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

• 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