Letisa: I am developing an argument on a number of fronts. I am working in relation to ideas of embodiment in relation to knowing as well as ideas about how Western thought has developed from the military culture of ancient Rome.

Toyin: Does is this notion of embodiment in relation to cognitive process gain from a specifically female inspirational base?

Letisa: I’m still working on that but my argument is for the notion that the act of knowing proceeds along a number of correlative lines, which include the sensory and the mental, that, in fact, the mind could be understood as located all over the body not only in the head since our sensory apparatus operates all over our bodies and are simply routed to their centres in the head.

Toyin: That makes sense. How do you intend to develop that into a cognitive procedure?
Letisa: That’s the challenge. The central challenge I face here is that the inspirational spring of my ideas derives from the fact that a lot of my ideas emerge from non-ratiocinative sources, of which the forms of bodily knowing are central.

Toyin: Could you please go to the point you were making about the military origin of modern Western discursive forms?

Letisa: I was refrying to its argumentative structure. Why must a question be examined, a point established, through the marshalling up of squads of points in favour of that point, arrayed in opposition to contrastive ideas? Why must the development of ideas and the examination of issues always resemble a conflict between combatants, the opposing side being the ideas not certified by the writer and the other side represented by the ideas they credit. Or even if this position does not emerge from the beginning, it emerges as the text progresses, so that there always exists or is developed a structure of opposition, between two groups of ideas.

Toyin: But is that not to be taken for granted ih the development of a perspective on a topic? Does one not need to examine contrastive ideas and arrive at those that are more valid? All ideas can not be equally valid.

Letisa: Noted. But I am not pleading for an uncritical embrace of all ideas available in relation to a question. All I am suggesting d that I seem to observe in the fundamental structure of investigation in scholarship the notion of a Manichean/oppositional duality, in which either/or propositions determine the structure of thought.

Toyin: You think such dualities are inadequate for knowledge?

Letisa: Yes. Because reality is often multiplex, kaleidoscopic, even fragmentary. To what degree can we isolate one phenomenon from another? Don’t many phenomena, particularly those relating to issues of value, infiltrate each other? I find myself using a military metaphor here, but I think you get my point.

Toyin: Can you suggest a style of investigation that would take advantage of the interdependence you are describing?
Letisa: I am still developing it. I am thinking of something like a navigational form of thought, where the purpose is to navigate our way in relation to as broad a range as possible of the possibilities of perception in relation to a subject. I am thinking of

Toyin: I seem to recall descriptions of essays by the French writer Michel de Montainge along those lines.

Letisa: Perhaps. But such styles of thought have not gained centrality in Western academe. The ethos of the warrior, who is certainly marshalling opposing forces against each other and of the hunter who operates in terms of an adversarial relationship with the Other represented by the animals he preys on, dominates scholarship, where this is conducted in terms of opposition between ideas and discourse is more often than not argumentative, with the qualities of mental combat embodying martial values.

Toyin: Intriguing. How do you arrive at conclusions? Do you stumble upon them or do you defer them endlessly?

Letisa: I know you are making fun of me but even those suggestions might not be as ridiculous as they sound.

Toyin: So, do we swim forever in a soup of inconclusion or do we arrive at any shore as we navigate the possibilities of an ideas or subject?

Letisa: Certainly. To postulate a permanent nondecision, nonjudgement would be irresponsible. That would be an excess of relativistic thinking. I am suggesting, as I still develop these ideas, a movement towards resolution with a tacit understanding that every resolution demonstrates some degree of the provisional and the specificity with which we circumscribe perspectives facilitates a bracketing out of ancillary but relevant aspects of those perspectives which we have relegated either to the background or to non-existence in our cognitive worlds.

Toyin: This reminds of a way you described this idea the other day-as a style of thinking the mobility of which dramatises a deferral of judgement in the name of a cognitive “synaesthesia” that enables/facilitates a perception of the subject matter from a variety of perspectives, even contradictory perspectives….

Letisa: Yes…leading to the possibility of convergence, or, even if not of convergence, of mutual tension, in which the absence of an ultimate coherence is itself an understanding that suggests possibilities of holding possibilities, understandings in a creative tension….

Toyin: You think, then, that such a tentative style of interpreting phenomena might be more in harmony with the paradoxical realities of existence than the notion of certainty, of linear coherence, even of dialectical balance that is /currently privileged in conceptions of the effort to arrive at meaning….

Letisa: My thinking is moving in that direction.

Toyin: You would seem, then, to be thinking in terms of an understanding of the search for knowledge more in terms of a quest for meaning, for structures, patterns, processes of understanding through which can be enriched, even if the ultimate truth value of the understanding arrived at, of the processes developed, may not be fully ascertained, are understood as to a degree, in flux

Letisa: But then, this does not imply, however, an absolute relativity. Absolute relativity, endless cognitive flux, could be more productive of a destructive anarchy, a breakdown in standpoints of collective responsibility than a liberating prospect

Toyin: How do you hope to escape from an absolute relativistic position?

Letisa: By treating conclusions, where necessary, as tentative in the ongoing project represented by the exploration realized through cognitive navigation. The sensitivity to the plural possibilities inherent a phenomenon or an issue or idea highlights the tension between the quest to know, to push back and even reshape boundaries that necessarily characterise a rethinking of our cognitive horizon, our epistemic envelopes, in contrast to the need to conserve, consolidate and apply what we gain in the process in contrast with, in tension with the renewed impetus to continue that quest, which continues beyond the bounds of what we can perceive at any point in time, as Dion Fortune puts it, may even take us out of space and time, “beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down”.

Toyin: You mention Fortune. That is intriguing. How does she come here and how did you start on the development of these ideas?

Letisa: It began in relation to my experience of ways of knowing that could not be accounted for by prevailing paradigms. And by my efforts as a woman, to find new ways of thinking that would transcend or even avoid the limitations of the patriarchal thinking that I have often come across. Feminist thinkers often recognise such patriarchal thinking but do not often realise its origin in martial structures and even use the same critical tools while debunking its fruits. I want to go to the very source, to the very girders that hold it up, to the underlying skeleton, as it were, of this style of thinking.

Toyin: Please elaborate.

Letisa: I realised that I could know things through my skin, and not simply by touch. I could intuit people’s mental sates without talking to them. How could I explore such forms of knowledge without descending to superstitious thinking and demands for acceptance for my claims without empirical proof? I realised that the key would be to examine the question of ways of knowing and develop an approach from that point that would be inclusive of my own experience.

Toyin: And your encounter with patriarchal thinking?

Letisa: I kept coming up against both circumscriptions of reality that were demeaning of both women and the men and women who perpetuated them as well as accounts of alternative styles of thinking.

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