African Philosophy of Mind
Anton Wilhelm Amo
Amo’s Philosophy of Mind
• Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759?), a native
of Ghana, became the first black professor
in Germany
• The Apatheia of the Human Mind: a critique
of Descartes’s dualism
Amo’s Philosophy of Mind
• Apatheia, from which we derive the word
apathy, means nonreactiveness,
passionlessness, imperturbability, or
unresponsiveness
• The Stoics thought of apatheia as an ideal
state in which the mind is free of emotions
and passions
• But Amo uses it more broadly
Mind as Passive
• Amo focuses on a distinction that underlies
much Western thought about the mind
• Emotions are called passions because the
mind is thought to be passive in receiving
them
• Anger, love, desire, pleasure, pain are
thought to be active in affecting the mind,
which is passive in being affected by their
causal power
Sensation
• Sensation, traditionally, is thought to be
similar to passion
• The mind passively receives sensory
impressions from the world
• Notice the imagery: The world makes
impressions on the mind much as a seal
might make an impression on hot wax
• The mind is active, on this picture, only when
it exercises reason
Sensation
• Sensation, Amo argues, is essentially
bodily
• It requires a complex physical
interaction between a physical object
and a perceiver’s body
Sensation
The Mind
• But how does interaction between object and
body have any effect on the mind?
• Amo grants the Cartesian assumption that the
mind is a spiritual substance
• But a spiritual substance, he insists, is purely
active and immaterial
• It always gains understanding through itself
(i.e., directly), and acts from self-motion and
with intention in regard to an end and goal of
which it is conscious to itself
Amo’s Paradox
• The mind as spiritual substance is
purely active
• Anything receiving sensations is in so
doing purely passive
Ideas
• For Descartes, the gap between
sensation and reason is filled with
ideas; indeed, Descartes’s contribution
to early modern philosophy is often
summarized as “the new way of ideas.”
Two Roles
• But Descartes is assigning ideas two
different and, in Amo’s eyes,
incompatible roles
• There is a difference between Jones’s
thinking ‘There’s a table’ and seeing the
table
Two Roles
• Amo argues that a spiritual substance
could think, but not see, hear, or feel
• The actual sensing must be material
• The faculty of sensation is not mental
but physical
A Thing that Thinks—and Senses
• We are not essentially things that think,
as Descartes declares, and only
inessentially bodies
• We are essentially both
• A person is essentially a thinking being,
but also essentially a sensing being,
and therefore essentially embodied
Mind and Brain
• The Akan language treats mind
(adwene) as intellectual—a faculty of
thinking rather than sensing or feeling.
• In Western thought, identity theorists
hold that the mind and brain are
identical.
• For the Akan, such an identification is
impossible.
Mind
• The mind is a “permanent possibility of
thought,” which is not an object at all
• The mind consists of thoughts, but it is
not simply a bundle of thoughts
• It is a certain kind of capacity, a
capacity to have thoughts
Basis of the Mind
• For the Akan, the
brain is the basis of
the mind
• It is by having a brain
that I have the
capacity for thought
Mind and Person
• A person consists of body, life-force,
and personality
• The mind is not a constituent of a
person, for the simple reason that it is
not a thing
• The mind is not a component of a
person for the same reason that moving
is not a part of a car
Mind and Body
• This dissolves the
mind/body problem
• Since the mind is not
a thing, the question
of how it can relate to
a material thing, the
body, does not arise
Dualities
• Western philosophers often split the self
into
– mind and body, or
– spirit and flesh, or
– reason and desire
• The dual elements are complementary
but also conflicting
• Reconciling and unifying them is the
central human task
Creativity
• The distinction between male and
female provides a model for this kind of
duality
• The union of male and female brings
about creation
• So, too, is the union of dual elements a
fundamentally creative process
Creativity
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Human beings are thus essentially creative
Our central obligation is to create
We create things
We create a personality through our actions
Together we create a social order
In each case, we must reconcile and unite
conflicting elements, synthesizing them into
an organic whole
Freedom
• Our creative essence rests on our
freedom
• The conflicting forces we must unite do
not control or determine us
• We are self-determining; we are free to
reconcile conflicting elements as we
please, creating, in the process, our
own distinctive personalities and lives
Freedom
• Our creative essence also rests on our
choosing among possibilities
• Possibilities, potentialities, are thus
central to who we are
• Finally, our creative essence implies
that we are also essentially agents
• We make choices and act, changing the
world and ourselves as we do
“A Thing that Acts”
• Descartes writes, “What am I? A thing that
thinks.”
• For the Akan, it would be more accurate to
say, “What am I? A thing that acts.”
• I am a thing that confronts and realizes
possibilities, makes choices, reconciles
conflicts, and creates things, including
myself
“A Thing that Acts”
Personal Identity
• Philosophers of mind ask not only
– “What am I?” and
– “What makes me human?” but also
– “What makes me me?”
• What makes me the person I am?
Personal Identity
• Am I really the same person I was as a
baby or a small child?
• Will I be the same person when I am
old?
• If so, what explains that?
• What makes me the same person
throughout the entire course of my life?
Mind/Body/Identity
• These questions are closely related
• If I am essentially mind or consciousness, I will tend
to look to mind or consciousness to explain my
continuing identity
• If I am essentially a physical being, I will tend to
look for physical explanations of my continuity
• Conversely, if I can explain my identity in certain
terms, that will suggest that my essence can be
understood in those same terms
Divided Self
• The Yoruba, like many west African
tribes, divide the self into three
components:
– the body,
– the mind (or soul, or consciousness), and
– the ori, the “inner head” or personality
Thought Experiments
• If Jones’s brain (or mind) is transplanted
into Smith’s body, is the resulting
person Smith or Jones?
Thought Experiments
• Jones?
• Smith?
• The Yoruba want to know how the resulting
being acts
• Does it act like Jones or like Smith?
• The Yoruba see this as a question about ori.
Does this person have Smith’s ori or
Jones’s?
Personality
• I am a being consisting of body and
mind and personality
• What is essential to my identity is my
ori, my personality
• That is what makes me me
• Anything that radically changed my
personality would disrupt my identity,
even if it did not disrupt body or
consciousness