Personal Identity in African Metaphysics



Personal Identity in African Metaphysics Leke Adeofe

Lecture Overview

1) Quick Overview of Metaphysics

a. Metaphysics describes the mechanisms that make Nature work (Physics is the study of Nature’s working, Metaphysics is the study of what makes Nature in the first place)

b. It’s often the study of “pure being.” Ontology is similar, asking what does it mean to “be a certain thing” (what is the essence of a chair? What makes a human a human and not something else?) Metaphysics, however, asks what does it mean to exist at all? Where does existence at all even come from? If everything is brought into existence by something else, does that mean that there had to have been something in the beginning that didn’t come into being, that’s always been in being, and that brings everything else into being?

i. In other words: if Physics is the study of gravity and the elements and growth and decay and movement and change, Metaphysics asks what does it mean to be at all (prior to changing or decaying or growing or moving, things must first exist, they must be, and metaphysics

2) Quick Overview of the Problem of Identity

a. The problem of identity is linked to ontology and metaphysics. It asks: since everything seems to be constantly changing, can we say that there’s anything stable over time?

i. On the one hand, the body is clearly always changing (trust me, I used to have so much more hair than I do now)

ii. On the other hand, the mind is also changing (my beliefs [Peirce], my memories, my personality, everything)

1. So if both body and mind are changes, what, if anything, is staying the same if I’m still “me” over time?

So the question here is: from the perspective of African philosophy, what does it mean to be human?

“Pre-theoretic concerns about personal identity challenge us to provide a coherent and unified response to the following questions: What is a person? What is it for a person to be the same persisting entity across time (or at a time)? How many ontologically distinct entities constitute a person? What relationship, if any, exists between an individual's first-person, subjective experiences and our objective, third person's perspective? African philosophy takes the challenge much more seriously than Western philosophy.”

3) Quick Overview of Human Being in the West

a. Aristotle: 3-part soul

i. Reason – exclusive to humans

ii. Desire – sense experience, shared by humans and animals

iii. Nutritive – growth, organ function, taking in food, etc., shared by humans, animals, and plants

b. St. Augustine (combing Aristotle with Scripture). God made everything the way Aristotle said it was. If so, what makes humans special is their capacity for “Reason” which they share with neither animals nor plants. Therefore, we ought to use Reason more than any other part of the soul.

i. If the soul is ordered that way, the individual is virtuous

ii. If the soul is ordered with “desire” above “reason,” the person is a “fool,” defying God’s plan for what it means to be human.

1. The fool, drive by desire above reason, loves things more than God (sex, food, material goods, etc.)

c. René Descartes (modern period)

i. Taking Augustine’s three-part soul (which he, in turn, got from Aristotle), Descartes demonstrates that we don’t need a body to be considered human. “I think therefore I am” means that I can doubt I have a body but still be thinking, meaning what I am (essence) is Reason. The other two parts of the soul (Desire and Nutritive) are bodily (sense desires are bodily, nutritive is bodily), and we don’t need those to explain what it means to be human. So instead of a three part soul, Descartes said the soul is “Reason,” period, and all else is body.

1. He created a dualist philosophy: humans are Reason (mind) and the body is inconsequential

“A tripartite conception of a person characterizes the African thought system.”

- Sounds like something similar to Aristotle/Augustine, maybe?

According to African philosophy, it’s quite different from anything in that Western tradition. A human is a union of:

(1) ara (body) - physical

(2) emi (mind/soul) – mental/spiritual

(3) ori (“inner head”) – mental/spiritual

- ori is considered “ontologically independent of the other two.” So it’s not Cartesian dualism. Those Western terms simply can’t reach the complexity of what’s going on here.

Whereas the Western tradition maintains that a single God created a human with either three (Aristotle/Augustine) or two (Descartes) parts, African philosophy maintains that a different deity created each individual part of the three (ara, emi, and ori).

- Ara (the body) is constructed by Orisa-nla (the arch deity)

- Emi (the mind/soul) is constructed by Olodumare (God or “Supreme Deity”)

- Ori (the “inner head”) is constructed by Ajala

Emi (the soul) is immortal and transmigratory.

Ori (the inner head) is the bearer of personal destiny and thus represents individual personality.

“What is a person in the African view? This question is ambiguous between two different but related questions: What are the constitutive elements of a person? What makes a person the same persisting entity across time?”

“In response to the first question, the constitutive elements are ara, emi, and ori. The task is to determine the extent to which this response would help with the second but interrelated question about persistence.”

In other words, we now what makes a person a person (those three parts). But the question now is, what is the essence of a person such it endures over time? Is there one that’s special (like Descartes said, the Mind, not the Body, endures over time)? Or two? Or three? Which one (or more) persists over time, despite all apparent change that really defines what a person is?

The emphasis in African philosophy is not on bodily persistence of time, nor really on the soul’s immortality which is kind of a given and shared by everyone with a soul, what is interesting to African philosophy is “concern with personal identity is concern with my psychic unity, not my soul—unless I am worried about the possibility of life after death. Concern with psychic unity is concern with the extent to which activities in my life fulfill a purpose. The purpose in turn provides meaning to my life, and it is that meaning that evidences to me psychic unity, that my life is on track.”

Mental or “psychic” unity, the unity of personality, provides meaning to an individual’s life, creates a coherent narrative and story with goals and a life’s ultimate purpose.

“A life lived consciously or otherwise in conformity with this state of becoming is a life on course, and the purpose that emerges from it provides genuine psychic unity to the individual. Ori, understood as destiny, embodies the quasi-historical self-actualization.”

“Trees do not have ori, and neither do cats, dogs, and dolphins. My concern with my identity is with whether my life is on track.”

In the West, when wrestling with what makes human special and we say “Reason,” that’s too vague, since, in many ways, animals have “Reason,” too. But African philosophy makes this clearer: what makes a human a human, the essence, is a human’s ability to determine his/her destiny own destiny. No animal, as far as we know, can do that.

“as African metaphysics suggests, our concern with personal identity is that whatever projects we are engaged in are to be fulfilled as well as possible, then it is a mistake to elevate these projects into a criterion of personal identity as the mental theorists have done.”

The projects don’t define us; we choose the projects, and then set ourselves to doing them as well as possible. This provides continuity through life via ori.

“The concern with the continuity of our intentions, beliefs, and memories is a concern not with specific projects but with the successful completion of whatever projects there are, as long as they contribute to our self-actualization.”

We’re not defined by what we do, we are defined by a course of continuous life doing it well.

“Ori provides the needed metaphysical support to our social existence; it helps to make our beliefs, character, and social projects really ours. With ori, our social existence exemplifies a self-actualization process.”

Clancy’s thoughts: this is the first time reading this. Inevitably, I’m drawing connections to things familiar to me. And this is so awesome nothing is really familiar and I love it. The closest things I can think of that might resonate with his are not Western at all, but Hindu and Buddhist (from Eastern philosophy, not Western).

- Hinduism advocates “yoga,” a term which means “union” with the divine (which doesn’t apply here) but a secondary meaning is “union” with oneself, i.e., self-actualization which does at least seem to apply here. Yoga is not “yoga” in the sense we in the West think it is (it’s been Westernized into a stretching/meditation system). In India, however, there are many different types of yoga, i.e., many different paths to self-actualization.

o If you’re inclined towards study, there’s “jhana yoga” where you self-actualize by studying and gaining knowledge throughout an entire life

o If you’re inclined towards doing good, charitable works in life and helping others, there’s “karma yoga”

o If you’re inclined towards theology and devotion to God, there’s “bhakti yoga” (a monastic life)

o Etc.

Certain forms of Japanese Buddhism has a similar sort of idea about self-actualization. Take for example the famous Sushi chef, Jiro. Jiro discovered what he wanted to do with his life early on, it “felt” right, a perfect fit, and so he started working, slowly, surely, harder and harder, day after day, year after year, to the single end of perfecting his art. Now he’s considered the greatest sushi chef in the world and one of the greatest chefs in the world, despite his impoverished beginnings, through hard work and self-actualization, he became (is becoming) himself. And that might be the point, possibly: “know yourself,” in the West, is only the start in African philosophy. Yes, we must know ourselves, we must known what we want to become (again, only humans can do this), but African philosophy goes further: we must not only know ourselves, we must then become ourselves. And no matter how much our minds and bodies may change, what strings a human life together is that drive to fully become oneself through the medium of what we freely choose to become.

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