Between Linear and Associative Logic
Abiola Irele, Wole Soyinka, Lepold Sedar Sengor, Negritude
I hope the recent surge of writings in the public domain on the work of Abiola Irele, highlighting his achievements in the exposition of the philosophy of Negritude, will contribute to the expansion of a love for theory, for systematic philosophizing and even for philosophical system building, in Africa related scholarship and arts.
Inspiring Thinkers in African Philosophy
Keeping in mind the very significant limitations of my exposure to African philosophy, the most compelling African thinkers I know of are largely visible as imaginative writers, Wole Soyinka, Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Mazisi Kunene, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Cheikh Hamidou Kane and possibly Bessie Head and as scholars of African art, such as Olu Oguibe, Rowland Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal, Henry and Margaret Drewal and Mary and Allen Nooter.
Some of these writers and art scholars are expositors of classical African cognitive systems rather than people who present themselves as developing philosophical structures of their own. The quality of their expositions, however, like those of Irele on Negritude, demonstrate such a high level of creativity even in the context of efforts to represent accurately the insights of the thinkers whose ideas they are presenting, that one may see them as distinctive contributions, even more when they are articulating conceptions from oral traditions which have to be carefully reconstructed and interpreted if their coherence and power is to be made explicit, a reconstructive exercise Achebe depicts beautifully in "Chi in Igbo Cosmology", these achievements also demonstrating glorious seeds that may be harvested in developing other philosophical systems.
From my little exposure to other examples of what is conventionally described as modern African philosophy in texts on the subject, apart from the efforts of Joseph Omoregbe on the nature of African philosophy and his global survey of philosophy, Nkeonye Otakpor on the world as a marketplace in Igbo thought, exposure gained through social contacts rather than research, and perhaps some other expositions of classical African thought, I have not been able to find much that excites me in my experience so far of this philosophy, particularly since my major interest is in cosmology, at the intersection of philosophical and scientific cosmology, accounts of the character of the cosmos in relation to the human being and how people may navigate within this nexus, as these ideas may be appreciated through a relationship with art and spirituality. I look to classical African thought, various religions and spiritualities outside Africa and Western and Asian philosophers, and more recently, to accounts of Negritude, for such mind expanding and inspiring ideas.
Re-engaging Negritude as Richly Complex Thought
Having recently read the Wikipedia essay on Negritude, and following up on contemporary scholars re-examining Negritude named in that essay, "Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), Donna Jones (Berkeley), and Cheikh Thiam (Ohio State) who all continue the work of Abiola Irele", as the article states, along with reading the superb Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Negritude, by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, it becomes clearer to me that my previous exposure to Negritude before my encounter with Irele's exposition of the philosophy was simplistic, and, on account of the inadequacy of our exposure to the complexity and scope of Negritude, a situation I suspect is suffered by quite a few other Nigerians and Anglophones interested in the subject.
Styles of Thought Within and Beyond Negritude
Imaginative and Systematic Thought
Wole Soyinka is perceived as the most prominent Anglophone anti-Negritudist. I have not read a detailed critique of Negritude by him although I am familiar with his famous "a tiger does not shout its tigritude" quip, making me wonder about the scope of his understanding of Negritude and his range of appreciation of its relationship with his own project of Africanist cultural affirmation centred in the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology.
My doubts are reinforced by the fact that Soyinka is a great writer and thinker but is more of an imaginative than a systematic writer, an imaginative communicator who has brought his creative powers to the illumination and adaptation of a cosmology, and is a system builder of a different kind from the central Negritude thinker Leopold Sedar Senghor, whom, from my growing appreciation effected through reading of works on him by scholars of Negritude, was an imaginative writer as represented by his poetry and philosophy, as well as a system builder, as his philosophy is described as demonstrating, his work lending itself significantly to systematic analysis in ways that enable its capacity to stand out, as different from Soyinka's writing which needs to be experienced in its naked essence, on its own terms, if it is to be adequately appreciated, being centrally an imaginative exercise which no other form of expression can replace, critical work on Soyinka being, to a significant degree, what the Buddhists would call "fingers pointing to the moon", inviting readers to look at the moon for themselves.
Associative and Linear Logic
Systematic expression involves the careful elaboration of concepts. Imaginative communication might be understood as related more to evoking the power of images and impressions than to conceptual elaboration. Systematic articulation is centred in linear rather than in associative logic, while imaginative expression operates more in terms of associative logic. Linear logic consists in the development of meaning by demonstrating how one stage of exposition in an idea leads to the next stage in a straight line, though the image of a "straight line" in this context is an example of associative logic. Associative logic, on the other hand, is focused on trying to indicate the nature of what is referred to by comparing it with or equating it to something else, so that the convergence of what is being compared and what it is being compared with can suggest the nature of what is being referred to.
In describing linear logic in terms of a straight line, for example, I have equated a style of reasoning and expression, something abstract, something that is not visible, with something visible, a straight line. I have therefore associated a straight line with a style of thinking and expression in order to suggest the character of that style of thinking and expression. One may also see linear reasoning and expression as proceeding arithmetically, in terms of 1 +1= 2 while associative logic progresses exponentially, in terms of a rising series of numbers expressed in multiples, such as 2 , 4, 8, 16, because the range of effects and ideas evoked by association expands rapidly the more they are engaged with.
This last set of examples is again another form of associative logic, describing a broader range of thinking in terms of specific patterns of a more limited style of thought, numerical thought. Both forms of logic, the linear and the associative, are priceless because they enable the communication of meaning using different but related capacities of the mind, but some forms of expression emphasize one rather than the other or use one exclusively.
Wole Soyinka as Imaginative Thinker in Comparison With Other Exponents of Orisa Cosmology
Of the breadth of Soyinka's writings, for example, one of the few, if not the only specific unifying philosophical concept one can discern him as developing is that of the Abyss of Transition, as outlined in Myth, Literature and the African World and mentioned in the introduction to Death and the King's Horseman. That concept, however, is more evoked and dramatized than expounded by Soyinka, a dramatization that reaches supreme heights in Death and the King's Horseman and is magnificently delineated in the evocations of ritual in "The Fourth Stage", if I recall correctly that great essay in Myth.
Soyinka's concluding poem in "The Credo of Being and Nothingness" is the most powerful purely imaginative exposition of Orisa cosmology known to me while the richest primarily systematic presentation I know is Bolaji Idowu's Olodumare : God in Yoruba Belief, the difference between both accounts not being centrally their length, Iduwu's work being a full scale book while Soyinka's is a seven stanza poem that fits on one page or a little over one page, but in their styles of expression. Idowu explains the relevant concepts in terms of basic logical schemes that require patient unfolding of the links between ideas even as he draws heavily on the imaginative structures of ese ifa, Ifa literature, and perhaps others genres of Yoruba verbal art, to expand and clarify the linear structure he is building. Soyinka, on the other hand, proceeds by evoking the core of ideas associated with each orisa or deity principally through images, conjoined with concepts those images reflect, eventually summing up the entire system in a few lines
Philosophical System Exposition by Soyinka Compared With those of Lao Tzu and African Philosophies of the Forest by Ayi Kwei Armah, Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Abiola Irele and Celia Nyamweru et al
System building in philosophy often involves the patient and steady construction of a body of ideas about the character of a phenomenon, and in philosophy of the kind Leopold Sedar Senghor pursued, it constitutes an effort to account for the nature of the universe and the human being's place in it through a network of ideas exploring the underlying structures of being, how they may be perceived and how the human person should live in relation to them.
Soyinka's account of Orisa cosmology in "Credo" is also an example of a philosophical/spiritual system, one communicated largely through imaginative methods. It can thus be correlated with the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a system that is largely allusive since the author begins by declaring that his subject is not really accessible to verbal expression, "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao".
The Soyinka and Taoist works may be contrasted with Ayi Kwei Armah's exposition of a philosophy of the forest as cosmological matrix in the central conversation between the healer Damfo and his student Densu in his novel The Healers, a body of ideas he describes in a personal communication as derived from Akan thought. Like the Soyinka poem and the longer Taoist work, the dialogue in The Healers is a brief, poetic expression, but organized more as a careful exposition of how qualities of the forest may be understood in terms of epistemic possibilities, strategies of knowing, through which experience of the ecosystemic wealth of the forest may be expanded into an understanding of how to engage with life as a whole, a perspective reinforced by other accounts from African thought along similar lines, such as Ahmadou Hampate Ba's summation in "The Living Tradition" from the UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. 1:Methodology and African Prehistory and Celia Nyamweru and Michael Sheridan's edited African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change. These conceptions are inadvertently subsumed by the richest exposition known to me of such philosophies of the forest, Irele's exposition of the image of the forest in Yoruba thought, in general, and in Ijala, Yoruba hunter's poetry, in particular, in"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka".
Philosophical System Building as a Human Imperative
To the best of my knowledge, system building is currently not in vogue in Anglo-American philosophy, Anglo-American scholarship being perhaps the most influential paradigm on Africa related studies. The central orientation in Anglo-American philosophy seems to be towards exploring the logical grounds through which thought and expression is carried out. Great philosophy, inspiring philosophy, in my view, cannot be built on such limited foundations. The Western philosophers who decisively addressed the foundations of knowledge in a manner that resonates across history and geography, such as Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes in Europe, did so in the context of broad philosophical ambitions that made clear the ultimate significance of the foundations of reflection in the quest for the meaning of existence. No wonder that the late 20th -21st century energizing of the philosophical orientations of theory in the arts in the West seems to have come largely from Continental philosophy, from the bold thinkers of Europe outside Britain, who seem to be borrowing in turn from the balance of abstraction and concreteness that is the distinctive strength of German thought.
The most influential thinkers, and here I include religious thinkers such as the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammed to others less obviously religious such as Kant and perhaps Confucius in China, are people who look around them, who look at themselves as representing qualities demonstrated by other human beings and ask themselves, "Why?", "What is the ultimate significance of all the coming and going, the toing and froing, that constitutes our existence?" "Where are we coming from and where are we going?" "Who am I?" "Who are we?" "How best may we live?"
The human race needs the efforts of such thinkers to orient itself in its journey through time and space. Such explorations help make sense of the struggle for survival that much of human existence consists of, the daily effort to nourish life in spite of the fundamental uncertainties that circumscribe human existence. These investigations throw light on the value of human being sandwiched between the abyss before birth and that after bodily dissolution, and even illuminate the significance of those great uncertainties, as far such voids of knowledge can be understood.
The Need for Greater Public Exposure to Africa Related Philosophies
Along with the exposure of the public to African writers, artists, filmmakers and at times scientists, the public also needs exposure to African philosophers in particular and to philosophers generally who are reflecting in terms of ideas derived from an African ideational ancestry.
Right now, I find philosophical debates on Facebook by Nigerians quite inspiring, those most striking for me being the speculative reality posts of Walter Emeka Dinjos and the debates inspired by the updates of Vahyala Kwaga. Debates in political philosophy emerging from discussions of the Nigerian state and its future inspired by people like Tony Osborg, Sopuruchukwu Ehidonye and Chidimma Egwuenu, writers of varied political persuasions, are also very engaging.
It would be wonderful if the various writings on Irele in the public domain online and offline could help catalyze such public domain discourses in African philosophy and contribute to developing African and Africa oriented thinkers exploring the fundamental questions of existence, in metaphysics - on the nature of existence, epistemology - investigating how knowledge may be arrived at and assessed, aesthetics - examining the nature of beauty and of art, ethics - enquiry into questions of truth, justice and right conduct, along with other branches of philosophy.
A modified version of this essays has earlier been published on Facebook as "Art, Art Criticism and Literature as Philosophy in African Thought"
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