African relational ontology, personhood and immutability

Abstract

In the Western theist tradition, the conception of a person tends to be understood as an intrinsic property. Hence, the classification of someone as a person does not depend on relational aspects of that person. From this, Western theists often understand that their conception of God as a person does not clash with the idea of immutability. In this article, I challenge the idea that being a person and being immutable are compatible properties by using Afro-communitarian philosophy and, more specifically Afro-communitarian metaphysics of personhood. Afro-communitarian metaphysics is fundamentally relational, i.e. it understands that most properties of the world depend on the existence of other entities. More precisely, personhood is a property that depends on the existence of relatable beings. But if this is true, then it is not possible to hold that an entity that has the property of personhood also has the property of immutability. More specifically, an entity that is a person has to change due to the fact that personhood is a relational property. This is because it is a necessary condition for being a person that one relates to others, i.e. one only becomes a person when this relation occurs. Hence, the process of becoming a person requires a moment before the relation with another and one after; thereby, the feature of being a person requires the feature of change. With respect to the Christian conception of God, what this implies is that if theist philosophers wish to understand Him as a person, they have to also accept that God is not immutable. For if other beings besides Him are not eternal, then it is only possible that He can be a person when these other beings first started existing. This is the case because the kind of relationality needed to be a person is not simply to relate to something (like emptiness), but to do something that makes Him addressable (which requires that the thing He relates to has the capacity to address Him). This means there are two moments of existence where He has distinct properties and, therefore, is mutable.