Before he comes bellowing about that abrupt ending, "Otherwise I'll mind my business I don't want"
Somehow, the full sentence got truncated in transmission. Here's the Full Monty, Professor Adepoju making complete sense with the grim ultimatum climaxing his train of thought addressed to Cornelius, namesake of the God-fearing Roman Centurion:
"Your post on USAAfrica was rich but you spoilt it by adding " ranting about Kant" etc. Why did you do that?
In scholarship, people critique, not dismiss. Critique means providing logical reasons for a point of view. Being dismissive is criticising without advancing a logical rationale. Why should I take you seriously if that's your approach? Do I respond dismissively too? If you edit that passage by presenting a reasoned rationale for your statement, I'll be happy to respond. Otherwise I'll mind my business. I don't want to engage in contests of how to be mean"
Perfect. All of the above in response to this my kind missive to him in which occurs the offensive bit that he refers to , in context, my saying,
" The only criticism I've heard from fellow ignoramuses here and there is that Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju seems incapable of saying anything about Ifa and allied Nigerian phenomena without reaching out to explain everything in terms of Western categories of philosophy, metaphysics, etc. I guess that if you were writing in Yoruba, for a traditional Yoruba audience/ readership you would dispense with ranting on about Kant, Heidegger, Dion Fortune, the Dalai Lama, etc."
I should provide " logical reasons " for what I said in that slight paragraph ? I'm still so sorry that I don't have the time for it., when the reasoning behind what I say is both implicit and explicit. Should I ever want to approach Ifa studies, from this very moment and before I arrived in Nigeria I would have reconnoitred the territory through the available social anthropological material , and I suppose if sufficiently interested would get initiated or baptised into the system without much further delay after my arrival, just as I was initiated into the Rifaʽi Brotherhood at the Ahmad Rifaʽi Mosque in Cairo in June 1991, on the recommendation of the then head of the Egyptian Sufi Council, Professor of Islamic Philosophy Abu Al-Wafa Al-Ghunaymi Taftazani after an hour's interview with him at his University of Cairo Office. To date, the most humble person I have ever met. Humble and sincere heart to heart, we dispensed with any pretensions, the only thing is that I did not know at the time was that he had such marked Shia leanings, just like the former rector of Al-Azar, Sheikh Mahmoud Shaltut
Anyway, in Adepoju's peregrinations when it's Ifa that's supposedly the focus, not Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Hinduism, Western Philosophy, Sufism or Kabbalah that one would normally assume is occupying the centre of gravity, centre-stage, the profound surrounding clutter of poorly digested philosophical gobbledygook mere crutches, as in " dress to impress"
"Logical reasons " etc. – not illogical ones I suppose. And of course, an explanation, no matter how plausible, is not necessarily the same as a proof:, even of the Trinity of Christianity , in contrast with the Trinity of Hinduism
There are the stunning metaphors of light in the Bible and the equally illuminating metaphors of light in the Holy Quran
And for the more scientific cosmologists there is this nice essay : Born in Light
" When something isn't right, it's wrong " ( Bob Dylan)
Sometimes, I forget where I am ( here) and that this is not supposed to be the comedy department, even for the high-minded who have a little smattering of that thing called a sense of humour, but this has to be ironed out here, where the offence was committed; it's better than crying or committing other secret sins in the dark.
I sent a nice message to Oluwatoyin Adepoju and got this in reply :
"Your post on USAAfrica was rich but you spoilt it by adding " ranting about Kant" etc
Why did you do that?"
Sun 17:28Me: I did philosophy as a minor but my interest in the subject developed after that three-year stint. You are being far too sensitive.
Sun 17:56Oluwatoyin: "In scholarship, people critique, not dismiss. Critique means providing logical reasons for a point of view. Being dismissive is criticising without advancing a logical rationale. Why should I take you seriously if that's your approach? Do I respond dismissively too? If you edit that passage by presenting a reasoned rationale for your statement, I'll be happy to respond. Otherwise I'll mind my business I don't want "
And now my reply, and hopefully other miscreants won't commit the same offence/mistake/sin against Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, the scholar.
Dear Oluwatoyin,
You are right. I didn't mean to cause such an offence. My heartfelt apologies. Please don't take me that seriously, or even half-seriously. I don't know a darn thing about Ifa either. To tell you the truth, I'm not even curious about Ifa. On the day of judgment I don't think that the Almighty is going to be asking, " Cornelius why aren't you a scholar?" - or asking me about Ifa, but I may be required to answer the question, " Why did you offend your friend Oluwatoyin? You should have known better than to do such a thing, to him!" That's why I'm apologising, sincerely, and whilst there's still some breath in this body, please accept my apology. I promise that I will try to not offend you again, in like manner.
And please feel free to rant on about Kant, Wittgenstein, Moshe Idel, to your heart's content. I'll admit that I wasn't being or pretending to be "scholarly" or deliberately ridiculous as that thread is hardly the venue for your kind of highbrow seriousness. I was being flippant, that's all, dismissive with a one-liner. In the future, I'll ignore that I don't feel sufficiently patient to engage in disembowelling. This thing about providing " logical reasons for a point of view", I'm afraid that sometimes I don't feel or think that it's necessary, there's always the axiomatic and the self-evident, such as that water is wet, the earth is round: Hitchens had the energy and the wherewithal to assert that " God is not great" - that Allah is not Akbar ( which would have cost him his head in some other believer country and he then went on to do what you require, in his case he wrote a whole book in defence of that view.
Way back in 1971, Ninian Smart was in conversation with Bryan Magee about some of the absurd, I mean the irrational vagaries of t some kinds of unfalsifiable, poetic and theological statements that are to be encountered in e.g. Paul's epistles
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