While many if not most discussions of common sense take their bearings from Hannah Arendt, this essay takes its from Stanley Cavell, who, though he famously professes uninterest in the idea of common sense, opens up a helpful approach to it in his consideration of the kind of claims made by ordinary language philosophers who know no more about their topic (what we in this language group say when) than their opponents. In order to bring this out, I distinguish between common sense as a passive, historically variable social a priori (what passes as so or true without argument or notice in a given community) and a critically efficacious common sense that actively challenges this, demanding reform, revolution or conversion. I describe the latter as an ‘aspirational common sense’, and explore its evocation in the writings or Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. As I demonstrate, each of these embraces an essentially paradoxical idea: something can be a matter of common sense though it is not currently commonly acknowledged to be good sense. I argue that this paradox is an essential feature to democracy in our time, one that opens individual citizens to the future and their own as yet unarticulated common sense.
Andrew Norris (Sun,) studied this question.