Commonsense Part 3

I get a lot of emails and comments about critical commonsense and if it fits into other theories. For example, someone might ask if what they belief is a commonsense belief. They usually understand that commonsense has a vulgar meaning (everyday common beliefs) and critical meaning (academic commonsense). What they don't seem to understand is the core idea behind the critical version of commonsense. The core is an orientation toward reality.

Vulgar commonsense is not concerned with this. It is not a philosophy or a critical business in any sense. It is the general good sense of common people that helps them keep from burning themselves, on a positive note, or enables them to justify unexamined stupid belief, on a negative note. In the 18th Century vulgar commonsense was the unexamined and intuitive assumptions of the common man and it was not good.

Critical commonsense is very different, though it shares a social component. Without going into it again, I will try to stay with the simple premise that CCS is an orientation toward reality. That sentence, in itself, is not very critical, so to understand it one would have to read many of these posts or, hopefully, explore Reid and the history of commonsense in philosophy.

One's belief or working philosophy fits into CCS if it takes as its major premise that reality exists and that the history of man is a history of intellectual work that attempts, to its detriment, to work against this existence. When a reader explores Kant and gets the feeling that it is academic bullshit (though in my opinion Kant has a lot of merit and, as has been recently discussed, actually has a commonsense core) and then when a reader reads Ayn Rand and feels it teaches them something, that is the difference between HC thinking and CCS.

There is vulgar thinking, the everyman, there is HC, the history of most philosophy post-enlightenment, and there is CCS. We can dismiss vulgar for the most part and focus on HC and CCS. Michael Billig, in his book "The Hidden Roots of Critical Psychology," delineates these histories, or finds other thinkers who delineate them, into Epicurean and Stoic. Epicurean is defined by atomism, the notion that individuals and their thoughts are, in a very modern sense, unique and isolated. Stoic is defined by social effects and social efforts. This is not the only way these trends differ. But in this sense, an atomist (like, in this description Locke and Hume,) assume they can create or redefine great ideas alone and in their individual minds. Reid calls this process armchair philosophy (as opposed to getting out of the chair and the academic office and going out in the real world). Some of the greatest ideas, it is true, have come from individual thinkers. Stoic's however (in Billig's research) belief that socialization is mandatory for truth, for understanding that knowledge is not small bits of "unique" truth, like lonely people playing on their cellphones, but synthesized into a greater web of truth. The stoic hero is Socrates who believed truth can only come from conversations - deeper ones - between people in social situations (the agora, or town square).

When students or readers ask about their philosophy and commonsense, I usually tell them to make sure they have explored CCS. What I mean by that, firstly, is that they need to understand what it means to emphasize reality. There must be concrete, real truths that thinkers obtain before they can socially and seriously converse with other thinkers and work toward truthful dialectic. Russell in his half-hearted commonsense way shows a great example when he writes, and I paraphrase, There are always people who say 'everything is relative,' but how can that be true? If all things are relative there would be nothing for them to be relative to.

I say this same thing about Hume. You can't be skeptical about everything (reality, identity, cause) because if you do the notion of objectivity vanishes and words are meaningless and there's nothing to talk skeptically about. I am aware on some level that this is an ought/is fallacy, that believing their SHOULD be truth does not equal truth, but within CCS this matter is explored more critically and to the extent that Reid's epistemology is explored. Reid's ideas about social agreement and Aristotle's "a priori" about reality are deepened to satisfy the hyper-critical academic bias.

Notes on Billig's book:

`Billig's is a fascinating work of brilliant scholarship. It is written in an elegant style, spiced with humour, and gives one the feeling that it was a labour of love. It can be recommended without reservation' - Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology

`This is a quite extraordinary and original book. Billig has managed seamlessly to interweave History of Philosophy, History of Psychology, Critical Psychology and a deep grasp of the social nature of language and, moreover, do so in a very readable fashion' - Graham Richards, Formerly Professor of History of Psychology, Staffordshire University and Director of the British Psychological Society History of Psychology Centre, London

`I can't quite capture how much I enjoyed this book. In beautiful, witty prose and through exemplary scholarship, Billig has produced an historical work that engages with profoundly important ideas not just for contemporary critical psychology but for psychology in general. Books as good as this are rare' - Alan Collins, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Lancaster University