America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

2. Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition

21 2 Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition The Basic Elements of Common Sense The philosophical and political import of common sense is strikingly suggested in a passage from Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections. The passage has the additional merit of highlighting the surprising philosophic richness of American culture and outlook. As a young German scholar studying in America at Columbia University around 1922, Voegelin found himself “overwhelmed by a new [cultural and intellectual] world of which hitherto I had hardly expected the existence.” He took courses with John Dewey, among others, and repairing often to the university library “started working through the history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought.” His account of what he learned in the process is illuminating: I discovered English and American common sense philosophy. More immediately , the impact came through Dewey’s recent book, Human Nature and Conduct, which was based on the English common sense tradition. From there, I worked back to Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. This English and Scottish conception of common sense as a human attitude that incorporates a philosopher’s attitude toward life without the philosopher’s technical apparatus, and inversely the understanding of Classic and Stoic philosophy as the technical, analytical elaboration of the common sense attitude, has remained a lasting influence in my understanding both of common sense and [of] Classic philosophy. It was during this time that I got the first inkling of what the continued tradition of Classic philosophy on the common sense level, without necessarily the technical apparatus of an Aristotle, could mean for the intellectual climate and the cohesion of a society. 22 America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense Precisely this tradition of common sense I now recognized to be the factor that was signally absent from the German social scene, and not so well developed in France as it was in England and America. In retrospect, I would say that the absence of political institutions rooted in an intact common sense tradition is a fundamental defect of the German political structure that still has not been overcome . . . . During my year in New York, I began to sense that American society had a philosophical background far superior in range and existential substance, though not always in articulation, to anything that I found represented in the methodological environment in which I had grown up.1 The passage indicates the meaning of “common sense,” its importance in the history of philosophy, and the political ramifications of its presence or absence as a cultural force. Let us consider each of these points in turn. Voegelin actually addresses only part of the meaning of common sense here, albeit the most fundamental part. Frits van Holthoon and David R. Olson have suggested, persuasively, that all the various employments of the term “common sense”are rooted in two related notions: common sense as“judgment, the capacity to recognize self-evident truths,” and common sense as the body of knowledge constituted by such truths.2 “Common sense,” then, has reference sometimes to a capacity of mind and sometimes to what is known through that capacity when it is finely attuned to reality. When we speak of a man having common sense, sometimes we mean the basic rational capacity of normally functioning persons, the ordinary variety intended when we say “that’s just common sense”; and sometimes we mean not any mental capacity but rather a certain mental achievement, as in good sense, or what d’Holbach had in mind when he said “nothing is more uncommon than common sense.”3 The first kind is (as Reid described it, indicating its political significance) the degree of reason “which is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable to our conduct towards others : this is called common sense, because it is common to all men with whom we can transact business, or call to account for their conduct.”4 The second kind of common sense is a product of exercising this basic capacity over and over again. It presupposes the capacity for judgment but is itself a certain mental disposition, an openness of consciousness to all that experience may show. Thus, as Voegelin said, it is a kind of “attitude”or posture toward reality, what I will call a “grounded mode of consciousness,” as it is grounded in and by experience . “Experience” here has two meanings: contact with the world (whether the physical or the mental dimensions...