This correlation of a theory of the self with the act of interpretation makes it particularly apt in the development of the hermeneutic task that is the purpose of this essay. Furthermore, the theory’s correlation of the conception of the self, not simply with the interpretation of texts, but with the interpretation of texts relating to the symbolic significance of the subjects life, constitutes this theory as a particularly valid framework for the interpretation of autobiographical discourses on which this essay is centred.
Friday, 12 October 2007
Ifa understands the client’s Ori as determining the Odu patterns assumed by the divinatory instruments when they are cast during a divinatory session, and therefore, of determining the texts that emerge in relation to the issue in question in the client’s life. In a similar sense, the autobiographer’s conception of the character of their self, as it exists in the present, having emerged through a development from the past, and as it could develop in future, is the locus around which the textual formulation represented by an autobiography is constructed.
In relation to this centring of autobiographical writing, and, necessarily, of its interpretation, in a conception of the development of the self which is the subject of the work, emerges the artist’s efforts to mediate between an exploration of the character of the self as a composition that emerges from the factors that have influenced it and as causative of those factors that constitute the character of the individual’s life. This tension between the self as caused and as causative represents a dialectical tension between independence of the self and its grounding within a complex of influencing factors that is central to the Ifa conception of the self in relation to the cosmos.
The Odu are understood not simply as geomantic forms and their textual representations in terms of poetic or prose narratives. Those geomantic and textual characteristics are perceived as constituting the physical embodiment of their essence as spiritual entities, each of which embodies its own Ori.
Abimbola characterizes the Odu as equivalent to volumes in a textual corpus or as chapters in a vast text. This characterization is a useful heuristic device in understanding the concepts they represent, but Abimbola’s exposition makes it clear that this characterization represents only part of the conceptual complexity represented by the notion of the Odu.
The concept of the Odu, in embodying geomantic and textual characteristics, could be seen as cognizable within the province of the symbolic signs represented by language, as conventionally understood. The complete range of its characterisation, however, goes beyond the ontological categories normally assigned to linguistic entities in the Western tradition but bears greater affinity with conceptions of sacred language in Indian philosophy, in which the sacred syllable om is understood both as a graphic symbol, representing a referent, as in Western linguistics, but as the creative word through which the universe has been created and is sustained. The syllable thereby embodies both linguistic and metaphysical categories of being19.
19 George,Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice (
Ifa divination describes Ori as fundamental to the divinatory process. It states that the client’s Ori determines the pattern assumed by the divinatory instruments when they are cast during a divinatory session on account of the pre-eminence of the Ori in all contexts relating to the individual. Abimbola’s account of this conception suggests that the Ori of the client achieves this shaping influence through a collaborative process in relation to the Odu, the organisational categories of the system, which are symbolised by the total possibilities of patterns that can be assumed by the divinatory instruments. These configurations also represent the frameworks of organisation of the textual corpus of the Ifa system.
18 Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (London : Longman, 1962) and Wande Abimbola, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ibadan:OxfordUP,1976) represent very lucid expositions of this concept but Adegboyega Orangun, Destiny:The Unmanifested Being (Ibadan: African Odyssey Publishers,1988) explores its complexities in detail.
Gusdorf again sums up the implications of this tension between memory, time and the self:
Recapitulation of a life reveals only a ghostly image of that life, already far distant and doubtless incomplete, distorted furthermore by the fact that the [person]who remembers [their] past has not been for a long time the same being…who lived that past….narrative[therefore]confers a meaning on the event which, when it actually occurred, had several meanings, or perhaps none. This postulating of meaning dictates the choice of the facts to be retained and the details to bring out or dismiss….An autobiography cannot be a pure and simple record of existence, an account in a logbook…Every [person] is the first witness of [themselves ]yet the testimony that [they] thus produce constitutes no ultimate, conclusive authority…17
Wordsworth depicts the self that interprets its own history at a point in the present to a person who perceives their reflection in a river as they sit in a boat The image perceived in the river is both like and unlike the exact features of the physical form from within which it is perceived on account of the refractive properties of the water within which this image is reflected. As the boat moves on, the challenge of discerning the specificity of resemblance between images, the reflection and the reflected, is problematised by the challenge of perceiving the specificities of the reflection while the individual is in motion.
We may liken the water in which the reflection appears to the flow of memory, in which experience is necessarily refracted through the dynamic matrix of individual consciousness and the reflection in the river to the self’s memory of itself and its history. The movement of the boat and the challenge of identifying specifities of resemblance between the reflection and the reflected relates to the consistently shifting points of vantage assumed by the mind at each point as it tries to interpret its experience as it moves forward in the flow of time16.
16 Wordsdworth develops this image in Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton 1978).but I am indebted to M.H Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York:Norton,1973)for its analysis in relation to autobiography.
The narratives that emerge in response to the query of the client of Ifa as well as the narratives constructed by the autobiographer can both be understood as narratological devices, stories with a pattern, that are being interpreted by those to whom those patterns have an intimate value. In the case of the divinatory process the interpreting agents are the client and the diviner, in the creation of autobiography, the writer.
The divinatory process as well as the process of autobiographical creation, consist in a process in which the significance of the aspects of the subject’s life which are being explored, are examined in terms of their relationship to their roots in the subject’s past and the development of these into the future, as understood from the vantage point of the present. Wordsworth’s evocative image representing the perception of self through the refractive mirror of memory, emblematizes this convergence between past, present and future in relation to the shifting perspectives of the self that experiences them.
The divinatory process as well as the process of autobiographical creation, consist in a process in which the significance of the aspects of the subject’s life which are being explored, are examined in terms of their relationship to their roots in the subject’s past and the development of these into the future, as understood from the vantage point of the present. Wordsworth’s evocative image representing the perception of self through the refractive mirror of memory, emblematizes this convergence between past, present and future in relation to the shifting perspectives of the self that experiences them.
a. Consciousness, Temporality and Textual Formations
The hermeneutic process constituted by Ifa divination demonstrates significant correlations with the interpretation of meaning manifest in the creation of autobiographies and self-portraits.
These points of convergence consist in the interpretation, in terms of textual forms, of the flow of experience in relation to the past and the future from a vantage point in the present. These textual forms constitute interpretive centres in relation to either specific situations, or in relation to the development of a broader span in the development of the subject’s life.
The deployment of textual forms as interpretive centres emerges from the fact that the process of Ifa divination consists in a procedure, in which, in response to the client’s query, the diviner casts his divination instruments and interprets for the client the significance of the configuration realised by the instruments. This significance is depicted in terms of poetic or prose narratives, and, at times, through lyric poetry, from one or more of the Odu, the organisational categories of the Ifa corpus, which are represented by the patterns formed by the configuration the divinatory instruments assume as they are cast.
The literary expressions that emerge in response to the casting of the divinatory instruments are supposed to embody a response, in symbolic terms, to the client’s query. The symbolic character of this relationship has to be interpreted by both the diviner and the client. This interpretation of the significance of situations in terms of symbolic narratives and imagistic patterns demonstrates a similarity to Nabokov’s conception of autobiography as best understood as created and read as an effort to crystallize, in the form of images, convergences of meaning, in which the thematic significance that emerges from the contemplation of the flow of experience is crystallized in terms of points of illumination.
Gusdorf and Pascal amplify this conception of autobiography in observing, in Gusdorfs words, that “…autobiography…shows us not the objective stages of a career…but reveals instead the effort of a creator to give meaning to his own mythic tale”12. Pascal, possibly recalling the inadequacies of memory as well as its associative character, further clarifies this configurative understanding of autobiography in noting that:
a reconstruction of a life’ is an impossible task. A single day’s experience is limitless in its radiation backwards and forward..[therefore]…autobiography is a shaping of the past. It imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story. It establishes certain stages in an individual life, makes links between them…This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life13.
This characterisation of the autobiographical enterprise recalls the protean allusiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the progression of a single day is depicted as radiating “backwards and forward” in terms of the range of allusions it evokes in relation to individual consciousness and human culture14. This perspective on autobiography implies, in Eakin’s words that the autobiographer endeavours to engage in “…the discovery of the order of a life…by inverting the [conventional] importance and role of chronology and meaning….thus giving precedence to thematic order and relegating chronology to a distinctly secondary level of importance”.15
a reconstruction of a life’ is an impossible task. A single day’s experience is limitless in its radiation backwards and forward..[therefore]…autobiography is a shaping of the past. It imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story. It establishes certain stages in an individual life, makes links between them…This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life13.
This characterisation of the autobiographical enterprise recalls the protean allusiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the progression of a single day is depicted as radiating “backwards and forward” in terms of the range of allusions it evokes in relation to individual consciousness and human culture14. This perspective on autobiography implies, in Eakin’s words that the autobiographer endeavours to engage in “…the discovery of the order of a life…by inverting the [conventional] importance and role of chronology and meaning….thus giving precedence to thematic order and relegating chronology to a distinctly secondary level of importance”.15
12 Georges Gusdorf, Lignes de vie (Paris:Editions O.Jacob,1991)
13 Roy Pascal,Quoted in FR852: Studies in Autobiography 11,European and Comparative Literary Studies,2002-2003(Kent University of Kent,2002).
14 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990).
15 Paul Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP,1985).
B. Autobiographical Discourse as a Quest for Thematic and Imagistic Convergence
Vladimir Nabokov describes the true purpose of autobiography as that of following thematic designs through the subject’s life as these are manifested in terms of underlying meanings realized through symbolic imagery. This implies that the significance actualised through the development of a human life could be understood less in relation to chronology than to underlying dynamics of meaning.
These dynamics might not be obvious at the level of surface structure represented by the linear development of the subject’s life, but would be cognized in terms of an image or pattern of images, which integrate various aspects of the temporal flow of individual biography into a framework of mutually explicatory units. Nabokov describes the atemporal but symbolically illuminating character of such imagistic forms in terms of images that emerge in a serendipitous pattern in the subject’s life, and integrate various aspects of their biographical progression into a mutually illuminating whole.
These dynamics might not be obvious at the level of surface structure represented by the linear development of the subject’s life, but would be cognized in terms of an image or pattern of images, which integrate various aspects of the temporal flow of individual biography into a framework of mutually explicatory units. Nabokov describes the atemporal but symbolically illuminating character of such imagistic forms in terms of images that emerge in a serendipitous pattern in the subject’s life, and integrate various aspects of their biographical progression into a mutually illuminating whole.
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Theoretical Framework and Methodology
A. Informing Conceptions of the Interpretive Possibilities of Traditional African Thought
The methodology we employ is based on conceptions, expressed with particular clarity and comprehensiveness by Okpewho, Houndtondji and Irele, which emphasise a need for creative approaches to the development of traditional African systems of thought.. Okpewho emphasises the need to transmute the predominantly oral forms of traditional African systems of thought into symbols so as to demonstrate their mythic essence. He argues that this transposition of form and meaning has become necessary on account of the need to make these systems accessible to a modern audience created by the distance between the modern sensibility and the imaginative and cognitive worlds within these traditions live8.
Hountondji elaborates upon the difficulties of actualising in a modern idiom the animating spirit, the inspirational essences of these traditions, and examines the difficulties involved in the need to explore them critically for the elements of contemporary value they embody9.
Irele suggests a means through which this transposition can take place in emphasizing the significance of a personal, imaginative appropriation of the oral tradition, so as to facilitate its transposition into a new idiom, in which its inspirational potential is actualised for an audience through the prism of the individual mind. The oral tradition would, therefore, be presented through a reinterpretation that attempts to communicate its significance as this is demonstrated to and through a particular consciousness10.
The application of the approach to oral traditions these scholars advocate would enable the realisation of the dynamic character of these traditions as cultural creations, which are capable of inspiring identification across time and space. In adapting these methodological orientations to our use, we demonstrate what Mudimbe describes as the capacity of myths to inspire responses that go beyond their original thematic orientations, “A careful student can always go beyond the formal systems, and unveil other symbolic networks, of which the members of the community might be absolutely unaware”.His elaborations on this conception resonate with the informing premises of this paper. He depicts myths as autonomous bodies open to retelling, reframing, reapplication and transformation11.
8 Isidore Okphewho, “Traditional and Modern Poetry in African Literature Today” in African Literature Today
9 Paulin Hountondji, “The Reasons for Scientific Dependence in Africa Today”Research in African Literatures,vol.21, no.3,Fall 1990,pp.5-15
10 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
11 V.Y.Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London : James Currey; Bloomington : Indiana U.P., 1988).
Hountondji elaborates upon the difficulties of actualising in a modern idiom the animating spirit, the inspirational essences of these traditions, and examines the difficulties involved in the need to explore them critically for the elements of contemporary value they embody9.
Irele suggests a means through which this transposition can take place in emphasizing the significance of a personal, imaginative appropriation of the oral tradition, so as to facilitate its transposition into a new idiom, in which its inspirational potential is actualised for an audience through the prism of the individual mind. The oral tradition would, therefore, be presented through a reinterpretation that attempts to communicate its significance as this is demonstrated to and through a particular consciousness10.
The application of the approach to oral traditions these scholars advocate would enable the realisation of the dynamic character of these traditions as cultural creations, which are capable of inspiring identification across time and space. In adapting these methodological orientations to our use, we demonstrate what Mudimbe describes as the capacity of myths to inspire responses that go beyond their original thematic orientations, “A careful student can always go beyond the formal systems, and unveil other symbolic networks, of which the members of the community might be absolutely unaware”.His elaborations on this conception resonate with the informing premises of this paper. He depicts myths as autonomous bodies open to retelling, reframing, reapplication and transformation11.
8 Isidore Okphewho, “Traditional and Modern Poetry in African Literature Today” in African Literature Today
9 Paulin Hountondji, “The Reasons for Scientific Dependence in Africa Today”Research in African Literatures,vol.21, no.3,Fall 1990,pp.5-15
10 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
11 V.Y.Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London : James Currey; Bloomington : Indiana U.P., 1988).
Expository and Analytical Structure
We begin with an exposition of the methodological framework that informs this essay. This methodology is based on particular conceptions of modes of interpreting traditional African systems of thought, as well as on points of convergence between one such system, the Ifa tradition and the interpretation of self and individual history represented by autobiography and the self portrait.
In applying the methodological imperatives we outline, we begin by demonstrating fundamental correlations between Ifa and autobiographical theory and practice and anchor these observations through an exposition of the autobiographical theory described by Nabokov in his autobiography Speak,Memory, which, even though articulated in relation to another mode of discourse, sums up most succinctly the significance of the hermeneutic strategies of the Ifa system for the study of autobiography7.
We then proceed to illustrate the specific correlation between Nabokov’s conception of autobiography and the Ifa system in terms of particular narratological images derived from the Ifa system. We define a narratological image as an image that emerges from a narrative to which it may act as a crystallisation of the symbolic or conceptual significance of the narrative. The images we choose are centred on the fragmentation and reconstitution of the self, or of its aspects, understood in both a concrete and an abstract sense.
In concrete terms, they symbolise the dismemberment and reconstitution of a subject. In abstract terms, they represent the relationship between chaos and order in the patterns that constitute a subject’s life, as well as an oscillation between the seeming dissolution and nascence represented by creative somnolence and the reintegration embodied by the re-emergence of hitherto submerged creative configurations. We then proceed to demonstrate the manner in which these images embody links between the metaphysical principles that underlie Ifa divination and the philosophical and aesthetic questions inspired by autobiography.
In the main body of the work we apply these narratological images, as the focus of the conceptions of autobiographical theory and practice we emphasise, to an analysis of selected paintings and letters of van Gogh. We demonstrate, in an organic manner, the correlations we make, at the level of deep structure, between the autobiographical orientation of van Gogh’s visual art as expressed in his paintings, the verbal art represented by the poetic form of his letters, and the hermeneutic, conceptual and imagistic centres of Ifa, which represent our analytical matrix. We anchor our analysis on our evaluation of the aesthetic values and their conceptual correlates realised through representative examples of van Gogh’s visual and verbal art.
7 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory : an Autobiography Revisited (London : Penguin, 2000)p.17.
We might have over dramatised our case particularly with reference to Gates’s work, which represents a landmark in the field of African studies, and of Longe’s, which correlates the ancient system of Ifa with one of the most contemporary and widespread of human technologies, but we hope to demonstrate that what Wenger describes as the demonstration of the universal significance of traditional African systems of thought can be realized in ways that go significantly beyond our current understanding of the cognitive and cultural range of these systems.
We have chosen the study of the Ifa system in exploring the question of the transcultural significance of traditional African systems of thought on account of its multidisciplinary, ideational and artistic range. It integrates mathematical and artistic methods of organisation and communication. It embodies what is likely to be the largest corpus of literary expressions integrated within one framework of discourse. These literary forms operate as a means of communicating ideas that relate to a broad gamut of observation and experience, from human history to flora and fauna.
The sculptural forms that are employed in the creation of the implements of the system represent one of the finest examples of traditional Yoruba art and embody a central source for traditional Yoruba aesthetic principles as well as of imaginative expressions of traditional Yoruba thought. These aspects of the system, however, represent the crystallization of a central spiritual impulse which is expressed in the fact that the system is fundamentally a school of spiritual discipline which is principally manifest, among other expressive forms, as a divinatory system.
We have chosen the study of the Ifa system in exploring the question of the transcultural significance of traditional African systems of thought on account of its multidisciplinary, ideational and artistic range. It integrates mathematical and artistic methods of organisation and communication. It embodies what is likely to be the largest corpus of literary expressions integrated within one framework of discourse. These literary forms operate as a means of communicating ideas that relate to a broad gamut of observation and experience, from human history to flora and fauna.
The sculptural forms that are employed in the creation of the implements of the system represent one of the finest examples of traditional Yoruba art and embody a central source for traditional Yoruba aesthetic principles as well as of imaginative expressions of traditional Yoruba thought. These aspects of the system, however, represent the crystallization of a central spiritual impulse which is expressed in the fact that the system is fundamentally a school of spiritual discipline which is principally manifest, among other expressive forms, as a divinatory system.
We choose to study van Gogh in relation to the Ifa system on account of the precise but highly suggestive correlations we observe between the Ifa system, autobiographical theory, and the manifestation of the autobiographical impulse in van Gogh’s letters and self portraits, as well as the points of convergence between these links with a broad range of disciplines, such as psychology, myth, anthropology and aesthetics.
One effort that does examine Ifa in relation to a transcultural framework of knowledge is Longe’s Ifa Divination and Computer Science6, which demonstrates the relationship between the numerical ordering and permutations of the Ifa system and the mathematical framework of computer science. Most insightful and suggestive of further possibilities as this work is it may be said to lay the grounds for further questions.
These questions include the possibility of going beyond the correlations the work develops to building investigations into the scope of the scientific or potentially scientific character of forms of knowledge within the Ifa system and related discourses in traditional Yoruba thought. We would need to investigate the possibility of developing a progression from this research that could yield new knowledge either through the application of principles of investigation similar to those employed by the creators of the Ifa system or through the application of the scientific or quasi-scientific forms of the system as it stands. This essay attempts to develop one such effort at creating knowledge that is based on Ifa but goes beyond its original formulation or its expression in related discourses.
These questions include the possibility of going beyond the correlations the work develops to building investigations into the scope of the scientific or potentially scientific character of forms of knowledge within the Ifa system and related discourses in traditional Yoruba thought. We would need to investigate the possibility of developing a progression from this research that could yield new knowledge either through the application of principles of investigation similar to those employed by the creators of the Ifa system or through the application of the scientific or quasi-scientific forms of the system as it stands. This essay attempts to develop one such effort at creating knowledge that is based on Ifa but goes beyond its original formulation or its expression in related discourses.
A key effort at developing the explanatory capacities of the Ifa system in relation to a field of knowledge that goes beyond its original cultural matrix is Henry Louis Gate’s Jrs The Signifying Monkey4 in which he correlates the figure of the Orisa or deity Eshu from the Ifa system and that of the Signifying Monkey from African-American folklore as correlative metaphorical expressions of hermeneutic principles relevant to the interpretation of African-American literature.
While Gate’s impressive work does demonstrates not only the conceptual and cognitive significance of aspects of the Ifa system in terms of a modern idiom represented by contemporary principles of hermeneutics, and further demonstrates the expansiveness possible to the cultural range of the system by relating it to African-American literature, we may argue that his work, to some degree, still constitutes an exercise that needs to be built upon in order to demonstrate the universal cultural potential of such systems.
The kind of study we propose would develop this significance, not simply in terms of studies that operate purely within the endogenous cultural matrices of these systems, even when these efforts relate these to those creators of discourse who relate their work explicitly to these artistic and conceptual formations. The perspective we advocate would study these systems as conceptual structures which can exist on their own as free standing conceptual apparatus, as it were, and which can be deployed in the study of relevant phenomena, from any cultural, spatial or temporal milieu, whether African, Western or Asian, traditional or modern5.
4 Henry Luis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism(Oxford; Oxford UP,1988)
5 Wiredu’s injunction to African philosophers to engage in the discipline of exploring questions of philosophical truth rather than remain fixated on questions about the existence of traditional African philosophy would seem to represent an effort in this direction. His analysis of the Akan concept of truth is an effort to explore the meaning value of one system but that effort remains within the ambit of intracultural study. Paulin Hountondji, “The Reasons for Scientific Dependence in Africa Today”Rsearch in African Literatures, vol.21, no.3, Fall 1990, pp.5-15, has analysed the limitation of address that seems to mark African scholarship and traces it to a problem inherent in the African’s mode of identification of the place of the African in the global structure of the development of knowledge. One philosopher who has located himself within the Western frame of reference from where he has explicated the foundations of philosophy as developed by the West as a paradigm for a global understanding of philosophical thought is Anthony Appiah in Thinking it Through: an Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (New York:Oxford University Press, 2003) but his work is limited in its failure to recognise adequately the problematic and controversial character of philosophical styles in different parts of the world. He does not engage, for example, with the premises that inform the ancient and well documented traditions of Asian philosophy, the epistemic formations and conceptions of philosophical purpose of which are often different from those of Western philosophy.
While Gate’s impressive work does demonstrates not only the conceptual and cognitive significance of aspects of the Ifa system in terms of a modern idiom represented by contemporary principles of hermeneutics, and further demonstrates the expansiveness possible to the cultural range of the system by relating it to African-American literature, we may argue that his work, to some degree, still constitutes an exercise that needs to be built upon in order to demonstrate the universal cultural potential of such systems.
The kind of study we propose would develop this significance, not simply in terms of studies that operate purely within the endogenous cultural matrices of these systems, even when these efforts relate these to those creators of discourse who relate their work explicitly to these artistic and conceptual formations. The perspective we advocate would study these systems as conceptual structures which can exist on their own as free standing conceptual apparatus, as it were, and which can be deployed in the study of relevant phenomena, from any cultural, spatial or temporal milieu, whether African, Western or Asian, traditional or modern5.
4 Henry Luis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism(Oxford; Oxford UP,1988)
5 Wiredu’s injunction to African philosophers to engage in the discipline of exploring questions of philosophical truth rather than remain fixated on questions about the existence of traditional African philosophy would seem to represent an effort in this direction. His analysis of the Akan concept of truth is an effort to explore the meaning value of one system but that effort remains within the ambit of intracultural study. Paulin Hountondji, “The Reasons for Scientific Dependence in Africa Today”Rsearch in African Literatures, vol.21, no.3, Fall 1990, pp.5-15, has analysed the limitation of address that seems to mark African scholarship and traces it to a problem inherent in the African’s mode of identification of the place of the African in the global structure of the development of knowledge. One philosopher who has located himself within the Western frame of reference from where he has explicated the foundations of philosophy as developed by the West as a paradigm for a global understanding of philosophical thought is Anthony Appiah in Thinking it Through: an Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (New York:Oxford University Press, 2003) but his work is limited in its failure to recognise adequately the problematic and controversial character of philosophical styles in different parts of the world. He does not engage, for example, with the premises that inform the ancient and well documented traditions of Asian philosophy, the epistemic formations and conceptions of philosophical purpose of which are often different from those of Western philosophy.
Justification of Purpose
This work is inspired by the need to contribute to the development of the study of traditional African systems of thought beyond what this author identifies as the descriptive and analytical stages of scholarship. We do this through the erection and application of a theoretical framework that goes beyond the descriptive and analytical foci which currently dominates studies of traditional African thought.
Most studies of traditional African thought consist in descriptions and analysis of the ideational structures they demonstrate, as well as, in some cases, of an analysis of the relationship of these structures to the cognitive and social organisation of the societies to which they are endogenous. Most of the studies make no effort to examine the significance of these systems to social formations and cultural productions that go beyond the host societies of these systems. The study of these systems of thought, however, has certainly gone beyond their classification as curiosities representing the infancy of the human race. Significant advances have been made in demonstrating their ideational sophistication and explanatory power, but these analytical advances are often limited to restricting these systems to tools of knowledge that can explain only those realities they were originally created to explicate or to which they have been explicitly related by modern forms of discourse2. Examples of such intracultural study include interpreting Ifa, for example, as a means of elucidating critical principles embodied in Yoruba visual art or relating it to the work of the Yoruba writer Wole Soyinka, who makes the mythology of the system central to his work3.
2 Classic examples of the best explications of traditional African system of thought in terms of the intracultural analyses described here are M. Fortes and G. Dieterlen (ed). African Systems of Thought (London : Oxford U.P. for the International African Institute, 1965 and Daryll Forde (ed) African Worlds : Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social values of African Peoples (Oxford : James Currey: LIT, 1999).
3Among the best examples of those works that examine Ifa in relation to the critical principles of tradional Yoruba visual art are Rowland Abiodun “Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation based on Oral Traditions”in Yoruba Oral Tradition:Selections from the Papers Presented at the Seminar on Yoruba Oral Tradition, ed. Wande Abimbola (Ile-Ife :Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of If.e, 1975)pp.421-469;Rowland Abiodun, ‘Riding the Horse of Praise: The Mounted Figure in Ifa Divination Sculpture’ in Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. John Pemberton 111(London:Smithsonian,2000)p.182-192.Olabisi Babalola Yai, ‘In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of Tradition and “Creativity” in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space’ in The Yoruba Artist, ed. R. Abiodun, H.J. Drewal, and J.Pemberton111(Washington D.C:Smithsonian,1994)pp.107-15; H.J. Drewal ,John Mason and Pravina Shukla, Beads, Body, and Soul : Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe( Los Angeles : UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998)Almost all of Soyinka’s work represents a transmutation of traditional Yoruba myth, the central repository of which is Ifa. His oeuvre spans a number of genres. In the essay, his representative work is Myth,Literature and the African World(Cambridge : Cambridge U.P., 1976)where he elucidates the mythopoesis that he elaborates in various forms throughout his career. The poetic works that ere most representative of his achievement are Idanre and Other Poems (London : Methuen, 1967) an early work in which he develops the myth of the Yoruba Orisa or deity Ogun in terms of an exploration of the significance of traditional Yoruba thought to perennial aspects of the human experience and A Shuttle in the Crypt (London : Rex Collings: Eyre Methuen, 1972) and the concluding poem of The Credo of Being and Nothingness ( Ibadan : Spectrum Books in association with Safari Books, 1991) in which the mythic essence of his work is distilled to realise a framework of imagery and thought that evokes with great power the communicative essence he realizes through the traditional Yoruba world view he consistently explores. His autobiographical The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka(London : Rex Collings Ltd, 1972) represents another distillation of the cosmic and mythic orientation of his aesthetic within the framework of contemporary experience. His novel The Interpreters (London : Heinemann, 1970) tries to interpret the life of the metropolis of Lagos and its inhabitants in relation to of traditional Yoruba myth. Soyinka’s greatest artistic achievement is in drama, which makes it difficult to single out one or two representative works but his early work A Dance in the Forests (Oxford;Oxford U.P, 1963) suggests the range of his artistic aspirations while the later works of Madmen and Specialists (London : Methuen, 1971) The Road (London : Oxford U.P., 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (London : Eyre Methuen, 1975) exemplify the peaks of his dramatic appropriation of the traditional Yoruba world view.
3Among the best examples of those works that examine Ifa in relation to the critical principles of tradional Yoruba visual art are Rowland Abiodun “Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation based on Oral Traditions”in Yoruba Oral Tradition:Selections from the Papers Presented at the Seminar on Yoruba Oral Tradition, ed. Wande Abimbola (Ile-Ife :Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of If.e, 1975)pp.421-469;Rowland Abiodun, ‘Riding the Horse of Praise: The Mounted Figure in Ifa Divination Sculpture’ in Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. John Pemberton 111(London:Smithsonian,2000)p.182-192.Olabisi Babalola Yai, ‘In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of Tradition and “Creativity” in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space’ in The Yoruba Artist, ed. R. Abiodun, H.J. Drewal, and J.Pemberton111(Washington D.C:Smithsonian,1994)pp.107-15; H.J. Drewal ,John Mason and Pravina Shukla, Beads, Body, and Soul : Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe( Los Angeles : UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998)Almost all of Soyinka’s work represents a transmutation of traditional Yoruba myth, the central repository of which is Ifa. His oeuvre spans a number of genres. In the essay, his representative work is Myth,Literature and the African World(Cambridge : Cambridge U.P., 1976)where he elucidates the mythopoesis that he elaborates in various forms throughout his career. The poetic works that ere most representative of his achievement are Idanre and Other Poems (London : Methuen, 1967) an early work in which he develops the myth of the Yoruba Orisa or deity Ogun in terms of an exploration of the significance of traditional Yoruba thought to perennial aspects of the human experience and A Shuttle in the Crypt (London : Rex Collings: Eyre Methuen, 1972) and the concluding poem of The Credo of Being and Nothingness ( Ibadan : Spectrum Books in association with Safari Books, 1991) in which the mythic essence of his work is distilled to realise a framework of imagery and thought that evokes with great power the communicative essence he realizes through the traditional Yoruba world view he consistently explores. His autobiographical The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka(London : Rex Collings Ltd, 1972) represents another distillation of the cosmic and mythic orientation of his aesthetic within the framework of contemporary experience. His novel The Interpreters (London : Heinemann, 1970) tries to interpret the life of the metropolis of Lagos and its inhabitants in relation to of traditional Yoruba myth. Soyinka’s greatest artistic achievement is in drama, which makes it difficult to single out one or two representative works but his early work A Dance in the Forests (Oxford;Oxford U.P, 1963) suggests the range of his artistic aspirations while the later works of Madmen and Specialists (London : Methuen, 1971) The Road (London : Oxford U.P., 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (London : Eyre Methuen, 1975) exemplify the peaks of his dramatic appropriation of the traditional Yoruba world view.
This work focuses on a conception of autobiography and the self-portrait as refractive mirrors within which the artist interprets themselves to their own consciousness as well as to the world. We emphasise questions of memory, temporality, self interpretation and self presentation, in order to highlight the imaginative essence of the hermeneutic processes in which the autobiography and the self portrait consist and through which they can be related to similar processes in Ifa divination.
In order to achieve this, we focus on a specific example of human experience as demonstrated in autobiography and as suggested in one of van Gogh’s self portraits. This aspect is the depiction of conceptions and experiences of divergence and convergence understood in terms of the configuration of the self and its experiences. This conception of divergence and convergence is interpreted in concrete and abstract terms. The concrete and abstract dimensions of this concept are developed through myths from the Ifa system and the understanding of this concept, in its abstract form, is applied to an exploration of examples of the visual and verbal art of van Gogh.
In order to achieve this, we focus on a specific example of human experience as demonstrated in autobiography and as suggested in one of van Gogh’s self portraits. This aspect is the depiction of conceptions and experiences of divergence and convergence understood in terms of the configuration of the self and its experiences. This conception of divergence and convergence is interpreted in concrete and abstract terms. The concrete and abstract dimensions of this concept are developed through myths from the Ifa system and the understanding of this concept, in its abstract form, is applied to an exploration of examples of the visual and verbal art of van Gogh.
Statement of Purpose
This essay is an effort at exploring the significance of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination developed by the Yoruba of Southern Nigeria in relation to autobiographical theory, and the application of this correlation to the visual and verbal art of the 19th century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. We examine Ifa in terms of autobiographical theory in order to indicate how the convergence of these forms of discourse could provide analytical models applicable to the study of life narratives across spatiotemporal and cultural boundaries, exemplified, particularly, by the manifestation of the autobiographical impulse in the letters and selected paintings of van Gogh1.
1 The central works on Ifa are William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa(Bloomington: Indiana UP,1969)p.3. Some of the other book length texts on Ifa as practised in Nigeria are, Wande Abimbola, Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa,Apa Kiini,vol.1(Collins:Glasgow,1968), Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa,Apa Kiini,vol.2(Collins:Glasgow,1969), An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ibadan:OxfordUP,1976),the pioneering analytical text, Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa (UNESCO,1975), Ifa Divination Poetry(NewYork:Nok,1977); Ifa Will Mend our Broken World:Thoughts on Yoruba Religion and Culture in Africa and the Diaspora(Roxbury, MA : Aim Books, 1997); Judith Gleason, with Awotunde Aworinde and John Olaniyi Ogundipe, A Recital of Ifa:Oracle of the Yoruba(New York,1972); Christoph Staewen, Ifa;African Gods Speak (Hamburg: Christoph Stewen,1996);Cromwell Osamaro Ibie,Ifism;The Complete Works of Orunmila,vol.1(Efehi:Lagos,1986) ), with nine volumes published and another nine anticipated, Ibie’s work promises to be, for some time, the most comprehensive recording in writing of Ifa texts.;Van Gogh’s complete letters are available in three volumes as Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh ( Boston: New York Graphic Society,1981). All quotations from the letters will be entered in the following order and using the following signs: CL for Complete Letters, Lt, representing a particular letter, followed by a number for the numbering of the letter, as well as VL followed by a number for the volume number and the page in the specific volume.
1 The central works on Ifa are William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa(Bloomington: Indiana UP,1969)p.3. Some of the other book length texts on Ifa as practised in Nigeria are, Wande Abimbola, Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa,Apa Kiini,vol.1(Collins:Glasgow,1968), Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa,Apa Kiini,vol.2(Collins:Glasgow,1969), An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ibadan:OxfordUP,1976),the pioneering analytical text, Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa (UNESCO,1975), Ifa Divination Poetry(NewYork:Nok,1977); Ifa Will Mend our Broken World:Thoughts on Yoruba Religion and Culture in Africa and the Diaspora(Roxbury, MA : Aim Books, 1997); Judith Gleason, with Awotunde Aworinde and John Olaniyi Ogundipe, A Recital of Ifa:Oracle of the Yoruba(New York,1972); Christoph Staewen, Ifa;African Gods Speak (Hamburg: Christoph Stewen,1996);Cromwell Osamaro Ibie,Ifism;The Complete Works of Orunmila,vol.1(Efehi:Lagos,1986) ), with nine volumes published and another nine anticipated, Ibie’s work promises to be, for some time, the most comprehensive recording in writing of Ifa texts.;Van Gogh’s complete letters are available in three volumes as Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh ( Boston: New York Graphic Society,1981). All quotations from the letters will be entered in the following order and using the following signs: CL for Complete Letters, Lt, representing a particular letter, followed by a number for the numbering of the letter, as well as VL followed by a number for the volume number and the page in the specific volume.
LIST OF CONTENTS
1. Statement of Purpose
2. Justification of Purpose
3. Expository and Analytical Structure
4. Theoretical Framework and Methodology
A. Informing Conceptions of the Interpretive Possibilities of Traditional African Thought
B. Autobiographical Discourse as a Quest for Thematic and Imagistic Convergence
C. Points of Convergence between the Hermeneutic Processes Involved in Ifa Divination and the Interpretation of Self and Individual History Constituted by Autobiography and the Self Portrait
a. Consciousness, Temporality and Textual Formations
b. van Gogh’s Letters as Imaginative Depictions of Self
c. The Self Portrait as Imaginative Self-Exploration
D. Correlation of the Hermeneutics of Ifa and Autobiographical Study in terms of the Orisanla Mythos
a. Orisanla Myth of Fragmentation and Reconstitution and the Levels of Possibility in its Symbolic Interpretation
b. The Orisanla Mythos as Embodying the Metaphysical Principles Central to the Ifa Divinatory Process and as Evocative of the Philosophical and Aesthetic Questions Inspired by
Autobiography
5. Depictions of Divergence and Convergence in the Visual and Verbal Art of van Gogh
A. van Gogh’s Last Self-Portrait as Emblematic of the Integration and Dissolution of Polarities in his Art and Life
B. van Gogh’s Conceptions of his Artistic Progression in Terms of a Convergence of Weakness and Power
C. van Gogh’s Interpretation of his Art in Terms of a Confluence of Form and Spirit
6. Conclusion: Triumph and Failure
Bibliography
1. Statement of Purpose
2. Justification of Purpose
3. Expository and Analytical Structure
4. Theoretical Framework and Methodology
A. Informing Conceptions of the Interpretive Possibilities of Traditional African Thought
B. Autobiographical Discourse as a Quest for Thematic and Imagistic Convergence
C. Points of Convergence between the Hermeneutic Processes Involved in Ifa Divination and the Interpretation of Self and Individual History Constituted by Autobiography and the Self Portrait
a. Consciousness, Temporality and Textual Formations
b. van Gogh’s Letters as Imaginative Depictions of Self
c. The Self Portrait as Imaginative Self-Exploration
D. Correlation of the Hermeneutics of Ifa and Autobiographical Study in terms of the Orisanla Mythos
a. Orisanla Myth of Fragmentation and Reconstitution and the Levels of Possibility in its Symbolic Interpretation
b. The Orisanla Mythos as Embodying the Metaphysical Principles Central to the Ifa Divinatory Process and as Evocative of the Philosophical and Aesthetic Questions Inspired by
Autobiography
5. Depictions of Divergence and Convergence in the Visual and Verbal Art of van Gogh
A. van Gogh’s Last Self-Portrait as Emblematic of the Integration and Dissolution of Polarities in his Art and Life
B. van Gogh’s Conceptions of his Artistic Progression in Terms of a Convergence of Weakness and Power
C. van Gogh’s Interpretation of his Art in Terms of a Confluence of Form and Spirit
6. Conclusion: Triumph and Failure
Bibliography
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