Portrait · Self · 1980s–1990s
Plate · Generated interpretation
What English Calls Mind
A Ghanaian philosopher refuses to let a European noun assemble an Akan person.
- Legon, and on the page
- Late twentieth-century Ghana
- 5.65°N 0.19°W
Before English offers you mind, notice which word you were already using.
Listen · Eve
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Kwasi Wiredu (1931–2022), teaching and writing from the University of Ghana, Legon, keeps returning to a translation problem that is also a metaphysical one. In essays including “The Akan Concept of Mind,” he argues that English mind does not map onto the Akan terms that English readers want to treat as its parts. Okra is not soul in the Cartesian sense. Adwene (thought, minding) is not a substance that sits beside a body. Sunsum is not a handy synonym for spirit. A person, in the accounts he is reading with, is assembled otherwise.
Wiredu’s own essays, and Kwame Gyekye’s An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (1987), are the doors. Neither is “Akan wisdom” as a proverb card. Both are arguments, in named languages, about what a person is said to be.
Wiredu’s pointed remark is that the Akans, as he reads the language, “most certainly do not regard mind as one of the entities that go to constitute a person.” Okra is spoken of as that whose presence in the body means life. Adwene is something one does. To import a European mind-stuff into that grammar is to invent a homunculus the sentences did not ask for.
This is not a claim that Akan speakers lack inwardness. It is a claim that a borrowed ontology can manufacture a puzzle. Descartes’s remainder and Wiredu’s warning are not the same sentence in two accents.
Whether a person is completed by community, by okra, by character, or by all of these in a sequence, is a live disagreement in the literature, not a slogan.
A word
okra
Akan. In Wiredu’s gloss, that whose presence in the body means life and whose absence means death. Not a tidy English soul. The house does not italicize the lemma in running copy; it is set as a term.
Distant echoes
Counterpoint
Early modern Europe · A stove-heated room in Germany, later on the page from the Netherlands
Beside the stove
Descartes subtracts until a thinking remains. Wiredu refuses to add a mind-thing the language did not seat in the person.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If a language does not seat “mind” among the parts of a person, is the English problem of consciousness a discovery, or an artefact of how the question was packed?