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ELIZABETH TROTT
Characteristics of individuation within the concept of humanity have
changed over time. One only need track the concepts of slave, child, or female
human being. What matters is that the dialectic of self and other selves
sustains differences without negating similarities. For example, we all need
water, though we all do not, by definition, like or respect each other.
Thus, we can be individuated within a context of other conscious human
beings. The concept of ‘other’ needs further clarification for it can extend to
infinite possibilities.
Others as community
‘Infinite possibilities’ is a conceptual description that unites us, and one
used by Leslie Armour in his article, “Economic Rights and Philosophical
Anthropology.”® Armour’s research followed the Saumur collective living in
the French town Saumur in the 1600s — a collective of Protestant, Catholic, and
agnostic academics working together to find common ground. The emerging
consensus was that human beings, in recognizing the infinite capacities of
God, though presumably beyond our grasp, must have infinite capacities
themselves, such as infinite ways of creating orders and structuring the
‘other.’ Some new concepts for stabilizing social orders beyond the accepted
dictates of religious declarations needed promoting. In fearing the economic
chaos that could result should religious wars prove pointless, principles of
order recognizable beyond a community’s beliefs and shared by infinite
minds needed to be fostered. For Armour, the claim to economic rights is
the basis for humans to develop their infinite possibilities, while recognizing
similarities with others emerged from sharing a common need to survive.
Armour’s exposition demonstrates that it is possible to recognize our
capacity to generate new orders of the human community. To suppress and
deny that conceptual possibility would be to deny one’s infinite creative
problem solving possibilities.
The dialectic of individual and community does not determine the
characteristics that comprise a cultural group within the human collective.
However, it does suggest that whatever the conceptual orderings of a culture
may be, they are not beyond comprehension and alteration. If we can rethink
the relations between individuals and God, we can rethink human relations to
all discernible experiences in innumerable ways. That means we can recognize
the possibility of understanding the cultural orders of other communities.
° Leslie Armour, Economic Rights and Philosophical Anthropology, in William Sweet (ed.),
Philosophical Theory and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ottawa, University of
Ottawa, 2003, 53-66.
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