Traversing Landscapes of Knowledge:Reflections on Writing My Essay Summing Up the World View and Language of Nimi Wariboko

                                                             

Cover Image

Majestic space evokes majestic mind exemplified by the questing figure in the painting by Nicholas Roerich, painter

extraordinaire of the conjunction between sublime landscapes and uncompromising spiritual aspiration dramatised

by Asian contemplative, hermit and monastic cultures, an orientation incidentally evoked by English poet Gerald

Manley Hopkins' awed recognition in "No worst, there is none" that the "mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful,

sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there."

The resonance of the eloquent power of outward geographies with the elevating sonorities of inward landscapes of aspiration is Roerich's most powerfully evoked theme.

At the Foot of the Mountain of Gnosis

After a journey of intermittent work over one year and five months and focused attention for two months, which yielded various self published essays on the work of philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko, I at last submitted my essay on his world view and language to be considered for inclusion in a book organised and edited by Toyin Falola whose inspiring call for papers for the book and generous extensions of essay submission time enabled the effort in the first place. Wariboko has himself been an inspiring companion on the journey, in his encouragement and friendship.

The essay is one of the most important things I have done this year and perhaps in my whole scholarly and writing career, shaping me permanently, creating a groundwork for future work of strategic significance.

The work brought me face to face with my limitations.

It was like encountering a mountain, sensitizing one to one's minuteness while provoking the aspiration to reach its summit, intimately exploring its uncompromisingly rugged verticality, a journey transforming the journeyer.

I was plunged into a vortex resonating with the ideas of thinkers who have shaped the course of knowing in the Western hemisphere and the ancient Greek heritage, as well as of figures, across North to West Africa and Asia, constituting the dynamism of struggles to understand the universe

I became like Frodo in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings, gazing into the magical mirror of Galadriel, a pool of water in which one may see the actual and possible history of the world, its past, present and possible futures, and even of oneself and one's acquaintances, but as snapshots without a link of coherence between them or of distinction between what time frames these events are coming from, simply pointers to what was, what is and what may be, "a great story in which one has somehow become involved," as Frodo's growing realization is described.

Dialogue with Figures Across Space and Time

I encountered the efforts of

the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, combining Germanic ideas of spirit and mind with the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit, a divine force enabling existence, into an account of the development of human thought and cosmic maturation;

of Karl Marx, described as adapting that conception into an exploration of the struggle to find self actualization within the world of work highlighted by the tension between expanding productivity, consumption and labour in the modernity emerging since the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, and by extension, its relationship to the transformation of weaponry enabling colonialism and the centuries running Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade central to reworking Africa, England and the US;

ideas of Kalabari masters of knowledge on the relationship between ultimate possibility and human capacity, resonating with ideations of classical West African thinkers and North African Christian philosophers on similar concerns, using different ideational frameworks and terminology,

efforts also echoed by 20th century and contemporary theologians across Europe and the US, correlative with Asian and South American thinkers,

as I struggled to understand and explain how these figures clarify the story being told in an unfolding sequence of books by Wariboko, a ceaseless productivity emergent so far in twelve carefully argued, densely ideational and richly inter-textual and trans-disciplinary books, along with essays, some of which, even when outside his more consistent scope, are strategic contributions to the disciplines they address, such as his essay on the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge reviewing Jacob Olupona and Rowland Abiodun's edited Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power and Performance.

From Metaphysics to Economics

I tried to appreciate both Wariboko's broad but focused zones of inter-textual exploration across books ranging over theology, philosophy, urban theory, economics and politics as well as other philosophical and religious contexts that frame those exploratory immediacies, my own response to Falola's summation in the invitation to contribute to the Wariboko volume, "His work must be in context as it drives the contents; and how the contents represent philosophical markers."

To better appreciate the style of thinking in terms of which Wariboko is working, its very helpful to contextualize it within global traditions of struggles to understand human existence and its development within its cosmic framework, since that is his central theme and perhaps the primary direction of religion and philosophy across history.

This is a supremely extensive topic but one that can be creatively addressed through the relationships between particular themes within Wariboko's works as these are subsumed by an overarching idea that may be seen as unifying that work.

One perspective on that ultimately conjunctive and more precise motif within Wariboko's exploration of humanity's implication within cosmic being and becoming, might be how to transform potentiality, what is possible, into actuality, in individual and social life, and the creative forces within and beyond the human person that may assist such creative change.

Within that central idea is the question of how to asses what one knows, since information needs to be processed for its value to be properly distilled. To better appreciate Wariboko's explorations of relationships between what is perceived and its meaning, between layers of significance in phenomena, an exploration he conducts across Kalabari, classical and contemporary African, Christian Protestant, Pentecostal and Continental thought, it is helpful to understand his grounding in the Continental tradition deriving from Immanuel Kant, who made that exploration the cornerstone of his philosophy, an orientation that reaches back to Plato and Aristotle in the Western tradition.

Also helpful is a sensitivity to Hegel's methods of abstraction and concretisation, and their conjunctions with and difference from similar strategies of cosmological interpretation in relation to specifics of existence.

This dialectic of enquiry into human cognitive capacity and its place in the sweep of cosmic time is a journey across centuries and geographies Wariboko demonstrates people's efforts to both appropriate and go beyond even when they are not working in relation to Kant, Hegel or the Western tradition, but engaging with fundamental issues and perspectives on ways of approaching knowledge that recur across space and time.

These engagements are demonstrated in Wariboko's work through the efforts of his varied interlocutors, theologians, Pentecostals,Continental philosophers and classical African thinkers, exemplified by Kalabari thought, to know both what is immediately perceptible through the senses, and what may lie beyond the senses, what can be seen or heard of events as they occur and patterns of possibility, of meaning, that go beyond immediate experience as evident within the immediate present, probing what these insights may illuminate about activity across and beyond time.

Can the human being approach or attain infinity, which the mind conceives?

I was able to examine at some length in the essay, Wariboko's metaphysics, the conception of the underlying, non-material character of the cosmos as appreciable by human beings, and his epistemology, ideas about how knowledge may be developed and assessed, as these are subsumed within ethics, conceptions about how best to live, perspectives framed by the possibilities enabled by the character of the cosmos, metaphysics, and how it may be understood, epistemology .

Within this ethical dynamic is humanity's management of resources known as economics, on which I was able to present some of the broader aspirations of Wariboko's thought, without detailing his economic strategies, even though, as a professional, academically trained economist, he has devoted at least three books and a number of essays to that subject which also runs across other books of his, a limitation I will have to correct in future reworkings of the essay, possibly for other uses beyond its immediate purpose.

From the Finite to the Infinite, the Mundane to the Sublime

The title of this reflection "Traversing Landscapes of Knowledge" reminds me of Immanuel Kant's great passage on finitude, mortality and infinity in his Critique of Practical Reason, the version quoted here translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott and sourced from Project Guternberg, opening with the following first paragraph and concluding with the next two paragraphs below:

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

...

The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as that of an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter of which it was formed, after it has been provided for a short time (we know not how) with vital power.

The second, on the other hand, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligenceby my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole world of sense, at least so far as can be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite."

What the natural world does for Kant, "the starry heavens above me" as he describes it in those lines, " the unservayable magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems... the limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance" as he elaborates in other paragraphs of that passage, is what this project has done for me, opening me into what he alludes to in those lines and explicitly describes in his Critique of Judgement as the sense of the Sublime.

This sense emerges for me, in this instance, in terms of a deepening fraternity with the relatively minuscule creature on terra firma who is compelled to roam the world and the cosmos in mind and body, trying to understand why and how, where from and where to, a species dropped from seemingly nowhere onto the earth, its members exiting at a time unknown, but who yet struggle against extinction with the dissolution of the body, trying to map the convergences of space, time and the beyond within which they find themselves.