Akan Moral Philosophy
from 1700 as recorded practice; older as tradition
Being human is an achievement measured by conduct, and someone who behaves badly enough can be said not to be a person at all.
- Active
- from 1700
- Where
- Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- African
The claim
Personhood is normative rather than biological. To say of someone that he is not a person is to make a moral judgement, and it is a judgement Akan speech makes routinely.
What it held
The Akan claim that interests philosophers is about what a person is. In Akan usage, saying of a man that he is not a person is not a metaphysical error but a moral verdict: he has failed at the conduct that personhood consists in. Being human is given; being a person is attained, and can be lost.
Gyekye and Wiredu, both Ghanaian philosophers working in the analytic tradition, developed this into an argument. If personhood is normative, then rights and duties attach to conduct in community rather than to bare individual existence — but Gyekye insists the position is moderately rather than radically communitarian, since the individual retains a capacity for judgement that can stand against the group.
The metaphysics behind it is tripartite: okra, the soul or divine spark; sunsum, personality or character; and honam, body. Sunsum is the one that can be cultivated or corrupted, which is where the moral work happens.
The method is philological. Proverbs, carved on linguists' staffs and in the language itself, are treated as the deposit of a working ethics — which raises the standing question of whether a worldview extracted from proverbs is philosophy or anthropology.
How it argued
Conceptual analysis of Akan terms and proverbs by professional philosophers who are also native speakers.
What it was arguing against
The assumption that personhood is a biological or metaphysical given, and the reading of African thought as undifferentiated communalism.
Where it disagreed with itself
How communitarian the position is — Gyekye argues moderately, Menkiti radically, and the exchange is the central debate in African ethics.
Common misconceptions
That normative personhood licenses excluding people. Gyekye's whole argument is that the individual retains critical capacity, and Wiredu has written on how consensus systems protect dissent rather than suppress it.
How it began
Akan-speaking societies with a long tradition of proverb-based moral instruction, taken up philosophically after Ghanaian independence.
What became of it
Living, and one of the most active areas of academic African philosophy.
Lasting influence
African ethics broadly, and the personhood debate that runs through it. Wiredu's work on conceptual decolonisation has been taken up widely.
Why it still matters
Normative accounts of personhood bear directly on bioethics, where the question of who counts as a person is not settled.
Put another way
A carved staff whose figure is a proverb everyone present can read.
Where to start
Gyekye's Essay. It is analytic philosophy on African material and assumes no background.
The surprising bit
Wiredu argues that African philosophers should test whether a philosophical problem survives translation into their own language — and that several classic European problems, including mind-body dualism, do not.
In their own words
When a man behaves badly, the Akan say: he is not a person.
One tree does not make a forest.
Connections
- Parallel to
- Ubuntu Philosophy, Communitarianism
The verdict
An ethics recovered from proverbs by people who could argue about it in two traditions at once.