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

Barry Hallen

Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000. 201 pp., appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover, $17.95 softcover.

It's no secret that most of the Western world persists in regarding "African thought" as an oxymoron. The old misperceptions die hard in the popular imagination, and also, it seems, in certain quarters of the academy. Readers of African Arts already know the litany of arbitrary oppositions, traceable back to the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1837) and beyond: Africans live in timeless intimacy with forces of spirit and myth rather than in the historical time of scientific Progress. As passive followers of cultural "traditions" rather than as intrepid innovators, they exist not as individuals but as "tribes." Thinking through pre-given affective symbols instead of empirically based reason, they have customs rather than laws, beliefs rather than knowledge. And of course, they create "fetishes," not "art." No need to continue this list of faulty assumptions--which have been well criticized in the pages of this very journal, among many others.

Barry Hallen is a philosopher who, like many working today in the fields of African culture studies, is deeply concerned with realigning such misapprehensions. Indeed, he suggests that "the philosopher is in a privileged position for doing so" (p. 148). Armed with a Western analytic philosophical method that looks closely--very, very closely--at language itself as the key to philosophical understanding, Hallen proposes to outline some central concepts of the moral, ethical, and aesthetic thought of Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria. The titular good, bad, and beautiful are addressed here, but so also are truth, knowledge, belief, and personhood itself. Many of these issues have long been topics of anthropological and art historical study but according to Hallen, such researches have in the main only perpetuated Western misunderstandings of African systems of thought as basically emotive, mythic, and symbolic in character.

The argument, then, is polemical at its root. Hallen sets out to challenge what he regards as "the ubiquitous paradigm of the pre-reflective, symbolic character of traditional cultures [that] channels anthropological approaches to Africa" (p. 147). He proposes also to redress the "disproportionate importance that has been assigned to a Yoruba aesthetics as a result of the influence of African `art collection ...'" (p. 114). Rather, he insists, we must look to "ordinary language"--and not to the vaunted discourses of myth or the luminous surfaces of Yoruba art objects--if we hope to locate the systematicity, the rational texture, of Yoruba philosophical thought. In this challenging, rigorously argued, and wide-ranging analysis, Hallen amply demonstrates that "on the level of everyday experience Yoruba discourse in its own right reveals itself to be conventionally commonsensical, rational, and empirical" (pp. 11-12). This is a welcome pronouncement, and a brave admission at that, given the parochial and certainly ethnocentric standards of rationality established by the very analytic philosophy Hallen embraces.

The "ordinary language" at stake here is gleaned, perhaps ironically, from conversations with extraordinary men: onisegun, medicinal specialists whose extensive education has prepared them well to articulate the nuances of Yoruba philosophical thought. As in Hallen's earlier book, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy (co-authored with J. Olubi Sodipo, London: Ethnographica Publishers, 1986), the words of the onisegun (whose names we never learn) are presented throughout the argument as sound-bites, excised from context in keeping with the "compartmentalizing" mandates of the analytic method of definition-and-argument. This is not a bad thing in itself--the statements demonstrate clearly the oniseguns' brilliant command of theoretical complexity across a spectrum of practical and philosophical matters. They also allow Hallen to draw out subtle nuances of meaning from terms long familiar to students of Yoruba culture, to add some new terms to the mix, and to outline the semantic relations between them.

But for the critical reader committed to the centrality of social context in the production of meaning, such a methodology will be the source of some serious discomfort. It is one thing to enumerate the components of personhood as described by "informants" in the extraordinary context of an interview (chap. 3). It is quite another to observe how personhood is structured within a social network of overlapping, and ordinary, discursive practices. As critical thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor have well argued, "discourse" is not bound exclusively to language. Yoruba philosophers such as M. Akin Makinde and Segun Gbadegesin also have recognized this, and have enriched their linguistic analyses with cultural commentary grounded in lived experience. Such commentary, however, is beyond the purview of analytic philosophy's method per se; as Hallen points out, "The analytical philosopher's `meat' is words ..." (p. 125). The reader, of course, will have to decide whether that meat constitutes a full-course meal.

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful is fundamentally a philosophical account of language in translation--the oniseguns' words are transformed not only by an overarching disciplinary bias but also by the act of translation itself. Hallen confirms this, and warns that in such a study one must "be careful--to try not to misrepresent African meanings and attitudes" (p. 9). In any cross-cultural translation, of course, the danger of misrepresentation is always present--it is heightened by the interpreter's desire to express something coherent (see p. 134), and diminished when the interpreter is fluent in both languages in question. Hallen suggests that his own "inadequate fluency in speaking the Yoruba language" (p. 6) freed him to ask the onisegun "how one should speak the language correctly," and so learn the meanings they assigned to specific terms. This is an elegant methodological tool, to be sure, but it also presents a paradox: How ordinary is "ordinary language" when its speaker and listener do not share that language--or, to a degree, the experience it describes--in ordinary, everyday ways? And further, if the terms under discussion are indeed ordinary, would not the argument have benefited also by including as evidence the voices of ordinary people such as marketwomen, motor mechanics, and farmers? No doubt their understandings, and even occasional misunderstandings, of these terms would tell us much about how Yoruba people deploy complex philosophical concepts in everyday life.

Hallen does indeed find the rational coherence he seeks in the oniseguns' statements, which are numbered and grouped together in the original Yoruba as a useful appendix. For readers conversant in Yoruba, comparing those original texts to their English translations will be an invaluable, but sometimes troubling, exercise. Hallen's translation of olori buburu as "bad destiny choosers" (p. 60, emphasis added), for example, implies a problematic ontological leap that is not present in the more mundane "owner of a bad head." As Segun Gbadegesin has noted (1998:155), one's ori--the head as the embodiment of one's "destiny"--is not always chosen before birth, but alternatively may be presented to its owner, as is so in cases of reincarnation. Conversely, Hallen consistently translates emi as "self," obviously a core term in any epistemological argument (pp. 45-46, et passim). Though he acknowledges the term's alternate translations as "breath" and "spirit"--which, together with "self," constitute a suggestive ontological triumvirate--he chooses to mitigate emi's spiritual connotations, despite what the, onisegun clearly intend to mean. My critique of Hallen's specific translations does not end here. I will add that I found it disconcerting to find in this linguistic analysis English translations of individual words and occasional whole phrases that do not appear in the Yoruba index. Similarly, the semiotic richness of some Yoruba passages--for example, the complex punning play that is so much a part of everyday Yoruba speech--is left untapped in their English translations.

Hallen cautions us against inferring a philosophical system exclusively from the "wisdom" contained in collections of proverbs--or, for that matter, in individual proverbs taken out of context (pp. 140-43). Likewise, he is skeptical about what he sees as art historians' tendencies to hypothesize broad cultural truths based on the formal analysis of objects or on extraordinary religious orature. These two moments come together in Hallen's discussion of the well-known proverb iwa l'ewa (pp. 126-32). Long an important phrase in Yoruba aesthetic studies, it has been translated as "Character is beauty," suggesting that it is the essence of the thing, and not its pleasing appearance as such, that constitutes "beauty." Hallen is right to point out that iwa, "character," is not only absolutely inherent to the individual subject (or thing); it is known to others because it is behaved, because it is performed and engaged within a social frame. This problematizes the ontological notion of an essential subject which, according to Hallen, was drawn by one historian of Yoruba art "from the relatively abstruse and esoteric rhetoric of Ifa divination and the technical professional terminology of artists in traditional Yoruba society" (p. 127).

It is unclear to me how the oniseguns' "ordinary language" is any less technical than that of the professional sculptor, or how their specific terms can so readily be divorced from the encyclopedic Ifa orature that is a cornerstone in the professional education of any onisegun worth his salt. What is clear, however, is that Hallen would like to make a sharp distinction between an art historical understanding of aesthetics and a language-based philosophical understanding. For him, language seems to provide a kind of transparent window of objectivity onto the deepest aspects of Yoruba philosophical discourse. Hallen is palpably dismissive of art historians' claims to explore objects as objectifications of philosophical truths; he reduces their evaluations of significant form to "speculative hypothesis, whose truth status will remain indeterminate" (p. 134). For example, he continues: "If the art historian observes that most carvings of human figures stand upright, that certainly is a safe empirical generalization. But to impute or infer that standing upright represents a definable moral or aesthetic value is not." True enough, but it does not take into account that most art historians back up such inferences by talking with the people who make, use and ascribe meaning to those carvings.

Hallen's desire to resituate Yoruba aesthetics in the terms of ordinary discourse is laudable, as is his discussion of the aesthetics of such "plebian `objects'" as farms, calabashes, and, indeed, humans (pp. 114-22). An art historically minded reader stands to learn a few good lessons here regarding the valuation of objects not normally considered worthy of display in the elegantly lit vitrines of Western galleries and museums. However, in Hallen's effort to distance his own analysis of Yoruba aesthetics from that of art historians, neither those art historians nor the visual objects of their specialized study receive adequate consideration. Hallen seems to discount the compelling power of visual art as a mode of discourse. As a student of Yoruba visual culture--philosophically inclined but not a philosopher--I found intriguing this observation as to the oniseguns' close association of knowledge (imo) with visuality: "Persons are said to `mo' (to `know') or to have `imo' (`knowledge') only of experience they have witnessed in a firsthand or personal manner. The example cited most frequently by discussants, virtually as a paradigm, is visual perception of a scene or event as it is taking place" (p. 15, emphasis added).

Given such a dramatic emphasis on visuality in the very constitution of knowledge, it is surprising that Hallen does not take into account the propositional value of visual artworks as "statements" concerning morality, ethics, the enduring or changing truths of the Yoruba world. Instead we are returned once again to the old binary of oral v. written: "The claim that, in `traditional' Yoruba culture, propositions (only) come out of mouths is here an empirical observation rather than a theoretically weighted premiss" (p. 32). This, however, is simply not the case. If artworks do not talk as such, they are nevertheless crucial components of a complex visual dialogue between their creators, their recipients, and the social forces that bind them all together.

Historians of Yoruba art, and Africanist art historians more generally, have long emphasized the importance of language and interdisciplinarity to the appropriate study of African artworks within a broader social and cultural frame. Via recourse to a variety of discursive modes, including classical orature as well as ordinary language drawn from firsthand ethnography--and in the cases of Babatunde Lawal and Rowland Abiodun, among others, from firsthand experience as Yoruba people--they have argued that Yoruba artworks articulate in form fundamental conceptions of moral personhood. Indeed, they have consistently shown that in Yoruba culture, canons of morality and canons of significant form are inextricable. Hallen says this too, making the claim as if for the first time. Have these art historians privileged certain species of objects in their analyses of Yoruba culture, and inferred cultural generalities from the nonlinguistic deportment of forms in space? They have indeed--such is the persistent, if sometimes vexing, bias of their discipline. Have these inferences been made in a vacuum, relying only upon the evidence of surfaces to support them?

Once upon a time, perhaps, but that was long ago. As even a cursory glance at recent anthropological or art historical literature would suggest, "the ubiquitous paradigm of the pre-reflective, symbolic character of traditional cultures" of which Hallen speaks has shifted dramatically over the last few decades. Individual agency, especially, has come to the fore in these studies, illustrating clearly that neither symbols nor objects are absolutely pre-given and passively received. They are instead opportunities for conscious interpretation and the creation of new meanings. Where once scholars could efficiently discuss a culture in terms of a common worldview, today they emphasize culture as an agglomeration of individuals' views of the world, views that both conform to and contest the givens of lived experience. This articulation is consonant with the Yoruba conception of "tradition" (asa) as a dialectical movement between received cultural practices and the individual "choice" (sa) that stands at its linguistic core (Yai 1994:113).

Ultimately Hallen hopes to prompt further dialogue between scholars of different disciplines and orientations, and he praises historians of Yoruba art whose works balance the analysis of both verbal and nonverbal objects and performances. For him, the study of ordinary discourse is the site of a possible "middle way" (pp. 146-47): between "reflective" and "pre-reflective" modes of cognition; between the individual and the community; between the objectively knowable systematicity of reason (as couched in language) and what Hallen figures as the relatively inarticulable, subjective vagaries of aesthetic response (as objectified, for example, in "taste"). Clearly privileging the former term in each of these pairings, Hallen can only suggest the possibility of a middle way, but he cannot take us there.

The "ordinary" is a messy thing, a polymorphous social thing that tends to drift beyond and call into question the constraints of academic disciplines such as formalist art history and analytic philosophy. To appropriately deal with the mess, it is perhaps useful to begin by relinquishing the desire to systematize it absolutely within a unifying discourse: "It is by losing one's way," says a Yoruba proverb, "that one finds one's way" (Ona ni a nsi mona). The ordinary, after all, is not just a discourse--it is a way of life. If we are persistent in seeking the ordinary in the extraordinary and the extraordinary in the ordinary, we won't be lost for long.

Gbadegesin, Segun. 1998. "Eniyan: The Yoruba Concept of a Person," in Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings, eds. P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux, pp. 149-68. Johannesburg: International Thomson Publishers.

Hallen, Barry and J. Olubi Sodipo. 1986. Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy. London: Ethnographica Publishers.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1837. Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Berlin: Verlag von Dunder und Humblot. [English ed. The Philosophy of History. 1991. Trans. J. Sibree. Buffalo: Prometheus.]

Yai, Olabiyi. 1994. "In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of `Tradition' and `Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space," in The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, eds. Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal, and John Pemberton III, pp. 107-15. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

DAVID T. DORIS, a recent Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, is currently Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. In 2002 he received a Ph.D. from Yale University, where he focused on Yoruba cultural studies.