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The Notion Of The Human Person In Kierkegaard Vis-À-vis African Individual
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In relation to the “existing subjectâ€7, the existentialists treat such
themes as freedom, decision, responsibility, finitude, guilt,
alienation, despair, death, the emotional life of man, problems of
language, history, society, and being. Some of these matters, which are
of great interest to the existentialists, have hitherto scarcely been
regarded as appropriate themes for philosophy at all. However, it is in
the exploration and development of these themes, drawn mostly from the
affective elements in personal life that the existentialist philosophers
have made their most important and characteristic contributions to
philosophy.
The African equally has a well-developed view of the
“existing subjectâ€. For the African, the “existing subject’, that is,
the human person is not alone in the exercise of his freedom, decision,
choice, responsibility and so on. He is a being with-others. He is never
an Island in the world of things and persons. Hence, John Mbiti has to
say of the African man: “I am because we are; and since we are,
therefore I amâ€8. Africans have a unitary world-view. These imply that
while Kierkegaard’s individual, the “existing subject,†is highly
individualistic, Africans make a further step of considering the
individual not just as a selfish existing subject, but more as a subject
existing among other subjects. In Heideggerian parlance, the African
considers the human person as a “being-withâ€. It is this rather
conflicting notion of the human person in Kierkegaard and the African
that forms the crux of this investigation.
1.1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The
notion of the human person has been a matter of serious concern to the
existentialist philosophers. But prior to the emergence of this
movement, philosophers have neglected the matters concerning the
concrete existing man. The pre-Socratic philosophers concentrated on the
cosmological aspect of the world. It was Socrates who came and for the
first time, directed the attention of philosophy to man. His belief is
that all the physical existent exist only in relation to the existing
subject. And this is correct. But no sooner had Socrates gone out of
sight than the concrete problems of man in his environment were
forgotten. Philosophers deviated from the existing individual to the
physical sciences. Philosophers over the ages have been philosophizing
on abstract principles that have no direct relevance to the existing
individual. This led to the depersonalize, dehumanization and
objectification of the human person. Man was no more regarded as a
dignified being but rather considered in relation to the function he was
able to perform. This frightening erosion of human values and the
abysmal depreciation of the dignity of the human person reached its
apogee at the dawn of the twentieth century technological advancement.
To be particular, the absence of the ‘person’ as an existent in the
philosophy of Hegel woke Kierkegaard from his ignoble slumber and
brought forth the birth of existentialism.
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