The tempo of philosophy, morality and democratic governance in Nigeria is likely one of the most charitable, substantial, iconic and related problems with immediately. It is because a quantum of issues has been raised over the exceptional and exponential exacerbation of unethical construct up in opposition to democracy, spiking of the stakes with unethical democratic practices and the corresponding financial, political and cultural despair, anguish, conundrum and their attendant problematic. We’re in need of saying due to this fact that simply as there may be an aesthetical and intuitive plank or hyperlink between morality and governance there may be nonetheless a phenomenological bridge amongst existential questions and semiotics of immorality, dangerous governance, lawlessness, meals insecurity, unaccountability, lack of transparency, non secular extremism, insurgency, inflation, corruption, mismanagement, home violence, misogyny, gender issues and political instability. It’s inside the purview of the “despair” of a median Nigerian and the shortcoming of successive Nigerian governments since Independence in 1960 to repair the Nigerian polity as depicted within the foregoing that we thought-about it existentially, cryptically and analytically humanistic to reach on the theme, “The Ethical Burden of The Artist and Oracle of Knowledge in Nigeria’s Democracy”.
The Oracle of Knowledge
The Oracle of Knowledge is a member of the sagacious mental class, the literati, the voices of purpose, the philosophers-king and the inventive writers, visible and audio artists interfacing with the orgies and contradictions of life. They’re the voices of imaginative and prescient, regeneration and ethical equipoise within the society and any polity. J.B Akam would describe human situation of persistent battle out of which unhappiness predominates (Okafor, 2017:1) as an important philosophic equipoise in his authoritative e book titled The Oracle of Knowledge in direction of philosophic Equipoise (Akam 2017). This can be a truism at the same time as he referentially acknowledged the sad Duke in Shakespeare saying to his sad companion, Jagues:
Thou seest we aren’t on their own sad;
This extensive and common theater
Presents extra woeful pageants than the scene
The place we play in.
Though human’s highest good is happiness to majority of the traditional, medieval, fashionable and modern thinkers, it’s nonetheless pontificated as a predicament by a category of recent philosophers referred to as the Existentialists who see the very best good as freedom, authenticity and duty as in opposition to despair, anguish and turmoil. This concern of thinkers, poets, folklorists, sages and writers over the ages underlines the occupation and preoccupation of the voices of purpose or knowledge coming from the choose few who’ve the particular reward. They’re the oracles of knowledge, the sagely characters normally on excessive ethical floor and with unadulterated creativeness, instinct, essential understanding and magisterial candor, who’re the philosophers, theologians, poets, painters, inventive writers and critics of yesterday and immediately in any other case referred to as the artists. The African counterpart of literary, oracular and sagely actions are culturally vented via the instrumentality of the humanities of folktales, fables, riddles, epigrams, myths, poetry and legends. Certainly in African philosophy knowledge, instinct and comprehension of fact are ontologically emotive and inventive. That’s the reason the oracle of knowledge is an avant-garde ethical excessive floor within the society.
In African (Igbo) philosophy, the Oracle of Knowledge is symbolized with a employees, an object, a bodily and artistic instrument referred to as “Ofor”. It’s a conventional employees for affirming or stamping the reality. It’s a image of holiness and spirit of ancestors, and its relation to God is fact. As a part of African philosophy, an ordained Oracle of Knowledge would chant a canticle holding the employees of Ofor as depicted within the poem titled “the Muse of Fact Oracle” (For Gbusaizu Dukor 1830 – 1958) thus:
Oracle,
He’s who carry,
The burden of previous age,
The expectation of gray hair,
And the responsibility of knowledge.
There may be energy within the fact,
The facility of the oracle is the reality,
The oracle in him is the reality.
Therefore his energy is the reality.
The ‘geist’, the spirit which he’s,
Has the facility of the spoken phrase,
The animistic model of transcendental actuality,
The divine spark and utterance of totality.
The reality of the spoken phrase,
Is the sunshine and sound of God,
By which all issues come to cross.
The oracle,
Raises the image of fact – ofo
Authority,
And the solar rises,
When it returns on the ground,
The solar units.
When the spoken phrases are uttered,
The planetary motion completes a cycle,
Neither the image nor the phrase,
Vibrates with out the enemies,
Heel on transfer.
Alas! He carry the image of fact,
And knowledge.
The image of fact,
Is in his hand and in his mouth,
He’s an enigma,
His defend and buckler is the reality,
The amour and weapon in opposition to enemies.
When the reality oracle pauses,
Fact is uttered.
When the oracle muses,
Every thing involves cross:
Prophecy, curse and blessing take wings,
Life is animated into objects,
Madmen regain sanity and
Bushes and rivers chant canticles;
Suppose not that fact shouldn’t be God.
Suppose not that the reality oracle is god,
However a historic individual, a centurion,
An African thinker and poet,
The poetry of the oracle is in his mouth and hand,
Fact is his poetry, phrase and life,
Suppose not that his fact shouldn’t be oracle of God.
Beware,
-The reality oracle shouldn’t be God,
He’s servant of God,
The chief priest of God,
The quintessence of loyal priesthood.
He’s a servant of God,
A prodigy, lengthy legs, lengthy footed,
Lengthy palms, tall fingers and nails and runaway mouth,
Good-looking,
Irregular options and physique?
Like Socrates!
And the reward of the muse like
Homer and Sophocle?
(Dukor, 2010; 131)..
The artist and the Oracle of Knowledge
Human predicaments typically, whether or not they manifest as despair, anguish, financial and political instability or social anomies are the results of dearth of the oracles of knowledge particularly area and time. The voices of sages, writers, cultural and literary critics on the whole stand for oracles of knowledge and for good and order within the society. The oracle of knowledge in keeping with Shawn Olson “presents sagely and philosophical recommendation for private issues, dilemmas and nationwide disasters”. An oracle is a god or consultant of God whose knowledge is unquestionable and appropriated or accessible for fixing human issues.
The human brokers of those oracles are women and men with inventive and philosophic creativeness who’re solid within the mould of Socratic philosophers-king, main the society with purpose to the final word advantage and good of mankind. As philosophers, poets or sensible males they’re a bunch of latest African Philosophers referred to as the “Sage philosophers” or these gifted with philosophic sagacity whose intent and objective in chanting canticle, poetic verses, producing drama and fictional or historic narratives is to ship societies from ethical conundrums. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and others tried to philosophically obtain this mission via poetic and imaginative depiction of colonial and post-colonial African/ Nigerian societies within the solid or mould of oracles of knowledge.
Achebe’s novels basically current an Igbo worldview, nonetheless in addition they carry a continental burden which vivify the African society as a sound cultural and philosophical area. His Issues Fall Aside and Arrow of God occupy very important and distinct positions within the dialectics of historical past and tradition. Each works affirm the existential and materials relevance of the African world in cultural politics.
The performs of Soyinka additionally present cultural and philosophical validity to the protean propensities of the African thoughts. His profitable of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 entrenched the validation. In poetry, Okigbo painstakingly calibrates a profound, however troubling if not tragic existential conundrum which colonialism foisted on Africa. An identical existential standpoint sustains the poetry and performs of J. P. Clark. If these pioneer Nigerian artists intentionally got down to codify the essence of the Nigerian being, their successors, particularly Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Femi Osofisan and Festus Iyayi turned out to be much more deliberate of their try to not solely create a regenerative consciousness, but in addition interrogate the very underpinning of the inventive ideology of their predecessors.
There may be on the Nigerian literary scene a consensus on the historic affirmation of literature typically because the deal with for tweeting data, the reality severally and collectively as enunciated by Achebe “literature provides us a second deal with on actuality; it permits us to come across within the protected manageable dimensions of make-believe the exact same threats to integrity that will assail the psych in actual life; and on the similar time gives via the self-discovery which it imparts a veritable weapon for dealing with these threats which they’re discovered inside problematic and incoherence selves or on this planet round us” (Anyokwu, 2017). Osofisan alternatively would argue that “literature mirrors actuality however not disinterestedly. Its final surreptitious purpose is in truth to show it right into a telling code for yet-unseen instances of the longer term. By forewarning of the hazards forward, it will possibly assist to pre-empt them, the author him-herself should be gifted with and show, a imaginative and prescient of unusual profundity and unwavering resilience (Anyokwu, 2017).
Oracles of knowledge are due to this fact artists, women and men, with robust, burnished creativeness whose imaginative productions decipher the trail methods out of which their societies might be liberated from the ethical, social and political shackles inhibiting progress. Because it have been they aren’t in caves and would work via inventive expressions to liberate others from the caves.
The foregoing elucidation and evaluation of “Oracle of Knowledge” is a hermeneutic prelude to a rigorous engagement with Morality and
Democracy qua morality and democracy in Nigeria. The query is; is Nigeria blessed with voice or voices of the oracle? There isn’t any doubt that there have been oracles of knowledge and their voices within the seek for peace, stability and progress of the Nigerian nation state since its creation as an amalgam of nationalities in 1914 and its subsequent freedom from colonial rule in 1960. These abound within the literary tapestry in types of narratives, poetries, folk-tales, scriptures, visible arts, dramas, and different works of arts.
In the identical vein, the philosopher-artist-poet-imaginative engagement of the ills of the normal and fashionable Nigerian society are the pure and anthropological extension of the data of the ethno common enterprise cum precipitated purpose of philosophers–king and teachers. There isn’t any doubt or skepticism in regards to the callings of the thinker artists and the philosophers – king or teachers and even their collaborations in essential engagement of post-colonial Nigerian state, as a result of whereas the previous is the product and gadfly of his area and time, society and tradition, the later because the thinker king is the excavator or purveyor of fact in its cultural sublimity. Within the essential and or conceptual engagement of the society because it have been, each the philosopher-artist or critic and thinker king or educational are data or knowledge staff for the preservation and innovation of human values and society.
The oracle of knowledge is a thinker, an artist and scientist. He’s the gadfly in each society. He’s a product of the society and time; take for example, the unconventional regenerative praxis adopted by the trio of Osundare, Osofisan and Iyayi who postulated data cum consciousness as advantage. On a worldwide scale Nigerian writers might be considered with the identical purposeful bent with which Socrates was endowed.
Socrates was the oracle of knowledge of the Historical Greek period on the interval of immense speculations and variety of studying when the big risk to Greece by the Huge Persian Empire had subsided. The data work of his time was to unveil what represent the basic stuff of the earthly substance. For him what represent data on this course is advantage i.e. advantage is data as “nobody does flawed voluntarily”. (Warner; 1988:55) This data is the reality or the nice. This ethical thinker and oracle of knowledge of all instances earlier than Jesus Christ so galvanized the society in principle and apply that he grew to become an ideal risk to the Athenian political leaders and therefore was executed. He was quoted to have mentioned “give me philosophy (fact) or loss of life”, and he ultimately died for the reality.
Socrates, Archetype of Oracle of Knowledge and the Artist
Socrates was a person who from the primordial and extant Greek literature, may very well be described as a person of future who was on oracle of knowledge project. He has continued to earn the admiration of essential thinkers, poets, inventive writers and actually giants from Aristophanes (in his clouds) to Erasmus, and had paradoxically incurred the hatred of Nietzsche, albeit in the identical literary custom of the oracle of Knowledge. At in regards to the age of forty, the Greek Delphic Oracle in reply to the query of who was the wisest man alive from a people affirmed that nobody was wiser than Socrates. As this episodic historic revelation was on the occasion of Socrates he not solely cognized it but in addition had the eagerness for it as his divine mission and mandate.
We are able to, due to this fact, hint the origin of the idea of “Oracle of Knowledge” to the Delphic Oracle (God) whose portrait is Socrates, the wisest man in his time, and all different sensible males in historical past who’re the purveyors and custodians of information, literary imaginative and prescient and normative values that maintain and consolidate the societies; an ethical burden within the sense through which immediately’s writers, philosophers, poets and sculptors attempt to redirect the societies from the brink of existential disaster. Extra burdensome is the best way the ancients Greeks conceived all vocations and disciplines from astronomy, medication, arithmetic, science to logic as arts, and Socrates in fact and spirit was all of this as Oracle of Knowledge.
The allegory of the cave referred to as the parable of the cave, analogy of the cave or the metaphor of the cave would illustrate clearly this inventive and philosophic conception of the Oracle of Knowledge as introduced by Plato as type of dialogue between Plato’s brothers Glaucon with Socrates because the principal speaker. It exhibits that the world we see is barely a mirrored image of the varieties the world represents and solely understanding the varieties can result in true data after which to knowledge. The metaphor of the cave is an imagery of a cave through which prisoners are stored. Since youngsters, they’re all chained in order that their legs and necks are motionless and compelled to look solely at a wall in entrance of them. Behind the prisoners is a fireplace and between the fireplace and the prisoner is a raised walkway on which individuals (puppeteers) can stroll carrying objects, human and animal figures. The prisoners might solely see these flickering photographs on the wall in entrance of them since they might not transfer their heads, and so, naturally sufficient, they presumed the photographs to be actual moderately than simply shadowy illustration of what’s truly actual. Socrates twist on this plot is when the prisoner received launched to show and have a look at the fireplace, he notices that the photographs weren’t actual objects on the walkway. If the prisoner is taken from the cave and introduced into the open the disorientation can be way more extreme as the sunshine of the solar can be way more sensible than the fireplace, the place the prisoner would be capable of see past shadows to the data and actuality (varieties) of the world to the consternation of his former place and his colleagues within the cave.
(Plato, BKS VII & VIII)
Socrates via his disciple, Plato had configured the allegory of the cave to show that true data is innate in man though he may very well be in a cave by circumstances of orientation, self-discipline, training and socialization, and except she or he is free of the cave and shackles she or he can’t see the sunshine of the solar nor observe cognitively the types of issues or realities. Socrates and Plato have been masters in poetic metaphorical and artistic plots and narratives for the aim of highlighting the truths for good financial, social and philosophical life and finally for the ethical society and good governance. Fact is the social engine of a very good society and the instrument of liberation from the clutches of ignorance and financial and political backwards.
Oracle of knowledge is, due to this fact, the Oracle of fact and whereby located the hall of an ethical society the place poets, inventive writers, actors in Nollywood or Hollywood scriptwriters, dramatist and philosophers are the scavengers and interlocutors of truths that underlie each ethical democratic flux. Nonetheless the very best consultant or ideally suited Oracle of Knowledge is Socrates, the Oracle of fact and morality in addition to the wisest man in Athens of his time. Literarily and philosophically, he educated and admonished the Athenians to eschew immorality, greed, profligacy and falsehood and dwell a very good life ruled by the reality. Within the Greek “Agora” or village sq. or market place he thought each gathering on good life and fact. His inventive and literary vocation was woven into dialogues, drama and poetries as technique of educating and propagating fact and justice within the society. His disciple Plato furthered his concepts on dramatic and poetic teachings on justice and political economic system within the Republic. A non compromiser of fact and morality, when the Athenian nobles and leaders grew to become outraged together with his teachings and needed to execute him, Socrates refused a leeway of escape from Athens as a result of, for him it’s both philosophy (fact) or loss of life as a result of a person who lived and grew in a society should be topic to its legal guidelines. The noose of the Athenian regulation was enacted to have its means and Socrates was executed in 399 BC. He died underneath the ethical burden of the oracle of knowledge within the historic Athenian democracy.
The Query of Morality and Creative Dedication to Nigeria’s Democracy
The allegory of the cave presents us an apt illustration of the ontology of fact which can’t be appropriated by these within the cave however which is accessible to somebody who’s unshackled, exterior the cave and underneath the direct affect of the daylight. For Plato, there’s a latent fact or data in man however which is inhibited by ignorance and J.J. Rousseau would argue “man is born free however he’s all over the place in chains”. The personae of Oracle of knowledge shouldn’t be in chains, he’s out of the cave and that’s the reason he’s underneath the ethical burden to actually ex-ray the society and present the trail to correctness, liberation and emancipation. In African conventional societies and amongst historic African Oracles of knowledge, knowledge was exhibited and fact comprehended via poetries, myths and fables due to their non secular and metaphysical bents and never so usually via prose and drama due to their round and non-transcendental nature and motif. In contrast to the scientific observatory paradigm the cultural paradigm of the normal African tapestry is that fact is girded and gauged out of non secular and metaphysical poetry and sensation. This can’t be completely denied by science with out some factor of fact.
• Dukor is a Professor of Philosophy at Nnamdi Azikiwe College Awka, Nigeria and Editor-in-Chief, Essence Library (www.essencelibrary.org)
