Lesson · 4 min Gentle
Is the Mind a Thing?
In one line Wiredu noted that Akan does not list the mind among a person’s parts; ask whether a puzzle lives in the world or the words.
Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, spent years comparing Akan, his first language, with English. He found that some questions that seem deep in English look different when you try to say them in Akan.
One example is the mind. Akan thought names several parts of a person, among them the okra, the inner self whose presence means life. Wiredu observed that the mind, adwene, is not counted as one of those parts. In English it is easy to picture the mind as a separate thing inside us and then wonder how it touches the body. Said in Akan, that picture does not come so naturally.
Wiredu did not claim Akan was simply right. His point was a method: before you try to solve a puzzle, check whether your own language built it.
Go deeper
This is one part of what Wiredu called conceptual decolonization: sorting the ideas Africans had taken over from colonial languages and schooling, to keep what holds up and drop what was simply absorbed. He applied the same test to Akan tradition itself, setting aside what did not help. The method travels: any speaker can try a hard question in another language, or in plainer words, and see what changes.
The work–life balance
Lena keeps asking how to find work–life balance, and every answer feels wrong. The phrase pictures two weights on a scale, fighting for the same hours.
A friend asks her to describe her week without the phrase. She says she wants evenings free for her children and one long project at work. Put that way, the problem is a schedule, not a scale, and she can start on it.
Try this today Take a puzzle you are stuck on and restate it in plain, different words; see whether the puzzle survives the change.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Is the Mind a Thing?.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/is-the-mind-a-thing. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Kwasi Wiredu” — Covers conceptual decolonization, his comparisons of Akan and English, and his observation that the Akan do not count mind among the entities that constitute a person.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Akan Concept of a Person” — Covers the okra as the innermost self whose presence means life, and the debate over Akan personhood.