IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

The introduction to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Kings James version of the bible describes King Solomon as “a Philosopher” who reflected deeply on how short and contradictory human life is, with its mysterious injustices and frustrations, and arrived at the conclusion that human life is “vanity of vanities”, “a chasing after the wind”. But in a paper entitled “Synergetic Specialism: A Philosophy of the Meaning of Life” Adekunle Ibrahim submitted that nothing in life exists for nothing, that something ultimately exists for something. In other words, life is not a vanity upon vanity nor ‘a chasing after the wind’; rather, every unit of existent, for him, exists for a purpose. The objective of this paper is to critically evaluate the claims and submissions of Adekunle’s Synergetic Specialism “as a system of thought that sees reality as a web of synergy between and among speciated entities for cross-functional necessity”. The issues here include the questions of the ontology of human existence and the notion of being. In other words, is every unit of existence a ‘specially netted’ and uniquely endowed being? What is a being? Also, is every existent of necessity? The method employed in tackling these questions are the critical and hermeneutic methods. The author is commended for a deep philosophical reflection and analysis of the meaning of life including the view that ‘nothing exists for nothing’. However, the paper disagreed with Ibrahim on many fronts including the point that ‘existence is not by chance but out of necessity’. It is the opinion of this paper that existence is by chance and not out of necessity.

Open Full Text (PDF)