Page 22 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

Uniqueness Mpho Tshivhase, Department of Philosophy
In a world where the focus tends to be more on group identities and group solidarity than individuals, the question regarding the uniqueness of persons seems to have fallen by the wayside.
The work of Dr Mpho Tshivhase in the Department of Philosophy focuses on both personhood and uniqueness. In 2018, she contributed a chapter to the book, Ubuntu and Personhood (Africa World Press) in which she defends the concept of personhood as primarily individual, thus displacing morality as definitive of our understanding of being.
Her focus has since homed in on uniqueness in order to capture
what is radically distinct about an individual’s identity.
She writes that, while most contemporary research on uniqueness tends to compare objects that are different in kind, her own interest is in the uniqueness of persons in relation to other persons, i.e. as instances of the same kind. In short, she is interested in what makes persons unique as beings with the same biological makeup.
Uniqueness of persons refers to
the radical difference that captures the distinctiveness of persons that enables us to speak of a person as the only person who can be who s/ he is; thus persons could be defined with respect to irreplaceability, incomparability, and rarity. In relation to persons as instances of the same kind, we could speak of a unique person as a person who is one-within-
her-kind (since nobody within her kind would be exactly like her). This kind of uniqueness, Tshivhase argues, is not given. Uniqueness of persons, or ‘processual uniqueness’, as she terms it, is a matter of construction wherein the necessary conditions for such construction include, but are not limited to, autonomy and authenticity.
Comparable views, such as genetic uniqueness, generic uniqueness,
and personalism, frame uniqueness of persons as an aspect of human- ness that is always already given. Tshivhase’s work rejects notions of uniqueness that frame the distinct nature of individuals in this way because such notions do not take into account normative aspects that are relevant in the formation of identities.
There is evidence of the valuing and relevance of uniqueness of persons in society, perhaps best illustrated
in the artistic industries and art
world where contracts are based on an individual’s uniqueness. Other instances that illustrate an implicit valuing of uniqueness include love, death, and cloning. Love makes it possible to perceive a person’s incomparable value, while death is an instance of recognising an individual’s irreplaceability. The notion of rarity
is also notable in the discomfort that persons display towards cloning.
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