Abstract:
The rationality of this interdisciplinary transversal conversation is premised
upon the conviction that there is much in common between the relational ontology of
ubuntu (e.g. ubuntu ngummuntu ngabantu) and the philosophy of organism of English
mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead. It is revealed that the African aphorism
which speaks to the deepest longings of a people has metaphysical and philosophical
moorings and the speculative process schema is based on physicality. In the course of
the transversal encounter, the mutual prehension of ubuntu-process yields a systematic
response to creaturely physical and mental suffering. A challenge of theodicy is
encountered by 'process' in posing divine passive complicity amid active redemption.
Ubuntu, for its part, is expanded into a responsive postfoundational mode. In both
internal conversations, ubuntu proves that it can bear the weight of an expanded
application and process prehensions are given flesh. An extended narratological
examination takes place between ubuntu-process, neuroscience and an ubuntu-process
approach to the homiletic of parables. Suggested trajectories for further application of a
postfoundational understanding of ubuntu, armed with not only its liminal expertise but
the relational cosmology of the philosophy of organism will comprise invitations to
apply Whiteheadean ubuntu-process to investigations of human relationship to the
environment and among differing human tribal allegiances, an elaboration of its intraand
inter-personal/intra- and inter-social dynamics drawing upon the learning from the
permeability of formal fuzzy logic, further elaboration awaits in an ubuntu-process
contribution to studies of integral theory, critical theory and embodied realism; the place
of ubuntu-process among other ontologies and, finally, the role of ubuntu-process in
descriptive and prescriptive analyses of mimetic dynamics.
