12 - Common understanding and individual voices

Summary

Some experiences are common to all human beings. They are responses to what R. F. Holland called the ‘big facts’ of human life – our mortality, our sexuality, our vulnerability to suffering, and so on. The commonness of these experiences is thought to transcend culture, even though different cultures make different things of them. Some people believe that acknowledgment of them includes a sense of common humanity that implies a sense of fellowship. It sometimes includes the thought, often voiced outside of philosophy, that human beings are at bottom the same, and that were we fully to acknowledge it, then that would of itself place certain ethical limits on our conduct. George Orwell expressed it when he said, in order to explain why he could not shoot an enemy soldier who was running holding up his trousers, ‘I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”, but a man who is holding up his trousers is not a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you do not feel like shooting at him.’ Simone Weil expresses a similar, but stronger, thought when she says that if one recognises a person being as a perspective on the world, as one is oneself, then one could not treat that person unjustly.