On Common SenseJudgment, that most critical human power, is enacted by the harmonious integration of manifold sensory modalities with another sense, a thinking sense, which seems to transcend our sensual apparatuses. So important is the understanding of this synthesis of senses that Immanuel Kant argued in his monumental
Critique of Pure Reason, "Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind, and Coach really is a dolt" (A59/B76), and he went on to devote a section of his study of aesthetic power of judgment (
Urteilskraft) to the common sense (
sensus communis), which he described as a universally shared human faculty that can serve as a standard for universally valid judgments.
However, as the learned dons of Getbig's Institute of Advanced Studies know, the study of the unity of the senses received earlier treatment in Aristotle's
Peri Psuche (On the Soul) as the
koiné aesthesis (common sense), which he argues is involved in actively blending what first appears as congeries of sensations within an awareness of having those sensations (426b). Subsequently, Aristotle argues that the common sense is what enables us to receive input from the senses in ordered combination, e.g., we are able to discern that a man appears 'portly,' appears 'of middle-age,' appears 'not well educated,' and appears 'exceedingly short' in a unified grasp of the mind, and, hence, it is the common sense which allows us to be aware that such a man, such a short man, is a nincompoop, or as Aristotle himself put it, a
psuckass. Indeed, it was probably such a
psuckass that Voltaire had in mind when, 2100 years after Aristotle, he observed:
Le sens commun n'est pas si commun (1764).
So much for "common sense."
