The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture

6 Rationality, Individuality, Secularity, and the Proverbial

6 R ATIONALITY, INDIVIDUALITY, SECULARITY, AND THE PROVERBIAL African philosophy has now become established on a secure and dynamic foundation. The genre accommodates a wide variety of approaches to the subject: Afrocentric (Eboussi-Boulaga 1997), analytical (Appiah 1992; Hallen and Sodpio 1986/1997; Wiredu 1996a), deconstructive (Mudimbe 1988), ethnophilosophical (Kagame 1956; Tempels 1959; Hegba 1982), hermeneutical (Serequeberhan 1994), Marxist (Towa 1971; Fashina 1989; Taiwo 1996), phenomenological (Kinyongo 1982), postmodern (Appiah 1992; Eze 1997b; Mudimbe 1988), and those committed to fashioning a methodology specially suited to what they see as the subcontinent’s distinctive cultural heritage (Makinde 1988b; Oruka 1990; Sogolo 1993). The genre is also writing its own history (Masolo 1994). A number of African entries are included in the latest Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). New ‘mainstream’ journals in the subject are being funded. African, African American, and philosophers of the diaspora are interrelating and interacting on concerns they have in common (Pittman 1997). Both in Africa and overseas, more conferences, either specifically on or including African philosophy, are taking place than ever before. This is as it should be if the substance of academic philosophy is to be both profitably applied to and enriched by the relatively neglected intellectual heritage of this remarkable subcontinent. If this book appears to harp excessively on the value of an analytic and linguistic approach to the subject, it is hoped readers will appreciate that such special pleading 140 | THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL is taking place in the much wider and richer African philosophical context outlined above. This concluding chapter is devoted to discussing one fairly standard approach to the exegesis of indigenous African philosophy, and two widely discussed contemporary themes from moral philosophy in Africa. The approach concerns the use of proverbs as a source of African philosophy . The themes concern the importance of the community to the moral life of the individual, and the importance of the religious or spiritual to African systems of morality. The discussions of these topics are not meant to be comprehensive or even broadly representative of the varieties of argumentation and research that have been and are being devoted to them. Rather, it is incumbent upon a narrative such as this to offer the viewpoints it might have upon such relevant topics that have not been discussed in the main body of the text. THE PROVERBIAL With regards to the indigenous cultures of sub-Saharan Africa generally, proverbs have long been treated by anthropological and philosophical researchers as a legitimate source of African philosophy. Africanists caution us against unceremoniously and unjustifiably transferring the banality and triviality now associated with the proverb as a form of expression in Western culture to the African context (Yai 1989, 1994). For in Africa they are said to have both a different function and level of theoretical meaning that make them key components as well as expressions of a culture ’s viewpoints on a variety of important topics and problems. The literature that has been devoted to their cataloging and interpolation is therefore substantial (Biebuyck 1973; Dalfovo 1985; English and Hamme 1996; Gyekye 1987/1995, 1997; Wiredu 1996b). Proverbs have not featured in this narrative in an important or prominent manner. They do occur in some of the quotations (22, 67, 130), but these are contexts in which a speaker also uses ordinary language and prose to portray and analyze a type of situation or problem and then ‘adds on’ the proverb as a more abbreviated way to epitomize an inductive generalization, sometimes involving a value judgment, that might be relevant to that type of situation or problem. My motive for raising this topic is that I have several rather standard reservations about texts which presume to articulate African philosophy solely on the basis of the exegesis of a culture’s proverbs. By comparison with ordinary language analysis, which concentrates on comparatively explicitly expressed, explicitly defined, and explicitly assessed values, a RATIONALITY, INDIVIDUALITY, SECULARITY | 141 preponderant reliance upon professional academics as the agents who choose which proverbs should be considered ‘keys to the kingdom’s’ cultural values, who determine how diverse proverbs should be interrelated to constitute some sort of system, network, or “worldview,”1 and who dictate which interpretations of the meanings of those proverbs should be considered most accurate and essential could from a methodological viewpoint become a perilously subjective exercise.2 Generally proverbs do not introduce themselves to us as...