From Hegel to Ifa
Inspired by Toyin Falola's In Praise of Greatness
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The Spiral of Being and Becoming in Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism, my interpretation of Victor Ekpuk's Good Morning, Sunrise, adapting the Nibidi spiral which may evoke the sun, journey and eternity
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is the most influential philosopher of history to have lived, largely through his influence on Karl Marx, who, taking forward Hegel's efforts in interpreting humanity's historical progression in relation to the concrete particulars of human experience, reworked Hegel in terms of a profound engagement with the social factors that shape human existence, impacting powerfully on various thinkers who have either acted to or shaped others who have reshaped societies in ways influenced by these ideas.
Hegel's inspirational force seems to be grounded in his work's relationship between abstraction and concreteness, between broad systematization and particularity, between the aspiration to a synoptic understanding of history and the role of various zones of human endeavor within this sweep. Thus, he remains an inexhaustible stream of inspiration at various levels of reflection in different disciplines, regardless of his limitations, such as his ignorantly grounded views on African history.
Among polymathic scholars, a group within which Hegel is particularly luminary, the historian and tran-disciplinary scholar and writer Toyin Falola is striking in the growing breadth of engagement he brings to African Studies, foregrounded by his latest book In Praise of Greatness: A Poetics of African Adulation. Falola's efforts in this book take my mind to the creativity of Hegel. Not content to organise and publish essays he has written over the years on various individuals, Falola proceeds to frame the essays in terms of reflections on what I describe as being and becoming and the strategies of interpretation of these poles of existence, although Falola is a much more concrete and particularistic thinker than those broad abstractions suggest, the abstractions being my own way of synthesizing a broad range of ideas in ways I can easily extrapolate from.
In my exposure to Falola's work so far, limited as that exposure is, though, I seem to observe an increasing degree of ambition to both scrutinize the details of experience and reflect on their overarching implications at the levels of general social experience and its relationship with spiritual conceptions understood as a means of probing fundamental realities that underlie the social. These orientations are evident in his essay "Ritual Archives", published in the recent Toyin Falola Reader and the Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy he edited with Adeshina Afolayan as well as In Praise of Greatness. It is possible that his work could proceed along such increasing intersections of the philosophical and the historical, the abstract and the concrete.
His writing also suggests possibilities of developing the potential of African conceptual schemes that try to account for the totality of reality, Falola's engagements with the correlation of the particular and the general, the concrete and the abstract facilitating reflection of how similar cognitive wrestlings in accounting for reality in its wholeness could be performed with the aid of those conceptual schemes. I have in mind here Yoruba philosophy, to which Falola is particularly committed as his immediate cultural patrimony, in its correlations with other philosophies across the world, from Negritude to various forms of Asian philosophy, to conjunctions between the Yoruba concept of ase and ori and the Igbo concepts of ike and chi, among other African correlations and reaching into the Indian Shakti, conjunctions some of which I delineate in " A Salute to the Elephant : Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines".
This is the domain of ideas which German thinkers, Hegel particularly, have developed so fruitfully in the idea of geist, a term which is more richly interpreted when untranslated, just like the Yoruba ase might be better appreciated through explanations of its scope than through efforts to translate it into another language, like geist, which, as ase and ike do, correlates universally pervasive creative force and individual consciousnesses, hence translators of Hegel's fundamental text on relationships between consciousnesses and history, Phänomenologie des Geistes, have translated it as The Phenomenology of Mind or The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Adapting Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's metaphor from A Thousand Plateaus, Falola seems more of a rhizomatic than a linear thinker, more interested in instantiations of possibility and their broad interrelationships than in efforts to project a sense of ultimate historical progression in the Hegelian sense, but his work could be profitable in terms of efforts to think along either line, motivated by his explorations of the intersection of context and outcome, of psyche and environment, the matrix of possibilities from which each life emerges in generating the social and historical networks that constitute human existence, adapting Shloma Rosenberg's interpretation, at his site Mystic Curio, of the "odu" in Olodumare, the Yoruba conception of ultimate reality, as the "receptacle of possibility and circumstance from which each moment is born", an interpretation that resonates with my reading of classical African thought as grounding the abstract in the particular, the metaphysical in the concrete, the trans-historical in the historical, through images of emptiness as containers of possibility, matrices understood in terms of the concave centre of the calabash, a ubiquitous symbolic form in classical African cultures, and its circumference as evoking the integration of metaphysical depth and temporal progression or transcendence in eternity, the cells in the Yoruba board game of ayo, in which the permutations between the pods with the nuts resting in them may be seen as evocative of the permutations of each moment and its place in the permutations of time, a dynamism which may be seen as explored by the superordinate Yoruba knowledge system Ifa, an exploration imaged by the relationship between the empty centre of the opon ifa, an Ifa sculptural and cosmological form used as a divinatory template, and its populated circumference, between the enablement provided by that empty space as the point where the divinatory patterns, the odu, emerge in the casting of the divinatory instruments, imaging the relationship between their welding of cosmological abstraction, of pre- human identity and the specifities of human experience as responses to the queries brought to the oracle, existential challenges suggested by the convergence of human action and abstract evocations of action and meaning, action and overarching frameworks, , evoked by the images shaping the populated circumference of the opon ifa.
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