KUNTUNKANTAN AS SYMBOLISING THE TOTALITY OF POSSIBILITIES IN RELATION TO A GIVEN SYSTEM

Kuntunkantan came to represent the totality of possibilities in relation to a system.

This could imply the totality of knowledge within a system. This knowledge could be realised and actual or potential. In terms of potentiality, it refers to the totality of knowledge possible in relation to a system. In terms of actual or realised knowledge, it refers to various degrees of explicitness of knowledge in or in relation to that system.

Two major systems are posited.

The first is the individual.

The second is the totality of being.

In reference to the individual, the symbol refers to the individual’s knowledge or the totality of their potential for knowledge. What are the boundaries of this? What are its shaping factors? To what degree and through what methods can this potentiality for knowledge be fully realised? What is the relationship between this potentiality for knowledge understood in relation to the epistemological structures and processes that are dominant in terms of each individual’s cognition, cognitive processes, the manner in which this is structured by biology and society, and the absolute possibility of expansion of knowledge through a theoretical or hypothetical exposure to as expansive a potential for knowledge as possible?

Between the system constituted by the human being and the cosmos, there exist systems intermediate between them in terms of scope. The human society, the non-human world, the global world, both human and non-human.

Ultimately, Kuntunkantan /could represent the unity of the cosmos in its macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects. The interlaced rings are/ may be understood, in microcosmic terms, as representing the various aspects of the human being, symbolised by the five elements that constitute the human person in the Fulani creation story, the four basic lines of the Odu of Ifa from which its complete repertoire of two hundred and fifty six hermeneutic possibilities emerges, and the stages of development of the human being in Classical Dogon thought, among other correlations with Classical African conceptions of the human being.

The microcosmic correlations broaden out to integrate relationships with macrocosmic coordinates. These extra personal correlations begin from the particular spatial coordinates through which any individual navigates their material environment, moves into the social coordinates through which the social environment is navigated, and eventually radiates outward into a relationship with metaphysical conceptions that underlie the physical form of the cosmos and its character in relation to the emergence and development of consciousness.

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