A Person Through Other Persons

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other persons.

The phrase is Nguni, and the thought it names runs through southern African philosophy. Taken as a slogan it sounds like an encouragement to be communally minded. Taken as a claim, which is how it should be taken, it is an argument about what a person is, and it contradicts the starting assumption of nearly everything else in this library.

Here is the contrast, stated plainly.

The Western books in this library, almost without exception, begin with an individual. Hobbes starts with people in a state of nature. Locke starts with a person who has rights before any society exists. Kant starts with a rational will. Descartes starts with a single mind establishing its own existence alone in a room. Then each asks what that individual owes to others.

Ubuntu reverses the order. It begins with the relationship and asks what an individual is, and the answer is that personhood is achieved through relationship rather than possessed independently. You do not arrive as a person and then enter a community. You become one through being in one.

Three consequences follow, and each is a genuine philosophical position rather than a sentiment.

The first concerns knowledge. If persons are constituted communally then the natural bearer of knowledge is the community rather than the solitary knower. Set this beside the chapter on testimony in the epistemology book: that chapter argued, from within the Western tradition, that almost everything anybody knows came from other people and that the lone-thinker model was always a distortion. Ubuntu starts where that argument ends up.

The second concerns wrongdoing. If a wrong damages a fabric of relationship rather than only transferring harm from one individual to another, then repairing the relationship can matter more than punishing the individual. That is a different theory of justice, with a different aim, rather than a more forgiving version of the usual one. It is not that punishment is deserved and mercy is nice; it is that restoration is the point.

The third concerns what a good life consists in, and follows straightforwardly from the first two.

Now the hard question, which the serious literature takes seriously and the popular presentation does not.

If personhood is granted through recognition by a community, what is the status of somebody the community refuses to recognise?

This is not a cheap objection. It is the exact place where the view is under pressure, and it matters because communities have withheld recognition from people constantly and on terrible grounds. A theory on which personhood is conferred looks as though it might permit personhood to be withheld.

There are answers. One is that the relevant community is humanity rather than any local group. Another is that failing to recognise a person is a failure of the community's own personhood, since it too is constituted relationally, which turns exclusion into self-harm.

Whether those answers work is a live argument, and the fact that it is a live argument is the point. This is a position with defenders and critics doing technical work, not a proverb. Treating it as a proverb, which is the common fate of non-Western philosophy in Western curricula, is a way of appearing to include it while declining to engage with it.