it is always a great feeling completing a work, be it a chapter, an article, a book. looks exciting
ken
On 3/24/16 4:12 PM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju wrote:
--
"Philosophy and Artistic Creativity in Africa"
in the
Forthcoming Palgrave-Macmillan Handbook of African Philosophy
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Something great happened today, the 23rd of March 2016, when I began to compose this.
I completed my first development of a multidisciplinary style of exploring ideas at the intersection of the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality in relation to African created and African inspired bodies of knowledge and artistic forms.
This summation is a chapter, "Philosophy and Artistic Creativity in Africa", in the forthcoming Palgrave-Macmillan Handbook of African Philosophy edited by Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola.
The focus of the chapter is on simplicity, beauty, precision and power of expression.
It is a great achievement for me because it is my first relatively extensive integration of aspects of what I have learnt so far in a quest I began as a teenager in the 80s, the exploration of African cognitive forms as demonstrating examples of the most exalted efforts of humanity to understand the meaning of existence.
The Feminine as a Transformative Force in African Art and Thought
Senufo Ancient Mother Cote de' Ivoire
"The importance of women is explicitly acknowledged in statues of a personage known as Ancient Mother who is typically depicted holding a small child on her lap.She represents the female aspect of creation and is the founder
and guardian of the matrilineage. Ancient Mother is considered the head of the Poro [esoteric order], as exemplified by the saying 'Poro is a woman.' She is the spiritual mother of all Senufo males who pass through Poro, and,
metaphorically, the mother of the community itself. The sacred grove is considered to be her ward, or compound. According to some scholars, carvings of Ancient Mother are deliberately non-naturalistic so as to emphasize her
symbolic rather than her biological role in Senufo culture. A statue of Ancient Mother is shown to novices during the Poro learning process [ initiation into adulthood], in part as an indication that beyond the obvious lies the
hidden, an idea also exemplified by the secret language learned by novices. Initiation begins with boys being taken from their biological mothers to enter a period of dislocation in the compound of Ancient Mother and under her
care. Ancient Mother absorbs the young novices, who are not yet seen as human.She will symbolically give birth to them many years later, after their initiation is complete. New initiates undergo a symbolic death through
such rituals as crawling through a muddy tunnel. They are reduced to a kind of emptiness, a liminal or in-between status. Over the long course of their initiation, they confess their breaches of acceptable behavior, and undergo
intensive instruction in the male arts of living and in the Poro language and other lore. They submit to numerous ordeals and tests, including small cuts inflicted by Ancient Mother's "leopard." At
one point, they pass through a narrow opening called "the old woman's vagina" to enter a symbolic womb. At the end of the process, tutors lead graduating initiates out through an actual door, signaling their rebirth as issues of
Ancient Mother. Now fully socialized men and complete human beings, they have been nourished by the "milk of knowledge" at their Mother's breast, as is keyed in the carving's iconography. Only superficially a biological nursing
mother, then, an image of Ancient Mother is a veiled and rather abstract sign of the systematic body of knowledge acquired by Poro initiates.Source - A History of Art in Africa." From Discover African Art. Accessed 24th March
2016.
.
Even now, texts of the caliber of the conversation between Death and Nachiketas on deathlessness through knowledge of ultimate reality and on the unity of humanity, the elements and the Ultimate in in the Indian Upanishads, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's sublime articulations on relationships between temporality and eternity, terrestrial minisculity and cosmic vastness in his Critique of Practical Reason and his magnificent exploration of the Sublime in Critique of Judgement, Isaac Newton's awesome exposition of the philosophical and religious framework of his scientific quest in the "General Scholium" in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, accounts of encounters with the source of existence in Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist and secular mysticism, among other texts that represent for me the peaks of human thought, examples of what R.S Korner in his book on Kant, describes as "the metaphysical moment", the awareness of human life as ultimately framed in a cosmic context, poised within a space of unknowing in which what is known of the meaning and direction of existence is at best a fragment of possibilities dimly sensed but not fully grasped, expanding in implications the more we know, to put Korner's vision in my own words, are more readily accessed than those relating to ideas developed in relation to the histories of African people in dialogue with their natural and social environments and ideas and artistic expressions inspired by the African achievement.
These texts and artistic forms exist, but they are largely far less well known and are far less readily accessible than texts and art from cognitive traditions and artistic expressions from the West and Asia.
The Feminine as a Transformative Force in African Art and Thought
Kofi Gamamiwosror Agorsor and Nyornuwofia Agorsor
Kofi Gamamiwosror Agorsor : "I started painting abstracts immediately when my mother joined the ancestors. I was very very sick at that time, still painting and painting...."
Nyornuwofia Agorsor : "The mother goddess "GBE" of her own will, redraws all her powers of creation (HELU). At this time, there is no Vibration, Rhythm and Motion. All the attributes of the male fall into sleep
(SODORLOR). We call this time KAKPO (involution or end of time) and everything is redrawn into the Mother Womb called (KPOGO). At this point everything recharges itself in the Mother womb and becomes renewed.
Then at her own will again, she wakes up and sets herself again in Vibration,Rhythm and Motion. [The language used in this explanation] is Wegbe or Yewegbe or "Ewe"[ from Ghana] . It means the Sound of the
Cosmos or the Cosmos... The source [ of these ideas is the cognitive discipline known as] Efa/Afa/Ifa/Fa/Teme/Morfiala/Lumina." Source for Kofi Agorsor: Comment on "My Mother" photo album in Kofi Gamamiwosror
Agorsor's Facebook account. Source for Nyornuwofia Agorsor : Comment on Inside the Cosmos photo album in Nyornuwofia Agorsor's Facebook account.
What I have done in that chapter is bring together some of the most powerful examples of such texts and art known to me, unifying them through a discussion on forms of knowledge, various ways of arriving at and expressing understanding represented by the development of conceptions in terms of linear and imaginative rationality as well as the transcendence of concepts, doing this essentially in terms of the self referentiality of African developed bodies of knowledge as systems that can be used to address the greatest scope of philosophical questions in terms of an arsenal of ideas drawn from within their own vast boundaries, from which scope dialogue may be developed with cognitive configurations from other civilizations.
I aspire to mastery of Western, African and Asian thought and art, as well as those of other civilizations, grasping their character as unified structurations as well as an understanding of their interrelationships and the ability to blend these configurations at will.
The examples in the chapter include published and unpublished texts, including a text by myself on the Akan Ghanaian Adinkra symbol system and excerpts from an essay by Kat N Rob on Cross River Nigerian and Cameroonian Nsibidi symbolism,available only on Facebook, social media having become a central source for scholarship.
The Feminine as a Transformative Force in African Art and Thought
Opon Ifa and Odu Ifa
The womb of Odu, the "odu" in "Olodumare" the Ultimate, in Yoruba thought, adapting Shloma Rosenberg, Odu, the generative matrix from which each moment is born, in the words of Shloma Rosenberg, Odu, procreative
matrix of Ifa, visioner of yesterday , tomorrow and eternity from within the present, visualized in terms of the empty centre of the opon ifa, its circularity evoking the space of infinity from which the permutations of existence
emerge into being as the 256 children of odu, the odu ifa, embodying all possibilities of existence as they manifest from the fecundity seen as empty because it transcends all conception, as the spirals of infinity frame the
circular centre where Ifa objects-opele or ikin- are cast to invite the metaphysical essences that are the odu ifa to manifest in relation to insight into specific existential contexts, providing guidance through life's challenges.
I pray I am able to build this work into a book, ideally one that covers as many bodies of knowledge and artistic expressions as possible from and inspired by developments within the various geographical regions of Africa.
I am grateful to Toyin Falola and Adeshina Afolayan for the inspiration provided by the invitation to write a chapter on a subject I have been steadily studying in terms of theory and practice for decades.
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-- kenneth w. harrow professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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