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7/23/2019 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications
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Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics
Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle
Transcultural and Scientific Implications
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Universe in Search of Knowledge"
Abiola Irele
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Abstract
A general assessment of Irele's career, followed by an exploration of the significance of
Negritudist concepts of rhythm in metaphysics as expounded by Abiola Irele,in relationto Irele's ideas on linear and non-linear science and metaphysics from within classical
Yoruba/Orisa cosmology with brief summative comments by two readers on Irele's
work.
Multidisciplinary Dynamics Realized through the Architectonics of the Essay
Abiola Irele is a philosopher, critic and theorist of literature, music and culture, an
educator whose writing is remarkable for its elegance, profundity and range, and whose
career is striking for the scope of his participation in the development of modernAfrican intellectual culture, from its formative years in the 1960s to the present, on
different continents.
The elegance of his writing emerges in his unique demonstration of the architectonics of
the essay.
In his best work, the sentence, as a building block of the essay, achieves a
communication of ideas that is both luminously logical and beautiful.
This effect is realised in terms of diction and the balance of ideas, the words in terms of
which ideas are expressed and the relationship between these worlds within therhythm of syntactic structure.
The entire essay itself becomes a cathedral of ideas, composed of numerous, intricately
interlinked concepts, yet suggesting depths of possibility of which the superstructure
realized by the expressed ideations are but the exposure to light of a complex
foundation which may yield to careful study.
Disciplinary, Temporal, Institutional and Geographical Scope
The range of his work is evident in its scope across philosophy, literary criticism, music
criticism and cultural criticism, as well as theoretical expositions in relation to these
fields.
His career embraces the formative years of modern African intellectual culture, and its
development to the present, its representative central institutional organs, represented
by editorships in the pioneering journal Black Orpheus in the 1960s, to editorship in
later years at Research in African Literatures and membership of the editorial board
of Transition, all these publications being central points in the development of modern
African thought, these being those journal editorial commitments I know about, as well
as an academic career spanning Nigeria, Ghana and the United States, contributing to
shaping the various strategic situations in the fortunes of Africanist scholarship as it
achieved a distinctive identity in its international representation, from Nigeria, to Ghanaand the United States.
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Exploring Negritude on Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle
One of his richest and most consistent contributions has been in the explication of the
philosophy of Negritude.
His work in Negritude is best understood in relation to the range of his explorations of
the intellectual, artistic and social dynamics of African culture, in relation to its global
context.
This work is also enriched by comparison with scholarship in classical African
philosophies, philosophies that Negritude describes itself as distilling and representing.
Irele's expositions of Negritude are also compelling in summing up, perhaps
unintentionally, central trends of ideas in non-African civilisations.
Studying Irele's summations on Negritude, therefore, is helpful in developing an
ideational vantage point from which to assess the significance of Negritude as a
demonstration of ideas emerging in relation to classical African cultures, as an
expression of ideas resonating with other cultures and as a potential matrix of
individual ideational development which anyone may adapt to one's own use.
Having presented some statements from Irele's " What is Negritude?" from his The
African Experience in Literature and Ideology in the first essay in this series of
explorations of his work on Negritude "Epistemological, Metaphysical, Aesthetic and
Social Vision of Negritude as Presented by Abiola Irele : Global Significance", I proceedto take a close look at further summations in the same essay.
In this exploration, I am interested in:
Irele's style of expression as an artistic form.
The contemporary and timeless significance of the ideas expressed.
The relationship of these ideas to writings in classical African philosophies.
How these ideas may be adapted for contemporary use.
Irele's exposition is based on that of Leopold Sedar Senghor, the central Negritude
theoretician.
He begins by quoting Senghor.
The beauty of the quotation might be a demonstration of Irele's academic grounding in
French as a professor of French, the quality of translation being vital to communicating
the beauty of ideas transported from another language:
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"Rhythm is the architecture of being, the internal dynamics which gives it form, the
system of waves which it sends out towards Others.
It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces,colours, volumes in architecture, sculpture and painting; accents in poetry and music,
movements in dance.
But in doing so, it guides all this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit.
For the Negro-African, it is in the same measure that rhythm is embodied in the sense
that it illuminates the spirit".
Irele comments on these lines:
"Moreover artistic expression and religious feeling are inseparably linked, in so far as
art is conceived primarily as an epiphany of the sacred, of the cosmic energy with which
the visible world is permeated.
Art is the imaginative restitution of the fundamental network of relationships which
exist between the various manifestations of this cosmic energy.
This is the foundation of the African's mystical participation in the universe".
Sublime.
An ideal, however, rather than a statement of empirical fact of how Africans generally
have lived at any time.
A vision of an ideal that is evident, not only in accounts of African cultures but in
philosophies from Asia to Europe, but expressed in a manner distinctive to various
writers.
This summation does not mention science, the other great pole of investigation that
parallels the arts, but Irele supplies the reference to science in another essay, "The
African Scholar", written decades later, and which does not address Negritude but
locates similar ideas in modes of thought evident in classical African and non-African
cultures as these are correlative with modern scientific thought.
Linear and Non-Linear Thought as Embodied by Esu
Let us look at brief extracts from Irele's summations in "The African Scholar" :
"... the analogy between the new scientific spirit as described by [Gaston ] Bachelard –
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with its progressive abandonment of the reductive bent of an earlier age, and its greater
attention to complexity, systems of relations and fields of force...
[Referring to French Africanist Georges Balandier's , Le désordre. Paris : Editions
Fayard,1988, which Irele describes as "a wide-ranging discussion of the sociological and
philosophical implications of the discovery of “chaos” by contemporary science"]... there
has always been a recognition, made explicit in ritual and avowed in the symbolic
discourse of non-industrial cultures and what he calls “sociétés de tradition,” of the
tension between the principles of order and disorder, of stability and randomness, as a
constitutive factor of all reality, natural and social.
It is this sense of a duality in the world that is felt as marking life and consciousness for
which Yoruba society in particular has found an embodiment in the person of the
trickster god, Eshu.
And it is significant to observe the striking analogy between the non-cartesian mode of
contemporary scientific awareness represented by the extract from Bachelard I’ve just
quoted above and the “mythical” grasp of the reality of the world as communicated in
this passage from a Yoruba praise poem (oriki) in celebration of Eshu:
Esu sleeps in the house
But the house is too small for him;
Esu sleeps on the front yard
But the yard is too constricting for him;
Esu sleeps in the palm-nut shell
Now he has enough room to stretch at large
...
The scientific historian Alan Beyerchen has remarked that the integration of linear
science with the nonlinear in a unified field of what he calls “pan-science” has now
become one of the major intellectual tasks of the future".
What is going on here?
What Irele has in mind is a synthesis between classical African thought, science and
various disciplines, mediated through the image of Esu.
Seeking Synthesis Between Orisa Thought, Contemporary Science and Correlative
Philosophies
This goal is similar to what has been achieved through the image of the Hindu deity
Shiva by Fritjof Capra in his very influential work The Tao of Physics, an achievement in
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synthesis that has led to the image of Shiva in his role as the cosmic dancer being placed
at the European scientific research centre CERN.
Is an Eshu centred synthesis as proposed by Irele possible?
Yes.
Why is it possible?
It is possible because the body of ideas that would enable such a synthesis exists.
All one needs to do is correlate the ideas.
Of what value is it?
How may one proceed?
Very simple.
First, one needs to take stock.
This stock taking involves outlining the ideas from Orisa thought (Yoruba religion and
philosophy) one wishes to correlate with ideas from science.
This stock taking could begin by correlating Irele's words, published in 1991, and
summations from Frijof Capra's latest book, co-written with Pier Luigi Luisi
and published in 2014.
Irele :
"... the new scientific spirit ... its greater attention to complexity, systems of relations and
fields of force"
Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi's book:
"Over the past thirty years, a new systemic conception of life has emerged at the
forefront of science.
New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation
leading to a novel kind of 'systemic' thinking."
Clearly, Irele and the Capra book are saying the same thing or something similar.
Capra arrived at his own understanding through a visionary experience of cosmic
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dynamism that enabled him correlate his knowledge of science and Asian thought using
the figure of the Hindu deity Shiva as representing the central ideas of this correlation.
Irele is suggesting something similar is possible through the complex of ideas associated
with Esu.
He is also stating that these ideas are pervasive across what I will call 'pre-modern'
cultures, though I'm m not sure yet how to define these cultures.
Irele has identified two major ideas in relation to the new scientific world view which
he states are correlative with mythic ideas from the traditionalist cultures, if I could also
use that name for them.
These ideas are :
"systems of relations [demonstrated through] fields of force".
"the tension between the principles of order and disorder, of stability and randomness,
as a constitutive factor of all reality, natural and social".
What does Capra's book say about his systems vision as embracing all reality, as Irele is
indicating about the significance of the vision he is presenting?
This question is answered by comparing the summations by Irele and those of Fritjof
Capra and his co-writer Pier Luigi Luisi on their book.
Irele :
"It has become increasingly clear that nature is more complex than was dreamt of by
modern science in its genesis, and that the positivist approach to knowledge by which
the scientific enterprise has been largely prosecuted up to the present century is no
longer capable of providing an account in their full range and depth of the workings of
nature, of encompassing objective reality in its scope and mystery. "
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi:
"As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception of life is emerging.
It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social and
ecological dimensions.
At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine
composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world,
ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a
whole is a living, self-regulating system."
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Is there any basis for Irele's confidence in the figure of Esu in Yoruba cosmology as a
unifier of these ideas in mythic thought beyond Western and perhaps Asian mythology,
these being the geographical boundaries of the kinds of societies I expect he is referring
to?
There is.
This basis emerges in the association of Esu with ase, the cosmic force that enables
existence and development in Yoruba cosmology.
This unique embodiment of ase is demonstrated in Esu being described as acting as a
mediator between all forms of being, humans, non-human spirits and the creator of the
cosmos.
This act of mediation is demonstrated in terms of the balance between various forms of
being, a balance demonstrated through sustaining the stability of existing norms as well
as upsetting that stability, at times in ways that lead to establishing another orientation
towards the order of things.
This summation is an interpretation of Esu's variety of dramatizations in ese ifa, Ifa
literature.
His association with cosmic force establishes the ideas of an order that unifies all of
existence, particularly since ase, cosmic force in Yoruba cosmology, is understood as
demonstrated in all forms of being, enabling their creative capacity.
Esu's description as a mediator between forms of being demonstrates the idea of
interrelationship within an ecology, metaphorically speaking, that foregrounds thequestion of the range of sentience, of modes of being and their interrelationships.
Esu therefore embodies the systemic orientation in terms of relationships between
conventional order and disruption of this order, as described by Irele.
Irele goes further to exemplify his understanding of Esu and of the potential of Esu for
projecting ideas relevant to a scientific cosmology centred in dynamic systems and the
balance of chaos and order through an enigmatic oriki, Yoruba praise poem, in honour
of Esu.
I present the entire poem from Jack Mapanje and Landeg White's Oral Poetry in Africa:
"Eshu turns right into wrong, wrong into right.
When he is angry, he hits a stone until it bleeds.
When he is angry,he sits on the skin of an ant.
When he is angry, he weeps tears of blood.
Eshu slept in the house-
But the house was too small for him;
Eshu slept on the verandah-
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But the verandah was too small for him:
Eshu slept in a nut-
At last he could stretch himself!
Eshu walked through the groundnut farm.
The tuft of his hair was just visible:
If it had not been for his huge size,
He would not be visible at all.
Lying down, his head hits the roof:
Standing up, he cannot look into the cooking pot.
He throws a stone today
and kills a bird yesterday!"
This poem depicts Esu as transgressing conventional expectations in various aspect of
social experience and natural law:
Justice/ethics- turning right into wrong, wrong into right.
Temporality- throwing a stone today and hitting a bird yesterday.
Biology- sitting on the skin of an ant
hitting a stone until it bleeds.
Physical space and biology- the house and yard are too constricting for him but the
groundnut shell allows him enough space to stretch himself
Biology, physical space and corporeal vision- he is so tall that walking on the path the
tufts of his hair are barely visible
Lying down, his head hits the roof:
Standing up, he cannot look into the cooking pot.
Most fascinating.
What is the significance of these ideas for science and philosophy?
The temporality image relates to ideas of retrocausality, carefully explained in the
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Wikipedia article on the subject , with a rich bibliography.
How may one proceed from this point?
I dont know enough about science to suggest further correlations but I have some ideaof how to explore ways of moving forward.
One of these is to examine Capra's example in his books, of which the Tao of Physics is
fundamental, this work presenting his correlation of the Shiva image with science as a
means of integrating Asian philosophies/religions and modern science.
It is vital to take note of both praise and criticism for the book, as well as descriptions of
other books like it before ( Ralph Siu's The Quantum and the Tao) and after its
publication, as presented in the Wikipedia page on The Tao of Physics.
Meanwhile, readers could see my earlier presentation of these quotes from "The
African Scholar" in larger tissues of the text at :
1. "Abiola Irele on Nonlinear Science in Relation to Classical African Thought : An
Excerpt from "the African Scholar"
Abiola Irele blog
2. “On the Internationalisation of the Study of Theory in Inter-Cultural Terms”
Cognitive Diary blog
3. “Philosophy, Science and Heart of Erwin Schrodinger”
Cognitive Diary blog
4. The response to the Schrodinger essay by Thomas Goodey at Physics_Frontier Yahoo
group
I have composed a response to Goodey but have not posted it anywhere yet.
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Nehru Odeh Prof. Abiola Irele's book, The African Imagination is not just
compelling, it is an unforgettable read.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 11 December at 01:10
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Great Nehru. Can you tell us more about it?
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 December at 03:18
Nehru Odeh Yes, it is a sprawling. book that tells us what is at the heart of African
literary discourse, and how African literature has been shaped by the African
colonial and post colonial experience. It interrogates major African literary texts
and writers.
Like · Reply · 11 December at 07:23
Suzanne Preston Blier So true about his book. Got to spend some time with Biola
this afternoon in Cambridge and gave him a copy of my Ife book. He is a wonderful
scholar and person and friend.
Unlike · Reply · 2 · 11 December at 03:23
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Wow.It would be wonderful to know more about this
book Suzanne Preston Blier. Can you sum up what you find striking about it?
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Like · Reply · 11 December at 03:29
Suzanne Preston Blier It is a group of his essays that looks at connections between
oral tradition and modem African imaginative expression focusing on everything
from negritude to Chinua Achebe.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 11 December at 03:39
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Thank you very much for that professor Suzanne
Preston Blier.
Also posted on:
Abiola Irele blog