What is Critical Commonsense?

I will try again to explain plainly what this is. It is not new, it has been attempted many times and the pinnacle was Thomas Reid (1710-1796) in the mid 18th Century. The best way to teach it simply is to first show what it isn't.

Commonsense. Plain commonsense is what might be called a first-reaction belief. When you look at the world, you might think that it is flat. There are reasons to believe that - you walk on it and it seems to continue in any direction as "flat." When you look at a perfectly even, level acre of land you don't think, "well it is in fact slightly curved due to the curvature of the planet" (this is by the way similar to what Einstein discovered about relativity). Commonsense beliefs are ones that people encounter first and everyday. A more interesting one is when you see an apple on a tree about five feet off the ground. Your first belief, if you form one, might be that somebody put it there conveniently the right height for you to reach up and grab it. These beliefs have a commonsense quality to them, they are a first-level-intellect approach to solving the world and learning.

Western philosophy (et al) has targeted commonsense and rightly claimed that it was the untrained thinking of the masses. They claimed that it was insufficient for exploring the world deeply and being a careful person intellectually. Kant famously criticized Reid and his friends in the Scottish school for appealing to the opinions of the masses.

But alas this "hyper-critical" philosophy that is, in some sense, an opposite of commonsense and is visible in almost all academic philosophy from Plato onward, devolved into obscurantism. Obscurantism is the covering over of plain truth by games and what can only be called the poetry of big words. Ever serious philosopher has found himself writing and getting carried away at difficult moments into a kind of stream of consciousness babbling that can only be hidden (as babbling) by big words and complicated sentences. This is, honestly, the basis of the products of HC philosophy and it is very specifically the bulk of it all from Kant until the present day. What we study at big universities is HC. And it is what precisely is defended by the academic apologists and scoffed at by the masses. To experience this nonsense I merely ask you to read anything, from Kant to Whitehead and in between. Attempt to make sense of it.

I asked an esteemed collegue once why he falls for it and he said, in all seriousness, "It is all entertainment to me. I like to read it and unravel it even though I know it cannot be understood. It is for my own enjoyment." Once he said this I woke from my own "dogmatic slumber" and realized that, among other things, I was not missing something. You see, for years I thought it was me, I thought I was not delving deep enough into philosophy; but it was at that moment that I realized that all academics were lost and that the source of the misguidance was HC.

To shorten this idea, however, we need to finally say what CCS is. If it is not simple, immediate reactions to the world and it is not overthinking ... What is it? And simply put it is the balance between the two. It is firstly taking the methodology of commonsense, which is to say "social" and secondly the expectations of HC, which is to say a form of pure reason, and combining them into a new, yet deep, penetration into the world. This is all done, as Reid certainly learned, while forming an understanding of the difference between philosophy and science. For where science explores the word, in all of its varied and useful ways, philosophers must depart and carve out a different method and goal.