Ashanti Gold Weights and Adinkra Symbols

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

From the Bergsonian metaphysical lens, Ashanti gold weights—intricate brass and gold miniatures used in trade and bearing Adinkra symbols—embody a confluence of temporal memory, intuition, and pure becoming. Bergson saw art not as reproduction but as revelation: a passage beyond conceptualized matter into the intuitive rhythms of durée (duration), where time is experienced as indivisible flow. The Adinkra symbols, with their ideographic density, do not communicate through abstract logic but through an affective, rhythmic resonance that penetrates the deeper layers of consciousness.

Each symbol and weight, whether it takes the shape of an animal, a geometric abstraction, or a proverb-encoded emblem, functions as a crystallization of social intuition—a lived intelligence embedded not just in words but in form and gesture. The Ashanti weights are thus not static objects; they are durational capsules of thought-in-becoming. Their aesthetic power arises not from mere ornamentation but from a metaphysical economy: where measurement of gold becomes an embodied measurement of wisdom, time, and relational ethics.

In Bergson’s terms, the gold weights resist spatialization (breaking time into discrete parts) and instead embody lived time. As mnemonic tokens in ritual trade, they fuse memory with intention—just as Bergson saw the vital impulse (élan vital) fusing past and present in a generative now. The Adinkra symbols extend this by offering philosophical fragments that operate like intuitive algorithms—complex, metaphorical seeds that grow only in experiential soil.

Thus, Ashanti gold weights are agents of qualitative knowledge. They are micro-sculptures that resist the mechanicity of modern measurement, offering instead an organic and fluid metaphysics of exchange: not just of goods, but of wisdom and presence. They whisper that value is not imposed, but revealed through shared memory and continuous becoming.