As we all know helper methods in lighting usually have the following signature:

openAffiliationCreateDialog : function(component, event) { ... }

My question here, is it possible to stop passing component around and figure it out from current context (i.e. THIS) right inside helper function?

We have some hierarchy of components which share common logic from basic helper through inheritance. And not all of basic helper methods have component as param. Now we need to add some additional functionality inside those methods "without component" which need to access some component attributes. So I'm wondering if there is a better way instead of going and modifying each helper method execution passing component as a param.