The Universe as Loom and Archive
in the Paradigm of Experiential Omnihermeneutics
Part 2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and ChatGPT
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Abstract
This essay develops experiential omnihermeneutics as a comparative name for the disciplined interpretation of the entire field of experience as potentially meaningful. It begins with Aleister Crowley’s resolution to interpret every phenomenon as a particular encounter between God and the soul and Milarepa’s transformation of a broken earthenware pot into a teacher of impermanence.
It then expands the paradigm through five African configurations of comprehensive interpretation. Wole Soyinka, reflecting on the prison poems collected in A Shuttle in the Crypt, describes how sensory, mental, oneiric and incidental materials were absorbed into the master image of the loom and shuttle as an imaginative defence against isolation. Ahmadou Hampâté Bâ presents the Fulani loom as a cosmogram in which the structure, movements and materials of weaving correlate with the elements, the directions of space, temporal cycles, human embodiment and the expenditure of life in creation.
Germaine Dieterlen’s account of Koumen and Peul pastoral initiation extends this participatory logic into a cognitive ecology in which clans, cattle coats, elements, directions, plants, shrines, speech sounds, lunar cycles and the initiate’s life course form an interdependent system of instruction. Mazisi Kunene’s account of classical Zulu epistemology distinguishes the analytic precision mind, ubuchopho, from the synthesising cosmic mind, ingqondo, culminating in a chameleon-like apprehension of life as a totality, symbolised by the rounded calabash and achieved through the slow fire of maturation.
A fifth configuration emerges through Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju’s readings of Atelier Wenger and Ifá: the chameleon becomes a principle of multicognitive adaptation, coordinating sensory perception, intellect, imagination, performance, intuition and revelation while preserving the differences among them. These models illuminate Toyin Falola’s scholarship as an intellectually rigorous form of omnihermeneutics: the transformation of memories, rituals, objects, histories, places and cultural practices into an expanding archive whose local particularities open towards African and global questions.
The essay argues that this paradigm proceeds through two complementary movements: a centrifugal radiation from the immediate phenomenon into far-reaching associations, and a centripetal gathering of those associations into coherent knowledge. It concludes by defining the disciplines required to distinguish generative interpretation from arbitrary overinterpretation.
The verbal text is complemented by images created by ChatGPT which vivify the text and amplify its evocative power.
Origins of a Paradigm
The Two-Prompt Method of the Toyin Falola Studies Review
I employ two prompts for ChatGPT to act on in surveying and assessing new information about the polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola on a weekly basis, which I present as the Toyin Falola Studies Review. One prompt asks Chat to simply provide the survey and assessment. The second prompt, leading to another production, asks the AI to present the same information through a particular theoretical lens. This helps to further demonstrate the interpretive possibilities of the earlier information provided, and to amplify the visibility of African/African inspired schools of thought, that being Falola's focus and to which I earlier committed myself in terms of what theoretical structures to use.
Beyond an Exclusively African Theoretical Framework
Recently, however, I have begun to feel constricted by that commitment, since my relationship with African thought, perhaps my strongest cognitive commitment, is enmeshed with an intercontinental and multicultural network of inspirations. Why not allow my own enthusiasms to fully drive the choice of theoretical structures, as they have done before now, though focused on Africa? I should feel free to move beyond Africa, if need be.
Subjectivity, Meaning and the Africa–World Oscillation
As I clarify in The Toyin Falola Studies Review No. 8,
''...while Falola and his work are entities separate from myself, and I aspire to engage them in a manner that anyone can appreciate, the roots of my interests in the cognitive constellation his person and work represent are in my own subjective realities, my understanding of what makes my existence meaningful, without which I would have no motivation for anything beyond survival, talk less the passion for scholarship.
Within this context, my Africa centred cognitive orientations are rooted in globally networked aspirations involving various cultural networks feeding each other. Hence if my Falola scholarship is to remain adequately meaningful for me, it must also operate in terms of such an oscillation between Africa and the world. Also, Falola's life and work are best appreciated in terms of this rhythm between the African and the beyond-African.''
In Search of an Overarching Theoretical Structure
Along those lines, my mind has been going to a possible non-African source of theoretical thinking, enabling the generation of an overarching body of ideas that would place Falola's life and work within a frame of thought both precise and broad ranging.
Milarepa and the Interpretation of Experience
My mind went to the life and philosophy of the Tibetan Buddhist hermit poet Jetsun Milarepa, who dedicated his life to the quest for ultimate reality, understood as both transcending the universe and pervading it. He pursued this quest through a life of solitary meditation in which his experiences with the world became opportunities for him to compose and sing songs interpreting each experience in terms of the theology of his Kagyu Buddhist school.
Reading Falola Through Milarepa’s Quest
Could Falola's protean, many sided investigation of African existence not be illuminated by a framework drawn from Milarepa's quest, particularly since the African thinker and scholar has been steadily expanding his writing into spiritual and philosophical terrain, as represented by his engagement with Yoruba, and more generally, African spirituality and philosophy, from his essay ''Ritual Archives'' to his edited book on the Yoruba deity Eshu to his book Yoruba Metaphysics, to his correlation of the Yoruba Ifa knowledge system in the person of the Ifa priest Yemi Elebuibon with the global development of religious and scientific cosmologies, in Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuin and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems?
Constructing a Bridge Between Milarepa and Falola
For that to work, I would need a conceptual bridge between Milarepa and Falola. This bridge would address Milarepa's life as a hermit, its balance between the individualistic, personal, intimate, expressions of his life and the imagistic and conceptual structures of his particular Tibetan Buddhist school, the Kagyu. The bridge would also engage the various interests of Falola as they open out into African and particularly Yoruba spiritualities and philosophies. The bridge would, through these ideational systems, conjunct the 11th-12th century Tibetan Buddhist hermit and the highly metropolitan, globally travelled 20th-21st century contemporary African and American scholar and writer, a man immersed in the world while Milarepa distanced himself from the world.
Aleister Crowley and the Spiritual Meaning of Every Experience
That bridge would be provided by the 20th century Western esotericist Aleister Crowley from whose autobiography I encountered the expression ''to treat every experience as a particular dealing of God with my soul'', which I later learnt is an oath in the A.A. the esoteric school he founded, an injunction that is incidentally correlative with the orientation of Milarepa, for whom every experience was an opportunity to reflect on his quest for ultimate reality.
Naming the Method: Omnihermeneutics
I then asked ChatGPT to expand the idea and give it a name, which it did-omnihermeneutics.
African Epistemic Images as Interpretive Instruments
I then asked myself-why not use images of particular epistemic significance from African thought in illustrating this idea I had developed by merging Crowley's and Milarepa's thought, images that will focus the idea and vivify it in the mind-the calabash of totality, the loom of comprehensiveness, the circular spatiality of chameleon vision, its ability to perceive the its environment in a three sixty range, described by Mazisi Kunene as an image of ideal perception of a subject in Zulu thought in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades, along with Fulani cattle hermeneutics, in which the origin, structure and dynamism of society and cosmos are organized in terms of the symbolism of milk and the patterns of the coats of cattle, and use this unity of idea and images as a theoretical template in exploring a week in new developments in Falola discourse?
Developing the Essay Through Human–AI Interaction
I fed these ideas to Chat and asked it to produce a coherent statement out of them, vivifying and deepening the evocative force of the text through its own self created images. The application to Falola Studies would come later. Hence the essay provided in the attachment to this mail.This link shows the various stages through which the essay was developed as I fed the ideas to Chat as they occurred to me.
The Question of Authorship
Whose essay is it? It is composed by ChatGPT and I, integrating ideas which I fed the AI. Could I have written the essay without the AI? Yes, given sufficient time and motivation but my mental acumen is not capacious enough to do at the same time all the things I would like to do, even in relation to Falola Studies, so I'm okay with outsourcing some to AI, and allow knowledge to come into the world which would otherwise not emerge because of conflicts of time and scope of mental space and energy or could be long delayed in emerging, but which I am at liberty to build upon subsequently, on my own or in collaboration with my AI co-workers.
AI as an Amplifier of Creative Possibility
In effect, working with Chat, I acquire a co-writer who amplifies my creative possibilities. Why not simply claim the entire creative production for myself then, after all, the level of my input compared to the AI is known only to me unless I reveal it?
Intellectual Integrity and Freedom from AI
That would be cheapening myself in my own eyes, before the altar of my soul, because I have been writing sophisticated and lengthy essays well before the advent of AI, some of which its either unlikely can be created by AI or would take wondrous ingenuity to so produce.
So, I paradoxically assert my freedom from AI by acknowledging it as co-writer and protect my conscience at the same time, since my scholarship is both a spiritual and an intellectual pursuit.
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