Radical Love, Revolutionary Becoming: Creating an Ethic of Love in the Realm of Education Through Buddhism and Ubuntu

• In Event: Roundtable Session 56
  In Roundtable Session: Praxis and Spirituality: Radical Transformations

Abstract

This paper re-conceptualizes the notion of the subject through a privileging of onto-epistemologies antecedent to Western thought; namely, the South African philosophy of Ubuntu and the Eastern philosophy of Zen Buddhism. South African and Eastern notions of subjectivity eradicate the independent, self-contained Western subject and reveals the subject in a perpetual process of becoming, born and re-born in relationship with the other, thereby radically transforming our being-doing in the world. Within the educational milieu, this new understanding of subjectivity together with the practice of the Brahmaviharas–loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity–opens the possibility of an ethical, more humane future free of the violence of dominance, guided by love and mediated through the praxis of a pedagogical ethic of love.

Author

• David Wayne Robinson-Morris, Louisiana State University