Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–1759) was a philosopher from an area that is Ghana today. It’s unclear how he got to Europe, but he studied and then taught philosophy and the law in Germany. He returned to Africa after being publicly mocked in Germany.
1 ‘To the benevolent reader’
I want to briefly look at this note tucked in at the end. It’s typical of the period, not only in Europe but in the Americas also, to promote, that is, to legitimize an African writer by including a recommendation or testimony to their talent or skill or intelligence or originality.
The recommendation here begins with a summary overview of Africa’s influence on European philosophy. I think one thing to keep in mind about this history is that the classical Mediterranean was not carved up in the familiar way. And part of that is just a more or less geographical fact that, if you’re moving a lot of people or a lot of things, it is easier to travel farther over water than over land, so the people you end up doing trade with (who end up becoming your scientific and philosophical partners) are those connected to you by water. Which means that, in the ancient world, there is more cultural and economic traffic between, say, Greece and North Africa than there is between Greece and (the rest of) Europe. So it is uncontroversially and unsurprisingly true that many prominent thinkers from the ancient Mediterranean came from Africa.
I don’t know that there’s any specific part of this text that I want to highlight, but you might skim pp. 191–195.
2 Mos geometricus
I think it’s worth pausing to note something about the structure of this text. There are two sorts of texts that look like each other but that are doing different sorts of things. The first is the medieval disputatio-style text. We’ve seen this in Aquinas and Vitoria. In those cases the structure is organized around the resolution of questions, of discourse.
Amo’s texts sit somewhere between that sort of text and a different sort of text that, let’s say, looks the same but has a very different purpose and organizing principle. The sort of text I mean is modeled on Euclid, and proceeds by definitions, propositions, scholia, and so on, from more basic and ‘fundamental’ claims to claims derived from them. In this case the text is organized in terms of logical dependence.
The so-called mos geometricus is an interesting expression of a number of epistemic crises of the modern period. Their epistemic advantage is that they make, or are intended to make, the steps in an author’s reasoning transparent. The reader can, as it were, perform all of the steps on their own, to see how the author gets from basic definitions and principles to later more elaborate claims. It may be worth wondering why this sort of construction is necessary or even attractive, and one very good guess, I think, is that in the early modern era you have a virtually complete collapse of intellectual authority. By the 17th century, Aristotle and the Church (and the traditions of commentary attaching to them) no longer draw the same sort of consensus they do in, say, the 15th or even 16th century.
It might also be worth adding that the Euclidean method is applicable to geometry, from an ancient perspective, because of geometry’s ideal status. No thinker in the ancient world thinks to apply the geometrical method to things like natural science, or even epistemology, on the grounds that the same bare, logical construction doesn’t accommodate for the many imprecisions and qualifications required for answering questions about the nature of the physical world and the things in it (including us). The fact that the Euclidean method is adopted to natural science (as in Newton, for example) testifies to a transformed conception of nature (in other words, not just a transformed conception of knowledge or discourse) according to which nature is built like a machine—that is, like something that can be explained in the progressive and logical fashion of a Euclidean demonstration.
3 The impassivity of the mind
Amo is going to argue against Descartes’ view that thinking includes sensing. He’s going to make that argument from a Cartesian perspective, that is, on the basis of dualism, the idea that mind and body, and extended reality generally, are really distinct. (“Really” in this context means that they are different things (res).)
The ‘controversy’ is described on p. 179. See too Amo’s claims about the inconsistency of Descartes’ views on this page and the following.
The argument begins with a definition of ‘spirit’: Spirit is “immaterial,” and its structure is “intentional.” See p. 159. From this, Amo infers that it is “purely active” hence “impassive” (p. 161). The argument for that gets worked out in three parts. First, if a “spirit” were “passive,” it would be capable of “admitting” something “by communication, or by penetration, or, finally, by contact” (ibid.). But:
- “Communication” would require a “spirit” to have something in it that was “other than what it was supposed to contain”; and “containing” is something anyway that only material things are capable of; but a “spirit” is not a material thing (p. 163)
- Something can be penetrated only if it has parts, but a “spirit” does not (p. 165)
- What can be touched is physical, but the mind is not physical (ibid.)
Thus “every spirit is beyond every passion” (p. 163).
4 Thinking as self-conscious, free, self-directed
Now, one counterintuitive result of this is that thinking (or “spirit”) does not receive its objects from outside of itself. Thus thought must do whatever it does ‘through itself’.
Moreover “spirit” is not “compelled by anything else”; it is “spontaneously,” freely active. The sort of work it engages in, according to Amo, is “intentional.”
The two corollaries to explanation 4 are wild, and I think in part because they don’t seem to be corollaries to 4 so much as to 2 and 4 or some more general set of explanations; so I want to briefly touch on them. Now, what we need to assume as background here is that matter is passive and spirit is active. Then:
- Corollary 2 (p. 169) says that everything active is spirit.
- If it’s active, it’s not passive, and
- if it’s not passive, then it’s not matter, and
- if it’s not matter, it’s spirit. So much for that.
- Corollary 1 (ibid, green passage at the top) says something totally nuts. Read it. The argument is:
- An efficient cause is active
- What is active is spirit
- What is spirit thinks through itself, hence
- An efficient cause thinks through itself (“must know itself”)
5 Sensation
What is sensation? Being “really affected, through the sensory organs, by the sensible properties of immediately present and material things” (p. 173). Because sensation is passive, but belongs to us, and we are composed of mind and body, but mind is impassive, it belongs entirely to the body. See p. 173 and p. 175.
“Impassivity with respect to sensing,” Amo then claims, means what it sounds like: “the absence of any sensation in a subject that is not suited to having it” (p. 177). So the mind must be impassive with respect to sensation. If it is unaffected by sensible things, then the mind is incapable of sensing. This is the argument to p. 189.