African Aesthetics by John Tunde Isola Bewaji

Art is a universal phenomenon. It pervades all aspects of sentience and especially human existence. It is the expression of the compulsive innate human and sentience tendency toward creativity. While I believe that virtually all living things have creative and artistic tendencies, I will indulge my Western intellectual tradition by indicating that it is one of the main primeval engagements and accomplishments of human beings which, when deliberately carried out, may distinguish humans from other beings, as the means by which humans are capable of focusing consciousness to achieve the comprehension, apprehension, annotation, demarcation, appreciation and documentation of their lived realities. It is in this regard that it is meaningful to speak of African art and African Aesthetics, while being mindful of the heterogeneity of the natural habitats, ethnicities and cultures of Africans, as there are some cultural affinities and identities of affiliation, consanguinity, differentiation, distantiation and separation that have manifested over many millennia which Cheikh Anta Diop has described as the Cultural Unity of Africa. In this Lecture, my effort will be to convey to my audience the elements of African Aesthetics. These elements stand out African Aesthetics from similar ones in most societies of the world, especially Western society. Now, I could have taken on a number of issues, since this is supposed to be a Teaching Aesthetics Lecture. I could dilate on art as, a) products of nature, such as in the formations of clouds in the “sky” (sky being a metaphor for space and cloud being the collection and dissipation of moisture), the canalling of water ways to form gorges and lakes (Oxbow lakes), the growth of trees or chiseling of rocks through thousands of years of weathering, or b) the highly sophisticated formation of columns of ants, thermite molehills, weaver birds’ nests, or even the dance of geckos to attract the female, and/or c) the anthropocene aesthetics, beaming the searchlight the effects of human action and inaction in shaping or misshaping the world around us. These would be legitimate issues in Aesthetic Lecture, but I feel that this would not be any different from any regular run of the mill kind of discussion, without helping the audience to gain much that could not be garnered from other sources. For these reasons I will zero in on African Aesthetics in this Lecture. And, my effort will be a modest one of showing how Art is life, life is Art, and Aesthetics is the feeling, the perceiving, the sensing, the living of that sublime relationship of appreciation of the beautiful which inhabits the ethically and socially affirming core of human creativity and nature.

BIO: John Ayotunde (Tunde) Isola Bewaji is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica Former Jay Newman Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College - CUNY Former Guggenheim Philosophy Research Fellow Former Rhodes Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy Editor, Caribbean Journal of Philosophy Author, Beauty and Culture (2003); An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2007); Narratives of Struggles (2012); Black Aesthetics (2013); The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society (2016).