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20th century, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Marx, Nazism, phenomenology, René Descartes, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath
One of the more potentially pernicious ideas in philosophy is the idea of “common sense,” so often played as a trump card against any idea that departs from the established prejudices of one’s interlocutors. But for the most part, that’s all “common sense” can amount to: prejudice, the pre-judgements shared in common by a given social context. Now this doesn’t necessarily make it bad. Hans-Georg Gadamer tried to “rehabilitate” the concept of prejudice (Vorurteil) on the grounds that even newly acquired knowledge must be measured against knowledge we already have. We must start where we are. As I noted in discussing dialectical and demonstrative argument, this is true even of foundationalist thinkers like Descartes who try to begin everything from first principles – in the chronology of their arguments, they must start with prejudice or “common sense” in order to figure out what the first principles are.
But Gadamerian prejudices can still be prejudices in the pejorative sense as well. Common sense is common only to a given social context; it is not common to humanity in general, and it is often not very sensible either. What was common sense to our ancestors – that the sun revolved around the earth, that women are intellectually inferior to men – is absurd to us, and within a couple hundred years our common sense will look absurd too. This is to be expected, for we are finite and limited human beings; we know what has been taught to us. But the more we rely on common sense, the more parochial our reasoning will be – the more we will be limited to our own context and the more absurd we will appear to future generations.
All of this is another reason why I think philosophy needs to consider historical context; we need to be aware of the big gaps between the common sense of other times and that of our own. What appears absurd to us did not appear absurd to others, and often for good reason. If our reaction to an important thinker’s apparently absurd claim is haughty dismissal, we close ourselves off to learning, and remain within the parochial shell of our own common sense, the sense that will be absurdity in two hundred years. But if – as Thomas Kuhn rightly advocated – we instead ask how an intelligent person could have made such an apparently absurd claim, then we may start learning about the assumptions taken for granted behind the text. And those assumptions may well teach us far more than anything the text explicitly claims.
Thill insisted on separating the history of ideas from their evaluation, in order to avoid genetic fallacies – the form of circumstantial ad hominem according to which explaining an idea serves to refute it or confirm it. Thill provides a good example of this in those vulgar Marxists who would identify an idea’s “bourgeois” provenance as sufficient to refuting it. Of course such fallacies are to be avoided. But the way to avoid this is not to juxtapose the premises of the arguments we read against our own assumptions, and immediately pronounce them false if they fail to match. Rather, to really find the truth in a text, we need to consider not merely what it says on the surface, but also the unspoken assumptions that gave rise to it, what phenomenologists might call its “taken-for-granted world” – its common sense, which will be so different from ours, and may be just what is needed to call our common sense into question.
For calling common sense into question, it seems to me, is one of the key tasks any philosopher is charged with. And this is often not a matter of mere abstraction. Common sense itself can be at the root of history’s darkest atrocities. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that anti-Semitism in early-twentieth-century Germany was simple common sense. One could differ on proposed solutions to “the Jewish problem,” but to say that Jews were just people like anybody else and posed no significant difficulties to the greater well-being of society – a view that has become common sense now – would have seemed the height of absurdity. Goldhagen’s view was more than confirmed to me when I read Marx’s famously anti-Semitic essay On the Jewish Question: this is not an argument for anti-Semitism, it simply assumes anti-Semitism. Everybody knows the Jews are a problem – that’s a given for the piece. But from that starting point, Marx argues that the real problem isn’t their religion, let alone their race, but the (supposedly) characteristically Jewish activity of “huckstering,” of capitalism. With such a view, Marx had managed to be several levels more enlightened than the common sense of his time, though not as much as we might hope with hindsight. But if we want to avoid the kind of atrocities that made perfect sense to Germans a few generations later, it is vital that we not limit ourselves to common sense as they did.
Reading this put me in mind of C.S. Lewis’ defense of reading “old books”, put forward in his preface to St Athanasius, which was recently and lengthily cited online here. The gist is this:
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. “
Beautiful comment. Lewis has said exactly the gist of what I was trying to say, only better. But then, perhaps he has now at last joined the company of the old thinkers who have stood the test of time.
A very interesting read, I enjoyed this post and found it quite thought provoking, I’m definitely gonna try to limit my “assumptions” in life and rely a little less on “common sense” in future, because this post sounds like perfect “common sense” to me ;-)
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the kind words, Keith, and thanks for reading!
Er, I mean Kevin. Terribly sorry for misreading your name!!
Great! As usual, many thought-provoking comments in your post!
The key conceptual problem in your post is, of course, the meaning of “common sense”. You are using it in the way Kuhn uses “paradigm”. Both of you subsume a great deal under your respective key concepts at the risk of undermining the required contrast case for the intelligibility of that key concept.
When you write “…the unspoken assumptions that gave rise to it, what phenomenologists might call its “taken-for-granted world” – its common sense…” and so on, it is clear that you are using “common sense” in the sense of “unspoken assumptions” and “taken-for-granted world”.
But the approach described as “common sense philosophy” uses “common sense” in a specific and clear sense, e.g., the work of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, G.E. Moore’s approach in his great paper “A Defence of Common Sense”, Roderick Chisholm’s epistemological particularism, etc. By the way, if you are interested in achieving some genuine insight into the fundamental issues pertaining to common sense, I highly recommend Moore’s essay and also Wittgenstein’s extraordinary reflections, during his last years, on Moore’s paper. Those reflections have been published in “On Certainty”.
If you use “common sense” in a non-standard and excessively broad way to refer to “unspoken assumptions”, your conclusions seem to follow. But it is erroneous to think that the “unspoken assumptions” of superstitions, bigotry, and religious beliefs constitute common sense!
In my view, “common sense” refers to the stock of Truths pertaining to the world naturally accessible to normal human beings anywhere on this planet and the faculties of the ordinary human mind employed in gaining access to those truths, e.g., that there is a world independent of our thoughts and desires, that there are other human beings, animals, and trees, the observable regularities of nature, human nature, and animal nature, basic uniform facts of human biology, etc.
To pursue a thread in your post, our common sense, in fact, provides an antidote to “anti-semitism”, whether anti-Jewish or anti-Arab, and other forms of racist pathology. Common sense tells us that all humans have the same biology, i.e., a Jew is subject to the same biological processes an “Aryan” or an Arab is subject to.
The exercise of common sense faculties, plain observations without the blinkers of pathology-inspired theories or abstractions about “race”, tells us that there is a preponderance of physical and psychological similarities among humans. Hence, the racist concoctions of “thinkers” who aver that some human groups are a different species actually violates common sense.
Common sense also tells us that, contrary to the “scriptural pathology” of priests, humans cannot live in the bellies of whales and women cannot fly around on broomsticks!
Thus the outbursts of irrationality, individually and collectively, and attendant atrocities which have periodically undermined the structure of individual lives and human societies is the result of deviance from common sense and espousal of religious or philosophical theories or beliefs which violate the truths of common sense.
Thill, it is the nature of the dominant paradigm (or common sense — whichever word you want to use) that certain assumptions are unseen as assumptions.
Your post illustrates this. The fact that you would view a statement such as that “there is a world independent of our thoughts and desires” as bedrock uncontrovertible “common sense” that is not worth questioning shuts you off to the exploration of a great deal of philosophical and religious thought.
I am not advocating that you change this view — and certainly not that you swap it for another view that is equally dogmatic. You might consider, however, that there is some subtlety in the concepts of what is “subjective” and what is “objective”, how we would know “objective” reality if we saw it, and the extent to which mind extends into and creates the physical world in the context of a reality where all things are interdependent.
Of course the last statement above concerning interdependence is a Buddhist view — you don’t have to accept that either. But if you don’t we could have an interesting discussion about what phenomena in the world have intrinsic existence and are not interdependent. It is just that to have this discussion you would have to relax your view of what constitutes “common sense” propositions that you are not interested in investigating.
Jim, as Wittgenstein would put it, your own life and actions, despite your your adherence to Buddhist dogmas, shows that you too believe that the world is independent of your thoughts and desires.
If you really, in contrast to merely professing it in the context of philosophical word games, believed that the world was dependent on your thoughts and desires, then you would engage in mighty strange and bizarre behaviors, wouldn’t you? For instance, you might then think that your wish that I become a “stalwart Buddhist” actually made me into one! LOL
Thill, I certainly have no wish to convert you to Buddhism!
I also have to say that you have a very shallow and erroneous understanding of Buddhism. Although you can find dogmatic Buddhists from time to time (just as you can find dogmatic philosophers) — Buddhism has no dogma. If I recall correctly, dogmatic belief is one on the non-virtuous samskaras — and this would include dogma related to Buddhist ideas as well as non-Buddhist ideas.
No one would argue that a thought can turn fire into ice, or make an apple tree grow pears. But it does not follow from that that an “objective” external world exists. Or, at least, if you postulate that it does that a statement like yours wins the debate.
Jim, you may want to consult the dictionary on the meaning of “dogma”.
The dictionary defines a “dogma” in terms of “An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true.”
All of your posts to date show that you do hold that the Buddhist doctrines of “enlightenment”, “emptiness”, “no-self”, “interdependence”, and such to be “authoritative”, if not “absolutely true”, since you have not admitted that they require rejection or even revision in the face of plausible objections. And this stance is characteristic of all Buddhists, especially on those doctrines. Hence, those doctrines are dogmas of Buddhism.
One must be cautious not to fall into delusion that one’s own religion has only sensible doctrines whereas other religions have dogmas.
Thill, I am actually making a different point. Buddhism views any conceptual belief as, at best, an abstraction that is as close to describing reality as a menu is to the experience of a good meal. Absolute truth is beyond conception as well as beyond thought.
So, any dogma or attempt to attach to a philosophical view is a mistake. At the same time, relative or expedient teachings are necessary on the path (appreciating that the path, by definition, is confusion). So, prostrating to a visualization of Vajradhara can be useful as a method for dealing with pride or for cultivating states of mind that are virtuous. It doesn’t mean that one needs to solidify the visualization by saying either that Vajradhara exists or that Vajradhara doesn’t exist.
Another way to say this is that Buddhism unravels itself at the end of the path. As Shakyamuni Buddha taught, once you have crossed the river, there is no need to carry the boat on your back.
“No one would argue that a thought can turn fire into ice, or make an apple tree grow pears. But it does not follow from that that an “objective” external world exists.”
Jim, one does pay a price for not taking logic seriously! LOL
The “objectivity” of a phenomenon is defined in terms of its independence from one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. If fire burns regardless of our thoughts or desires concerning its properties, then, by the definition of “objective”, that’s an objective phenomenon. And if there is just one phenomenon which is objective or independent of one’s thoughts and desires, then it follows that an external world exists!!!
It’s just logic, Jim, logic!
Thill, any so-called external phenomena is conditioned by the observer. A mosquito, a man and a bacterium would experience a beautiful woman in quite different ways. Furthermore, the concept of “beautiful woman” in the last sentence is a mental construction that has little or nothing to do with our present experience.
This, to me, is common sense. The projection of an external world independent of an observer is what is pure fantasy. How would one even conceive of what that would be like?
And if the observer is essential to the experience, then one cannot say that the world is not co-extensive with the mind. There are subtleties in how this might be approached (differences, for example, in Yogachara and Madhyamake approaches — and I would be out of my depth quickly in discussing them). But dismissing whole schools of philosophical thought that have engaged scholars and practitioners for more than two thousand years with a waive of the hand and view that their time has been wasted because they don’t adhere to “common sense” is a cop out.
Here is a great passage from Thomas Reid (Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense). Buddhists, skeptics, idealists, and such would profit from a careful perusal of this passage:
“However this may be, it is certainly a most amazing discovery that thought and ideas may be without any thinking being—a discovery big with consequences which cannot easily be traced by those deluded mortals who think and reason in the common track. We were always apt to imagine, that thought supposed a thinker, and love a lover, and treason a traitor: but this, it seems, was all a mistake; and it is found out that there may be treason without a traitor, and love without a lover, laws without a legislator, and punishment without a sufferer, succession without time, and motion without anything moved, or space in which it may move: or if, in these cases, ideas are the lover, the sufferer, the traitor, it were to be wished that the author of this discovery had farther condescended to acquaint us whether ideas can converse together, and be under obligations of duty or gratitude to each other; whether they can make promises and enter into leagues and covenants, and fulfil or break them, and be punished for the breach. If one set of ideas makes a covenant, another breaks it, and a third is punished for it, there is reason to think that justice is no natural virtue in this system.
It seemed very natural to think that the Treatise of Human Nature required an author, and a very ingenious one too; but now we learn that it is only a set of ideas which came together and arranged themselves by certain associations and attractions.
After all, this curious system appears not to be fitted to the present state of human nature. How far it may suit some choice spirits, who are refined from the dregs of common sense, I cannot say. It is acknowledged, I think, that even these can enter into this system only in their most speculative hours, when they soar so high in pursuit of those self-existent ideas as to lose sight of all other things. But when they condescend to mingle again with the human race, and to converse with a friend, a companion, or a fellow-citizen, the ideal system vanishes; common sense, like an irresistible torrent, carries them along; and, in spite of all their reasoning and philosophy, they believe their own existence, and the existence of other things.
Indeed, it is happy they do so; for, if they should carry their closet belief into the world, the rest of mankind would consider them as diseased, and send them to an infirmary. Therefore, as Plato required certain previous qualifications of those who entered his school, I think it would be prudent for the doctors of this ideal philosophy to do the same, and to refuse admittance to every man who is so weak as to imagine that he ought to have the same belief in solitude and in company, or that his principles ought to have any influence upon his practice; for this philosophy is like a hobby-horse, which a man in bad health may ride in his closet, without hurting his reputation; but, if he should take him abroad with him to church, or to the exchange, or to the play-house, his heir would immediately call a jury, and seize his estate.”
This is a great passage — beautifully written.
At least as it pertains to Buddhism, the passage conflates the concept of egolessness with non-existence. Buddhism does not deny that the world appears — it is just that experience is so ephemeral and changing that concepts of “I” and “other” cannot catch up with it. Even that doesn’t quite capture the concept. Egolessness as a concept is the lack of intrinsic or independent existence. Even aside from impermanence, you can’t even say that “I” and “other” have any independent attributes in a single moment of time. This is because any quality that is identified only has meaning in a relative sense. For example, to say I am “big” has meaning only in relation to something small. To say, I am “beautiful” only has meaning in relation to something “ugly”. So, because I exists only in a relative way, it can (at least in Buddhist logic) be seen to have no independent existence.
I want to think some more about your other insights and arguments and respond to those.
“At least as it pertains to Buddhism, the passage conflates the concept of egolessness with non-existence.”
Well, Jim, I think I pointed a few months ago that in plain English “egolessness” or “no-self” means that the ego or the self does not exist. So, if you don’t mean non-existence, then don’t say “egolessness”, “no-self”, etc.
Philosophical Buddhists are the ones creating confusion here by conflating dependence with non-existence! It is a misuse of English to say “The ego or self does not exist.” when you actually mean “The ego or self depends on certain things or factors for its existence.”!!!
“Thill, any so-called external phenomena is conditioned by the observer. A mosquito, a man and a bacterium would experience a beautiful woman in quite different ways.”
Ah, so you do admit the existence of “the observer” a.k.a. “the self”! Great!
As you know, conscious observers have existed only for an insignificant amount of time on our planet. If your thesis is correct, then we can’t really say anything about, or make any sense of the history of our planet before the appearance of conscious observers on it. Is this something you want to affirm?
It is important to distinguish the issue of whether the existence and properties of the observed depend on the observer from the issue of whether the experiences and valuations of the observed depend on the observer.
I think your point constitutes an affirmative answer to the latter issue and I am inclined to agree with you on this. However, the same point cannot be extended to the former issue. The existence of the woman valued in terms of “beautiful”, or her essential properties, does not depend on the human or non-human observer. A color blind person may not be able to distinguish between the red and green colors in a carpet but this does not imply that the carpet does not have those properties.
“Thill, any so-called external phenomena is conditioned by the observer.”
Jim, I would think that the Buddhist doctrine of interdependence would lead you to affirm that the observer is also conditioned by external phenomena! Surely, as a Buddhist, you can’t possibly think of dependence in terms on one way traffic going from the observer to the external phenomena?
When I wrote earlier that the observer’s thoughts and desires may condition her experiences and valuations of external objects or phenomena, I forgot to add that those experiences and valuations may also be conditioned by the nature of the external objects or phenomena.
This seems an accurate statement of the Buddhist view to me. Buddhists speak of two-fold egolessness (egolessness of self and egolessness of other). Self is perceived only in relation to “other” and is conditioned by “other”. This is relative truth.
Neither self nor other has intrinsic existence and to hold that self exists would be to fall into a theistic view. To hold that self or other does not exist would be to fall into a nihilistic view.
Unfortunately, when we use words, we have to say that something is or is not. This tends to create misunderstandings — such as Mr. Reid’s view above that the Buddhist view of emptiness or egolessness is the same as non-existence or void. Overall, perhaps since our dominant habit is to fall into eternalist views that we exist, Buddhists tend toward words like “emptiness” or “egolesness”. Sometimes to try to avoid the confusion a Buddhist will speak of “not two” instead of egolessness. But that is not entirely helpful because “not two” tends to toward a mistaken view — as in the Buddhist joke about the hot dog vendor — that Buddhist hold a view that will “make them one with everything”.
One of the main points of the view is that reality is beyond concepts of any kind. So a conceptual way of thinking about emptiness might be to think of self and other as being empty of concept.
This is my understanding at least.
Thanks for this, Thill. As you have no doubt guessed, this post was written with you in mind; and you are right that it does not do enough to justify its definition. The revised definition deserves a fuller response than a single comment; I have written two posts in response that will go up tomorrow and Sunday.
You are welcome, Amod. I look forward to reading your posts!
Here are a couple of great remarks from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.
“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” (remark # 115)
“My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on. – I tell a friend e.g. “Take that chair over there”, “Shut the door”, etc, etc. (remark # 7)
Since “sound judgment” is generally associated with standard uses of “common sense”, and I take it to be a necessary element in the latter, it is not common sense to think that water can be turned into wine, women can fly around on broomsticks, etc., even if the majority of people in a society or all over the world profess such beliefs under pressure of conformity to the “scriptural pathology” of religious authorities.
“The fact that you would view a statement such as that “there is a world independent of our thoughts and desires” as bedrock uncontrovertible “common sense” that is not worth questioning shuts you off to the exploration of a great deal of philosophical and religious thought.”
We can’t descend into lunacy in the guise of, or under the pretext of, doing philosophy! One has already begin the descent if one can’t see that fire burns us regardless of any thoughts or desires! Are we to demonstrate the “greatness” of philosophy by
asking questions such as “If I think that fire is ice, will fire still burn me?”????
Thomas Reid would perhaps not have jumped the common sense hurdle as Thill sees it:
(from SEP)
Common Sense has many mansions. We may ask whether they be hermetically sealed from each other, each magisterium having its own door bell.
Thanks, Michael. This raises the issue of whether Reid’s philosophy of common sense is consistent with his “Newtonian theism”, and, more broadly, whether a “common sense philosophy” is consistent with theism.
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