A Person Is Made

Female figure from an obu (house of images), Late 19th century — Female figure from an obu (house of images), Igbo artist, Late 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

A thought says: I am not yet the person I should be. It is quiet and it is patient. It does not accuse, it measures. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a restlessness at a birthday. Ifeanyi Menkiti, a Nigerian philosopher, asked in 1984 what such a thought assumes. His answer was that a person is not finished at birth. The sources read for this article describe a debate among philosophers. None of them tested how people in any community think about themselves.

The claim

In an essay called “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” Menkiti argued that in the African view the community defines the person as a person. A fixed quality such as reason, will or memory does not. He described personhood as something that has to be attained, through a process of incorporation into the community that runs through stages of life and through rites. A person becomes a person, on this reading, and a person can fail to. He quoted an Igbo proverb in support: “What an old man sees sitting down, a young man cannot see standing up.”

The answer

Kwame Gyekye, a Ghanaian philosopher, argued that Menkiti overstated it. In Gyekye’s view, a human being is a person because of what he or she is, not because of what has been acquired. The community does not confer it. Gyekye proposed a moderate communitarianism, in which the value of the individual and the value of the community are balanced. The philosopher Kwasi Wiredu sided with Menkiti and read his claim as a norm, a standard to be reached, and not a description of everyone. The debate has gone on for decades.

What it says about a thought

A thought like “I am not yet who I should be” assumes that there is something to grow into and that others are part of the measure. Menkiti’s reading gives that thought a home. Gyekye’s reading asks what is left of the person before the measuring starts. KTT does not choose between them.

What is not known

Whether people in any one community think of themselves as Menkiti describes is not known. He describes a view found in traditional thought, and the philosophers disagree about how general it is.

Whether the thought “I am not yet who I should be” is common, and what it does, is not known either. The sources read here do not measure it.

Whether the two readings can both be right, for different meanings of the word “person,” is open. Gyekye himself says the word is ambiguous.