“According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’”
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“Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that […] by ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book. […] Being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.”
SOURCE: Birhane, Abeba. “Descartes Was Wrong: ‘a Person Is a Person through Other Persons.’” Aeon
Comparative Literature Journal 