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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. + ]4 +
