USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Epistemological, Metaphysical, Aesthetic and Social Vision of Negritude as Presented by Abiola Irele : Global Significance

OH yea,  Epistemological, Metaphysical, Aesthetic etc...

I humbly suggest that " the Great Dr. Toyin Adepoju " and Sheikh Bangura team up to write a book about  my old teacher Abiola Irele and his ideas, assuming that Abiola Irele's ideas have not been standing on their own legs and are in need of further explication by the likes of Adepoju and Bangura...

On Thursday, 23 April 2015 15:16:11 UTC+2, toyindanteifa wrote:

The philosophy of Negritude has its most able presenter known to me in Abiola Irele.

The ideational power, aesthetic force and architectonic scope of Negritude emerge with compelling force in his  exposition of this philosophy.

Negritude may be understood as an effort to distill the essence of classical African systems of thought as these encompass various philosophical fields.

These fields of philosophy are :

Epistemology- the exploration of processes of arriving at knowledge and of assessing the validity of claims to knowledge.

Metaphysics- discourse on the nature of existence.

Aesthetics- explorations of the nature of beauty and of art.

Social philosophy- examinations of social systems.

I find Irele's writing on  Negritude the most inspiring, in the midst of brief exposure to translation into English of writings by other Negritude thinkers.

I have read other efforts to map classical African systems of thought as a unified body of ideas, the most striking for me being John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy, and with a focus on Yoruba thought, Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World.

Irele's expositions in African thought, generally, and on particular aspects of this body of ideas,  are unique.

His exposition of Negritude contributes to building a platform for better appreciation of the potential of this philosophy  as a developing body of thought.

Through studying his expositions of Negritude, one is better positioned to appreciate Negritude as an ideational network that can be correlated with research in classical African systems of thought across the years, demonstrating the degree to which Negritude makes factual assertions about these systems.

Through such study, one may also better understand the points of conjunction of Negritude and ideational structures from other points in time and space.

The refinement of Negritude, taking it beyond its limitations, may also be facilitated by such investigation.

Above all, there is an urgent need to press forward the task of demonstrating, through empirically validated correspondences, the correlations between classical African systems of thought so as to better manage this body of ideas and practices as a unified system of knowledge that may be adapted and applied to various contexts.

It is possible to achieve this task without uncritical homogenizing of classical African systems of thought.

These bodies of ideas and practices may be understood as variations of a unified core of perspectives on the nature of existence.

These  variations represent vantage points through which responses to some of humanity's perennial questions are projected.

These variations share striking similarities, the most explicit of which include convergences of metaphysical and epistemic vision and structure across systems of thought, some even sharing similarities in their names, such as the Ifa/Afa/Fa/Fan complex of divinatory and knowledge systems.

What is the value of studying ideas and practices created in Africa or inspired by African developments?

Each continent has developed culturally confluent ways of looking at the universe, each of these continental units representing pieces of a mosaic demonstrating the human perspective on the cosmos as has been achieved so far.

These cultural units are particularly distinctive in form before the emergence of the global dominance of modern Western thought, represented particularly by modern science as it began its definitive maturity  in the 17th century Europe and the rise of the global appeal of Western  social systems, particularly in economics and education.

Systems of thought and expression  across the world that demonstrate the most uniqueness and which represent the greatest diversity,  projecting insights into existence and expansions of human creativity  which are often not superseded by later developments  even though these developments may enable refinements and recastings of earlier  achievements, are in the arts, such as  philosophy, spirituality, literature and other expressive arts.

These classical knowledge systems may  even provide new insights into various aspects of science.

The study of African thought, in general, and classical African thought, in particular, is vital for understanding  perspectives on central aspects of existence and of existence as a whole that are either unique to African systems or represent variations of perspectives also evident in other parts of the world.

A powerful summation of Irele's on Negritude is his essay " What is Negritude?" in his The African Experience in Literature and Ideology.

He has also published a collection of his essays on Negritude, The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought.

"What is Negritude?", however, is a particularly useful beginning for examining Irele's studies of this philosophy on account of the stylistic power and architectonic grandeur of the essay.

The essay is so conceptually rich and aesthetically powerful in its use of language, its crafting of an architectonics out of the weaving of sentence structures, it needs to be appreciated in terms of its ideas and its manner of presenting those ideas- a work of art, an example of ideational engineering the power of which is expressed to a great degree  in its marriage of method and purpose.

In pursuit of this detailed understanding, I am interested  in the illumination the essay may enable beyond the temporal context in which Negritude emerged.

The essay could also facilitate the  building a comprehensive understanding of Irele's thought as demonstrated in various works.

Along those lines, I look briefly at some of the summations of the essay, placing the summations in quotation marks.

" The term 'Negritude' has acquired, in the way it has been used by different writers, a multiplicity of meanings covering so wide a  range that it is often difficult to form a precise idea of its particular reference at any one time or in any one usage."

"...the writings of [Leopold Sedar ] Senghor afford the most coherent expression of Negritude..."

Irele proceeds to present Negritude through an exposition of Senghor's ideas :

"The psycho-physiological constitution of the African determines his immediate response to external reality, his total absorption of the object into the innermost recess of his subjectivity" .

"...the motive response of the African is an act of cognition, in which the subject and the object enter into an organic and dynamic relationship, and in which intense perception through the senses culminates in the conscious apprehension of reality".

"[The African's] mode of apprehension involves a warm, living dialectic of consciousness and reality".

" The African's apprehension amounts to 'living the object' in the depth of his soul, penetrating through sensuous perception to its essence [quoting Senghor] 'Knowledge coincides, here, with the being of the object in its discontinuous  and indeterminate reality' ".

Beautiful ideas, superbly presented.

There is no known human group that operates like this, however, as a naturally occurring way of life.

I have excluded Irele's description of Seghorian thought as describing emotion as the primary means through which this unitive perception of being is reached, in order  to make it easier for me to point out what I see as of perennial, trans-cultural significance in these ideas and what is not factual about them in relation to African thought.

No human group is known to operate primarily by emotion.

The correlation of emotion, reason, sensory perception and perhaps other aspects of cognition is what makes the human being.

No human group operates naturally in terms of a unity of perception between the human being and the world.

The distinction between the self and the world is central to human consciousness.

The idea of unity between self and world, of being able to experience other forms of being in their essence, is a spiritual and philosophical ideal presented in various schools of thought, Hinduism, Buddhism and other schools of Indian philosophy being particularly rich in expositions of this ideal, although it also emerges forcefully in modern interpretations of   classical African philosophy of nature, specifically Yoruba thought as presented by Awo Falokun and  Susanne Wenger,   and perhaps in shamanistic cultures.

These ideas, particularly in terms of my selection from Irele's much more detailed presentation, may best be understood as variations of an ideal that has emerged in various cultures across time, an ideal that aspires to unify the human being and the cosmos, in this case through intuition,  context of cultivating the bond between the human being and the cosmos, thereby facilitating humanity's sense of being at home in the universe.

Irele's summations, as I have abstracted them here, represent some of the most powerful statements of this vision as I have observed it in various school's of thought, from Western Romanticism to Indian Trika philosophy.

Is it possible to take advantage of these ideas, and use them, even if one does not identify with the complete context in which they are presented in Irele's exposition of Negritude?

Yes.

One can adapt them to other contexts while noting that one is making a selection from a larger body of ideas the full context of which one might not agree with in all its particulars.

It is possible to correlate these summations of Irele's with accounts of classical Yoruba,  Igbo, Indian Srividya and Trika theories of perception, for example,  in terms of the aspiration to  perceiving the unity of the cosmos through identity between the perceiving human subject and the object of perception.

Irele continues his exposition of Negritude with a superb summation of Senghor's Negritude aesthetics.

We could examine this later in relation to the factuality of its descriptions of African thought, its relationship to other bodies of thought as well as  its insight into human potential.

Also posted on Facebook

Abiola Irele [Blogger]

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