![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
One of the most hotly debated issues in present-day Arendt scholarship concerns the status of common sense or sensus communis in Arendt’s theory of judgment. Is her notion of common sense a priori or a posteriori, i.e. empirical? What is at stake in this debate seems to be no less than the promise of a reconciliation of a commitment to the situatedness of judgment with the universalistic aspiration to transcend mere partiality and subjectivism. My intervention in this debate focuses on a neglected aspect of Arendt’s thought, her hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The fact Arendt analyzes common sense in a hermeneutic-phenomenological fashion, implies that the very question whether it is an a priori faculty or refers to a particular community is not pertinent. Instead, she shows that common sense is co-original with the common world. Common sense both presupposes a common world and fits human beings into it.
Notes
1 Villa, 1996, p. 105.
2 Arendt, 1958b, p. 1142.
3 Arendt, 1958a (The Human Condition; henceforth HC), pp. 208–09; Arendt, 1994a, p. 318.
4 Arendt, 1994b, p. 21. I slightly adapted the English translation from the German original: Arendt, 1996, pp. 68–9.
5 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt, 1982); henceforth LKPP. Particularly relevant literature includes: Beiner 1982; Beiner, 1997; and the special issue on judgment of Philosophy and Social Criticism, 34 (2008), No. 1-2 (in particular: Ferrara, 2008a, 2008b; and Lara, 2008); Norris, 1996; Yar, 2000; Degryse, 2011; Bernstein, 1990; Benhabib, 1988; Biskowski, 1993: pp. 86–87; etc.
6 Ferrara, 2008a: pp. 6–7.
7 Ibid.: p. 12.
8 Ibid.: p. 13.
9 Alessandro Ferrara (2008a, 2008b) particularly points to the hermeneutic and phenomenological accounts of common sense of Gadamer, respectively Schutz and Husserl as suffering from relativism. In this article, I argue that Arendt’s hermeneutic-phenomenological account of common sense escapes this danger (as well as the danger of universalism). A detailed comparison between respectively Arendt’s and Gadamer’s treatments of common sense might yield interesting differences, assuming for the moment that Ferrara’s charge is justified (in fact, the issue of the professed relativist implications of Gadamer’s reflections on sensus communis, tradition and Horizontverschmelzung is open to debate). However, such a comparison would deserve a separate article length treatment, so is beyond the scope of the present article.
10 Arendt addresses the issue of common sense in HC (especially chapter 6); The Life of the Mind I: Thinking (1971; henceforth LOM I), especially §8 and §10; the essays ‘The Crisis in Culture’ and ‘Truth and Politics’, in Arendt, 1961, pp. 197–226, 227–64; ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, in Arendt, 1968; and in several previously unpublished lectures and essays, most notably the 1954 lecture ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (Arendt, 1990); the 1954 essay ‘Understanding and Politics’ (Arendt, 1994a), and the 1965–66 course ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ (Arendt, 2003b).
11 See section II.
12 Cf. Norris, 1996: pp. 174–5, n27.
13 Arendt, 1951 (The Origins of Totalitarianism; henceforth OT): pp. 343, 353, 457–77; cf. Canovan, 1992: pp. 53, 55, 56.
14 OT: p. 353.
15 OT: p. 471.
16 OT: pp. 470–73.
17 OT: pp. 457–8.
18 HC: p. 208.
19 OT: p. 475.
20 HC: p. 50; cf. pp. 57–8, 208 and OT: p. 477.
21 Vasterling, 2011b.
22 Young-Bruehl reports Arendt to have once remarked this: Young-Bruehl, 1982: p. 405. On Arendt as a phenomenologist, see, among others, the special issue of Journal Phaenomenologie on Hannah Arendt, No. 11 (1999); Moran, 2000; Schnell, 1995; Vollrath, 1977, 1979a, 1979b; Burke, 1997; Hinchman and Hinchman, 1984, 1991; Ricoeur, 1983; Hull, 2002; Jacques Taminiaux, 1996, 1997; Krüger, 2007; Vasterling, 2011a, 2011b. On Arendt as a hermeneutical phenomenologist, see: Opstaele, 2001; Ricoeur, 1989a, 1989b.
23 On this influence, a complete library has been published, ranging from plain gossip to erudite studies. The two best monographs on the intellectual relationship between Heidegger and Arendt to date are Taminiaux, 1997, and Villa, 1996.
24 Heidegger developed his hermeneutic phenomenology in Sein und Zeit (1927) (Heidegger, 2001) and his 1920s lectures.
25 Opstaele, 2001: p. 108.
26 Therefore, Arendt fits the French phenomenological tradition better, since French phenomenologists have always been more politically interested than the Germans.
27 Vollrath, 1977, p. 166.
28 To be sure, the background of Arendt’s challenge of empiricism and scientism does not derive from a rationalist approach, but from hermeneutic phenomenology. She is equally critical of rationalism, as her discussion of respectively ideology (section I) and the key modern rationalist philosophers, René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (section IV below) demonstrate.
29 For hermeneutic phenomenologists, ‘meaning’ first refers to ‘meaningfulness’, that is, to meaningful contexts or situations in which human life is always embedded. As such, it is distinct from the logical sense of ‘meaning’, i.e. ‘intelligibility’. The cognitive or epistemological category of intelligibility is, according to hermeneutic phenomenologists, derived from the primary meaningfulness.
30 Ramberg, Bjørn and Kristin Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics’, §4.
31 Arendt, 1994a: p. 308.
32 Schnell, 1995: p. 274.
33 Among others in OT; Arendt, 1994c; and Arendt, 1994a.
34 Arendt, 1994b: p. 3.
35 Arendt, 1958c: p. 482.
36 Arendt, 1962: p. 2; Arendt, 1961: pp. 6, 14; Arendt, 1963: p. 19.
37 In some cases, the biographies of persons may constitute such events. Or in other words, some persons’ lives illuminate the world in an exemplary way.
38 I will elaborate this argument in section IV.
39 This assimilation therefore implies, in Arendt’s vocabulary, the reduction of human beings to what they are. How, phenomenologists ask, could such a self-enclosed being possibly relate to and interact with something or someone else, without the aid of a lever? Krüger calls this ‘das anthropologische Integrationsproblem’ (2007: p. 614). The classical problem of the relation between mind, consciousness or res cogitans (Descartes) on the one hand, and body or res extensa on the other hand, is the best-known example of this anthropological problem. In the metaphysics of the subject, world and nature are identified with necessity and being determined by laws of nature (Kant’s Reich der Notwendigkeit). The self, on the other hand, is associated with freedom and determining (Kant’s Reich der Freiheit). Phenomenologists, on the contrary, show that the subject-object dualism is nothing but an anthropological misunderstanding, since we are situated, worldly beings. For example, Arendt’s phenomenological conception of the person as a showing-but-slippery who, is an alternative to the reduction of people to what they are.
40 HC: pp. 10, 193.
41 Vollrath, 1979a: p. 35.
42 Krüger, 2007: p. 612.
43 Vollrath, 1979a: p. 34.
44 Young-Bruehl, 1982: pp. 319–20.
45 Cf. Taminiaux, 1997: pp. 202–03.
46 Arendt, 1972: p. 110.
47 OT: pp. 474, 477.
48 HC: pp. 57–8.
49 Arendt, 2003a: June 1958, p. 595. My translation.
50 LOM I: p. 50.
51 LOM I: p. 51.
52 HC: p. 283.
53 LOM I: p. 50; OT: p. 477.
54 LOM I: p. 50; 119; OT: p. 477; cf. Arendt, 2003a: August 1958, fragment 4, p. 600.
55 LOM I: p. 50.
56 LOM: p. 50; see also OT: pp. 475–77.
57 Arendt, 1996: pp. 68–9.
58 Arendt sometimes suggests the terms ‘common sense’ (‘sound human reason’, gesunder Menschenverstand, le bon sens) and sensus communis (community sense’, Gemeinsinn) refer to different phenomena or faculties (see for example HC: pp. 283 (incl. n.44), 284; LKPP: pp. 70, 71, 72). However, she never explains what exactly this difference pertains to and most of the she time does not make a distinction at all, simply calling it ‘common sense’, and uses the two notions interchangeably (for example: 1968: p. 28; in the German original version of this essay: ‘Gemeinsinn oder gesundes Menschenverstand’: Arendt, 1989: p. 28; Arendt, 1961: p. 178). Since her description of both common sense and sensus communis is strikingly unambiguous – a sixth sense which is somehow related to common world, and opposed to privacy and private sense (for example 1994a: p. 318; 1990: p. 100; HC: pp. 208–09; Arendt, 1961: p. 178, p. 266; LOM I: p. 59; LKPP: p. 64). I assume that both have the same referent, though putting a somewhat different emphasis.
59 OT: pp. 475–77; Arendt, 1961: pp. 22–3, p. 178; Arendt, 1968: p. 13.
60 Cf. HC: pp. 208–09, 283; 1990: pp. 84, 100; 1954, Arendt, 1961: p. 178, p. 266; LOM I: pp. 50, 59, 119; LKPP: p. 70; Arendt, 1971b: p. 425; Arendt, 1994a: p. 318.
61 Arendt, 1990: p. 100; LOM I: p. 59.
62 Cf. Lara, 2008, on common sense and world disclosure. Common sense is not just the source of the mental processes of understanding and judging, but also of thinking and cognition, including science. I will not go into this because I focus on the present scholarly debate on Arendt’s notion of common sense which is entirely focused on its relation to judging and understanding.
63 Arendt, 1961: p. 221; 1994a: p. 316.
64 Arendt, 1994a: pp. 310–11, 321; cf. the first section of the present article. Arendt mentions ‘the broken thread of tradition’ also in LOM I: p. 212; Cf. Arendt, 1961: pp. 3–16; Arendt, 1968: p. 10.
65 Taylor, 2004; Benhabib, 1990; Disch, 1994: p. 144; Cf. Luban, 1993: pp. 241–2 on the differences between ancient and modern narratives.
66 Arendt, 1994a: pp. 309–10, 313, 316. Cf. 1968: p. 10.
67 Arendt, 1994a: p. 313.
68 Arendt, 1968: p. 10.
69 Ibid.: p. 8.
70 Arendt, 1994a: pp. 310–17. Cf. Vollrath, 1979b: p. 91.
71 Ramberg and Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics’, §4.
72 Arendt, 1994a: p. 322.
73 In ‘Understanding and Politics’, Arendt (1994a) describes understanding in terms very similar to the ones she uses in other writings to describe judgment: ‘understanding [is] (...) closely related to and inter-related to judging’ (p. 313). In both common sense and imagination play important roles. I guess understanding could best be regarded as the prerequisite of judgment: without the prior process of understanding, no judgment can arise. In this article, therefore, I use understanding and judging interchangeably.
74 On enlarged mentality or erweiterte Denkungsart and ‘representative thinking’ see, among others, Arendt, 1961: pp. 220–21, pp. 234–5, 241, 242, 247.
75 Arendt, 1961: pp. 307–08.
76 Ibid.: p. 322.
77 Ramberg and Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics’.
78 Arendt, 1994a: p. 324, n.7.
79 Ibid.: p. 312.
80 Arendt, 1990: p. 100.
81 Arendt, 1994a: pp. 310–11.
82 HC: p. 284.
83 Ibid.: pp. 277–84; LOM I; 1990: p. 80. Cf. Norris, 1996: p. 173; Canovan, 1992: p. 151.
84 LOM I: p. 59.
85 OT: p. 458.
86 LOM I: pp. 49, 52.
87 Ibid.: pp. 19–20.
88 HC: pp. 208–09.
89 Arendt, 1997 [1957]: p. 91.
90 Villa, 1992b: p. 717; Arendt, 1990: p. 102.
91 HC: pp. 280–88. Cf. Villa, 1992a: pp. 301–02; Canovan, 1992: p. 151.
92 Arendt, 1961: p. 178.
93 HC: p. 209; cf. Arendt, 1961: pp. 89–90.
94 Young, 1997: p. 358.
95 LKPP: p. 42
96 LKPP: p. 67.
97 Cf. Villa, 1992a: pp. 296–7.
98 Cf. Vasterling, 2007.
99 See the introduction to this article.
100 Arendt, 1979: p. 309.
101 Lyotard, 1993. Cf. Vandeputte, 2008.
102 For example Beiner, 1982: p. 1997; Yar, 2000; Lyotard, 1993.
103 For example Disch, 1993, 1994; Young, 1997.
104 LKPP: p. 75.
105 Arendt, 1994a: pp. 316–17.
106 Ibid.: p. 318.
107 Arendt, 1961: p. 273; cf. 1961: p. 274.
108 HC: p. 209.
109 Arendt, 1972: p. 110.
110 LKPP: p. 40.
111 Zerilli, 2005a, 2005b; Degryse, 2011; Vandeputte, 2008; Peeters, 2009.
112 LKPP: pp. 75–6; cf. LKPP: p. 43.
113 LKPP: p. 43.
114 Fuss, 1979: pp. 166–7.
115 Arendt, 1990: p. 100.
116 OT: pp. 475–6. Cf. OT: p. 477; 1994a: p. 318; LOM I: p. 50; HC: pp. 208–09.
117 Norris, 1996: p. 173, n.23: ‘[G]iven the central role played by common sense in the revelation of the world, it is circular at best to attempt to define the judgments of that sense in terms of the world it makes possible.’ Cf. Biskowski, 1993, who makes a similar argument as I do.