African Philosophy of Mind

Anton Wilhelm Amo Amton Wilhelm Amo Statue at the University of Halle, Germany. From BlackPast.org. Permission requested.

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 Nostra immagine Canapo di artigianato orientale raffigurante tre figure femminili con canestro sul capo Source Twice25 & Rinina25 Date 07/08/07 Author Permission (Reusing this image) Own work, attribution required (Multi-license with GFDL and Creative Commons CC-BY 2.5) I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

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 Makonde elephant. I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

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 Carving from Makonde. About 1967 I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

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” Afrikanischer Maler Title Deutsch: Weiße Dame von Auahouret Year Deutsch: um 4000 v. Chr. English: c. 4000 v. Chr. Technique Deutsch: Felsmalerei Dimensions Deutsch: ca. 140 × 100 cm Source The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. Permission [1] Public domain The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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