Why is it Important to Revive CCS?

Simply put, commonsense as a deeper and more critical system of thought (as it is different from HC, which means separate from HC expectations) is an important part of thinking and education. Without a "real world" approach to strategies and goals, as Reid presaged, most people would lose interest in philosophy. Those in armchairs and nice desks at big universities may not feel this loss because they are surrounding by like-minded thinkers (even if those thinkers don't agree with their positions); but the truth is that the common, intelligent human in 2022 thinks, for example, physics and medicine are interesting, but philosophy is not. They may talk about popular and current politics (sometimes that's all they do) but they have no interest in philosophy, the root of politics.

Reid said (and I paraphrase and extrapolate) that normal, intelligent people confronted with Hume and empiricism and radical skepticism, if that was to become philosophy, would find philosophy ridiculous. Rand's point was that if we look at "serious" academic philosophy, including Hume, Kant, existentialism, postmodernism, etc (HC), we see a system that has nothing to offer to an otherwise intellectual student. Rand's point is that there is no guidance and no value. In short, the HC base is built on one similar to Christianity's sympathy and language-perversion when it should be built on human nature. She believed philosophy as it should be is the primary learning tool for fundamental intellectual discovery. Most of it in the past three hundred years is of so little value to students and so convoluted and esoteric, that an otherwise useful, social, and attainable set of tools are buried beneath obscurantism.

Because of this, reviving a system like commonsense, which was the competitor of overly obscurant skepticism (Descartes, Berkeley, Hume), can today achieve what it achieved in the mid Eighteenth Century. It can achieve the status of competitor. If allowed to compete, at the least, we might find that what it truly does is offer a more useful and digestible system of deep thought to the masses.

When we say "Everyone is stupid," perhaps what we mean is not "The are too dumb to learn philosophy," but we mean, "Philosophy did not do its job making them smart." Certainly the thread of social optimism in commonsense allows for this. Socrates stood in the streets talking to people and ridiculing elite concepts of morality. Reid united a world against radical skepticism and was wildly popular into the start of the Nineteenth Century. Rand offered a commonsense objectivism combined with a digestible art-style and a strange optimism to the students alienated from the history of philosophy. She presented the talking-head characters in her books as walking, talking Nietzschean dialectics. And though she was loathe to admit this attachment to Nietzsche, the crux of her one-sided theme was the overturning of HC epistemology and ethics for an optimistic self-governing, libertarian, and value-based system.

These three are important figures in the examples of how commonsense challenges the notion that the masses cannot learn philosophy. They present the idea that instead the masses are not interested in armchair obscurantism. Whether this is the complete truth or in competition with Mill's assertion that the Scottish Commonsense movement was beneath philosophy, is irrelevant. These three paint a forgotten and more stoic picture of our intellectual history.

Perhaps, though, the main contribution came from the most durable and iconic figure of all, Friedrich Nietzsche. He combined styles and disciplines of learning in such a way, including art, aphorism, literature and psychology, so that despite his rough iconoclasm he has had more influence than any other thinker on our intellectual culture. Ask an otherwise intelligent person if they've heard of Kant and they shrug. Ask them about Nietzsche and they smile.