The Poetics of Philosophy Part 1: Nimi Wariboko's Circles of Being and Becoming
Abstract
A reflection on the contemplative power of theologian, philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko's acknowledgements in his forthcoming book The Pentecostal Hypothesis.
The theologian, philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko is a consummate and prolific writer of books. Scholarly books. Profound and complex. Verbally powerful, at times lyrical, at times conceptually and expressively muscular in uncompromising force, often imaginatively recreative.
There is another side to Wariboko, however, that may be seen as being as significant as the Wariboko writing those books.
The words of this Wariboko can be fitted into an essay but they are so rich that the Wariboko in those books might perhaps be derivable, in a deductive process, from this Wariboko.
This is the Wariboko of the acknowledgements pages of his books.
This is my favorite Wariboko.
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Spatial Reverberations
Private space reverberating in public space, public space resonating in private space
"What can I say from my depths that will touch the depths of people I have never met?''
Picture by Toyin Falola of Wariboko in his home and image of Boston street on day of Wariboko's inauguration
as
Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University.
I admire the other Wariboko-the wrestler with complex concepts enmshed in the jungle of ideations deftly navigated, the imaginative language crafter bringing alive the shapings of the conceptual wrestler in language of uncompromising rigour and power.
There is another Wariboko, however, who is like the gentle rain as the other resembles potent rain, both fertilizing Earth for luxuriant growths.
This more lyrical Wariboko is akin to the rhythm and spirit of the Yoruba oral poem ''Ayajo Asuwada," which declares ''Dew pour lightly, pour lightly/ Dew pour heavily, pour heavily/ Dew pour heavily/ So that you may pour lightly/ Thus Ifa was consulted for Olofin Otete/ Who would pour myriads of existence upon the earth,'' as quoted in Akinsola Akowowo's ''Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry.''
This Wariboko depicts with utmost clarity Wariboko as poet and scholar, aesthete and theologian, creator of landscapes of mental expansion from roots in the everyday, a Wariboko evident throughout his work but prominent as the sole voice in his acknowledgements pages, the Wariboko in whose company I converse with the greatest masters of world literature.
Let us listen to this Wariboko as evident in one example of his acknowledgements pages.
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Philosopher at Prayer in Circles of People and Light
Picture by Toyin Falola of Wariboko in concluding prayer at his professorial inauguration
Apologies for increasing the paragraphing for ease of online reading, particularly on social media:
Writing a book, building thought, is a process that impels me into concentric circles.
Once I get into the circle of manipulating ideas, I quickly realize that I am standing in the circumference of debt, credits of encouragement, insights and wisdom of past teachers, and advice given to me through time.
No sooner have I grasped this revelation than I discover that all along I was standing in a wider circle of editors, producers, and marketers of books, and funders of research.
Circle upon circle!
There is also the infinite circle of the Spirit of God that grounds all the circles.
Each of these circles demands recognition.
Where do I start?
From The Pentecostal Hypothesis. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade, 2020, xxi (Forthcoming).
The Ghanaian Akan and Gyaman Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene
I love those lines of Wariboko’s for their expansive use of the image of the circle, aesthetically satisfying and imaginatively and ideationally expansive, unifying self and others within the embrace of the ultimacy that enables existence.
The writer is simply trying to say ''thank you'' as writers do before they open their books, but this writer takes the expression of gratitude further, projecting it in terms of the universally reverberating image of the circle, moving from the most immediate referent, himself, to those who have been directly or indirectly part of the creative activity represented by his book, culminating in the most inclusive circle, the creator of the universe who enables these possibilities of self expression and interpersonal creativity in the first place.
He continues:
Definitely, I cannot start from myself, though writing forces me to dwell at the center of my thought and spirituality. This center that I claim was given to me as a gift. It is a gift of God, human beings, and nature.
For by grace I write through gift. Writing is not only of works lest any writer should boast. For we are the workmanship of our God, cultural time and space, and unmerited genes, crafted in tears and sweat, dollars and blood for good books, which our families and communities prepared beforehand that we should bring forth.
Once again, where do I start?
From the depths of my heart flow gratitude, admiration, and love to the following friends who assisted me in the birth of this book…
The outermost circle is contracted inward, a motion bringing the other circles with it into the centre, where the writer is situated.
The centre is thereby perceived as enabled by the radiations within which he, Wariboko, exists, from the ultimate creator of the universe to the biological and interpersonal constructions that shape his existence.
Having contracted the concentric radiations into himself, he then projects them away from himself, in another round of expression, from centre to circumference, doing this through an outflow of gratitude, admiration and love.
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That Which was Enfolded shall be Unfolded
That Which was Enfolded shall be Unfolded
The journey of the philosopher around the illuminating circle of the Man of Galilee imaged in the rose window from the church in the Boston University School of Theology where Wariboko's inauguration into the Walter G. Muelder professorship took place, the picture a detail from Toyin Falola's visual records of the event.
Top left: Nimi in 1983 as radical Marxist young man in third year at the University of Port Harcourt. Photo from Nimi.
Second from top left: Nimi in 1989 as a young banker in Lagos. Photo from Nimi.
Third from top left: Picture of Nimi, after gaining his MBA in Finance and Accounting from Columbia University, NYC, six months earlier. Picture taken in Twon-Brass, Bayelsa where his wife and himself had taken their first son, born on October 2, 1992, in New York City, to show his maternal grandfather.. Photo from Nimi's Facebook page.
Fourth from top left: Nimi. October 1988. Photo from Nimi.
Fifth from top left: Nimi in January 1979. 16 years old. In his hometown of Abonnema, Nigeria. Dressed for his grandmother’s funeral. Student of Nyemoni Grammar School, Abonnema. Photo from Nimi.
Sixth from top left: Nimi as the Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts. Photo from Nimi's Amazon page.
Seventh from top left: Nimi. 1989. Banker in Lagos. Photo from Nimi.
Extreme left, middle, first picture: Nimi. March 4, 1988. Photo from Nimi.
Bottom, extreme left: Nimi at 18 years old. First year at the University of Port Harcourt. Photo from Nimi.
Bottom, second from left: Nimi as a professor in Boston. Photo from Nimi's Facebook page.
Bottom, third from left: Nimi preaching, about 2001, as a full time pastor of RCCG International Chapel, Brooklyn, New York while an adjunct professor at NYU. Photo from Nimi's Facebook page.
Bottom, third from left: Nimi preaching, about 2001, as a full time pastor of RCCG International Chapel, Brooklyn, New York while an adjunct professor at NYU. Photo from Nimi's Facebook page.
Bottom, fourth from left: Nimi, centre, and colleagues at his professorial inauguration. Photo by Toyin Falola.
Picture on top of inauguration image: Nimi. May 1985. National Youth Service Corps national service the year after BSc graduation. Photo from Nimi.
''A lively transdisciplinary thinker, Dr. Nimi Wariboko loves to unfold, refold, enfold, and energize past and present ideas and hopes in relation to the possibilities of future human flourishing.''
This is a superb meditation actualizing one of the richest efforts of religions and philosophies to unify the individual and the totality, cosmos and creator.
Such initiatives range from Hinduism and Buddhism, whose visual symbolism is significantly representative of the symbolic use of the circle, as in the Buddhist Womb and Diamond mandalas, depicting the cosmos as expanding from a centre and the cosmos as converging towards a centre.
It is inclusive of such Christian conceptions as "God is a circle with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere."
Related orientations are demonstrated in the visualization of cosmos in terms of the unity of physical and spiritual time and space, within the embrace of eternity, depicted as the intersection of a horizontal and a vertical line within a circle, evident in or suggested by such Africana visual forms as the opon ifa of Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality, Benin Edo Olokun igha-ede and the Kongo cosmogram, as well as resonant in the Voodoo peristyle.
They reverberate in German philosopher Immanuel Kant's concluding meditation in his Critique of Practical Reason, where he declares, "Two things fill the mind with ever newer and ever 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."
This oscillation between self and cosmos, between the observer and the observed, between the enablement of the observer by the observed, as the cosmos enables the embodied existence of the human mind observing it, leads Kant to reflect on contrasts of space and time.
He is inspired by the difference between the comparative minisculity of Earth and even more so of his own person, and of the brief time available to him on Earth, in relation to the majestic spatial and temporal spans of the cosmos.
He concludes in reflecting on the capacity of his mind, unfettered by these physical and temporal constraints, to soar into infinity.
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"You Will Bear Fruit in the Lives of People You Will Never Know"
"You Will Bear Fruit in the Lives of People You Will Never Know"
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
Picture by Toyin Falola of Wariboko at his professorial inauguration and of Boston street on event day
Milarepa, Tibetan Buddhist hermit and poet, describes a meditation in which one wishes well being on all that exists, projecting this attitude with such intensity that one's mental processes transcend thought, as depicted in Evans-Wentz' edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa.
The hermit, withdrawn from society, in order to '' reappraise human potential against the human condition,'' as described by Richard Sullivan, referencing Arnold Toynbee on the logic of monasticism in Sullivan's introduction to Lowrie Daly's Benedictine Monasticism, thus imaginatively reintegrates himself into society.
Through such meditation, the hermit becomes a participant in social progress at a fundamental, though unseen level, as another hermit, the Christian monk Thomas Merton, poignantly describes the invisible intertwining of society and recluse in his Contemplation in a World of Action.
From the hermit's cell or cave, the one withdrawn from society is yet centred in the busyness of humanity, as such eremitic thinkers as Milarepa and Merton understand this mystical bond between the individual and humanity from within the womb of solitude.
From the hermit's cell or cave, the one withdrawn from society is yet centred in the busyness of humanity, as such eremitic thinkers as Milarepa and Merton understand this mystical bond between the individual and humanity from within the womb of solitude.
Wariboko's contemplative reckoning of those circles of creation that have enabled his book distills such perspectives in a manner applicable to and adaptable by everyone.
Wariboko, like Kant, is not a hermit but an academic scholar. He is compelled to recognize, from within the solitary intimacy within which the creativity of ideas often emerges, from inside that investment in solitude that hermits, scholars and all thinkers share, that all his activity is enabled by ''a cloud of witnesses,'' adapting Paul's expression from his Biblical ''Letter to the Hebrews.''
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Philosopher and Colleagues
Picture by Toyin Falola of after event activity at Wariboko's professorial inauguration
One might not be a hermit, but, in moments of apartness, in sensitivity to the fundamental alonness that is the ground of human identity, one could recognize, as Wariboko does in his acknowledgments in The Pentecostal Hypothesis, that the very existence of that essential ground is not self made, but a construct of possibility beyond one's reckoning, working through biological genesis at work since the cosmos came into being, ultimately eventuating in the individual reflecting on self and other, raw potential shaped by ''cultural time and space, and unmerited genes, crafted in tears and sweat [ and] dollars,'' enablements from society, family and carers, a network of radiations enclosing the self in a matrix of being and becoming, of existence and unfolding, enablements ultimately owing their being to a creative principle beyond identification by humanity, but which some call God.
May we not adapt this example to ourselves, as we reflect on the work that we are? The creative process we constitute? The unfolding possibility emanating from within us, as we we are enabled by something we do not fully understand, evident in the fires of cosmogenesis but reaching further back beyond the wall that divides the ultimate foundations of existence and the human mind as it is presently constituted, a fundamental distinction between human knowingness and the Nothing of Physics, the Void of Buddhism, symbols of that beyond us?
We should expand our sensitivity in the recognition of unity of self and others.
With the Wariboko of The Depth and Destiny of Work, we should climb into the depths of the self to encounter the coalescence of the multitude within the resonance of individuality.
With the Wariboko of The Charismatic City, we should work towards the creation of civic spaces for experiencing beauty, awe and stimulation for making friendships.
We should cultivate with the Wariboko of The Pentecostal Principle, a sensitivity to a transformative principle represented by human dynamism within history, as we race towards the Absolute Infinity, his term for humanity's ultimate destination.
Let us give thanks for the circles of possibility that enfold us.
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