ideas constituting classical Yoruba thought, he sums up three fundamental ideas shaping this body of knowledge, here briefly presented with subheadings by myself:
1. Cosmic Incomprehensibility
We exist in a universe that is not fully comprehensible to us.
2. Spiritual Engagement
Humans can engage with [invisible] spiritual forces [ which coexist with the visible inhabitants of the universe].
3. Complementary Duality
These forces exist in an unseen or invisible realm, known as Orun...fantastical, magical, and challenging to grasp...[" the dwelling place of [ transitioned] ancestors and the origin of human existence before birth"] [ a zone] yet closely intertwined with the physical world...
. ..humans[ though] primarily residing in the physical world...are capable of interacting with the invisible realm under specific circumstances. (xii)
Comparative Philosophical Context
Universal Resonances
A fine summation, concise yet comprehensive, applicable to perhaps all classical African schools of thought and possibly to most spiritualities, and could be compared with Antoine Faivre's pioneering efforts in concise yet comprehensive mapping of Western esoteric cosmology through a similar list of ideas, indicating their interrelations ( "Western Esotericism and the Science of "Religions").
That balance between the challenges of total comprehension of the universe and engagement with the universe, between human physicality and semi- spirituality, says it all for me.
A Symphony of Mystery
Christian
It takes me from my engagement with Yoruba and other schools of African thought to other spiritualities, summed up in the concept of mystery as depicted by Catholic theologian Karl Rahner in stating that the appreciation or understanding of the universe does not consist purely of expanding the boundaries of the known, whether in physical terms or beyond the physical, but in sensitivity to the difference between the known and a dimension of being that eludes full grasp, making the known equivalent to an island in a sea:
" The true system of thought is the knowledge that humanity is finally directed precisely not toward what it can control in knowledge but toward the absolute mystery as such; that mystery is not just an unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known but rather the blessed goal of knowledge which comes to itself when it is with the incomprehensible One..The true system [ of metaphysical knowledge] is [ therefore] the system of what cannot be systematized."
(Leo Donovan, "Living into Mystery: Karl Rahner’s Reflections on his 75th Birthday", America : https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/01/02/living-mystery-karl-rahners-reflections)
"In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge...what is called knowledge in everyday parlance is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.
It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only beceauase it is can we be borne by it.
Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery? Is it the little light with which he illuminates this island-we call it science and scholarship- to be an eternal which will shine forever for him?
...when one begins to ask about asking itself, and to think about thinking itself...when one turns his attention to the scope of knowledge and not only to the objects of knowledge, to transcendence and not only to what is understood categorically in time and space within this transcendence,only then is one just on the threshold of becoming a religious person."
(Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, Darton: London, 1978, 22-23).
German Secular Philosophy
" Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever deeper admiration and awe the more often and the more steadily they ate reflected upon: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me".
(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement)
Ifa
"Ifa is about approaching everything as mysterious. Whether the mystery is great or small, Ifa invites us to marvel at its beauty as we grow in wisdom.
Mystery is encoded in all things that silently reveal how everything is connected in a dance around polarities which mutually affirm one another and move the world onwards.
Whether it is the mystery of life, creation, God, a plant, or a technical problem which we seem unable to figure out, we are touching Ifa.
It is about approaching all things and every situation with curiosity, beceause everything is encoded in mystery, awe and riddles.
Ifa is the key which enables us to decode these riddles and mysteries as they appear in our lives, in nature, in all realms of being and existence."
(Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold, Ifa: A Forest of Mystery, Scarlet Imprint,2016, 7).
Yoruba Orisa, Christian, Igbo
The yam is a primary symbol of mystery and its capacity for illumination.
Orisa
"The yam is dark and grows and rests in darkness; but it is white inside, where it is sweet sustenance.
Orisa Oginyon [ in Yoruba spirituality] is the god of the yam, which means that he is the yam. And he is Obatala, the author of all inspired life. Through being the yam he is the sacred sustenance of matter; through being Obatala he is the transcendent light-dimension of that same matter.
Christian
'...the transparency of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe; the divine radiation from the depths of matter aflame'[ Teilhard de Chardin] "
Susanne Wenger, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, Perlinger, 1983, 113, 138).
"Romanus Egudu ( poet of Igbo culture):
'I have dug it fresh,
this boneless flesh
of air, earth, warmth
and water, this
life out of the heart
of death..'
Visceral and sensous, entering deeper and essential associations, including the cosmic...extending the significance of the yam into a parable of the human condition, utilising lamguage that truly reflects the numinous essence of the experience, the social symbolism of the new yam and the metaphysical context both of its celebration, its seeding and maturation from decay".
( Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, New Horn, Ibadan, 1988, 321)
Falola’s outline of Yoruba metaphysics captures a similar profound sensitivity to mystery as the fundamental context of existence, pointing toward the incomprehensible, not merely the knowable.
This perspective elevates Yoruba metaphysics beyond cultural specificity, situating it within a universal quest for meaning—a system of what cannot be systematized.
The Nature of a Human Being
Who is the person who finds himself within this mysterious cosmos and who tries to grasp it as far as possible within its ultimate incomprehensibility?
It is a creature called eniyan, the Yoruba word for "person", implying the sentient composite, the animated physicality demonstrating certain unique qualities consrituting a human being.
What are those qualities?
The human person shares in the balance of mystery and intelligibility, of matter and spirit, constituting the universe.
This embodied entity has its nucleus in something beyond conventional perception, something rooted in the world of spirit, ori, "the head", a non-physical head or nucleus embodying the ultimate potential of the self, " personalised and unique to each person, connecting humans to the spiritual and physical worlds, acting as a bridge to the supernatural forces, which humans cannot fully comprehend," Falola states.
Navigating a universe which is more mysterious than comprehensible, within which even his own life is not fully under his control, the individual shapes his existence through choices made at the intersection of fate and free will, decisions contributing to shaping iwa, the unique identity of the individual, as "various physical and spiritual attributes interact and function within the human body...external, spiritual, and physical forces that shape and blend into a person" making the individual a "convergence point" constutiting "eniyan", the human person, as Falola sums up.
Human rationality is foregrounded in a description of "iwa", character as demonstrated through action.
Iwa is itself fed by a complex of factors, most significant of which is ori, the head as a physical form containing the brain and its counterpart in the non-material essence of the self embodying the self's ultimate potential.
"Ori in ordinary speech means 'head'. The head is the physical dwelling place of the sacred principle.The brain, the most complex organism known, is in fact an ideal coordinating centre for the numberless sacred energies that are united in us"( Wenger, A Life with the Gods, 73)
Toward a Narrative Cosmology: The World as Story
I am also struck by the following in Yoruba Metaphysics:
" In Yoruba mythology, humans are portrayed as characters in a masterfully constructed story.
The authors, superior beings, create these characters as having no awareness of their true purpose.
When the storytelling is skillfully executed, the characters influence the plot, and the plot, in turn, shapes the characters.
Although the characters' paths are predetermined, their decisions and behaviour bring the narrative to life.
If they fail to follow the plot, they are unable to justify their existence and consequently cease to be".
This is marvellous in the pathos involved in trying to develop a bird's eye view of the human condition, concluding on a note suggesting the scope of the human being's ignorance of the ultimate rationale of his existence even as he strives to shape reality within the possibilities available to him.
Ifa cognitive networks are organized in terms of stories by diverse creators, composed over a vast period of time, as suggested by the scope and variety of the texts.
Falola's life-as-narrative motif, a strategic contribution to Yoruba thought on account of its explicatory and applicatory potential, is an image rich with possibilities for adapting the narrative imperatives of Ifa to explaining the totality of the human condition.
Falola's account of Yoruba thought as depicting the world as a narrative, in which humans are characters who influence the plot and the plot, in turn, shapes the characters, a narrative in which humans are both actors and authors, gestures toward a narrative metaphysics—where the shape of the world is not fixed, but unfolding, participatory, and interpretive.
It also uggests a method of mapping the distinctiveness of Yoruba thought's most prominent ideas on relationships between faith and free will, as different from those of Igbo and perhaps Kalabari thought, for example, on fate and agency, as variants of the same structure of ideas defining African thought South of the Sahara, as I increasingly understand these synergies, akin to Falola's references to an "African thought system".
Between Cosmological and Individual Narrative
Falola's experience in composing and writing Yoruba Metaphysics as described in its acknowledgements may provoke senstivity to the motif of life as narrative, a narrative unfolding in terms of the confluence of the known and the unknown, which the human being navigates in ways shaping the outcome of the narrative, instigating questions of the balance between fate and free will, a pivotal concern of classical Yoruba thought and the thought of its proximate cultures in West Africa, from the Edo to the Kalabari, the Igbo and the Akan, among others.
Adapting the Yoruba adage of life as a river, a whirlpool emerged in the narrative river of Falola's life when he suffered a sudden stroke while driving at the time of writing the book.
He survived the stroke and went on to an escalating program of writing and publication, including the completion and publication of some of his most strategic works, from Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies to Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks and now, Yoruba Metaphysics.
What confluence of factors came together to make him so fortunate? What is the relationship of such fortune to his own will to live and triumph, taking forward his varied consultations with Yoruba culture bearers and other catalyctic figures in his research, eventually resulting in Yoruba Metaphysics and other books emerging after the stroke?
Resonances of iwa and ori radiate from this story, as eniyan proceeds on a dynamic motion through space and time.
A tree in the Osun sacred forest in Osogbo. Trees are understood as spiritual centres in endogenous Yoruba and endogenous African thought.
Conceptual Challenges
Between Ethnicity and Cosmological Allegiance in Yoruba Life
The Marginalisation of Endogenous
Yoruba Spirituality
The first sentence of Yoruba Metaphysics, from the "Author's Note" reads:
" To appreciate work on Yoruba metaphysics, readers who are not of Yoruba descent must make an effort to let go of their preconceived ideas, whether they are influenced by Western, Christian, Islamic, or any other beliefs".
But most Yoruba are Muslims and Christians. Is the world view described in the book not actually the perspective of a minority in Yorubaland?
I expect a significant number of Yoruba people in Yorubaland are acquainted with these ideas and they often occur in Yoruba films, but to what degree do they represent the faith allegiance of most Yoruba people?
Is it not more realistic to concede that what is being discussed is a spirituality and philosophy originating in Yorubaland, was developed in Yorubaland, but lost its dominance in Yorubaland even as it metamorphosed into a pan-ethnic, multi-racial and intercontinental system of knowledge and practice, achieving a level of inter-class penetration beyond its current situation in Yorubaland?
During the recent show of power in Ilorin in Yorubaland by the Islamic leadership of the city, leaders who practice a politically absolutist form of Islam as an outpost of the Sokoto jihad which conquered Ilorin and imposed its brand of Islam, absolutism expressed in their forbidding the public practice of the endogenous spirituality of the Yoruba people, I read an advocate of the Ilorin stance, on Facebook, challenging adherents of the endogenous religion with the question " can you point to anybody in political leadership [ politicians being a defining elite if not not the ultimate elite in Nigeria] who belongs to your religion?"
It would be hard to answer in the affirmative beceause endogenous Yoruba spirituality is grievously marginalized even in Yorubaland, as demonstrated by the dominance of Christian and Islamic places of worship, the celebrity status of Christian pastors, the sheer demographic force of the Abrahamic religions and the potent association of Christianity with Western modernity, the current face of human development in Nigeria and the foundation of its educational system.
The current Nigerian President, a Yoruba man and his Vice-President, to a number of the most prominent past and present governors in Yorubaland, are Muslim. The rest are Christian.
I am not aware of any Nigerian politician who identifies as a practioner of any traditional African religion. It would be challenging to find public figures who do so.
In referencing the concept "Yoruba metaphysics " therefore, how realistic is it to describe it purely in terms of one faith community, and one that is marginal in its land of birth?
Between Native Yoruba Spirituality and Imported Religions
In discussing Chinese metaphysics, for example, one needs to address the indigenous spiritualities of Confucianism and Taoism but also the imported religion of Buddhism, examining what is distinctive in Chinese Buddhism.
In exploring Yoruba metaphysics, then, should both the endogenous and imported spiritualities not be addressed, on account of the range of their local and global impact, describing any distinctive qualities they demonstrate in Yorubaland?
What kind of world view, what metaphysical construct about the nature of reality enables one's to be a practising Muslim and an adept practioner of traditional Yoruba spirituality and even a leader of the Ogboni esoteric order, the best known of Yoruba esoteric groups, as I recently observed in Osogbo, in Yorubaland?
What metaphysical orientation is demonstrated in being an ardent Muslim and yet a leading seller of Yoruba herbal products, ritual artefacts and sacred arts, as I also recently observed in Osogbo?
Yorubaland has originated distinctive forms of Christianity, such as Aladura and its derivatives, Cherubim and Seraphim and the Celestial Church of Christ, the beliefs and practices of which suggest a traditional religion/Christianity syncretism.
What metaphysical identities do they represent?
What of other churches?
What kind of world view, of metaphysical orientation, can enable one be a prominent Methodist priest and yet be the writer of what for years has been perhaps the premier account of endogenous Yoruba cosmology in English, rich in weaving a compelling picture through the use of Yoruba oral traditions, as exemplified by Bolaji Idowu’s Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief or Rowland Abiodun's life as a dedicated Christian Scientist and yet a foremost scholar of Yoruba metaphysics in its intersection with aesthetics and ethics, as represented by his Yoruba Art and Language?
Yoruba Christians have been particularly strategic in shaping Nigerian Pentecostalism, from as far back as the first Pentecostal church in Nigeria, Christ Apostolic Church founded in 1941 and led by Josheph Babalola, a deeply impactful figure in the explosion of the Pentecostal church in Nigeria.
What world view, what metaphysical orientations , are demonstrated by this continuity of influence?
In speaking of Yoruba metaphysics, therefore, should one not identify and respond to the various metaphysical forms that are distinctively Yoruba, distributed across traditional Yoruba spirituality, Islam and Christianity?
In focusing on endogenous Yoruba spirituality, would it not be more appropriate to refer to it not simply as "Yoruba metaphysics ", as if it were the only metaphysical system that captures the allegiance of a good number of Yoruba people, but to use terms that reflect its distinctive character as one out of a number of Yoruba metaphysical forms, terms such as "Traditional Yoruba Metaphysics", " Endogenous Yoruba Metaphysics ", "Classical Yoruba Metaphysics", " Orisa Metaphysics ( focusing on the deities of the religion, which include the ori, the spirit of the human being ) or Isese Metaphysics " ( focused on the community of believers)?
The non-ethnic name suggestions may facilitate appreciation of the fact that endogenous Yoruba thought has gone beyond its ethnic origins, operating as a pan-ethnic, trans-racial and intercontinental knowledge and belief system, a process Falola himself outlines in Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks.
On the Universality of Metaphysics from Religion to Science
The recognition of various metaphysical orientations commanding the allegiance of significant demographics in Yorubaland is facilitated by an appreciation of metaphysics as a description of the nature of existence, of the structure and dynamism of the universe and humanity's place in it.
Every human action, even the very act of living from day to in society, all institutions, all knowledge systems, from religion to science, are based on a metaphysical foundation representing a picture of the world and the universe as a significantly comprehensible structure the logic of which makes life worth living, ensuring a regularity of experience that justifies human existence and activity.
Yoruba Metaphysics, however, at times treats the concept of metaphysics as identical with the kind of world view demonstrated by endogenous Yoruba thought, as opposed to Western thought and science, which actually demonstrate their own metaphysical orientations.
Forms of Rationality
The idea of a metaphysical system implies a form of rationality, a kind of logic enabling the orderly structure represented by a metaphysics. That is the rationality Falola's book is devoted to demonstrating.
Hence the distinction made between spirituality and rationality in the third paragraph of the book is problematic.
It also runs the risk of perpetuating the Senghorian Negritudist fallacy of describing emotion or intuition as African and reason as Western.
Studies in Yoruba forms of logic, from Hallen and Sodipo's work on hearsay "igbabo" as opposed to "imo", knowledge, in Yoruba thought, among other concepts they explore, to their work on aesthetics and ethics to Rowland Abiodun's elaborations on aesthetics and ethics in Yoruba thought demonstrate the rationality of endogenous Yoruba philosophy.
An Individualistic Strategy of Unifying Endogenous Yoruba Thought
Yoruba Metaphysics develops a strategy of integrating endogenous Yoruba thought, a strategy that is Falola's contribution to the field.
In the Author's Notes he describes the text as primarily valid in presenting Yoruba thought as a specialised style of spiritually centred thinking.
What he actually achieves, however, is painstakingly outlining a ratiocinatively ordered cosmological scheme, at the intersection of intellect, matter and spirit, within the ultimate mystery represented by the cosmos.
Though his focus is on the Yoruba expression of these ideas, its intra and intercontinental resonance may be readily identified, paradoxically highlighting the uniqueness of the Yoruba expression of this global matrix.
Conclusion: A Slow and Thoughtful Walk
In this opening installment of my response to Yoruba Metaphysics, I have given a very broad overview of aspects of the Author's Note, the Preface and the Acknowledgements.
I intend to continue by responding to the life-as-narrative motif in the Author's Note, exploring how it can sum up the author's perspectives in the Note, the Preface and Acknowledgements, the sections I've read so far, exploring its implications for understanding Yoruba thought as an existential and cosmological drama.
My goal in writing this review is not speed of delivery or immediate comprehensiveness of response.
I want a slow and thoughtful walk with the author, thinking with him and thinking with his help, perhaps developing new insights through his stimulation as I map his ideational progression.
This approach reflects the very methodology Falola himself employs: the careful, systematic exploration of complex ideas that resist easy systematization.
Like the knowledge system he studies, this review acknowledges that some insights emerge only through patient, sustained engagement with mystery.
Falola’s vision of a Yoruba metaphysical system is not just a scholarly contribution—it is an invitation to reimagine the interface between thought, faith, and narrative.
In taking up that invitation, I hope to think more clearly, see more deeply, and perhaps—through his stimulation—come to new insights of my own.