Descartes was wrong. ‘A person is a person through other persons’
meritocracyBy Abeba Birhane
According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or lfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘lf’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in 美文诵读African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am becau we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’
We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform lf-understanding. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues. The lf I take grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviours from the lf that talks to my PhD supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it tho who agree with me, tho who critici, or tho who
prai me.
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Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous lf can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was esntially lf-contained and lf-sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. While Descartes didn’t single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours.
Descartes had t himlf a very particular puzzle to solve. He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature. But Descartes believed that there was a trade-off between certainty and a kind of social, worldly richness. The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito – the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic. So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing lf, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.
anthony davisFew respected philosophers and psychologists would identify as strict Cartesian dualists, in the n of believing that mind and matter are completely parate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look. The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the lf and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a ries of cognitive process. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.
Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society. But even then, the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not lves that co-evolve with others over time. In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genove, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulte
d on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnesd the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a ries of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to obrve what people did. They were the first to geilivableidentify the so-called ‘bystander effect’, in which people em to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around.
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Darley and Latané suggested that this might come from a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people. But as the American psychologist Frances Cherry argued in 绯闻女孩第一季The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Rearch Process (1995), this numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people’s real motives. Genove’s murder had to be en against a backdrop in which violence against women was not taken riously, Cherry said, and in which people were reluctant to step into what might have been a domestic dispute. Moreover, the murder of a poor black woman would have attracted far less subquent media interest. But Darley and Latané’s focus make st
ructural factors much harder to e.
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