Community, Individuality, and Reciprocity in Menkiti

2021

We are in a society where its system permits an individual to take precedence over a group/community; the reason why we often put wealth above good character. In Africa, some scholars, text and philosophers have attributed this social woe on imperial influx that took over African traditional institution around 19th century. In his quest to search for socio-cultural, metaphysical, epistemic and moral constituents of a person, Ifeanyi Menkiti, a prolific African philosopher gave a turgid articulation on the Person and Community in African Traditional Thought, with a sharp position that a community/group takes precedence over a person/individual. Put difference, it is a community that defines an individual. This paper therefore is committed to review and critically examine contents in this Menkiti’s radical communitarian position. Doing this, we shall examine the essence of a person/individual (with a special focus on metaphysical, epistemic and moral constituents of a person), the pro...

2018

I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am", generally regarded as the guiding principle of African humanism, expresses the view that a person is a person through other persons and is closely associated but not identical with African communitarianism, or communalism. Against Ifeanyi Menkiti's "unrestricted or radical or excessive communitarianism" Kwame Gyekye has proposed a "restricted or moderate communitarianism". Whereas personhood, for Menkiti, is acquired over time, with increasing moral maturation, seniority and agency, Gyekye considers it to arise automatically with being born human. The problem with Menkiti's account of personhood is that it is at once too wide and too narrow. On the other hand, it remains unclear to what extent Gyekye's is a communitarian view-and to what extent it is distinctly 'African'. I conclude with a critical reflection on the implications of African communalism and personhood for non-human animals.

MADONA UNIVERSITY Thought and Action Journal of Philosophy, 2022

Abstract: Conceptualization of personhood by Menkiti’s (1984) Person and Community in African Traditional Thought, Gyekye’s (1992) Akan Concept of a Person and Mbiti’s (1970) African Religions and Philosophy has shown that communal intimate belongingness is mostly limited to a micro community more than the totality of a larger African community. Within the context of this communal living, they have argued that, an individual owns no personality, and only becomes a person through social and ritual incorporation. For these scholars, personhood has been pictured as a state of life that is acquired “as one participates in communal life through the discharge of the various obligations defined by one’s stations” (Menkiti, 1984 p.176). Personhood they say, is a quality acquired as one gets older. Hence, according to them age is the determinant factor. This paper argues that, this mode of thinking not only ignores the essentials of personhood, namely, self-determination and the rights of the individual but it also, exposes the overbearing mode of the community and scuttles the inherent freedom and primacy of the individual thought and his right to question communal ideas. The youth has a different point of view from that of an older individual, though both are defined by the quality of personhood. African wisdom literature upholds that life in its existential meaning is human fellowship and solidarity among individuals though, the rights of individual persons and freedom of self-expression within the communities are not in doubt. The paper argues the conclusion that, while communal ethos matures the individual in the community, such conclusion does not have ontological and epistemological precedence over individual persons. In his lone level, the individual experiences varying modes of competing epistemologies that activates his moral arsenals to evaluate, protest, distance and effect reform on some features of the community to ingratiate his widely varying needs and interests. Key Words: Communitarianism, personhood, personal identity, ethical maturity, human well-being, African thought, African philosophy, African heritage, inter-cultural philosophy, African studies.

This article explores Kwasi Wiredu's argument that personhood is a status to be obtained through one's community instead of being given on account of being born a human. Therefore, a person becomes (or loses) their personhood through communal engagement. This makes personhood a moral and political concept with massive implications for how Western philosophy perceives the self and the other. I argue that these moral and political implications are much stronger than many want to realize. Wiredu's account, if accepted, compels one to reconceive the notion of personal development, worldhood, and what decolonization entails.

Slavery, colonialism and racism unanimously, conferred on Africans the denigrating status of a people without rationality and knowledge. This denigration and denial of humanity to the African man spurred many African scholars to develop theories that would counter those erroneous Western views. In an attempt to tell African story by Africans J.S Mbiti developed his notion of African personhood that is regarded as being communalistic. In fact, Mbiti so popularized the communalistic concept of personhood as the universal African view that his famous aphorism "I am because we are and since we are therefore, I am" has become a point of reference to every generation of African thinkers. This paper is convinced that the reason for this state of affair is that the issue of African personhood has not been given the attention it deserves, as it has been somehow occluded by the bland assertion of communalism that has fast turned into a cliché. This neglect also lies at the root of some of the continent's most intractable problems since a people's anthropology certainly influences their political and economic systems. Thus, the article employs the method of hermeneutics to contest the Mbitian-African communalistic concept of personhood. Contrary to Mbiti's view, the paper discovered that Africans have an understanding of the person that is so complex so much so that it cannot be collapsed into the so-called communalistic system. The article consequently, following Ike Odimegwu recommended "integrative personhood" as, a better representation of the African communalistic worldview.

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematise moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights.

Social Identities, 2001

Is the idea of 'the autonomous person' a European invention? This conundrum, posed to us by colleagues in philosophy and anthropology at the University of Heidelberg in June 1997, seems straightforward enough. Even ingenuous. But hiding beneath its surface is another, altogether less innocent question, one which carries within it a silent claim: to the extent that 'the autonomous person' is a European invention, does its absence elsewhere imply a de cit, a failure, a measure of incivility on the part of non-Europeans? And what of the corollary: is this gure, this 'person', the end point in a world-historical telos, something to which non-occidentals are inexorably drawn as they cast off their primordial differences? Is it, in other words, a universal feature of modernity-in-the-making, a Construct in the Upper Case? Or is it merely a lower case, local euroconstruct? 1 We begin our excursion into African conceptions of personhood in a decentring, relativising voice, the voice often assumed by anthropologists to discomfort cross-disciplinary, transcultural, suprahistorical discourses about Western categories, their provenance and putative universality. From our disciplinary perspective, 'the autonomous person', that familiar trope of European bourgeois modernity (Taylor, 1989), is a Eurocentric idea. And a profoundly parochial, particularistic one at that. 2 To be sure, the very notion that this generic person might constitute a universal is itself integral to its Eurocultural construction, a part of its ideological apparatus. What is more, 'the autonomous person'-the de nite, singular article-describes an imaginaire, an ensemble of signs and values, a hegemonic formation: neither in Europe, nor any place else to which it has been exported, does it exist as an unmediated sociological reality (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 60f). Neither, of course, does the classical contrast between (I) the self-made, self-conscious, right-bearing individual of 'modern Western society', that hyphenated Cartesian gure epitomised in the Promethean hero of Universal History (Carlyle, 1842, p. 1), and (ii) the relational, ascriptive, communalistic, inert self attributed to premodern others. As we shall see, African notions of personhood are in nitely more complicated than this tired theoretical antinomy allows (

2013

The paper is based on the hypothesis that received meanings of personhood in any social context are almost always associated with notions of power. Drawing on some interesting insights from the quite recent history of African philosophy as a counter-colonial practice as well as from available evidence in social anthropology, the paper specifically investigates the link between social power and a widely received conception of personhood namely, the communitarian/ normative conception of personhood. Two central claims are advanced. First, the paper suggests that the search for and the articulation of a distinctive African conception of personhood are strongly motivated by some non-epistemic motive, which the paper identifies as a struggle for power. Second, the paper argues that the communitarian/normative conception of personhood is deeply contingent upon social power differentials among individuals in community and, relatedly, this feature of socially engendered personhood is suffic...

2017

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.exists the notion in African philosophy that to be regarded as a person, an individual needs to be morally excellent, and the way to secure this moral excellence is through maintaining good relations with others, meaning that one has duties directed towards others. This is the view which was popularized in philosophy by Ifeanyi Menkiti (1984) and is known as the communitarian normative conception of person. Proponents of this view tend to stress the importance of the community in facilitating the development of the individual. Kwame Gyekye (1997) argues against Menkiti for the latter’s over-exaggeration of the role of the community, and calls him a radical communitarian for doing so. However, Gyekye ends up committing to the same error as the radicals. As a result, a debate has ensued regarding the appropriate characterization of the community/individual relationship, with the above-mentioned philosophers, classic communi...

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2008