Constitution Limb

Canonical definition

The second limb of the Reciprocal Care Principle, holding that no Individual is constitutively self-sufficient and that treating any Individual as self-sufficient is a category error of the Constitution-Direction type, because the provision experienced as self-originating is constituted from the periphery (capable others plus the institutional A-floor). See Reciprocal Care Principle. Explanation. Nobody stands entirely on their own. What feels like "I provide for myself" is actually built out of what capable others around you supply, plus a basic social safety-net underneath. Treating any person as truly self-sufficient gets the facts wrong: the support is real, it is just invisible because it arrives from the edges rather than from the centre. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". John Donne (1572-1631).