UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
141
some fundamental ontological basis which belongs to every individual human being, irrespective of his/her social status. According to Onah,
when a human being is said ‗not to be a human being‘ such a statement is largely metaphorical. Infants and insane persons, for instance, may be excluded from some social responsibilities, but this does not deny them the basic dignity they deserve as human beings, as one who deliberately kills an infant or a mad person would definitely be discovered. Moral valuations, strong as they are in such traditional thoughts, do not equate to ontological valuations21.
With regard to Menkiti‘s it-argument, it suffices to point out the linguistic difficulties contained therein. In Igbo, for instance, the same pronoun (o) stands for he, she ,it. Only from the context can one tell whether the statement o di ndu22 means he is alive or she is alive. It is not clear on what basis Menkiti would claim that that statement referred to a child should be translated ―it is alive. What is clear is that a child is never referred to as a thing (ihe or ife) in Igbo, except perhaps in the extreme case of parents who have suffered so many successive infant deaths that they believe a reference to a newly born child as a thing could deceive the ogbanje spirit, thought to be responsible for such deaths, into leaving the child alone.
Having suggested these level of akonauche of man at various stages, our interpretation, proposes a philosophical thoughts that are culturally nurtured, ontologically grounded, and universally relevant.
UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
142
intelligence, cleverness, quickness of wit are aspects of what the Igbo person needs for adjusting himself to, and thereby manipulating changing circumstances- and –circumstances are always changing. This change is not only the progression of different situations and events. It equally also involves ontological status of things, since things are not always what they seem or what they were. The Igbo person is supposed to be regularly conscious of the difference between appearance and reality and to react to the potentials deception before it takes place23.
Similarly, Animalu says,
the natural world… is one of infinite varieties and complexities, creative intelligence (akonauche) which was one of the attribute of our ancestors, should guide our thoughts in a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together, a world where- as modern physics tells us- even empty space is curved24.
In the same vein, Ejiogu, supporting Nwoga and Animalu, has this to say,
part of the ethnic identity often played down in the socio-economic circumstances we find ourselves is our traditional use of ‗creative intelligence‘ which is its self among the attributes of our ancestors.
… stresses that there should be recourse to the use of ‗creative intelligence‘ in all facets of life because it is the basis of our socio-cultural as well as socio-political economy….that there is no one way of doing anything, but many ways through the use of ‗creative intelligence25.
Okere supporting the view that a person is a complex entity still struggling to understand him/her and the community says,
this identity in no other than the self, the onwe. But we cannot round off this study of the self in Igbo thought without at least a brief mention of the defining context in which the identity plays itself out. If we have been looking at the structure of the kernel of the self, one must immediately add that this hard core is surrounded by a thicker layer of enveloping relationships. The self as so far studied remains in a way only an abstraction. Even though one can be thought of as a unit and in abstraction from any thing else, in fact, the self is never alone. The individual is never a pure, isolated individual26.
UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
143
There is an Igbo saying to this effect that madu anagh agba ka ugba- a human being does not fall like a bolt from the blue. The human being is conceived as the focus of a web of relationships.
According to Adeofe,
any credible theory of personal identity must be metaphysically and socially stable, and the two forms of stability must be interconnected… Metaphysical stability helps to explain the unity of the self, so to speak, that makes personal identity possible.
Social stability helps to explain our socialized existence, our belief systems, social character, and projects of value that seem to make our lives meaningful27.
He further says that, a theory of personal identity is likely to be stable in some form or another, but the challenge is to be stable in both forms in the same context at the same time with respect to the same determinations… The self-actualization process allows me to recognize a social life as mine, not my surrogate‘s28.
The individual knows that he/she is existing in a physical environment where others are meeting.
He could have existed without others because the biblical narration tells us that Adam was first created and that later was given Eve as a companion29, and not as condition for the knowledge of the self. This means that what is a person is more a metaphysical exercise than from a social point of view.
In the words of Matolino,
I think that of the confusion in the old communitarian camp arises out of the failure to make the distinction that limited communitarianism makes between personal identity and social identity. If old communitarians had made this distinction then they would have naturally come to see the difference between individual rights and social rights. Rights apply to both the personal and social sphere of identity but they are different sorts of categories that require different sorts of application. Individual rights are of such a category that we think most important and very fundamental both in the regime of rights and to the individual
UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
144
person. These are the sort of rights that we should talk about when we are talking of personhood. Social rights on the other hand are the kinds of right that belong to a category that is of lesser importance than individual rights30.
4.5 Ilu or Ilulu, Proverbs in Igbo Culture that support Ak[nauche as vital component of