As a Nigerian, you have this “geopolitical compass”, of being at the bottom of a political scale of importance whose peak lies in “the abroad”, or as we say, “saner climes”. Now, I wouldn’t say that Nigeria has a better standard of living than say, the United States, but I’d say there is a distinct sense of inferiority that comes with such a vision of the world.
Whether theist or atheist, there is some sort of idealization going on where the peak of life is just to be western, while simultaneously (for the religious at least) having a reactionary condemnation of western “degeneracy”. Now, this is a very limited and nuanced account, but there is a point here. Having finished Edward’s new book, “The City of the Gods”, I think I have found the beginnings of a vocabulary within which to talk about politics, which I normally despise with a passion. In particular, I’ve known for some time that Platonism can help me to see any science as the interrogation and analysis of the integrity of the objects of said sciences, but I always run up against the messiness of politics, the raw irrational “human element”, which I realize I partake in even in my very despisal of politics. But here, with this vocabulary, I can at least talk about the principles of this element without reducing it to something else or doing away with it, or predicting it with any but a universal and thin degree of resolution.
Edward’s book deserves a proper review, but I have not read The Republic, which this book is a commentary on. So, I will leave it to the more informed experts. I do, however, want to write about the things this book has helped stir in my thinking the past few weeks, most notable of which, is the nature of justice in the soul and the organization of souls, especially how it applies to me as a Nigerian.
Thin Formalities
“Justice, then, is the principle by which a unique individual finds a place in a harmonious community which recognizes and accepts them for who they are, and sustains itself through the contributions such individuals make to it.” (Pg 82)
One of the things to keep in mind while reading Butler is his insistence on the thinness of the universal, and the thickness of the local. In practice, this means that form underdetermines content. In the case of this book, although we can discern the form of some truth (in this case, about justice) in his work, we should not read the content as blandly universal. The myths, the contexts, etc, are local. It is not the case that, as in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, my death results in me actually going to the meadow of Greek myth to meet the Moirai. The Moirai are not my Gods. As Gods, they do deserve honor, but they are not my Gods. Their afterlife does not necessarily apply to me. However, this does not make the Moirai irrelevant. It does not mean I can not honour them as at when due or their locality of their world is less valuable. This is something that is derided in contemporary southwest Nigeria (if not in the whole): Locality. Although there are pockets of change, the whole still treats the ability to speak local dialects even within the same language family as somehow less ideal. I, personally, was encouraged not to speak Yoruba in school. I’m generally bad with languages (I am just, in the past few years, gearing up to speak yoruba, even if I understand a bit), but I believe this probably hindered me a lot more than normal. There is perceived more value in the “International”, the “global”, the more “universal”. One should not be a “local champion”, as we used to hear.
There is nothing wrong in the universal, but to be a bit proverbial, the sky floats because it is light. Without the earth as anchor, it will fly away into nothing. For my purposes, the universals about Justice gained from Edward’s book should be able to wrap around my context without distorting its shape too much.
Given the definition of Justice we see at the beginning of this section, it is safe to say Nigeria is not Just. Nowhere is perfectly just, but focusing on Nigeria, we have our own variations on the non-ideality of our justice. We can expand and universalize the notion of individual to something closer to the Platonic frame by seeing that there is no thing that is not “one” in some way. Indeed this is the most basic truth about anything, that it is identifiable at all: i-dentifiable, as one thing. Justice then concerns a lot more than relations between members of the human species. It would concern the relationships between humans and animals, the ecosystem, the universe. Cosmopolitics concerns ultimate justice. But it also concerns the Soul, insofar as the Soul is still a unified multiplicity. There are many senses to the word “Soul”, but for my purposes, a Soul is a “temporal manifold”, an organization of units in time, rather than space. A body, by contrast, is a spatial manifold, an organization in space. Given how tied they are, there is no body without soul, although one wonders if there can be soul without body. There is Justice in the Soul too, insofar as its elements are individuals in the broadest sense. I wish I could give a broader account of my current thoughts on Psychic constitution from a more “modern” perspective, but this quote from Antonio Vargas will have to do, on the Souls of Gods and human souls:
“it is wrong, technically to say that each city and each clan has its guardian deity - rather it is the deities who control the human groups, just like the individual humans control their own bodies. A multi-generational, stable human group for Proclus is a great living being, the body of a daimon, of a spirit.
(It is in this sense that the body that we care for is not only a particular body, but a “particular and partial” body, as I translated above. It is a particular, individual body, but it is also a partial one because it is always part of one or more greater bodies, the body of the family and the city and the nation and ultimately of humanity.)”1
See the structure here. The temporal manifold (of a spatial organization in this case) reveals a Soul in the present, whether it is a human being or a human group. Apply that liberally. The issues to be solved within this framework might be visible if you hold to the categories that go with it, one of which is the absolute goodness and moral uprightness of Gods. But, I don’t think I can answer that here except in the form of better questions from partial answers. What will be focused on from this formal account is the way this illuminates Nigeria’s injustice and a possible way forward, from my perspective.
Genealogy and (Non)Ideality
“The Ideas, therefore, are essentially orientations of production—natural, social, ethical, aesthetic.”2
It is by now common knowledge that Nigeria is a creation or (more specifically) and amalgamation of British colonial territories. We might compare it to the fusing of metal pieces, themselves fusions, into one whole clangy piece. Interrogating this truth, we find its edges, the first of which is that to the extent that we overemphasize the agency of the British Empire, we erase the agency of the descendants of those defeated kingdoms then under colonial rule. If history is destiny, then Nigeria cannot be more than a British creation. Indeed, this idea tends to lead to the idea that Nigeria must break up, but we run up against the edge of that idea too: break up into what?
The proposals tend to repeat (in theory and rhetoric) the injustices of the greater whole it wants to disintegrate. Nigeria has hundreds of “tribes”, but it is arguable that “tribes” are in part a colonial creation. “europeans colonized kingdoms, not ethnic groups… ethnic groups are by their nature, transnational, they always have.”3 Separatism based on tribal supremacy will always end in anti-ideal fascism:
“"Fame" without standing for something, without being sustained by some ideal, by affiliation to something transcendent, is just dismemberment. In the fascist case, we see an almost perfect counter-ideal, a cult of destruction in identification with the nation in its most debased and reductive sense, systematically evacuated of any ideality.”4
Unity based on the uniformity of dressing and appearance, the uniformity of (perceived correct) dialect, “pure blood”, etc: all of these are, according to the definition, anti-justice, since justice pertains to the individuation of a unique individual, not just the instance of a type or class. If all that pertains to the unity of the nation is the uniformity of a class and the limitations on the variations within this class, then this is a purely material unification, and as all matter, it disintegrates quite quickly.
The ideal, as an orientation of production, is also an orientation of re-production, hence the “Form of forms” in Platonism is the form of Animality itself. Animals reproduce, and this reproduction is not merely the shuffling of cards, it is the result of choices, choices inalienable to the unique animal individual. While Plato conceives this commonality of the unique choice through the doctrine of reincarnation, insofar as an individual can reincarnate as different animals, we can further imagine this through the insights of modern theories of evolution themselves, insofar as what some may think as a strict wall between species and families of animals has been broken down and its ashes spread to reveal a complex family of lives and a family shaped by choices as much as the environment. The ideal itself is given integrity by the choice of the individual, and by this principle the ideal is universal: it is thin, and appropriately diverse in its instances, around which it is “wrapped” in each instance, sustained by the weight of the individual it is “wrapped” around.
This, I believe, is the first partial answer that will lead to better questions. There is, truly, the force of history, of genealogy, but there is also the force of the individual, of the choice, within which the ideality gains intelligibility. If we remain within the frame of the closure of genealogy, we end up with a false chain of being: Ascent to “the West”, or descent to disintegration. The former is a false ideality to which we can never reach, not because this ideal is inexhaustible, but because this ideal is not ideal. True ideals produce, or aid production. False ideals tear apart. But where does one turn to for true ideals?
Constitution
“It seems that having common hieroi [Holy Things] is what individuates a ‘nation’ as distinct from a state for Plato,... a nationality in this sense is those who worship the same family of Gods, so to speak. Such a religion is at once potentially universal, inasmuch as it is open in principle to anyone, without, on the other hand, losing its cultural determinacy.” (Pg 94,95)
I hope I never tell anyone I have the solutions to all Nigeria’s problems. I clearly don’t, and I think anyone who says that is rather self-deluded. But we should do our part to illuminate the problems, and at least help untie the binding knots.
In case this is not clear, this post is not an “anti-west” rant. I am not here to tell anyone to “Abandon Western Ideas and run to the bush”. What I am here to say is that we do have agency, and that we are demiurges. To articulate that statement is a work of many lifetimes, so we should get started trying to understand it.
As I see it, the average Nigerian is in the grips of a heavy schizophrenia. The artificial division between “nature” and “culture”, the related discord and partial synthesis between the various traditional religions and the self-described monotheisms, and the conflicts between the legacies of our indigenous histories and our current modes of understanding and governance. You see it everywhere, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. I will focus on the religious and metaphysical side of this.
It is quite clear that Islam in Nigeria is in the grips of virulent extremist ideologies. I think this is the extreme case. But the formal elements of this extremism live within Christianity as well, in the media we consume, in the preachings, and in the way we talk about minorities. Perhaps it is true that indigenous religions are not necessarily bastions of diversity, but it is not the case that any religion practised in Nigeria is. Perhaps the atheists are right. At least, in this case, religious violence and intolerance are the order of the day. But then, how can one who is a theist aid religious diversity, even of atheists, through religion itself? How can I understand the basic rights of citizens as because and not in spite of my theism and religious beliefs? What is the ideal through which Nigeria can reproduce itself for as long as possible, in health, with the aid of religious belief?
To think of this constitution of this Soul of souls, we begin with the “tribes”, the “ethnicities”. The plasticity and materiality of language, without some ideal anchor, will eventually lead to the devaluation of that language. Nigeria is composed of many ethnicities, large and small, with many variations between locales, with their own histories and myths, and their own Gods. Indeed, this is the ideality of the tribe: it begins with their Gods.
The ideality of Gods is in their ever embodiment in the many generations of people who invoke them. “Embodiment” here is, as usual, very loose in meaning, very “thin”, it simply means the centre of a metaphysical perspective that unites its periphery. With colonialism, this organism was disrupted. In the language of Kopenawa, the “sky” fell. The organisms are sick, and/or dying within the Nigerian machine. This is a great source of Nigeria’s troubles. People are fighting over scraps of metaphysical and cultural flesh. But if indeed nations are born from the ideality of their Gods’ families, then the true individuation of the Nigerian state as more than a discarded British offspring must begin here, in the rediscovery of this ideality. In the words you have heard so much already, the universality of the Nigerian state must be thin, so that its localities can be thick. Rather than crush its citizens with a heavy sky, it should float up as a canopy.
However, there is no revival of ancient kingdoms. We do not live in that world anymore. The reconstructed sky will bear the scars of history. Instead of hiding it, we should fill those scars with gold. One more specific implication I can say is that, for the monotheisms here, something will have to give. The ideality of Gods is not in their supreme aloneness but in their community formed of freedom, choice, and openness to the other. For us, this is the possibility of multiplicity that is not just divisive difference. For the religious, this means an acknowledgement of an ideal multiplicity of Gods, a multiplicity not totalized by some OverGod or similar. It requires letting go of intellectual structures that are quite old, even revered. It requires the renunciation of proselytism, of the religious war for a total hold of souls, even the eschatological type. If the Gods can give sun and rain to atheists and theists alike, why should the sky of the state discriminate between either for its universal obligations to citizens?
We end, therefore, with two constitutive orders. The first is the order of states, the universality of the state and its corresponding “thinness”. The second, more fundamental, is the order of choice, of nations formed by the infinitude of freedom, and the constraints of its fruits, of ethnos that cross between and within states, held together by the cooperation of Gods, mortals, and everything in between. It is this dual bond that can be a basis of interstate co-operation, insofar as the states themselves are individuated as units in relation and the nations and ethnos within and across them can constitute relations. This “thin thread” can be a start, in this case, of a new type of pan-africanism, and more specifically, of a new vision of an ideal Nigeria, however far-fetched it can be.
Antonio Vargas, “Proclus on the Vocation of Humanity,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), February 15, 2023, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/proclus-on-the-vocation-of-humanity.
Edward P. Butler, “Soteriology (from Twitter),” accessed August 6, 2023, https://lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com/49474.html.
Isaac Samuel, “Europeans Colonized Kingdoms, Not Ethnic Groups,” Twitter, August 16, 2023,
Edward P. Butler, “Anti-Ideality of Fascism 2,” Twitter, August 6, 2023,