What is a Person?
Exploring the Thought of Nimi Wariboko
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Quotations from Nimi Wariboko in quotation marks
Commentary in square brackets by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
"Personhood refers to the conception of the nature of the human being.
It relates to the concept of what it means to be human in a given society.
[ Does this mean different societies have different dominant views of what it is to be human? Yes, though broadly related across cultures. These differences in views account for dominant ways of relating to different kinds of people, ways of relating evident in each society]
In many African communities the person is conceptualized as composed of two "non-fixed" substances, spiritual (teme in Kalabari) and physical (oju in Kalabari-Ijo).
[ Are humans really body and spirit as many schools of thought claim?
How may we access this spiritual part of the human being?]
These substances are only adequately understood and articulated within a relational ontology.
They are what they are because they function within a complex adaptive network of relations.
Person is relation, and it cannot be understood apart from relationality.
[ To what degree can we live without reference to other people or other aspects of existence beyond ourselves?]
The substances are also forms of consciousness; there is spiritual consciousness and physical consciousness.
These consciousnesses embody ways of knowing; meaning they engender and sustain different, but complementary, ways of knowing.
[ A summation of the foundational idea of spirituality and of many philosophies, schools of thought centred in exploring how these diverse forms of knowledge are developed and describing the knowledge thus discovered.
The idea of complementarity in ways of knowing is particularly rich, suggesting the need to recognize the unity in duality of the human being]
Nimi Wariboko
Personhood is a concept of human being and a model of human behavior robust enough to carry (some of) the weight of epistemology, social ethics, or to indicate how a group of people relates to their reality, interpret it, and engage it."
[ A comprehensive thumbnail summation of how ideas of what it means to be a person grounds or centres all aspects of human existence.
The two legged human creature is the one ranging over the Earth, trying to understanding it and the cosmos enfolding it, shaping that Earth in the image of that understanding.
What is the self understanding of other species on Earth?
We can only guess.]
Quoted text from Nimi Wariboko, "The Future of Du Bois: Consciousness,Citizenship, and Epistemology in Africa"The 41st Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
November 13, 2019.
Image In Text
Two Persons, W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar and activist in relation Blackness in the US and Africa, top and Nimi Wariboko, philosopher and economist at the intersection of African and Western thought, bottom.
The person at the bottom searching for the person at the top, through visiting Du Bois' office in Accra, Ghana, where he emigrated to from his native United States, the US to which Wariboko has emigrated to from his native Nigeria, the US from where Wariboko has come to Ghana in search of the spirit of Du Bois.
Pic of Du Bois at Atlanta University,1909. W.E.B. DuBois Library Special Collections, University of Massachusetts Amherst. From "W.E.B. DuBoisReturns to Harvard". Accessed 11/14/2019.
Pic of Wariboko by himself, 2015. From Du Bois lecture Power Point.
Also published on Facebook.
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