Trajectories for future ubuntu-process transversal conversations

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Ubuntu-process

This project began as a thought experiment upon ‘process’ fieldwork to launch this particular European/Occidental-formulated system of thought in search of a lived example of its epistemological categories and intersubjectivity of being. Here, the transversal rationale places the philosophy of organism under the gaze of ubuntu in search of lived relevance and places ubuntu in a philosophical conversation with an interlocutor. This present work canalizes a multivalent flow of expressions and experiences between hemispheres of culture, epistemologies by way of cosmology, theodicies and narratologies.

This relationship which forms the basis of this present work is a conversation in the prehension and concrescence of mutually-encountering entities (whether speculative or ‘real’). In the journey of laying out the conversation between ‘process’ thought and ubuntu we arrive at a unified yet internally variegated system of epistemology and ubuntu-process. A transversal encounter awaits in its modified integral theory, adapted critical realism and postfoundational embodied realism. A fish does not know that she is in water (we are, of course, assuming this along with our silence as to a fish’s drive to know) nor, in the case of gill fish, that she is ‘filtering’ water to extract oxygen in order to ‘breath’. However, humans (and certain other sentients along the hierarchy of being) can know the physical, mental and metaphorical mediums in which we swim for our survival as a species and our identification as a member of a society. Ubuntu and the philosophy of organism are seen as two sides of the same philosophical and existential river, two mutually-prehending objects/occasions which we will traverse, back and forth, alternately engaging and standing apart from each discipline to discern their respective “operative principles and lines of force” (McLuhan 1969).

Exegeting a postfoundationalist ubuntu

This work is an exploit of the intersubjective nature of the conversation between ‘process’ and ubuntu, as two disciplines each revealing their understandings and articulations of the intersubjectivity of life and thereby uncovering an epistemological postfoundational ubuntu-process capable of an expanded confidence in incorporating creaturely occasions of suffering as well as a transversal epistemological resource for a narratology. This goal will be achieved through an introductory distillation of key ‘process’ speculative cosmological/ontological categories with special attention to areas of both parallel convergence with and co-incident reverberation within the renown African aphorism ubuntu, variously translated; e.g. in Ramose (1999:49f), as “a person is a person through other persons”.

This synoptic accounting examines ubuntu tethered to the aphorism’s African, cultural moorings while opening ubuntu’s philosophical, anthropological and spiritual external limits and plumbing the depths of its internal relational ontology, moving it towards a postfoundational understanding of ubuntu. At the outset, it must be acknowledged that while the lived application of ubuntu may be arguably understood as presuming a humanist moral impetus (e.g. Metz 2007:321,n3; 328, passim), the emphases of this present study is descriptive of an intersubjective relational ontology by which a postfoundationalist ubuntu becomes with the philosophy of organism, an acceptance of a humanist explication which renders in its transversal conversation a conjoint, and all-encompassing, systematic cosmology, theology, theodicy, and narratology.

The conversational journey

The structure of this transversal conversation – between its introduction (1.0) and suggested trajectories of further investigation (5.0) – is in three sections: (2.0) “Whitehead’s process ontology, where processes are structured productions with definitive result or culmination points…[as]…an ontology of events” (Seibt 2005:18), including an introduction to the eight descriptive fundamental categories of existence of the philosophy of organism; each interwoven with existential and philosophical affinities within the ubuntu worldview; (3.0) an exposition of Whitehead’s ‘process’ ontological accounting of occasions of suffering.

the ontological affinity of this ‘process’ schema and the inter-relatedness categorized by ubuntu relationships will invite that African aphorism into a hermenetic of dialogue with its interlocutor using the stepping stones of Whiteheadean categories; the challenging consideration of passive complicity of the divine realm in the “allowance” of creaturely suffering as the only alternative to a loss of free will be extended through a postfoundationalist portrait of ubuntu which does not pretend that suffering, evil and injustice is not part of the warp-and-woof of the creaturely domain; (4.0) the blended and dynamic space occupied by the relational activity and ontology of an ubuntu-process community is applied through a transversal conversation with neurolinguistics to reveal that the African aphorism reflected in the aide memoire of the word ubuntu can be applied in the field of homiletics particularly and narratology generally.

Table of Contents

• 1.0. Introduction
  • 1.1 Transversality against stereotypes
  • 1.2 Ubuntu-process
  • 1.3 Exegeting a postfoundationalist ubuntu
  • 1.4 The conversational journey
  • 1.5 Against dualisms of Cartesian, narrative and nostalgic natures
• 2.0 Cosmology: Philosophy of organism a cosmology at the service of ubuntu
  • 2.1 A postfoundationalist endeavour
  • 2.2 Suspicion of the speculative
  • 2.3 Conciliation in the liminal space:
  • between the alligator and the hippo
  • 2.4 The uncomfortable space
  • 2.5 A relational ontology of ubuntu-process
    • 2.5.1 An ontology of ‘events’
    • 2.5.2 Not serial, not uni-directional
    • 2.5.3 The transitory and tri-fold nature of prehensions
    • 2.5.4 The One and the Many become one another
    • 2.5.5 Being, Becoming and Perishing
    • 2.5.6 Evolution – including God
    • 2.5.7 Consciousness and interactions
      • 2.5.7.1 Unity of pattern/diversity of input
      • 2.5.7.2 Modes of feeling
    • 2.6.0 Eight ‘process’ categories of existence
    • 2.6.1 Entities, occasions, res verae, res vera
    • 2.6.2 Prehensions
      • 2.6.2.1 The ties that bind
    • 2.6.3 Nexus
    • 2.6.4 Subjective forms
    • 2.6.5. Eternal objects/potentials
      • 2.6.5.1 Hierarchy of Eternal Objects
    • 2.6.6 Propositions
      • 2.6.6.1 Whiteheadean feelings and ubuntu encounters
    • 2.6.7 Multiplicities/Disjunctions of diverse entities: How an ubuntu community ‘gets along’
    • 2.6.8 Contrasts/Synthesis
      • 2.6.8.1 Space and time
    • 2.7.0 Transversal ontologies
    • 2.7.1 Traversality of ubuntu-process
    • 2.7.2 Three-fold ubuntu-process
      • 2.8 The Blackness of Ubuntu
    • 2.9.0 Transversal hierarchies
    • 2.9.1 of human Being
    • 2.9.2 of God

• 3.0 Theodicy/Androdicy/Gynodicy of ubuntu-process
  • 3.1 Suffering
    • 3.1.1 Is God complicit?
    • 3.1.2 Is human suffering Eve’s fault?
  • 3.2 An ubuntu-process response to all disequilibria
  • 3.3 A search for an authentic ubuntu response to crises
    • 3.3.1 Incorporating occasions of suffering/injustice
    • 3.3.2 Of women
    • 3.3.3 Via Etymology: ubu-/-ntu
    • 3.3.4 Extending the postfoundational reach of ubuntu-process
• 4.0 Narratology
  • 4.0.1 Metaphors and models
  • 4.0.2 Shared space of homiletics
  • 4.0.3 How one story makes sense of another
  • 4.0.4 Story as multidimensional validation
  • 4.0.5 Ontology of shared narrative
  • 4.0.6 Mutually-prehending stories and the ‘literary’ mind
  • 4.0.7 How language works: a neuroscience -process/ubuntu transversality
  • 4.1.0 Narratology at work
    • 4.1.1 A parabolic journey through II Samuel 12:1b
    • 4.1.1.1 The parable ‘trap’ is set
    • 4.1.1.2 The parable ‘trap’ is sprung
    • 4.1.2 Ubuntu-process exegesis applied
• Parable 1: How the poor man caught a king
  • 4.1.3 Ubuntu-process exegesis applied
• Parable 2: The Lion and the Corn
• 5.0 Trajectories for future ubuntu-process transversal conversations
  • 5.1 Of the environment and other tribes
  • 5.2 ‘Fuzzy’ boundaries of ubu-/-ntu
  • 5.3 Integral Theory/Critical Theory/Embodied Realism
  • 5.4 Other ontologies
    • 5.4.1 Meretopology
  • 5.5 Mimesis and longing
  • Bibliography

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