This is a terrific piece. On the one hand, the world is upside-down. We need real thinking and action to set it right. On the other hand, the world, as it should be, is hidden from us, buried under all these layers of manipulation, exploitation, and repression. We have to get to the real common sense of things to set them right, to make them just. And what people believe is just can be absurd and really unjust.
Which then is common sense ? A vision of how the world really should be -- meaning, the real world below repression, provided we can see though it. Or how people perceive the world as it "really" is --- meaning when it isn't influenced by one element, usually whatever element is under discussion (i.e. taking the bate)?
In Arendt, Kant, and the German idealist, there is a debate about what constitutes common sense, which translates as gesunder Menschenverstand - something like healthy human understanding. In latin, which Arendt brings forward, its the senus communis, which places emphasis on what we understand together. Arendt places it at the center of politics - politics as the act of forming a common understanding.
There must be a discussion of sense communis in Chomsky. He believes in an innate form understanding in the form of an inner grammar. I aways wanted to read this in him but haven't yet. On a political level, he always likes to say phrases like: 'this is what any 10 year old child understands'. He loves Descartes, and in a way, hegelian/marxist thinking have driven us from Descartes. But there is a lot to be said for his vision of the autonomous freedom of common sense. It is in one of the Meditations, maybe 3, where he writes about sitting in front of the fire, in the living room, closing off all of the false and wrong impressions, impressions that can't be trusted, to get to a realm of true and pure thoughts about the world. The simplicity is hard to adapt today, considering all of the layers of repression. He is speaking about how we know things are true, rather than evil demons influencing us, giving us false ideas. But we can easily understand the world of capitalism, misogyny, heteronormativity, racism as Descartes demons, even if we cannot simply access the realm of common sense, but see it rather as a process of forming communal understanding.
Eric: thanks so much for this reading and commentary. I struggled with this dinner-table encounter because my knee-jerk reaction was to respond with my hard-won evidence-based knowledge about the complex relationship between class, race, location, age etc and "attitudes to drugs". But I knew that that was not what the speaker was getting at. He was talking about something else altogether. I read his statement as a moralistic one, as opposed to an intervention into a serious moral discussion about drug use, regulation, etc. Eventually I settled on common sense in the Gramscian sense because Hall's own work on common-sense thinking both under Thatcherism and neoliberalism are of course closely tied to the historical construction of middle England and its foil, the Islington soirée-loving chattering classes (my own soirée was a couple miles away in Hackney and queerer than the CCs are typically imagined I think, but I felt interrelated in that regard too, not just as an activist). So I went down a rather wandering British cultural-studies route. But I didn't have the opportunity to do something else (because this particular comment wasn't complex enough) which was to examine O'Shea and Hall's study of the "good sense" that sometimes appears in more complex examples of common sense (for example, when a seemingly reactionary statement about "benefit scroungers" also contains evidence of a critique of state abuse of power). And I'm left wondering if Arendt's thinking on the senus communis, and perhaps Chomsky too, might intersect here. And understanding contemporary oppressions as Descartes demons is also so interesting. A final thought: what you say about being driven away from Descartes by hegelian/marxist thinking reminds me that going back to Hall these days, and his (partial) critique of Foucault and preference for Gramsci's hegemony as crucial to understanding the workings of power and ideology, made me think about the odd formation of cannons, in which certain thinkers (Foucault in this case) come to and remain at the fore while others (Gramsci) are less often cited. Certainly true of gender and sexuality studies, even though in the popular sphere contemporary understandings of power and ideology are often voiced in much cruder, functionalist terms (on twitter anyway, and sometimes in the classroom). Lots more to discuss!
and I want to read Hall now. Also reproduced here in an edited volume: http://library.lol/main/4BC7B2C05B4C0D43BA6629B5AD9069B6
This is a terrific piece. On the one hand, the world is upside-down. We need real thinking and action to set it right. On the other hand, the world, as it should be, is hidden from us, buried under all these layers of manipulation, exploitation, and repression. We have to get to the real common sense of things to set them right, to make them just. And what people believe is just can be absurd and really unjust.
Which then is common sense ? A vision of how the world really should be -- meaning, the real world below repression, provided we can see though it. Or how people perceive the world as it "really" is --- meaning when it isn't influenced by one element, usually whatever element is under discussion (i.e. taking the bate)?
In Arendt, Kant, and the German idealist, there is a debate about what constitutes common sense, which translates as gesunder Menschenverstand - something like healthy human understanding. In latin, which Arendt brings forward, its the senus communis, which places emphasis on what we understand together. Arendt places it at the center of politics - politics as the act of forming a common understanding.
There must be a discussion of sense communis in Chomsky. He believes in an innate form understanding in the form of an inner grammar. I aways wanted to read this in him but haven't yet. On a political level, he always likes to say phrases like: 'this is what any 10 year old child understands'. He loves Descartes, and in a way, hegelian/marxist thinking have driven us from Descartes. But there is a lot to be said for his vision of the autonomous freedom of common sense. It is in one of the Meditations, maybe 3, where he writes about sitting in front of the fire, in the living room, closing off all of the false and wrong impressions, impressions that can't be trusted, to get to a realm of true and pure thoughts about the world. The simplicity is hard to adapt today, considering all of the layers of repression. He is speaking about how we know things are true, rather than evil demons influencing us, giving us false ideas. But we can easily understand the world of capitalism, misogyny, heteronormativity, racism as Descartes demons, even if we cannot simply access the realm of common sense, but see it rather as a process of forming communal understanding.
Eric: thanks so much for this reading and commentary. I struggled with this dinner-table encounter because my knee-jerk reaction was to respond with my hard-won evidence-based knowledge about the complex relationship between class, race, location, age etc and "attitudes to drugs". But I knew that that was not what the speaker was getting at. He was talking about something else altogether. I read his statement as a moralistic one, as opposed to an intervention into a serious moral discussion about drug use, regulation, etc. Eventually I settled on common sense in the Gramscian sense because Hall's own work on common-sense thinking both under Thatcherism and neoliberalism are of course closely tied to the historical construction of middle England and its foil, the Islington soirée-loving chattering classes (my own soirée was a couple miles away in Hackney and queerer than the CCs are typically imagined I think, but I felt interrelated in that regard too, not just as an activist). So I went down a rather wandering British cultural-studies route. But I didn't have the opportunity to do something else (because this particular comment wasn't complex enough) which was to examine O'Shea and Hall's study of the "good sense" that sometimes appears in more complex examples of common sense (for example, when a seemingly reactionary statement about "benefit scroungers" also contains evidence of a critique of state abuse of power). And I'm left wondering if Arendt's thinking on the senus communis, and perhaps Chomsky too, might intersect here. And understanding contemporary oppressions as Descartes demons is also so interesting. A final thought: what you say about being driven away from Descartes by hegelian/marxist thinking reminds me that going back to Hall these days, and his (partial) critique of Foucault and preference for Gramsci's hegemony as crucial to understanding the workings of power and ideology, made me think about the odd formation of cannons, in which certain thinkers (Foucault in this case) come to and remain at the fore while others (Gramsci) are less often cited. Certainly true of gender and sexuality studies, even though in the popular sphere contemporary understandings of power and ideology are often voiced in much cruder, functionalist terms (on twitter anyway, and sometimes in the classroom). Lots more to discuss!
Great writing Carrie I really enjoyed the article.
Thanks Roberta!