Monday, April 3, 2017

Individualism and Moral Amnesia

A common grammatical error is an expression of Moral Amnesia: though 'individual' is properly a quantifier, it is routinely treated as a substantive.  In such cases, it is thereby abstracted from what it quantifies.  The usage, thus, furthermore, abstracts from the process that produces the signified entity, which, as is entailed by the concept of Individual, is the Instantiation of some Universal.  But, the human species is a biological whole, not a Universal, so the Logical representation of the generation of a new member is, more accurately, Diversification.  Thus, in several stages, the common use of 'an individual' dehumanizes its referent, i. e. expresses Moral Amnesia.  That diagnosis is not to deny that social homogenization is not an ill requiring resistance and correction; rather, it shows that 'Individualism' is tantamount to a cure by amputation, a welcome development, according to the theology of Salvation that seeks to rescue individual Souls from a cursed species.

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