Ubuntu Village · Metaphysics & Ancestral Wisdom
The West asks if you are free. Our ancestors asked a truer question.
For centuries, Western philosophy has framed one of life’s deepest questions as a duel: free will versus determinism. Are you the author of your choices, or is every move written in advance — by your genes, your upbringing, the laws of physics, the will of the gods? It’s a powerful question. But notice how it’s built: it assumes a single, separate self standing alone against the universe, asking whether I am free. Our ancestors asked it differently. And in that difference is a wisdom the duel keeps missing.
Beginning from “We,” Not “I”
Ubuntu teaches us, “I am because we are.” Before we ask whether the individual is free, we have to ask a prior question the Western frame skips—is the self even separate to begin with?
In much of African and diaspora thought, a person is not a lone atom of will but a knot in a living web of relationships: ancestors, family, community, land, and the not-yet-born. Your choices are real. They are also shaped by, and accountable to, everyone you are bound to. That isn’t a loss of freedom. It’s a truer picture of where freedom actually lives—not in isolation, but in relationship.
So the question shifts. Not “am I a free agent or a determined machine?” But how do we shape one another, carry one another, and choose—together—what we become? Our piece on epigenetics and ancestral memory explores the science behind how ancestors transmit more than stories — they transmit biological imprints that shape who we become.
The Western Debate—Honestly Told
This is worth understanding on its own terms, because brilliant people have wrestled with it for a long time.
The case for free will: humans possess genuine agency—the power to choose independently of outside force. Without it, the argument goes, moral responsibility collapses; you can’t hold someone accountable for what they couldn’t help.
The case for determinism: every choice is the product of prior causes—genetics, environment, history, the laws of nature. Hard determinism calls free will an outright illusion. Soft determinism says our behavior is caused but can still be influenced.
Kant’s challenge: Immanuel Kant argued free will and determinism are incompatible—that a world with the same past and same natural laws must unfold the same future, leaving no room for genuine freedom. Yet he insisted humans possess a capacity for self-determination that mere physical law can’t explain.
The compatibilist bridge: compatibilists argue the two can coexist. Freedom, in their view, isn’t acting outside all causes—it’s acting in line with your own desires and values. You can be both caused and free if your actions flow from who you genuinely are. Critics say this just redefines the word to dodge the hard part.
What Neuroscience Adds—and What It Doesn’t Settle
Modern brain research has thrown fuel on the fire. Some studies suggest the brain begins forming a decision before we’re consciously aware of choosing—which some read as proof that “free will” is a story we tell after the fact.
But this is less settled than headlines suggest. That our choosing has a physical basis in the body doesn’t mean choosing isn’t real—it means choice is embodied, which our ancestors never doubted. The breath, the gut, the nervous system have always been part of how wisdom moves through a person. Neuroscience is, in its own language, rediscovering that the mind is not a ghost floating above the body. That’s not the death of agency. It’s a more honest map of it. Our piece on mirror neurons and communal healing explores how the brain is wired for shared decision-making and collective belonging. That inquiry leads naturally to a deeper question: where do thoughts themselves begin before we are aware of them? We’ve looked closely at the origin of your thoughts — examining how consciousness generates ideas before we consciously claim them as our own.
The Ancestors Are Not Your Fate
Here is where the duel most badly misleads us. It’s tempting to file “the ancestors,” “inheritance,” and “where you come from” under determinism—as if the past is the thing that robs you of choice.
That is not how ancestral wisdom holds it.
Your lineage is not a sentence handed down. It’s an inheritance handed over—and what you do with it is yours. The ancestors provide you with language, memory, survival, wounds, and gifts. Then they ask, “What will you carry forward? What will you heal? What ends with you?” That is agency in its deepest form—not freedom from the past, but the freedom to choose your relationship to it.
This is why, in this tradition, destiny and choice are not enemies. You may be born into a story already in motion. You still hold the pen for your chapter. Determinism says the river’s course is fixed. Ubuntu says, “Yes, there is a river—and you are one of the hands that bends it for those downstream.”
Why This Question Matters for How We Live
This isn’t an abstract puzzle. What you believe about agency shapes how you live.
Reject agency entirely, and you risk fatalism—the helpless sense that nothing you do matters, that you are only a leaf on the current. For communities that have survived slavery, colonization, and systemic injustice, fatalism is not just sad; it is disarming. It tells the oppressed that their efforts are pointless. History says otherwise. Every act of resistance, every freedom won, and every lineage that refused to be erased is evidence that human beings bend the river.
And yet pure, isolated “I did it all myself” individualism is its distortion—it erases the community, the ancestors, and the collective labor on which any real freedom is built. No one is self-made. We are made by, and we make, each other.
The truest place to stand is between the two: empowered and accountable. You have real power to choose. And your choices belong to a “we”—they ripple backward to honor those who carried you and forward to free those still to come.
The Resolution Isn’t a Verdict—It’s a Practice
Western philosophy keeps hunting for a final answer: free will, or determinism, or compatibilism—case closed. Maybe that’s the wrong shape for the question.
Our ancestors didn’t resolve the tension. They lived it—holding destiny and choice, fate and freedom, the individual and the community, all at once, in practice rather than in proof. Pour the libation and plant the seed. Honor what was written and pick up the pen.
That is the wisdom the duel can’t reach. Not a winner between free will and determinism—but a way of living that refuses the false choice between them.
I am because we are. And the river bends in our hands.
References & Further Reading
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Free Will (the authoritative scholarly overview)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Compatibilism
- BBC Science Focus — Do We Have Free Will? (accessible neuroscience summary)
Related Links
When the Ego Shadows the Self: The Problem of Limited Identity
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About the Author: Kimathi
Kimathi is a Nairobi-based writer and cultural observer contributing to Ubuntu Village’s Africa desk. His work documents the lives, subcultures, and overlooked stories of everyday Kenyans — from the nganya matatu scene to the night workers who carry the city while it sleeps. He writes from the inside out, with the city in his bones.
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