[lit-ideas] Re: Thinking as a kind of suicide
- From: Chris Bruce <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 07:52:23 +0100
On 5. Nov 2007, at 20:02, wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
I think Arendt's use of the term "common sense" may bear strong
connotations with the L term "sensus communis." A term Kant uses in
his political writings, of which the 3rd Critique is a central text,
according to Arendt's deliberations on the analogies between the
aesthetic and the political. Does anyone know what "sensus communis"
is about? (I don't pay much attention to Kant's last, political
writings.)
Walter O.
MUN
Is the following any help in understanding Kant's use of 'sensus
communis'? (R. Eisler's _Kant Lexikon_ pointed the way.)
From " THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT by Immanuel Kant (trans. J.C.
Meredith). SS 40. Taste as a kind of sensus communis."
"... by the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a
public sense, i.e., a critical faculty which in its reflective act
takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone
else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgement with the collective
reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from
subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for
objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon
its judgement. This is accomplished by weighing the judgement, not so
much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgements of
others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as
the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which
contingently affect our own estimate. ...
... the ... maxims of common human understanding ... are these: (I) to
think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else;
(3) always to think consistently. ... As to the second maxim belonging
to our habits of thought [i.e., to think from the standpoint of
everyone else - in other words to use our 'common sense'], we have
quite got into the way of calling a man narrow (narrow, as opposed to
being of enlarged mind) whose talents fall short of what is required
for employment upon work of any magnitude (especially that involving
intensity). But the question here is not one of the faculty of
cognition, but of the mental habit of making a final use of it. This,
however small the range and degree to which man's natural endowments
extend, still indicates a man of enlarged mind: if he detaches himself
from the subjective personal conditions of his judgement, which cramp
the minds of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgement from
a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his
ground to the standpoint of others)."
Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
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