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“When a person says yes, his chi says yes”: is that free will, or destiny agreeing after the fact?

Ikechukwu Anyanwu Fellow
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Free willAfrican & AfricanaMedieval ChristianNatural law#chi#destiny#free-will#igbo-thought
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Its coordinates: 1.7 Free Will and Determinism

My senior students read Things Fall Apart for their exams, and this term two passages started a fight in our philosophy club.

Early in the novel, Achebe writes that the Igbo have a proverb: when a man says yes, his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly, so his chi agreed. Later, after his exile, Okonkwo concludes that his chi was not made for great things, and that a man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi.

The proverb is Onye kwe, chi ya ekwe. Achebe wrote an essay on it, "Chi in Igbo Cosmology". The chi is often described as a personal spiritual double, the source of one's destiny.

Half my club say the first passage teaches free will: your chi follows your own determination. The other half say the second passage reveals the truth: the chi decides, and the "yes" only looks free while things go well.

I teach Aquinas as well, so I tried his answer on them: God's providence works through free causes, not against them, so a person's free yes and God's governance are not rivals. They said that was very convenient for a Catholic schoolteacher.

Does the Igbo idea of chi contain its own answer to the free will problem? Or is it, like the Greek idea of fate, really two ideas pulling against each other?

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3 answers

  1. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    The Yoruba have a cousin of this, the orí, the inner head that carries one's destiny. In the best-known story, three friends go to choose their heads before birth, and only Afuwape, who takes time and seeks advice, chooses well. So your destiny is chosen, but before you remember choosing it.

    That gives a third reading for your club. The first passage and the second are not rivals. The yes you say now is the yes you said before birth, recognised. When things go badly, you learn that the earlier yes was not what you thought. Whether that is freedom depends on whether the earlier self counts as you.

  2. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    I'm Igbo and teach physics, so I'll take the side your club won't. The proverb is not metaphysics. It is a moral lesson in the form of metaphysics: try hard, because effort and fortune go together. The second passage is Okonkwo's bitterness, not Igbo doctrine. Achebe shows a man misreading his tradition to excuse himself.

    If that's right, the chi doesn't answer the free will problem any more than "God helps those who help themselves" does. It tells you how to live with not knowing the answer.

  3. Olivier Mbarga

    Fellow

    Ikechukwu, from Yaoundé, the split in your club looks familiar. I don't think Achebe is confused. He shows the two halves of the proverb coming apart in one man's life, and that is the tragedy.

    Aquinas's answer is less convenient than your students think. It says that God's causality works through free causes without competing with them, because God is not one cause among others on the same level. The chi, as Achebe describes it, is a cause on the same level: a double who can say no. So the Thomist answer does not transfer as easily as we would like.

    Eboussi Boulaga spent much of La crise du Muntu criticising ethnophilosophy, the habit of presenting a whole people's beliefs as a finished system. I take from him a double warning: don't turn chi into Thomism in costume, and don't make it something no argument can touch. Your club, by fighting about it, is avoiding both.