Abstract
Friedlander argues that the account of common sense is internally related to the elaboration of the universal voice and the problem of communicability of feeling. Taken together they establish the framework for a logic of exemplification: the ideal character of the universal voice is possible only on the ground of the natural character of common sense, and conversely, the possibility of recognizing a natural ground of the meaningful articulations of our world emerges only by taking upon oneself to occupy the higher standpoint that does not yet exist, to represent the idea of universal agreement in taste.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
The usual term in German is Menschenverstand. Kant speaks of Gemeinsinn and contrasts it with Gemein Verstand. But in §40, in which he returns to the issue, he clearly identifies Gemeinsinn with a non-vulgar idea of common sense.
- 2.
Aristotle uses the Greek term koinē aísthēsis to denote a sense in which the data of the different senses are related to one and the same object of perception. Koine is also the term used for ordinary or low – e.g., in reference to common dialect (as opposed to a high language). It is significant to note in this context that, in the tradition of interpretation of Aristotle, the sensus communis is often related or even identified with the imagination (phantasia).
- 3.
There are several other important points in the transmission of the term “common sense” in the philosophical tradition up to Kant. Thus, for example, Descartes takes the common sense to effect the transition from the bodily or sensory to the unity of the mental. For an account of the transformations of the concept, see, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 17–27.
- 4.
A question that lies beyond the scope of the present chapter is whether the rule that is to be exemplified is to be taken to be the rule of that specific instance of beauty or something like the rule or principle of beauty in general. Deciding on this question would make a lot of difference in the interpretation of Kant’s account. In the first case, we think of a kind of gradual convergence upon the judgment of a specific work of art. In the other case, one may for instance think of the idea as given in the systematic interconnection of the instances of art. This latter model is taken up by the Romantics in their notion of the Idea of Art. In this context, see Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), 116–200.
- 5.
Compare the necessity that pertains to the moral law to what we think of as exemplary necessity that is conditional. When we think of the “ought” of the moral law, we have as a ground a law in relation to which one can show why everyone ought to act in such and such a way. But in taking my judgment as an example, when I cannot appeal to a principle or law, I take my feeling to testify that I speak for a universal agreement of subjects.
- 6.
This is importantly the structure that Kant articulates in explaining the possibility of the work of art as a product of genius. Genius is possible only as natural talent – that is, as a condition in which nature in an individual gives the rule, without the individual being capable of articulating this rule as one that consciously guides their production. In other words, in genius we must assume a potential of intelligibility of nature, as a ground of production. My discussion of common sense would suggest that this notion of ground is to be recognized also as being at work in the understanding of the structure of taste more generally.
- 7.
In the Anthropology, in his discussion of common sense cases in which one appeals to mother-wit rather than the wit of schools in judgment, Kant suggests that they are cases in which empirical judgments depend on “determining grounds of masses of judgment that lie in the obscurity of the mind. One could call this logical tact, where reflection on the object is presented from many different sides and comes out with a correct result, without being conscious of the acts that are going on inside the mind during this process” (An 7:140). The term “tact” is striking. It relates to the discussion of the social dimension of the sensus communis to which I turn later in this chapter.
- 8.
The characteristics of objective systematicity in nature are homogeneity, variability, and affinity. The last one has a counterpart in the characterization of the activity of the imagination in the Anthropology:
By affinity I understand the union of the manifold in virtue of its derivation from one ground.…The word affinity (affinitas) here recalls a process found in chemistry: intellectual combination is analogous to an interaction of two specifically different physical substances intimately acting upon each other and striving for unity, where this union brings about a third entity that has properties which can only be produced by the union of two heterogeneous elements. Despite their dissimilarity, understanding and sensibility by themselves form a close union for bringing about our cognition, as if one had its origin in the other, or both originated from a common origin; but this cannot be, or at least we cannot conceive how dissimilar things could sprout forth from one and the same root. (An 7:176–77)
It is particularly interesting that Kant thinks of affinity as that mode of activity of the imagination in which one has a sense of the common ground of imagination and understanding. The term affinity in its connection to chemistry has a significant place in aesthetics after Kant through Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809) and Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (in Selected Writings, 297–360).
- 9.
This can be compared to another term that is important to Kant, namely “orientation.” In his essay “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Kant identifies orientation as a fundamental capacity of reason (OT 8:133–46). Orientation presupposes a relation to the totality of the needs of reason in feeling.
- 10.
This should be related to the Second Moment:
Whether someone who believes himself to be making a judgment of taste is in fact judging in accordance with this idea can be uncertain; but that he relates it to that idea, thus that it is supposed to be a judgment of taste, he announces through the expression of beauty. Of that he can be certain for himself through the mere consciousness of separation of everything that belongs to the agreeable and the good from the satisfaction that remains to him; and this is all for which he promises himself the assent of everyone: a claim which he would also be justified in making under these conditions, if only he were not often to offend against them and thereby make an erroneous judgment of taste. (CJ 5:216)
- 11.
Hannah Arendt takes Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment to be the blueprint for his political philosophy. In this context she takes his discussion of common sense in §40 to be of particular importance. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 63–73.
- 12.
In his early essay “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” Stanley Cavell relates the ordinary language practices of Austin and Wittgenstein to Kant’s account of the aesthetic judgment, writing that “Kant’s ‘universal voice’ is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claim about ‘what we say’” (“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 94). Lacking any empirical grounds, the conviction in the philosopher’s claim depends in part on his ability to make what is thus exemplified appear surprisingly natural to us, testifying to our form of life, as if a “natural ground of our conventions” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], 125). In thematizing this investigation of the grammar of language, Cavell appeals once more to a Kantian term pertaining to judgment, to the schematism of judgment. The grammar of ordinary language reveals the lines of projection of the imagination. In ordinary language, we can present the intuitive design of the space of possibilities of our concepts. Cavell takes Emerson (and Wittgenstein) to be broadening the Kantian idea “so that it speaks not alone of deducing twelve categories of the understanding but of deriving – say schematizing – every word in which we speak together” (Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 39).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Friedlander, E. (2017). On Common Sense, Communicability, and Community. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54655-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54656-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)