metaphysics becomes obvious when we recall our earlier discus· sions of the Igbo concept of omenani. There. is a general tendency and an inner urge in Igbo culture, as we noted, to "dance according to the tune of Omenani." This indicates that in Igbo culture God as Osebuluwa guides and directs individuals and the community to an end He has chosen for them. The issue is then: How can a human person (the most self-possessed of created beings) be his own and yet depend on the Absolute Being who guides and directs him? How can we reconcile these two things: distinctness from Chi-ukwu in the sense of autonomy, and beholdenness to Him precisely in the act of autonomy?
It must be admitted that in the history of philosophy some thinkers, for instance, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre do not see any possible reconciliation. For them the human subject must seek
"birth through himself"31 as an absolute will-to--power, absolute self-invention and freedom. The human subject should and must be ontologically autonomous. According to them, to reach self-fulfillment man must step out of the realm of beholdenness to God and enter into the realm of absolute being-in-itself. This means, of course, becoming God. As we are going to see shortly, the Igbo mentality would differ from this extreme position and would rather attempt a possible reconciliation.
The Igbo attempt at a reconciliation of autonomy and independence:
From the Igbo idea of community we know that the people's cultural life is characterized by love, concern, brotherhood and a deep sense of belonging. These characteristics give rise to a general adoption of cultural norms. They "also constitute the basis for the general tendency and the inner urge to "dance according to the tune of Omenani.” In this context, it would seem, especially to Western readers, that the general adoption of cultural norms do generate a generic kind of cultural communication in which everyone acts, be-lieves and thinks alike. The fact is that opinions, fears, joys and goals are imperceptibly transferable from person to person because of such an original, unquestioning identification of all. From this it would seem that by living in such a community, the lucidity of one's self-consciousness is veiled and therefore one is not yet in a completely realized communication since one is not yet aware of autonomous selfhood or will. In such a community it could appear
136 BEING AND GOD
as if each person is reduced to an ego point which is substitutable for another mere ego point. This can be illustrated by the fate of Obi Okonkwo, the chief character in Chinua Achebe‟s novel, No Longer At Ease.
The gist of the story is that Obi Okonkwo was sent to England
£or a university education sponsored by the contributions of his town's people. Having imbibed Western culture, he came back to Nigeria and found himself oscillating between two cultures, his people‟s culture and that of Westerners. The crux of the problem was his personal decision to marry a woman whom he met in England. Virtually all of his town's people were opposed to this marriage as we can see from the following citation:
'Very good,' said Joseph bitterly, 'Are you going to marry the En·
glish way or are you going to ask your people to approach her Peo-ple according to custom? •.. What you are going to do concerns not only yourself but your whole family and future generations. If one finger brings oil it soils the others. In the future when we. are all civilized, anybody may marry anybody. But that time has not come . . . • What is an engagement ring? Our fathers did not marry with rings. It is not too late to change (your decision). Remember you are the one and only Umuofia Son to be educated overseas. We do not want to be like the unfortunate child who grows his first tooth and grows a decayed one.3Z
During one of the monthly meetings of the Umuofia Progressive Union, Lagos Branch, the president spoke on behalf of the entire town to Obi:
'You are one of us, so we must bare our mind to you. What the government pays you is more than enough unless you go into bad ways.' Many of the people said: 'God forbid!' 'We cannot afford bad ways,' went on the President .... You may ask why I am saying all this. I have heard that you are moving about with a girl of doubtful ancestry, and even thinking of marrying her….‟33
In view of all these remonstrations, Obi had to withdraw his decision to marry the woman of his choice. This would show that in the Igbo community no one may freely choose whatever he decides. Thus it seems that the Igbo society does not accommodate the freedom of an individual who wants to have his or her own way. However, it is important to remember that, as we saw earlier, the principal Igbo cultural norm is that 'one should so act as not to bring
The Name Chi-ukwu 137 afflictions to the entire society of which one is a dynamic part.' This principle presupposes and recognizes each person's free capability for deviance.
It is a principle (says 1.1. Egbujie) underpinned through and through by freedom itself. Since the Africans' sacred holistic view of ... the ... world ... put together is such a strong existential ideal, how could an African society come to let a member of its human world go his or her own way, a thing which would be tantamount to the polluting of the whole?34
Implied in this citation is the belief that for Africans the free-dom of the human subject is better respected within the context of the whole. Thus the insistence on the individual's adherence to the entire community, rather than being a hindrance to one's freedom, is really designed to facilitate the good use of one's freedom, especially insofar as one's interest is basically involved. No law commands anyone to love himself. But since unrestrained love of self is bound to implicate others, those others rightly rebel against purely egotistical conduct.
One thing we must admit here is that the Igbos are dealing more With the question of a practical, a cultural phenomenon within a society, than with the metaphysical examination of freedom. In the latter Case any consciously deliberate human act derives from free·
dom, and is an index of freedom. Freedom abstractly considered ad-mits of all possible and imaginable individual decisions and choices even to the point of the option not to choose, which is itself a choice and proof of freedom. On the other hand, in practical freedom, since no person alone makes up a community in which a culture inheres, there is the O118oing dialectic of the individual's freedom and the societal freedom that originally produced and conserves cultural norms. The logic, then, of the Igbo community is that since it has been the free decisions and choices of the forerunners of the com-munity to establish a free bond that was passed on to posterity, it is not proper for one to decide abstractly against those meanings and realities thus handed down.
According, to the Africans there is· no such thing as freedom's reason to negate freedom in the practical order. It is still within one's free self-articulation that one chooses to unite with primor- dia) freedom's constitutions, the substance of a culture.35
So it is among the Igbos. For them one‟s free self-articulation is
138 BEING AND GOD
meaningless unless it is within the context of the community's freedom.
Notice that “to unite" here is not the same as merely to conform.
Conforming is not truly the attitude of a free agent because of its externality. But the attitude of uniting is truly that of a free agent since it reflects what is fundamental to a human being living in a society.
From the foregoing we may gather that the Igbo idea of freedom of the individual seems to be like the Christian idea of freedom: individual freedom' is not freedom to kill or destroy oneself (otherwise it would not be a sin to commit suicide), but freedom within the provident hand of God guiding and directing to the final end. In fact, one is most free in a reasonable sense only when one is free in this context, which actually is the context of creation. To be free outside this context means that one was not created.
The delicate dialectic of the individual's freedom and the com-munity's freedom is analogous to the dialectic of the part and the whole in a sentence. The whole which is the meaning of the sentence transcends each word, its part. The words manifest their meaniJij1; only in the context of the whole. Yet the role of the part cannot be minimized.
Similarly, a respect for the freedom of the whole does not minimize the freedom of the individual. beholdenness to an Absolute on the other-is to see the latter as the ground of the former. Human autonomy can be authentic only if it is grounded in a beholdenness to an Absolute from whom it derives its meaning. We have seen this amply demonstrated in the Igbo cultural milieu. To think of an autonomy in terms of Sartre and his forerunners would be a contradiction in terms in Igbo culture. The ground of such an autonomy would be nothingness, so there would be no autonomy at all. For the ab-solute being, for this would mean having as many abab-solute beings as there are human subjects. If all human subjects are absolute, the
The Name Chi-ukwu 139 result is that one is still compelled to go beyond these absolute be· ings in search of the ground for them. Then a more fundamental question has to be asked: How are we to define human? In Other words, how do human beings perceive themselves? Are we abso-lutely autonomous in religious experience?
To recapitulate, throughout this chapter we have sought for an understanding of being in its ultimate cause from the Igbo point of view.
We have seen how the functional unity of the elements has provided the Igbos with the basis for their view of things. Within this milieu the people, prompted by reason complemented by faith or religious understanding, discover God and accept his existence as the ultimate source of all that is.
From that point our focus has been on what, according to the Igbos, we can know of this God. Our consideration of Igbo names for God has been of help to this. The major names are Cbineke. Osebuluwa and Chukwu. Chineke introduces us into a knowledge of God as the ultimate source of being, the creator who maintains a causal relationship with all beings. This causal relationship is expressed in the Igbo concept of "chi," a most intimate metaphysical presence of God in each of his creatures. From our analysis and in· terpretation of the significance of the name Osebuluwa, we understand that this creative presence of God entails his care and support. God's presence in creatures means that he has a plan for them, and directs and guides them to the achievement of this end.
A consideration of the implications of the name Chukwu led us to realize that even though God is intimately and creatively presel1t in his creatures, the Igbos still recognize that this God, as he is in himself, is the unlimited fullness of being, the Absolute who is totally
"other," that is, distinct from all his creatures. From this arises the issue of participation which we saw as the problem of reconciling the Igbo ideas of God as Chi-na-eke and Ose-buluwa on the one hand and Chi-ukwu on the other. An examination of this issue led us back to the primordial metaphysical question asked by Parmenides: If there is Being, how can there be anything else?
In the light of contemporary philosophy the question was seen as that of Kierkegaard's miracle of creation: the creation of something which is something. But this miracle, as Hurd has shown, can be narrowed down to thecontemporary problem of human freedom. Hence our chapter ends with the Igbo way of viewing or reconsidering the problem of the autonomy of the human subject and behold· enness to an Absolute Being; namely: seeing the latter as the ground of the former.
140 BEING AND GOD
In the final section of this work, attempts will be made to high-light the problem of Igbo metaphysics, the impact of this metaphysics upon other areas of philosophy, and some of the practical results of the Igbo understanding of being as we have presented it in this chap-ter and the preceding chapchap-ters.