An Igbo Dualistic Conception of The Human Being: A Discourse

Abstract

The conception of the human being remains a philosophical controversial discourse among scholars even of Igbo extraction. The discourse has taken many dimensions describable as social, ontological, aesthetic, theologico-anthropological and even normative, but the loophole is that none appears all-inclusive to inhere a negative conception. Consequent upon that, each conception influences the components of the human being according to each conceiver. But what is truly the nature of the human being? Is s/he entirely made up of only physical or spiritual or bothcomponents? Thus, as a contibution, this paper upholds an ontological dualistic human conception by the Umuoka people that presents the human being as Maadjvuru 'survivedsustained-spirit' and that influences the numerous components of the human being. That is, a metaphysics on the human nature that presents the human being as a spirit that is socio-ontologically sustained in the community. The expectation from this paper is therefore a defence of a metaphysical presentation of the human being as a manifestation of the spirit, a concretized-spirit with complex physical and spiritual components whose sustenance is both social and ontological, and whose existential experiences underpin the complexity and reality of his/her nature. Taking a critical and analytic design, this paper shall adopt hermeneuticalapproaches.