Philosophy's Continuous Coastline

Common sense, or sensus communis, may refer to (1) a human individual’s “sixth sense” that organizes and unifies inputs from the five physical senses. Common sense may also refer to (2) a widely distributed basic human awareness and ability to judge. Descartes started his Discourse on Method with the observation that “Good sense is of all things the most equally distributed … The power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly speaking what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men.” Finally, the sensus communis may refer to (3) the results of human judgments that exist in the form of viewpoints and values that are widespread within a particular linguistic or historical community. For example, Herodotus spoke the common sense of his culture by memorializing the Greco-Persian Wars and ensuring that certain human achievements might neither be forgotten nor lose their glory. Since viewpoints and values persist over a period of time and are inculcated into new generations while a community lasts, this third type of sensus communis may be said to form a tradition. All three types of sensus communis play a role in creating the linguistic and intellectual environment required for philosophical analysis and synthesis.

Did Kant think that humans possess any variety of sensus communis among their higher faculties? If so, then is the Kantian sensus communis concerned with coordinating sensory input, as in (1); competence in judging, as in (2); or creation and evaluation of historical traditions, as in (3)?

Regarding judgment: For Kant, sensible intuition serves as the basis for human thought about nature. Objects given within consciousness (mental representations) arise from sensible matter (states of sense organs) and a priori sensible forms (space and time). Only on a higher level of cognition does natural knowledge arise from the understanding (correct judgment) applied to sensible intuitions, mental representations, or given objects. Regarding evaluation: Kant distinguishes between fulfilling hypothetical imperatives based on desire and obeying a Categorical Imperative based on a reverence for the moral law. Thus, Kant believes that there are higher cognitive faculties related to understanding and moral evaluation that we could view as varieties of sensus communis.

There is another Kantian higher faculty in which sensus communis plays a role: There exists an aesthetic faculty in which the imagination is applied to aesthetic intuitions (mental representations of a certain kind, i.e., aesthetic objects) in order to evaluate the subject’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure toward the aesthetic object. The very first footnote in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first half of his Critique of Judgment) defines taste as the faculty of judging the beautiful. Subsequently, in ¶ 1 of § 40 of that work, Kant says that although we may speak of senses of truth, beauty, or justice, etc. when referring to one’s dexterity in rendering judgments; we know full well that these concepts have no empirical basis but rather spring from (what we read as) “higher faculties.” [Kant seems in this paragraph carelessly to have lumped together all higher faculties into a single Erkentnisvermögen (faculty of cognition), which would contradict his overall thesis, stated in § 1, that the judgment of taste is not a judgment of cognition. (Das Geschmacksurteil ist also kein Erkenntnisurteil.)]

Continuing in ¶ 1 of § 40, Kant holds that common sense, interpreted as common human understanding (gemeiner Menschenverstand), may refer to “mere healthy understanding” (bloβ gesunder Menschenverstand); which is the least we can expect from a creature purporting to be human and which - - so far from being a positive distinction - - is actually a vulgar quality. Kant disdains Reid’s approach to common sense.

In ¶ 2 of § 40, however, Kant finds that gemeiner Verstand also bears the meaning gemeinschaftlicher Verstand, i.e., that common sense may refer to “public sense.” Common sense as public sense refers a perfectly disinterested subject’s (i.e., “one’s”) act of reflective judgment (Reflexion): One takes into account the a priori form of representation of all others in order to conform one’s judgment to that of the totality of human reason, thereby avoiding the illusion that private considerations might prejudice the judgment. This is accomplished by comparing one’s judgment not only to others’ actual judgments but also to others’ merely possible judgments, abstracting away from one’s own limitations. Kant admits that the operation of reflection appears rather too artificial to be common, but insists that abstracting away from mere charm and emotion is necessary when rendering a universal judgment. Nevertheless, it strikes the present writer that common sense as public sense involves more than just (2), the ability to judge aesthetic objects; and includes (3), the traditional results of judgments in particular communities in particular epochs.

In an aside in ¶ 3 of § 40 Kant states three “maxims of common sense”: First, think for yourself. Second, think from the standpoint of everyone else. Third, think consistently at all times. This is Kant’s formula for implementing the Enlightenment, blasting superstition and tradition, and restricting common sense to option (2) of our analysis.

Kant says in ¶ 4 of § 40 that taste is more justifiably designated as sensus communis or public sense than is “healthy understanding.” Aesthetic, rather than intellectual, judgment is the effect that mere reflection (bloβe Reflexion) has upon the mind; and this effect is a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Taste might even be defined as the faculty of judging what makes our feeling regarding a given representation universally communicable without the use of concepts. In a footnote, Kant identifies taste with a sensus communis aestheticus, whereas gemeiner Verstand corresponds to a sensus communis logicus.

In ¶ 5 of § 40 Kant reformulated the idea of mere reflection as the interaction between free imagination and understanding apart from concepts, resulting in the communication of an aesthetic representation (i.e., in an aesthetic representation communicating itself) as an internal feeling of a purposive state of mind, not as a thought.

Regarding the perfectly disinterested subject (the “one”) who is tasked with assessing common sense as public sense in the foregoing discussion: Are Kant and his readers trying to achieve a “view from nowhere,” consistent with the work of Thomas Nagel? His view is that achieving objective reality is a great good, but that objective reality is incomplete. Alternately, do we seek to approximate a “view from everywhere,” an estimated totality of human reason that may likewise be incomplete? Or are we looking for a “view from somewhere,” a land of particular traditions?

Kant embodied the Enlightenment tradition of thinking for oneself, which in turn derived from the Cartesian paradigm of retiring to a mountaintop with one’s reason and good sense (sensus communis) in order to establish all knowledge for oneself based on the cogito ergo sum. Modernity, including Kant’s philosophy, sees thinking for oneself as a rejection of all tradition, even though systematic thinking seems itself to be a tradition. In some of his lectures, Professor Phillip Cary has pointed out that post-modernity sees modernity as a tradition that is unaware of its own status as a tradition. On this view, modernity is either a dead end, because it and all other traditions have been discredited; or else one tenable tradition, among others, that has something to contribute to analysis and narration. Modernity seems to be a sensus communis of type (3) as defined in the first paragraph of this post.

Adopting one possible post-modern perspective, religions could be seen as interacting historical traditions in the quest for meaning. As an exponent of modernity, however, Kant saw traditional, revealed religions as potential sources of superstition. In terms of Venn diagrams, one imagines Kant depicting revealed religions as overlapping circles on a plane representing the “religious universe of discourse.” Kant seems to have implied that all “revealed-religion circles” overlap a common, smaller region representing a unique, natural religion of reason. For Kant, this Vernunftreligion exists as an aid in motivating moral choices, fulfilling the Categorical Imperative, and forming part of the philosopher’s proper domain of pure reason. (This view is adapted from the Preface to the second edition of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.) Nevertheless, the possibility that modernity and its Vernunftreligion may themselves be Western traditions seems to loom over the Kantian project.