“A person is a person through other persons”: Ubuntu philosophy as educating Sara Lidman’s literary philosophy of conscience

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptual conversation that takes place between African Ubuntu philosophy and the concept of conscience in the novel Jag och min son [Me and My Son] (1961/1963) by the renowned Swedish author and activist Sara Lidman (1923–2004).The novel explores the moral self-deception of the white, racist, colonial oppression in South Africa, through a first-person-narrated story. Throughout the novel, the narrator, a white Swedish man, fights against his own conscience as a usurper in Johannesburg. The novel’s concept of conscience, the article argues, is informed by the Ubuntu understanding of humanity: that a person is a person through other persons. By investigating this conceptual connection through the prism of Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, and especially his notion of acknowledgement, the article argues that Lidman – in this novel – formulates a moral philosophy that in which literature itself constitutes a form of shared sixth human sense: conscience.