Reading Ubuntu relationality through a Levinasian lens

Abstract

Ubuntu philosophy is a moral framework rooted in African traditions, emphasising interconnectedness, community, and a shared humanity that is based on a relational conceptualisation of the subject. In this article, I argue that Levinas’s radically passive ethical agent that operates through affective relationality rather than reason may be employed as instructive lens to lay bare the metaphysical dynamics at play in Ubuntu relationality – something which existing Ubuntu scholarship fails to do. While Ntibagirirwa (2018) argues in favour of conceiving of Ubuntu as a metaphysical concept he does not elucidate how exactly relationality may be accounted for. In other words, he fails to explain how and on what basis the metaphysical interconnectedness of the Self and the Other can be realised in the ethical obligation of altruism, which Ubuntu insists upon. A Levinasian reading of Ubuntu, I argue, finds its justification in their common contention that the humanness of the human being can only be verified in moral acts.