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232 Chapter 9
tarianism. It is only through the support of others that we are to realise true
individuality and rise above and beyond our biological distinctiveness into a
person whose singularity is inseparable from the journey to moral and
ethical development. Individuation is an achievement that involves struggle
and the acceptance of rites of passage. Ifeanyi Menkiti captures this
relationship between biological distinctiveness and personhood in the
following passage:
In the stated journey of the individual toward personhood, let it therefore be
noted that the community plays a vital role both as catalyst and as prescriber of
norms. The idea is that in order to transform what is initially a biological
given into full personhood, the community of necessity has to step in, since
the individual himself or herself, cannot carry through the transformation
unassisted. But what are the implications of this idea of a biologically given
organism having first to go through a process of social and ritual
transformation, so as to attain the full complement of excellences seen as
definitive of the person?
One conclusion appears inevitable, and it is to the effect that personhood is
the sort of thing which has to be achieved, the sort of thing at which
individuals could fail. I suppose that another way of putting the matter is to
say that the approach to persons in traditional thought is generally speaking
maximal, a more exacting approach insofar as it reaches for something
beyond such minimalist requirements as the presence of consciousness,
memory, will, soul, rationality or mental function. The project of being or
becoming persons, it is believed, is truly a serious project that stretches
beyond the raw capacities of the isolated individual, and it is a project
laden with the possibility of triumph, but also of failure. 17
If the community is committed to individuation and the achievement of a
unique destiny for each person, the person in turn is obligated to enhance the
community that supports him or her, not simply as an abstract duty that is
correlated with a right, but as a form of participation that allows the
community to strive for fidelity to what Masalo has called participatory
difference. 18 For Masalo, this participatory difference recognises that each
one of us is different, but also that each one of us is called upon to make a
difference by contributing to the creation and sustenance of a humane ethical
community. We can understand, then, that our ethical relationship to
others is inseparable from how we are both embedded in and supported by
a community that is not outside of us, something over ‘there’, but is
inscribed in us. The inscription of the other also calls the individual out of
himself or herself. Ubuntu is in this sense a call for transcendence. The
individual is called back towards the ancestors, forwards toward the
community, and further towards relations of mutual support for the potential
of each one of us.
17 I Menkiti ‘On the normative conception of the person’ in K Wiredu (ed) A
18
companion to African philosophy (2006) 203.
D Masalo ‘Western and African communitarianism’ in Wiredu (n 17 above) 496.