Ubuntu: Beyond an African Humanism

I wrote this paper over Winter and Spring quarter in my freshman year for publication in Columbia University's undergraduate philosophy magazine, Gadfly. In it, I explore the question of how accurately the African philosophy of ubuntu can be characterized as an "African humanism," and what insights it can bring to dominant Western genres of humanism. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to devote so much of my time to writing this paper, but I can at least trace my inspirations for the paper back to several key moments.

The first and definitely largest inspiration for my paper came from my experience with high school debate. I participated in Lincoln-Douglass (LD) debate, a unique form of debate that emphasizes philosophical argumentation. As a result of my participation in debate, I became interested in analytic philosophy (a style of philosophy most commonly practiced in Anglo-American institutions) but had also been troubled by the lack of philosophical perspectives from non-Western traditions, such as African, Chinese, or South American ones (I later ended up taking classes about each of these philosophical traditions during my time at UW). Fortunately, an opportunity to engage more deeply with African philosophy came during my senior year of high school, when the debate topic was selected to be about lethal autonomous weapons. While researching about lethal autonomous weapons in Africa, I stumbled across this article that mentioned ubuntu in the conclusion. I had no idea at the time that this small mention would turn into a deep philosophical interest that I would pursue throughout college, including a presentation at an undergraduate philosophy conference and a prize-winning philosophy paper.

From this one article, I began to research and build a case about lethal autonomous weapons from an African philosophical perspective. In the process, I read many philosophy articles and books that would later become sources for my paper in Gadfly. The unique competitive and scholastic environment of debate pushed me to think through interactions between the works on African ethics that I was reading---which were predominantly written from an analytic philosophical perspective---and other interdisciplinary perspectives. In particular, I became interested in how African philosophy could provide an alternative to traditional Western analytic philosophy that spoke to critical perspectives on racism and colonialism.

To provide a bit more context about LD debate, debaters often choose to specialize in different "styles" of debate such as philosophical, critical, or policy arguments. Typically, each "style" of debate has its own stereotypes attached to it: philosophical debate tends to emphasize abstract and theoretical ethics, critical debate tends to emphasize structural theories of power and oppression, and policy debate tends to emphasize legal and empirical data. I suppose, then, that one of the reasons I wanted to write this paper was to push against these stereotypes of philosophical debate, to demonstrate that analytic philosophy can provide radical and useful frameworks to critique structures of opression, and to show other high school debaters what made me so interested in it that I wanted to pursue a degree in philosophy. You might notice that the paper is structured much like a high school LD debate case: it begins with an explication of the harms of Western humanism, provides a syllogism for an ethical framework that can be used to theorize about these harms, and then demonstrates how this ethical framework can be applied to generate alternative ways of political life that solve these harms.

With that long piece of background context out of the way, I'll list a few more of the key moments that inspired this essay here:

• While I writing cases for debate, I came across an Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on ubuntu that drew a distinction between "African humanism" and "Western humanism," but didn't understand this distinction at time. This essay was also an attempt to answer this curiosity by explaining the distinction between African and Western humanism in ways that I could have understood as a high school debater.

• In the summer before my freshman year, I came across this paper about ubuntu and AI ethics. Although the broader topic of this paper was interesting, I became especially fixated on a single line from the paper: "When a person fails at achieving ubuntu, It is common in Nguni languages to say 'Wo, akumuntu lowo' (Oh, that is no person), referring not to biology, but the negation of one’s duty to act humane." Although this line was only a minor point in overall topic of the paper, it sparked the beginning of an answer to my questions about the differences between African and Western humanism.

• In Autumn quarter of my freshman year, I took C LIT 240. This class examined portrayals of deviance in literature and media in the American South and the Carribean. After one class in which we read about Columbus' interaction with the indigenous people, one student remarked something along the lines of: "although Columbus viewed indigenous people as non-human, it was actually Columbus and his men who were acting in un-human ways." This remark unexpectedly reminded me of the paper I mention above, solidifying the idea that African philosophy might allow us radically different ways of approaching issues of oppression.

• This paper would not have been written without a message from a high school friend who worked at Gadfly, encouraging me to submit to their next issue. Their message prompted me to take the plunge and submit a pitch for what would eventually become (after months of writing and editing) my first published paper.

• As a fun fact, my primary Gadfly editor was also a former LD debater that I knew! They were a tremendous help in getting this essay over the finish line, and I think the shared experience of debate gave us a shared lexicon that enhanced our collaboration.