Between Metaphysics, Rationality, Spirituality and Supernaturality in Endogenous Yoruba Thought: Rethinking the Opening Concepts of Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Between Metaphysics, Rationality, Spirituality and Supernaturality
in
Endogenous Yoruba Thought
Rethinking the Opening Concepts of Toyin Falola’s
Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality (2025)
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Abstract
This essay responds to the inspiration and limitations of the first page of the opening of Toyin Falola's account of classical Yoruba thought, Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality, by presenting a version of the ideas Falola introduces on that page. The essay develops perspectives directed at clarifying the varieties of Yoruba metaphysics, the range of metaphysics generally, relationships between metaphysics and rationality, connections between endogenous Yoruba metaphysics, spirituality and intellect and the nature of the spiritual and of the supernatural, thereby reworking an inspiring creative product in pursuing greater understanding of the subject in question.
This is my third engagement with the book. The first one is the imaginative dialogue " ‘What is a Human Being?’ Discourses in the Forest: Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics in Dialogue”. The second is “The Scholar as Disciple? Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Part 1”.
Critique and Further Development of Discourse through Reworking a Text
This essay is an effort to engage the subject by presenting the ideas discussed in that first page in a way that addresses those conceptual challenges.
One may learn much from Falola’s communicative ordering, his pursuit of organizational and expressive clarity, and his scribal discipleship, in spite of whatever degree one identifies with or does not identify with those aspects of his epistemic identity in particular works or his oeuvre as a whole. It is along the lines of identification and inspiration even while holding that some of the ideational presentations on the first page of Yoruba Metaphysics may be better addressed, that this essay is written. References will be minimal on account of time.
Diverse Forms of Yoruba Metaphysics
The title of Falola’s book is Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality. The term “Yoruba’’ in that title is ethnic and cultural. It refers to a particular African ethnicity and the oldest cultural achievements of that ethnicity as represented by a cosmological scheme its thinkers developed, the fundamentals of which came to be understood and identified with by the general populace when this world view was the only one existing within Yoruba society, before the advent of Islam and Christianity.
One may also reference Yoruba Christian and Yoruba Islamic metaphysics, indicating the distinctive metaphysical systems developed within Christianity and Islam in Yorubaland, and the interactions between these metaphysical orientations and between those and classical Yoruba thought, these intra and inter religious forms of thought and action evident in practice even when not explicitly theorized.
Yoruba Christian Metaphysics
Yoruba Christian metaphysics is demonstrated by the world views developed in approaches to Christianity originating in Yorubaland. These approaches include the Aladura movement, the Cherubim and Seraphim and the Celestial Church of Christ. They also include the distinctive approaches to Pentecostalism developed in Yorubaland, beginning from the seminal influence of Joseph Babalola in relation to the Christ Apostolic Church, the first Pentecostal church in Nigeria.
Yoruba Islamic Metaphysics
Yoruba Islamic metaphysics is actualized by distinctive approaches to the character of the universe evident in how Islam is practiced in Yorubaland. One demonstration of this metaphysics is in the intertwining of Islam and endogenous Yoruba spirituality, in which Muslims are also ardent practitioners of classical Yoruba religion or sellers of spiritual implements and herbs from that endogenous culture, both orientations evident in Osogbo, a centre of such conjunctions.
Isese/Orisa/Endogenous/Classical Yoruba Metaphysics
Falola’s book is centred in endogenous Yoruba metaphysics, a body of knowledge fundamentally native to the Yoruba, constructed by its culture bearers, perhaps also in dialogue with other cultures, one example of closely correlative systems evident across parts of Africa, and eventually spreading beyond Africa, particularly in its Yoruba variant.
It is endogenous on account of its being significantly constructed by Yoruba people in Yorubaland. It may be understood as “classical” on account of its role as the inspiration for further developments in this culture, within Yorubaland and beyond, even beyond Africa. The term “Isese” may represent the community of those who identify with this culture while “Orisa” is the generic name for deities in this spirituality, and may be used in representing the religious culture as a whole.
Sources of Classical Yoruba Thought
Classical Yoruba thought, as is necessarily the case with a largely oral tradition, even though it applies to any body of knowledge of widespread identification, can be presented only in terms of an individual perspective or a unification of perspectives or a consideration of those perspectives as distinct from each other. This is so on account of the various ways in what that cognitive culture may be perceived.
The only way in which the idea of a monolithic classical Yoruba thought is valid is in the simple descriptions of basic concepts and a simple presentation of an overarching world view. The situation changes when the discussion goes beyond such simple descriptions of the basic concepts and world view. More sophisticated presentations of those fundamental ideas and overarching descriptions emerge.
Therefore all accounts of classical Yoruba thought, of its fundamental ideas and its overarching schemes are largely the views of individuals trying to make sense of something that may be approached from various perspectives.
Bolaji Idowu’s deity centred account of classical Yoruba cosmology in Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief is different from the focus on cosmic life force, “ase” in Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton and Rowland Abiodun’s first chapter in Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, while both approaches are subsumed, in his own distinctive way, in Abiodun’s Yoruba Art and Language:Seeking the African in African Art. Falola’s account, among others, represents yet another effort to sum up this rich and many-sided culture.
These writers developed their understanding of the culture through oral dialogue with its practitioners as well as by reading works on the culture written by others, practitioners and non-practitioners. These practitioners also represent diverse approaches to the culture’s constitutive concepts and its overarching vision, as is evident from discussing with them. Such interactions, both verbal and scribal, reveal that no one person is a custodian of the totality of perspectives on this culture, with each person addressing it, no matter how thoughtfully or well informed, being but a prism of the matrix, a facet of a magnificent diamond, refracting light from various angles.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics as World View
Metaphysics is understood in this essay as a cohesive exploration or mapping of the meaning, structure and dynamism of existence and of humanity’s place within such a scheme. Metaphysics is fundamental to human existence beceause it represents a rationale for the character of the universe, justifying humanity’s confidence in its coherence, its sustainability and the value of existing within it.
The confidence that one will wake up from sleep and find a world that is the same today as it was yesterday, enabling one to continue one’s life with a reasonable expectation of stable processes and expected outcomes, such as being able to cross the road without the road vanishing as one proceeds across it, implies a metaphysical scheme which one may subconsciously operate by. When this common quality of human rationality is examined in detail and developed in particular directions, we have the various explicit metaphysical schemes proliferating in the world, from the religious and spiritual to the intellectual and the scientific.
A favorite description of metaphysics for me is by the English philosopher Anthony Kenny about the Italian thinker Thomas Aquinas, as developing “…a framework of concepts, transcending the interests of particular [intellectual] scientific disciplines and offering an understanding of the universe at a very general and abstract level, is what is meant when philosophers talk of a metaphysical system” ( Aquinas, Oxford UP, 1980, 32).
Forms of Rationality in Metaphysics
A metaphysical scheme may represent a focus on a particular kind of rationality or a combination of various kinds of rationality. A rationality is a style of making sense of things. A faith based rationality involves validating ideas through confidence in an authoritative force, whether a person, a group or a book, an inward conviction or more, with more or less reference to whether or not the belief thereby sustained is accurate or factual.
Much of human life is based on faith, with greater or lesser reference to the rationale for that faith, to grounds for holding it to be valid, because the world is too complex and the human mind too limited to adequately grasp all its aspects, even those required for daily living.
When faith is elevated to the level of belief in the existence and powers of entities that are conventionally unverifiable, and at more elaborate levels, to explaining the meaning, origin and direction of the cosmos and of the human being within that complex, we have a religious or a spiritual metaphysics.
When a body of ideas about values, identity and processes is based on what can be conventionally verified through the senses or intellect, what can be validated by the use of linear reason, reason in which the relationships between cause and effect can be ascertained by any suitably educated person using their thinking faculties, and where these faculties are employed in developing an understanding of the universe, noting the distinctions between what is logically verifiable and what is not, we have an intellectual metaphysics.
Classical Yoruba Metaphysics as Integrating the Intellectual and the Spiritual
Classical Yoruba metaphysics may be seen as existing between faith based, religious or spiritual metaphysics and an intellectual metaphysics. Its intellectual core is represented by ideas explaining the nature of existence in ways that can be readily examined using intellectual tools.
These include ideas of ethics, of justice and of how to live, and of aesthetics, on the nature of beauty, roughly speaking, although endogenous Yoruba thought ultimately subsumes even ethics and aesthetics within a spiritual matrix. Ideas about the source of the universe, the various entities within it, including humans, and their interactions with each other and the cosmos in classical Yoruba thought, are closer to faith based or spiritual orientations.
In between the exercise of faith and of intellect in understanding the universe are perspectives emerging from diligent observation of reality but which cannot be subsumed by the intellect. An example of this is the concept of “oju ona’’, the ordinary eye or mind, and “oju inu’’, the “inward eye’’ or mind.
This is a spectrum ranging from sensory perception to intellect, emotion, imagination and beyond. Emotion and imagination are subjective forms of knowledge which may be described as a bridge between the generally perceived universe and individualized perceptions. Beyond those foundational but conventional forms of awareness are unconventional forms of knowing, such as extra-sensory perception. This account of cognitive progression adapts Babatunde Lawal’s description of endogenous Yoruba epistemology, theory of knowledge in “ Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art”.
Spirituality
The first term in the subtitle of Falola’s book is “spirituality”, a concept open to varied interpretations. I take spirituality as involving aspects of existence that are beyond explanation in terms limited to human cognitive capacities, human faculties of understanding, whether intellectual, sensory, emotional or even imaginative. I understand endogenous Yoruba thought as centred in mapping relationships between the spiritual and the material, and can be described as ultimately concluding that even the material universe not only rests on spiritual foundations but is pervaded by spiritual presence.
Supernaturality
The second term in the subtitle is “supernaturality”, another idea that can be diversely interpreted. Is there really anything that is supernatural, beyond nature, not subsumable within the context of nature defined by the material universe or even the human mind which is based on the material biology of the brain and the human body?
Is the spiritual not itself an aspect of nature, nature as constituted by material and non-material forms?
Classical Yoruba thought could be described as representing such a view, centred in an ontology, a theory of being, of the foundational qualities defining existence, represented by “ase”, cosmic life force, pervading the universe, enabling being and becoming, existence and change, and associated with the deity Esu, in his embodiment of the complex unity of diversity.