The Assumption of Personhood- African and Western philosophies
Elliot Andrew Fox
Far from the abstract clichés of normative philosophy, the metaphysical question of what constitutes personhood sits at the heart of politics, law, ethics, and culture. Across cultures and histories, the idea of personhood has served not only to shape how individuals see themselves but also how societies structure rights, duties, and relationships. It is a question that, at its core, links human nature to the social forms that arise from it, forms built to facilitate the flourishing of the individuals within. Consequently, definitions of personhood hold foundational weight: they subtly, yet decisively, direct the evolution of political and cultural priorities.
In 20th-century African philosophy, particularly among thinkers drawing from the Akan tradition of West Africa, personhood was reconceptualized through the lens of a communitarian social rhythm diagnosed in pre-colonial villages. Numerous cultural researchers into the social environment of this village setting testify to this rhythm; Jomo Kenyatta suggests that nobody is an isolated individual, or rather, their uniqueness is a secondary fact to their status as a relative or contemporary, while Kwesi Dickson explicitly states that ‘for many, this characteristic defines Africanness’. For this cultural context, identity is relational, dynamic, and socially sculpted. The Akan, consistently, do not view personhood as an intrinsic or automatic status granted at birth. Rather, it is an achievement, a state of being realized through one's alignment with the values and aims of their community. As philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti succinctly put it: “I am because we are.” This assertion captures a broader idea: namely, that a person becomes a person through immersion in, and contribution to, the communal fabric. Thus, for the question of personhood within African philosophical thought, ontological primacy is held in the community as the only fertile ground of its attainment.
On the other hand, normative Western views on the metaphysical question of personhood conversely place ontological primacy on the individual over any inherited communal structure. Here, personhood, though conceptually imagined in a manner isolated from the brute physical form of the human species, in that it is conceptually defined, doesn’t preclude membership of novel or familiar non-human species or universally welcome all humans, is commonly understood as universally inherent on account of being tied to features such as rationality, memory, or consciousness thought to be uniquely human. The Western tradition has favored universal qualifications: whether someone is a person or continues to be the same person depends on attributes that supposedly persist across time and space. From the soul to Locke’s notion of persistent memory, and later developments in psychological continuity theory, these models seek internal criteria that grant personhood independently of one's social standing. It is easy to see how such a principle yields deductive utility within the historically contingent political story of the West, which settled in its defining concepts of liberalism and democracy, that theoretically aim to grant citizens individual freedoms and rights that supersede their duties to their state. It is crucial, therefore, to not naturalize this standard of personhood and instead acknowledge it as equally politically and culturally relational to the Akan conception of personhood that was understood in relation to its utility to African traditions of communal survival.
Furthermore, the Western introspective tradition is not without its theoretical issues. Consider the common Western remark that someone is “not the same person anymore.” This expression is not a clinical assessment of memory loss or physical change. It’s a judgment- often moral, relational, and cultural. It reflects how we recalibrate the label of ‘person’ based on a shifting alignment with expected character traits. But such traits are not universal objective states of affairs; they are bestowed upon oneself and others based on the alignment of observed or introspected behavior through a culturally calibrated diagnostic apparatus. These traits, therefore, may be rooted in objective psychological affairs and yet be ultimately, inexorably tethered to one’s cultural milieu for their understanding. As these diagnosed traits construct the person we understand ourselves and others to be, the personhood we satisfy across our diverse social relations amongst our society must be culturally coded, relationally meaningful, and therefore contextually assigned. We might literally, therefore, in a manner consistent with common understanding, be different ‘persons’ when exercising our relationships with our families, colleagues, and romantic partners, as these relational contexts demand us not only to promote different character traits but contextually impose different diagnostic apparatuses for these traits or expand their set.
The Western definition, also by promoting a universally targeted criterion for personhood whilst insisting on its conceptually distinct notion from the brute physics of the human species, has struggled with the perennial issue of counterexamples which continually disturb this contradictory stance. Dementia patients or children with developmental disabilities spoil this party constantly by obviously requiring the notion of personhood whilst not meeting the ‘uniquely human’ specified criteria. This raises a deeper issue: if psychological and physical continuities alone are insufficient, what do we really mean by 'person'? Suppose a hypothetical species were to evolve that fulfilled every psychological condition recognized by Western standards- would they automatically be persons? Likely not, unless they could also participate in meaningful human social life. In a similar vein, we don’t still recognize our dementia-suffering loved ones as ‘persons’ saliently on account of their continued physical presence or psychological firings, but because of the social relationships they formed with us, that manifest both in their continued identity as Dad, Mum, or Grandma, and the relational duties we still feel obliged to fulfill. The implication is striking: personhood, even in Western thought, is implicitly social.
Back to the Akan conception of personhood, their understanding and its cultural clash with Western ideals was vividly illustrated in 1979, when the President of Zimbabwe praised Margaret Thatcher as “truly a person” for her role in ending white-minority rule. In the Akan tradition, such a statement makes perfect sense. Personhood is earned, not assumed. It can be gained, lost, and approximated. This tradition divides life into phases: from infancy to adulthood, through ancestral status, and eventually, the nameless dead. Personhood is an ideal to be realized, not a given essence. Its attainment depends on socially validated milestones: marriage, procreation, contribution to the community, defense of its values.
Critics of the Akan model often charge that it risks marginalizing or mistreating those who don’t fulfill these communal expectations- children, celibates, or dissidents. But this is to misunderstand the Akan framework. Even those who do not attain personhood are still human beings, believed to possess divine worth. The tradition distinguishes between personhood and human dignity. Moreover, compassion toward those unable to fulfill communal roles, such as the impotent, is embedded in the system, unlike what might be assumed under a strictly rights-based model.
A more substantive critique, however, lies in the Akan model’s tendency to moral conservatism. Because personhood is tightly bound to communal values, any deviation—whether motivated by autonomous moral insight or dissent—can lead to exclusion from personhood status. A pacifist who refuses to join a community army, for instance, may be judged as failing to meet the conditions of personhood. These dynamic risks creating a system of moral dogmatism, reinforced by the cultural authority of ancestors whose values remain operative long after death. In such a system, flourishing is circumscribed by tradition.
To retain the insight of the Akan emphasis on community without reproducing its rigidities, we need a more fluid conception of personhood, one that acknowledges culture’s constitutive role without allowing it to become tyrannical. Menkiti’s phrasing; “I am because we are, and because we are, I am” can point the way. It resonates cross-culturally with a metaphorical idea of personal identity being a hollow concept in the context of isolation, raised in Jean-Paul Sartre’s book La Nausée, where the protagonist frequents a café owned by Monsieur Frasquelle. It is observed that when the café is empty of customers, Frasquelle becomes unconscious; ‘his head empties too,’ ‘when he is alone, he is asleep’. Beyond the coffee house, in the classroom, in the workplace, even at home, people discover themselves, shape themselves, and realize their capacities in the context of relationships. These relationships unfold within cultural systems: families, villages, nation-states, each of which hosts values, practices, and languages. The community, then, does hold ontological primacy, but not as a static moral authority. Rather, it offers the stage on which personhood is enacted, interpreted, and made intelligible.
From this, with both cultural angles (Western and Akan) gesturing toward a deeper truth-that personhood is not discovered in isolation, nor fully absorbed by society, but forged in the relational space between self and other. From this, we might derive a refined condition of personhood suitable across the cultural contours of time and space: not merely memory, not merely biology, not even just contribution to community, but the formation and recognition of character traits through social interaction that are always culturally interpreted. What constitutes the core of personhood, then, is not some eternal metaphysical criterion, nor a fixed communal role. It is the culturally mediated recognition of an individual’s identity. Whether we invoke a 'soul,’ a secular 'self,’ or an 'individual spirit’ as in the Akan belief of sunsum, we are reaching for the same thing: a concept that grants autonomy and significance beyond mere physical existence. It allows us to treat others and ourselves not as interchangeable biological units, but as beings with personal depth shaped by relationships and the cultural webs they’re spun from.
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