Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Toyin,
Permit me a few observations and comments. This interesting post stirs my philosophic curiosity.
1. There is no doubt that Soyinka deserves a place in the honorific space of philosophy. There are also many more scholars that deserve such inclusion for their philosophic sensibility. My paper at last year's 75th birthday colloquium for Abiola Irele was an attempt to induct him into that space and to argue that philosophy ought to step down from its vaunted height into multidisciplinarity. What qualifies Irele is his transdisciplinary status which is an urgent requirement to combat our virulent postcoloniality. Check out his magisterial introduction to Paulin Hountondji's African Philosophy: Myth or Reality?
2. One way to enlarge that philosophic space is to read and interpret the emergence and evolution of philosophy, for much of its history, as having progressed along two related paths-philosophy as an attempt at worldmaking/worldviewing and philosophy as critical thinking. Much of professional philosophy from the 17th century and especially since Kant have gone on at the second level. Most of the earlier philosophers were however concerned with generating wisdom for living. That is why someone like Socrates, Nietschze, the Ifa corpus, the I Ching and other metaphysical cum religious systems would seem extra-philosophical. It took the intervention of Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein's supervisor at Cambridge, to prevent the university from rejecting the highly unorthodox Tractatus!
3. Given your queries above, I was thinking it would make for an interesting research to tease out the relationship between Soyinka's idea on nothingness and Jean-Paul Sartre's being and nothingness, in existentialist metaphysics. For Sartre, humans are aware not only of what is there but also what isn't there. We see being and no-thing.
4. If you are not familiar with the industry of modern African philosophy, where then did you get your conviction that " a significant degree of African philosophy primarily expressed in writing, in European languages is done by African imaginative writers"?
Be well, my brother!
Adeshina Afolayan
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovadepoju@gmail.com>
Sender: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2013 17:41:20 +0100
To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>; <NaijaObserver@yahoogroups.com>; <NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com>; <NIgerianWorldForum@yahoogroups.com>; <nigerianid@yahoogroups.com>; <nigeria360@yahoogroups.com>
ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] Introduction to Research Paper
Is Wole Soyinka a Philosopher?
Questions about Discursive Formations
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Process and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Thanks, Teniola.
On the philosophical character of Soyinka's ideas in relation to various branches of philosophy, I would see that as the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate.
Why do I use the term 'easy'?
I put it that way because of the wonderfully juicy adventures in knowledge the quest to explore that question opens up in the context of Soyinka's explicit engagements in his essays, complemented by his imaginative literature, with philosophical exploration, particularly metaphysics and ethics.
Strengths of his are in metaphysics and ethics, his ethics at times flowing from his metaphysics as I try to show in my last response to you.
Soyinka's Metaphysics of Terrestrial, Cosmogonic, Biological and Mental Space
To the best of my understanding, his metaphysical foundations are in Myth, Literature and the African World, where, using his vocation in the theatre as a framework, he depicts the origins of the human need to engage with cosmic immensity and dramatizes such efforts in the navigation of space in theatre, exemplified, particularly, by Yoruba ritual.
He can be described as a philosopher of space, his work facilitating a fusion of classical Yoruba concepts of the life cycle as transmuted in his concept of the Abyss of Transition and his theoretical and practical explorations of the concept of nothingness as a mental state.
These efforts represent a contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of religion because they expand, in a novel manner, the ancient idea of nothingness, developed across the history of Asian and Western thought and recently emergent in science,as in Tian Yu Cao's wonderful"Ontology and Scientific Explanation," in Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science and the idea of the life cycle emergent in various cultures that understand human life in terms of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
The novelty of his treatment of these concepts emerges from his enriching of the concept of nothingness by imbuing it not only with an energizing of its traditional understanding as a generative possibility, as in Asian thought and modern science, but emphasizes it in terms of a distinctive understanding of process, the process of transition between states of being, cosmogonic, biological and mental, as developed though his distinctive interpretation of Yoruba metaphysics of the life cycle.
This summation needs to be very carefully thought through so to make it clearer, unravel its various strands and assess their validity.
Relevant questions to guide this process could be: 'Has Soyinka developed any new ideas in these efforts of his?' Does he develop new concepts or new interpretations of old concepts?' 'To what degree is his conceptual expression dependent, not so much on explicitly new ideas, but the sheer force of how they are expressed?' 'May we describe his range of combinations of metaphysical ideas his originality of conception?' 'To what degree are various philosopher's achievements a novel recasting of old ideas, novel combinations or interpretations of old ideas or entirely new ideas?' Is Soyinka's Abyss of Transition a new idea, and if so, is it a contribution to philosophy? If so, why and what field of philosophy?
What is totally unique about the vision of the Buddha? I cant see it.
Is Marx not a recasting or reinterpretation of Hegel?
Presenting or Recasting Soyinka?
Such a summation is a recasting of Soyinka in terms of causal relations between his ideas which might not be as explicit in his writing but are demonstrable in that writing.
I dont know if he makes an explicit connection between nothingness, the void and the Abyss of Transition, and if one is making the connection, as I am doing, to what degree is that a representation of Soyinka or an adaptation of Soyinka?
Imaginative Literature and Philosophy
What role should his imaginative literature play in efforts to describe him ass a philosopher? After all, most great writers try to achieve some depth of vision, a form of wisdom, in their works. Does that make them philosophers? Are we to agree that the boundaries between what is or is not philosophy- an English word derived from Greek and imbued with the cultural history of the West- a cultural history that in its intellectual form is built on exclusiveness of other world views in shaping the foundations of the disciplines that constitute their framework, the self understanding of these disciplines, are often culturally defined , differing and overlapping across cultures?
Why has Nietzsche been baptized into Western philosophy when he is is different from the tenor of that philosophy as it had emerged in his 19th century?
On what terms are the Chinese founders of Taoism, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu known as philosophers when all their work consists of poetic statements on the nature of reality?
Why is the Western philosopher Wittgenstein's purely aphoristic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus called a work of philosophy when at the time he wrote the Western philosophical tradition was centered in the expository technique of the essay ?
Comparing Histories and Forms of Philosophy : The I Ching as Both Divinatory and Philosophical System
Why is the Chinese divinatory text the I Ching,which Wikipedia accurately but provocatively describes as a " book containing] a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; in Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose", regarded as one of the most seminal philosophical works in Chinese history?
Its philosophical significance is emphasized in a number of Chinese philosophy and divination texts I have come across. These are Bo Mou's edited Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy where the first three chapters explore Yi-Jing or I Ching philosophy; Richard Wilhelm's introduction to his translation of the I Ching and Fung Yu Lan in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, a book that is particularly useful in relation to the question of the character of philosophy in various cultures because he explores that question in comparing Chinese and Western philosophy.
In the chapters "The Yin-Yang School and Early Chinese Cosmogony" he describes the transformation of the divination system from its occult base to a more critical systematicity, and in the chapter "Neo-Confucianism :The Cosmologists" he describes Chang Tsai, Chou Tun-yi and Shao Yung as deriving their philosophies from the I Ching,
Wikipedia sums up the emergence of this philosophical approach to the I Ching divinatory system:
"During the Warring States Period, the text was re-interpreted as a system of cosmology and philosophy that subsequently became intrinsic to Chinese culture. It centered on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change'.
Why Not the Ifa/Afa/Fa/Merindologun, Iha Ominigbon and Other African Divinatory Systems as Philosophy?
If the I Ching can be called philosophy, why not the Yoruba Ifa/ IgboAfa/ Dahomean Fa complex, its similar systems such as the Yoruba Merindologun, the Benin Iha Ominigbon, and their textual corpus?
(Particular discerning descriptions of this divinatory complex as a systemic whole expressed with some variety in various cultures are presented by Jaap Verdujn , that link being to his Eji-Ogbe Publishing page with links to his Ille Dafa Ifa community, and his Independent Ifa-Orisha Practitioners group., and the monumental work online and in books by Van Bimsbergen, such this selection from his work on divination.
On Merindilogun [ Wikipedia essay and PDF by Awo Falokun Fatumnbi, George Wilson, always most insightful on Yoruba spirituality and thought) and the Benin Iha Ominigbon ( Iha Ominigbon Divination, a careful summation by Aimiwu Emovon and "Iha Ominigbon/Oguega Divination", an detailed exposition by chief Dr. Daryl).
The Role of an Ancient Tradition of Exegesis and Adaptation in Developing the Philosophical Possibilities of the I Ching
Works like the I Ching, however, have undergone centuries of exegesis, of interpretation, with various philosophers integrating the insights they gain from it into their more explicit systems and the underlying concepts of the system codified in an easy to appreciate form, the whole exercise assisted by the fact that the I Ching is a single book while Ifa alone, a situation greatly multiplied when considering the entire complex, contains an unspecified number of texts, not all indicating a vision obviously consistent with others, and the form of which may differ across geo-cultural boundaries. Wande Abimbola's Ifa poetry from Yorubland is different from the prose forms evident in Cromwell Ibie's version, possibly from from Benin, where Ibie is from, and the task of specifying the concepts underlying Ifa and the relationship of its divinatory practice to those concepts seems to be at an embryonic but promising stage.
In the section on 'philosophy' of the I Ching, the Wikipedia essay briefly presents the symbolism and mathematical possibilities of its of its binary structure, evoking, incidentally, a similar structure in the Ifa complex, the symbolism of which is briefly explained by Babatunde Lawal's 'Ejiwapo : The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture" (wonderful essay but cant find the PDF version that has the impressive images) anchoring this binary conception in a broad overview of Yoruba thought.
I have tried to develop the philosophical symbolism of this binary structure in"A Quest for the Organizing Principles of the Cosmos: An Exploration Using Ifa , an Africana Knowledge System"; Olu Longe in his inaugural lecture "Ifa Divination and and Computer Science" and with Dele Oluwade, "On the Code Characteristics of the Ifa Divination Codes", (The Journal of Computer Science and Its Applications (Journal of the Nigeria Computer Society) , Vol.9, No.1, 23-28); S. Modupeola Opeola's , "From Ifa Divination to Computer Science", an essay I think was in Glendora Review's first issue of Yoruba Ideas; Moyo Okediji's ongoing exploration of the odu ifa, Ifa organizational structure, on Facebook, possibly aong with other examples, xplore the mathematical implications of the Ifa system.
My "Research into Classical African Knowledge Systems" debate compilation and my "What is the Significance of Ifa?" are careful efforts to delineate an understanding of the character of Ifa within a ratiocinative context that integrates its ratiocinative and supra-ratiocinative components. Many more of my engagements with Ifa from various perspectives can be seen at the various publication platforms under Cognitive Platforms at the website of the Centre I founded, Compcros : Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems.
With these comparative examples in mind, it would seem that a case for Soyinka as a philosopher who expands insight in particular philosophical fields a needs to engage with the question of the character of forms of discourse, their interrelationship and the social and disciplinary contexts that define disciplines and legitimize them.
African Writers as Among Africa's Most Creative Philosophers: Soyinka, Kunene, Armah and Hampate Ba
In what sense(s) can Soyinka be described as a philosopher?
A response to that could depend on the philosophical tradition one uses as one's yardstick of judgement.
Even within the Western tradition, perhaps one could correlate him with thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche being certainly baptized into the pantheon of Western philosophers.
Soyinka's style of philosophizing could be seen as related to Asian philosophies in its emphasis on imaginative strategies, although with a greater degree of reliance on linear thinking than the more prominent classical Asian philosophers, such as Lao Tzu, the founding figure of Taoism.
I have read only a little of newer, what some call modern African philosophy but have read somewhat more in African literature. That exposure, though highly qualified, convinces me that a significant degree of African philosophy primarily expressed in writing, in European languages is done by African imaginative writers.
I would hold that Soyinka and a number of African writers, such as Mazisi Kunene in great introduction to his epic poem Anthem of the Decades, in my view, the most important and powerful thing he has written, having real almost all his works; Ayi Kwei Armah's fantastic dialogues between Densu and Damfo in The Healers and perhaps the writings of Ahmadou Hampate Ba can be described as among the most creative contributors to African philosophy composed in writing, but their kind of philosophy is closer to the classical Asian model and the unusual examples of the West, and the dialogical and imaginative narratives of Plato, than to the dominant style of expression in Western philosophy.
Wrestling with the Nature of Philosophy within an Dominantly Western Paradigm?
Joseph Omoregbe in "African Philosophy: Yesterday and Today" (in Bodunrin Philosophy in Africa: Trends and Perspectives reprint in [E. C. Eze] [ed.] African Philosophy: An Anthology (1998: Oxford, Blackwell) presents an inspiringly inclusive understanding of the nature of philosophy. Many other philosophers and thinkers in relation to Africa have addressed this debate of what is philosophy in the African/West context, but, in my cursory reading, I am yet to see them discussing Asian philosophies as models for comparison and perhaps emulation in the effort to make the various aspects of African thought more reflexive,.
Are they perhaps obeying Western traditions of cultural exclusiveness?
Questions about Discursive Formations
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Process and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Thanks, Teniola.
Not read Climate of Fear and Of Africa, but your recommendation will hasten my addressing them. I will also check out 'Even Nothing is Something'. Would you like to give the name of the author, privately, if you prefer?
Is Wole Soyinka a Philosopher? : What Are His Contributions to Any Field/s of Philosophy?
On the philosophical character of Soyinka's ideas in relation to various branches of philosophy, I would see that as the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate.
Why do I use the term 'easy'?
I put it that way because of the wonderfully juicy adventures in knowledge the quest to explore that question opens up in the context of Soyinka's explicit engagements in his essays, complemented by his imaginative literature, with philosophical exploration, particularly metaphysics and ethics.
Strengths of his are in metaphysics and ethics, his ethics at times flowing from his metaphysics as I try to show in my last response to you.
Soyinka's Metaphysics of Terrestrial, Cosmogonic, Biological and Mental Space
To the best of my understanding, his metaphysical foundations are in Myth, Literature and the African World, where, using his vocation in the theatre as a framework, he depicts the origins of the human need to engage with cosmic immensity and dramatizes such efforts in the navigation of space in theatre, exemplified, particularly, by Yoruba ritual.
He can be described as a philosopher of space, his work facilitating a fusion of classical Yoruba concepts of the life cycle as transmuted in his concept of the Abyss of Transition and his theoretical and practical explorations of the concept of nothingness as a mental state.
These efforts represent a contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of religion because they expand, in a novel manner, the ancient idea of nothingness, developed across the history of Asian and Western thought and recently emergent in science,as in Tian Yu Cao's wonderful"Ontology and Scientific Explanation," in Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science and the idea of the life cycle emergent in various cultures that understand human life in terms of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
The novelty of his treatment of these concepts emerges from his enriching of the concept of nothingness by imbuing it not only with an energizing of its traditional understanding as a generative possibility, as in Asian thought and modern science, but emphasizes it in terms of a distinctive understanding of process, the process of transition between states of being, cosmogonic, biological and mental, as developed though his distinctive interpretation of Yoruba metaphysics of the life cycle.
This summation needs to be very carefully thought through so to make it clearer, unravel its various strands and assess their validity.
Relevant questions to guide this process could be: 'Has Soyinka developed any new ideas in these efforts of his?' Does he develop new concepts or new interpretations of old concepts?' 'To what degree is his conceptual expression dependent, not so much on explicitly new ideas, but the sheer force of how they are expressed?' 'May we describe his range of combinations of metaphysical ideas his originality of conception?' 'To what degree are various philosopher's achievements a novel recasting of old ideas, novel combinations or interpretations of old ideas or entirely new ideas?' Is Soyinka's Abyss of Transition a new idea, and if so, is it a contribution to philosophy? If so, why and what field of philosophy?
What is totally unique about the vision of the Buddha? I cant see it.
Is Marx not a recasting or reinterpretation of Hegel?
Presenting or Recasting Soyinka?
Such a summation is a recasting of Soyinka in terms of causal relations between his ideas which might not be as explicit in his writing but are demonstrable in that writing.
I dont know if he makes an explicit connection between nothingness, the void and the Abyss of Transition, and if one is making the connection, as I am doing, to what degree is that a representation of Soyinka or an adaptation of Soyinka?
Imaginative Literature and Philosophy
What role should his imaginative literature play in efforts to describe him ass a philosopher? After all, most great writers try to achieve some depth of vision, a form of wisdom, in their works. Does that make them philosophers? Are we to agree that the boundaries between what is or is not philosophy- an English word derived from Greek and imbued with the cultural history of the West- a cultural history that in its intellectual form is built on exclusiveness of other world views in shaping the foundations of the disciplines that constitute their framework, the self understanding of these disciplines, are often culturally defined , differing and overlapping across cultures?
Why has Nietzsche been baptized into Western philosophy when he is is different from the tenor of that philosophy as it had emerged in his 19th century?
On what terms are the Chinese founders of Taoism, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu known as philosophers when all their work consists of poetic statements on the nature of reality?
Why is the Western philosopher Wittgenstein's purely aphoristic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus called a work of philosophy when at the time he wrote the Western philosophical tradition was centered in the expository technique of the essay ?
Comparing Histories and Forms of Philosophy : The I Ching as Both Divinatory and Philosophical System
Why is the Chinese divinatory text the I Ching,which Wikipedia accurately but provocatively describes as a " book containing] a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; in Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose", regarded as one of the most seminal philosophical works in Chinese history?
Its philosophical significance is emphasized in a number of Chinese philosophy and divination texts I have come across. These are Bo Mou's edited Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy where the first three chapters explore Yi-Jing or I Ching philosophy; Richard Wilhelm's introduction to his translation of the I Ching and Fung Yu Lan in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, a book that is particularly useful in relation to the question of the character of philosophy in various cultures because he explores that question in comparing Chinese and Western philosophy.
In the chapters "The Yin-Yang School and Early Chinese Cosmogony" he describes the transformation of the divination system from its occult base to a more critical systematicity, and in the chapter "Neo-Confucianism :The Cosmologists" he describes Chang Tsai, Chou Tun-yi and Shao Yung as deriving their philosophies from the I Ching,
Wikipedia sums up the emergence of this philosophical approach to the I Ching divinatory system:
"During the Warring States Period, the text was re-interpreted as a system of cosmology and philosophy that subsequently became intrinsic to Chinese culture. It centered on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change'.
Why Not the Ifa/Afa/Fa/Merindologun, Iha Ominigbon and Other African Divinatory Systems as Philosophy?
If the I Ching can be called philosophy, why not the Yoruba Ifa/ IgboAfa/ Dahomean Fa complex, its similar systems such as the Yoruba Merindologun, the Benin Iha Ominigbon, and their textual corpus?
(Particular discerning descriptions of this divinatory complex as a systemic whole expressed with some variety in various cultures are presented by Jaap Verdujn , that link being to his Eji-Ogbe Publishing page with links to his Ille Dafa Ifa community, and his Independent Ifa-Orisha Practitioners group., and the monumental work online and in books by Van Bimsbergen, such this selection from his work on divination.
On Merindilogun [ Wikipedia essay and PDF by Awo Falokun Fatumnbi, George Wilson, always most insightful on Yoruba spirituality and thought) and the Benin Iha Ominigbon ( Iha Ominigbon Divination, a careful summation by Aimiwu Emovon and "Iha Ominigbon/Oguega Divination", an detailed exposition by chief Dr. Daryl).
The Role of an Ancient Tradition of Exegesis and Adaptation in Developing the Philosophical Possibilities of the I Ching
Works like the I Ching, however, have undergone centuries of exegesis, of interpretation, with various philosophers integrating the insights they gain from it into their more explicit systems and the underlying concepts of the system codified in an easy to appreciate form, the whole exercise assisted by the fact that the I Ching is a single book while Ifa alone, a situation greatly multiplied when considering the entire complex, contains an unspecified number of texts, not all indicating a vision obviously consistent with others, and the form of which may differ across geo-cultural boundaries. Wande Abimbola's Ifa poetry from Yorubland is different from the prose forms evident in Cromwell Ibie's version, possibly from from Benin, where Ibie is from, and the task of specifying the concepts underlying Ifa and the relationship of its divinatory practice to those concepts seems to be at an embryonic but promising stage.
Pathways to Developing the Philosophical Possibilities of the Ifa Complex : Number Symbolism in the I Ching and the Ifa Complex
In the section on 'philosophy' of the I Ching, the Wikipedia essay briefly presents the symbolism and mathematical possibilities of its of its binary structure, evoking, incidentally, a similar structure in the Ifa complex, the symbolism of which is briefly explained by Babatunde Lawal's 'Ejiwapo : The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture" (wonderful essay but cant find the PDF version that has the impressive images) anchoring this binary conception in a broad overview of Yoruba thought.
I have tried to develop the philosophical symbolism of this binary structure in"A Quest for the Organizing Principles of the Cosmos: An Exploration Using Ifa , an Africana Knowledge System"; Olu Longe in his inaugural lecture "Ifa Divination and and Computer Science" and with Dele Oluwade, "On the Code Characteristics of the Ifa Divination Codes", (The Journal of Computer Science and Its Applications (Journal of the Nigeria Computer Society) , Vol.9, No.1, 23-28); S. Modupeola Opeola's , "From Ifa Divination to Computer Science", an essay I think was in Glendora Review's first issue of Yoruba Ideas; Moyo Okediji's ongoing exploration of the odu ifa, Ifa organizational structure, on Facebook, possibly aong with other examples, xplore the mathematical implications of the Ifa system.
My "Research into Classical African Knowledge Systems" debate compilation and my "What is the Significance of Ifa?" are careful efforts to delineate an understanding of the character of Ifa within a ratiocinative context that integrates its ratiocinative and supra-ratiocinative components. Many more of my engagements with Ifa from various perspectives can be seen at the various publication platforms under Cognitive Platforms at the website of the Centre I founded, Compcros : Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems.
With these comparative examples in mind, it would seem that a case for Soyinka as a philosopher who expands insight in particular philosophical fields a needs to engage with the question of the character of forms of discourse, their interrelationship and the social and disciplinary contexts that define disciplines and legitimize them.
African Writers as Among Africa's Most Creative Philosophers: Soyinka, Kunene, Armah and Hampate Ba
In what sense(s) can Soyinka be described as a philosopher?
A response to that could depend on the philosophical tradition one uses as one's yardstick of judgement.
Even within the Western tradition, perhaps one could correlate him with thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche being certainly baptized into the pantheon of Western philosophers.
Soyinka's style of philosophizing could be seen as related to Asian philosophies in its emphasis on imaginative strategies, although with a greater degree of reliance on linear thinking than the more prominent classical Asian philosophers, such as Lao Tzu, the founding figure of Taoism.
I have read only a little of newer, what some call modern African philosophy but have read somewhat more in African literature. That exposure, though highly qualified, convinces me that a significant degree of African philosophy primarily expressed in writing, in European languages is done by African imaginative writers.
I would hold that Soyinka and a number of African writers, such as Mazisi Kunene in great introduction to his epic poem Anthem of the Decades, in my view, the most important and powerful thing he has written, having real almost all his works; Ayi Kwei Armah's fantastic dialogues between Densu and Damfo in The Healers and perhaps the writings of Ahmadou Hampate Ba can be described as among the most creative contributors to African philosophy composed in writing, but their kind of philosophy is closer to the classical Asian model and the unusual examples of the West, and the dialogical and imaginative narratives of Plato, than to the dominant style of expression in Western philosophy.
Wrestling with the Nature of Philosophy within an Dominantly Western Paradigm?
Joseph Omoregbe in "African Philosophy: Yesterday and Today" (in Bodunrin Philosophy in Africa: Trends and Perspectives reprint in [E. C. Eze] [ed.] African Philosophy: An Anthology (1998: Oxford, Blackwell) presents an inspiringly inclusive understanding of the nature of philosophy. Many other philosophers and thinkers in relation to Africa have addressed this debate of what is philosophy in the African/West context, but, in my cursory reading, I am yet to see them discussing Asian philosophies as models for comparison and perhaps emulation in the effort to make the various aspects of African thought more reflexive,.
Are they perhaps obeying Western traditions of cultural exclusiveness?
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovadepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Date: Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] Introduction to Research PaperTo: "WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com" <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com>
Thank you very much, Mr. Toyin.
Yes, I'd definitely love to share with other groups, as I look forward to the possibility of the expansion of response from these groups.
The suggestion of a philosophical system attributable to Soyinka is, at least for the moment, not more than a statement of its possibility – one that occurs as a rather distant idea, the provability of which I have no intention of pursuing at this time. Maybe something might prompt the mind towards such an endeavor in the future, but your more careful option (of non-explicit systematicity) is precisely what I wish to explore for now.
My professors – those who are likely to constitute the panel for my project defence – are rather puristic in their opinions as regards what qualifies a thinker or a body of work as philosophical. They are, therefore, likely to press me with questions concerning how my work contributes directly to philosophical discourse, in terms of the specific branches of philosophy – metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, logic, and perhaps the philosophy of religion; in other words, how I think Soyinka's sustained discussion of tolerance/intolerance contributes to these branches of philosophy. (Never mind that one of them has a published inaugural lecture, Even Nothing is Something, which focuses on the problem of intolerance – he calls it 'traditional metaphysical thinking' – and its effects, and quotes copiously from Soyinka's Credo of Being and Nothingness!)The relevance to ethics and the philosophy of religion is easy enough. I had ideas about how to connect with metaphysics, but thanks to your response/suggestions – especially that concerning the question of the relationship between primordial totality and the multiplicity of existence – I feel a lot more confident about this area too.Reading the Credo of Being and Nothingness myself, I recognize much that is amenable to metaphysical/philosophical discourse – such as, to mention a few, Soyinka's criticism of implicit exclusivist dicta (e.g. Rene Descartes' 'I think therefore I am'), and his going back to the Neolithic man in his explication of how these dicta themselves may be seen to have originated, which is very similar to the conjuration of the 'hypothetical state of nature' by such figures as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc. Aspects of the metaphysics of intolerance – its origin, forms, evolution, plus an important distinction between religious intolerance and the theocratic, etc. – are also discussed in Climate of Fear. Your insight has opened up new vistas for me to explore, and this is very much appreciated. I will also consider looking into some of the literature suggested by you.Finally, sir, I hope to also look into Soyinka's offering of the Orisa spirituality as a path to tolerance, and I think that his Of Africa would be instrumental in the explication of this. Any comments/suggestions please? Thank you very much.Teniola.
From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovadepoju@gmail.com>
To: WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 5, 2013 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] Introduction to Research Paper
Wow.
Wonderful writing.
Would you want to share this with other groups?
That could expand the possibilities of response.
Of course, with the Credo of Being and Nothingness and other works, Soyinka addresses the question of tolerance/intolerance consistently in his essays and his more explicitly imaginative works.
I am struck by your summation that his consistency of engagement with the subject suggests a philosophical system.
Is that necessarily so?
Would the possibility of a related body of ideas, but not equivalent to the explicit systematicity of a philosophical system not be one option to explore?
Its possible, though, to define such a correlative body of ideas although I would not know if I would call it a system.
It could also be relevant to engage carefully with the relationships between the various genres Soyinka works in if one is to adequately correlate them in terms of related themes.
I would hold that this subject can be traced in terms of Soyinka's poetry, drama, autobiography and essays as one takes care to demonstrate the distinctive contribution brought to the articulation of vision by the distinctive use of the tools of each genre.
At the centre of Soyinka's vision, one could identify a focus on creative plurality. Plurality, in this context, implies the sensitivity to various ways of addressing the same phenomenon, without, however, arguing uncritically that this removes the necessity for comparative evaluation of the validity of various perspectives.
One can describe this pluralistic vision as emerging decisively in the poem Idanre, in terms of the celebration of the rupture of the original cosmic totality and the subsequent diffusion of being from this disintegration. This is how Soyinka interprets the myth of the shattering of the being of the creator deity Obatala by his slave Atunda, described in some sources as correlative with Esu, the orisa of paradox, deceit and transformation.
Soyinka's essay the Credo of Being and Nothingness can be described as elaborating on a related subject, this time an aspect of the theme of creative plurality, plurality in terms of creative coexistence among various religious faiths. In the process of this exposition he introduces a subject he develops with particular power in The Man Died, the relationship between a speculative, imagined, mythopoeic state of nothingness and the plurality represented by the cosmos, a plurality that brings with it the conflicts that define much of human life.
If existence is so chaotic, why not aspire that the universe or oneself should return to an unformed nothingness, where there is peace in unconflicting unity?
This question seems to be evoked in Soyinka's treatment of various approaches to the complexity of being in 'Drama and the African World View' or 'The Ritual Archetype' in his essay collection Myth, Literature and the African World, where he describes two types of response to the question- one that immerses itself in life in the world, represented by the Hindu example of the God Siva whose phallic eruption unites earth and the world beyond, and those that seek escape from the chaos of the world, as in the example of the Buddha- 'One thing do I teach, brother, now and always, suffering and deliverance from suffering'..the Buddha is quoted as declaring.
Soyinka's preference is for the immersion in being represented by Ogun, who led the Gods to join with the human world, away from the unity of the primordial existence they once enjoyed before the Obatala rupture, 'purged spirit, contemptuous of womb yearnings' as Soyinka describes him in Idanre.
This commitment to creative plurality, to immersion in the tensions of living, is severely tested in his almost two year experience in prision during the Nigerian Civil War, as depicted in his autobiographical prose narrative The Man Died, where, as he puts it in the introduction to his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt which came out of the same experience, the 'little mind butchers', his jailers, played various tricks meant to destabilize him. What does he do? He derives strength from his material environment and from within himself, along with the help he gets from secret collaborators.
One method of drawing strength from his mental universe is that of invoking the idea of nothingness, of the void, of a state of nonexistence before creation, to help strengthen his mental balance.
Recapitulating his childhood exploration of a nothingness before existence as he describes it in Credo, he depicts himself as withdrawing into a nothingness at the centre of his own being, a creative centre evoking the void within the human self co-extensive with the void from which the cosmos came into being, as understood in various cosmogonies, particularly Hindu and Buddhist, whose conceptions of creative nothingness Soyinka evokes in Shuttle and The Man Died, and from there, as shown in Shuttle, he draws strength from nature and from visualized helpers who have trodden before him a similar path of struggle.He thereby recapitulates the pssage through an abyss of transition, the space of possibility he describes Ogun in Myth as pasing through in carving the path for the Gods to come to earth, to participate in the multiplicity represented by terrestrial existence.
Soyinka thereby dramatizes in his own experience, an archetypal journey recounted in various ways in myth, as indicated by Isidore Okpewho in his comments on The Man Died in Myth in Africa, if I remember well, and elaborated in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces; in spirituality, as in accounts of shamanic initiation in Joan Halifax's Shamanic Voices and in various death and resurrection rituals, in Osiris' death and rebirth in Egyptian mythology, and in Jesus death and resurrection; in autobiography, as in examples of transformative experiences occurring under the pressure of intense suffering or illness, as illness proved vital to the discovery of their artistic vocation by the great writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jorge Luis Borges, and by the contemporary historian and philosopher of religion, Karen Armstrong as described in her The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, an experience likely to have shaped her understanding of religious meaning as centrally arising out of the crucible of personal creativity and experience ; in literature, from as early as Homer's Odyssey, to Virgil's Aeneid, to Dante's Divine Comedy, to Angie Sage's recent work of magical fantasy Darke, in which like the various characters who descend either into an underworld of psychological and physical suffering or a literal underworld, or as Soyinka did into a psychological void of the kind described in Buddhism, a nothingness expressive of the primal, creative void at the heart of existence, as in the example of the Buddhist monk/poet Jetsun Milarepa's autobiography Tibet's Great Yogi, Milarepa, which Soyinka references in The Man Died, and as expounded so beautifully in Judith Simmer-Brown's Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism in relation to the dakini, the traveler in space, that space being the nothingness expansive like the sky and yet arising in the conjunction between mind and cosmos, Sage's character travels to the Darke Halls and experiences his own moment of recognition, a central prize of the journey in this archetypal cycle.
Commitment to the ideal of plurality has a price, and that price could consist in the testing of one's commitment through painful, possibly harrowing experience, as Soyinka undergoes in his prison experience. One of his strategies of self empowerment in this trial is that of drawing strength from the idea of the cosmic nothingness before the emergence of the multiplicity that is the cosmos.
Madmen and Specialists portrays evil arising from fanatical dedication to perverted ideals and the cleansing of this evil through purification by fire as the old women-the sage witches-burn down Bero's space where these horrors are performed.
My particular interest here is in the relationship between totality and multiplicity, between nothingness and creation, in relation to the challenge of tensions arising from multiplicity of existence and how it may be engaged with, one approach to this engagement being a critical commitment to a creative plurality of perspectives.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Teniola Tonade <mr.ttonade@yahoo.com> wrote:Please Read, offer comments and perspective that might help in the completion of this. Thank you.
A PHILOSOPHICAL LOOK AT WOLE SOYINKA'S TREATMENT OF THE THEME OF TOLERANCEBy Teniola Tonade
IntroductionThe world is gradually burning away. The phenomenon of terrorism – one that has, admittedly, plagued human society for a long time coming – has grown exponentially, in the past few decades, into a veritable juggernaut. Spates of suicide bombing, random shootings, plane hijacks and other machinations of evil ingenuity have almost become a daily dose for us, the non-militant populace of the world; indeed, these have become a permanent reality, threatening to, literally, tear the world apart.At the heart of this lamentable situation, and in the hearts of the perpetrators of these evils, lies intolerance – especially, but not only, of the religious strain. We live in a world where believers, adherents and members of one religion, sect, ideology, view, race or creed, far from listening to those of others and attaining mutual understanding and tolerance with them, actually reduce their counterparts to nothing, profiling them as worthless, not worthy to be heard and, therefore, ultimately expendable. And in carrying out the self-imposed task of ridding the world of unbelievers – the unaligned or uninitiated, the infidels or kafri – none is to be spared. There is no regard for the normal rules of engagement. Civilians, women and even children are as guilty as the combatant sections of the other side, their lives also to be snuffed out (or, more appropriately, burned out) prematurely. September 11, 2001, by no means the only important and grisly act of terrorism in recent times and past, but only for its sheer magnitude, remains a universal reminder of this destructive potential of intolerance. So will a mere mention of certain names – Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Ku Klux Klan, Adolf Hitler, and the 'Right to Life' crusaders, to mention but a few – send a similar chill down the spine of anyone with even a most meagre sensibility.Such is the menace that intolerance breeds, and the conclusion is not far-fetched, that if this condition is left to continue unabated, then human life on earth – not just our individual lives but the very fact of human existence – is bound to become more critically endangered. Imagine the nuclear bomb finding its way into the hands of Al Qaeda!The German philosopher, Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), provides us with a view of the function of philosophy thus: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." This submission has become something of a mantra in the mouths of many philosophers after Marx, and, the extremisms engendered by Marxist philosophy nonetheless, one is obliged to affirm the laudability of such an instrumental view, in itself, of philosophy. In line with this thinking, therefore, the popularity of Marxism appears to be properly justified.But if a philosophy or a thinker that emphasizes merely the purpose of changing the world is greeted with so much applause and popularity, how much more, then, is due to one that emphasizes the more fundamental purpose of preserving that world, and preserving human life in it? Surely, one cannot think of changing or transforming a world that is doomed to be destroyed, a world whose very existence is evidently endangered by intolerance and its agents. Thus, prime attention must be given to philosophers or thinkers, who have devoted their time and intellectual energy to the most essential cause of extricating our world from intolerance, aiming to neutralize the threat of doom that hangs, like the fabled sword of Damocles, above our precious world.One such thinker is Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning writer, activist and philosopher. The last of these qualifications – the label of a 'philosopher' – is, of course, deliberate. It is bound to be disputed, quite understandably, by many, especially those from the more pedantic sections of the philosophical enterprise. We shall come to this in due course, as it is one of the issues that this project work seeks to confront. For now, however, let etymology be arbiter to determine who a philosopher is – and thus we have it: a lover of wisdom.Soyinka's wisdom is often directed at the human condition, delineating its realities and advancing prescriptions for its betterment. More specifically – and this is more directly relevant to our topic of discourse – this penetrating wisdom is often preoccupied with the matter of tolerance and, perhaps even to a greater degree, its dangerous and anti-human antithesis – intolerance. In a bewildering amount of books, essays, articles, lectures, poems and even interviews, Soyinka discusses the phenomenon of intolerance in its many manifestations, forms and guises, its root causes and effects on human society, and the dangers that it poses to the very existence of the human species and the sustainability of our world. Not to be regarded, however, as a mere prophet of doom, Soyinka also, side by side with the negativities of intolerance, discusses the alternative of tolerance, emphasizing both its desirability and possibility, and never forgetting to spell out the paths to its genuine attainment.Worthy of note also is the fact that Soyinka's preoccupation with the issue of tolerance/intolerance spans an incredibly long period of time (from the 1960's down to the present decade), and the thread is seldom broken. This goes to show the relative consistency of Soyinka's vision, tempting one to argue for the existence of a philosophical system that might be attributed to the man. More critically, however, it shows the perennial and intractable nature of the problem of intolerance, thereby dismissing the possibility of any simplistic solution. Soyinka does not eschew the complexities that come with the search for tolerance, yet his overall conclusions and prescriptions are refreshingly not so complex, renewing humanity's hope in the actualization of that ever-receding dream that is World Peace.Teniola.@mrtonade on Twitter.
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