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1 Do academics have common sense?
If you treat common sense as you would any other cultural form, the obvious first step would be to consider what other scholars have had to say about the subject. However, in 2001, Jeremy Paxman – a British journalist and political commentator – published words that sound a note of caution about such a seemingly routine step on the road to understanding:
The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect. The characteristic English approach to a problem is not to reach for an ideology, but to snuffle around it, like a truffle hound, and when they have isolated the core, then to seek a solution. It is an approach which is empirical and reconciling and the only ideology it believes in is Common Sense. The English mind prefers utilitarian things to ideas.
(Paxman 2001, 193–192)
The above quotation is where Paxman attempts to explain the antipathy he perceives, within English society, toward intellectuals, ideology, and idealism in general. Although Paxman goes on to say he does not feel that commitment to this “ideology [of] Common Sense” is the primary cause of this antipathy, his utilitarian “ideology” is treated as a contrasting pole to academic understanding. For Paxman’s Englishman, the senses and concrete solutions are privileged over detached reflection. This leaves the reader with two enduring impressions: that the English scorn ideas in favour of practice, and that common sense, insofar as it is an intellectual phenomenon at all, is utterly bound up with that practice. This is a curious characterisation for Paxman to make here, considering that empiricism and utilitarianism are both theoretical schools, favoured by generations of intellectuals, English or otherwise. The work of such academic luminaries as John Locke and David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, which in truth lies at the very foundations of English quotidian culture and liberal ideology today (Fox 2005; Sober 2008; Ryan 2012), is submerged into a natural matter of perceiving the world in a sensible fashion, and responding to these perceptions in a practical, matter-of-fact way. Although Paxman highlights both the empirical1 and utilitarian aspects to English knowledge culture, they could be captured together as pragmatism.2 Indeed, mere empiricism on its own would presumably be viewed as suspiciously abstract, as conveyed by these excerpts from a book on naval slang: “Common sense, a quality sometimes lacking in university graduates of otherwise high intellect” (Jolly 2000, 112) and “Your average university graduate these days is the sort of bloke who can tell you the square root of a pickle-jar … lid to three decimal places – but can’t get the bloody thing off …” (ibid., 327).3 The meaning here is clear; empiricism needs to be part of a pragmatic attitude for it to be common sense. Furthermore, intellectuals – like university graduates – are deemed to lack this attitude, despite their empirical abilities. I would, therefore, argue that rather than conceive of common sense as an English species of empiricism as Paxman invites us to do, it is rather an English pragmatism – continuously oriented towards solving practical issues over more abstract questions.
In addition to pointing us towards pragmatism as a defining feature of common sense, Paxman’s musings and the humour of naval dictionaries help us in another way too: they highlight the tense relationship between intellectuals and the rest of English society, in which common sense plays a key role. This tension both affirms the value of expertise outside the high hall of academe and gives voice to popular criticism of the people that inhabit those halls. “Academics may be very learned” my informants would say “but they just lack common sense”. Reflecting upon this tension – between scholars and the public, and the knowledge they hold – is a helpful place to begin, because before we can truly understand what common sense is, we must understand who uses it, and why. But as we shall see, despite their supposed lack of common sense, intellectuals from numerous disciplines have tirelessly explored the concept. How effective these explorations have been, however, remains to be seen.
Koinē aísthēsis and other opinions: key philosophical debates on common sense
While common sense in English culture may be the pragmatic antithesis of intellectualism, this has not stopped generations of philosophers from using the phrase, and in turn influencing popular conceptions of it. And despite the quintessential “Englishness” of common sense itself, such academic engagements draw heavily on an intellectual lineage that reaches far beyond English shores. As such, “common sense” – as referred to in academic philosophy – denotes a quite distinct set of meanings to those conveyed by its lay usage. Descartes’ bon sens, Kant’s gesunder Menschenverstand, Reid’s common sense, etc., are all different from one another, and from lay usage, in their meanings and broader cultural significance. The dialogue – between distinct intellectual and popular understandings of common sense, between more or less pragmatic, and more or less abstract attitudes – mirrors a dialectical relationship at the heart of English attitudes toward knowledge. The polysemy of common sense both emerges from and sits at the heart of this dialogue. Before the common sense can be examined ethnographically, it is helpful to consider the philosophical tradition against which this very English pragmatism is so often contrasted.
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Academic discussion of common sense reaches back to Ancient Greece, and the writings of Aristotle. In On the Soul, Aristotle reasons for the existence of a basic sensory capacity – common to all animals – that is able to integrate perception from the other senses into a single sensorium, a capacity he called koinē aísthēsis, literally “the common sense/perception” (Aristotle 1957). In the writing of prominent Roman politicians – including Cicero – communis sensus was used to refer to a set of concepts and reasoned ideas that are shared in common by a group of people – specifically, the Roman citizenry (Bugter 1987, 89). Despite the fact that both terms are translated in English as “common sense”, the distance between these concepts is striking: both owe a significant legacy to quite different intellectual projects and cultural contexts. Aristotle, for example, was seeking to provide an explanation for the agency shown by non-human animals without attributing them souls and reason, as his mentor Plato did – a position Aristotle rejected. Both Plato and Aristotle were drawing upon ancient medical theories about human physiology – with competing schools claiming that either the brain or the heart was the seat of perception (Gregoric 2007, 10:7). Cicero, meanwhile, was sympathetic towards Stoic philosophy, and so his use of a civic common sense reflects the Stoic agenda of the mapping of nature, reason, and ethics onto one another, in order to create a robust basis for personal behaviour and societal norms (Johnson 2013).
Aristotle and Cicero’s models of common sense are part of a legacy bequeathed to many subsequent philosophies, from René Descartes’ discourse on sensation and reasoning (Descartes 1709, 1; Wilson 2012, 32–45), to the aesthetics of Kant (Kant 1914, 92–94). Broadly speaking, though, it appears the Greek and Latin literatures have given rise to two distinct traditions. Thinkers drawing upon Aristotle link common sense to the senses and basic cognitive faculties pertaining to them, as propounded by the Scottish Common Sense Realist School of the Enlightenment (see Johnston et al. 1915). Those drawing on Cicero and the Stoics treat common sense as simply the shared knowledge base of any given society, a view exemplified by Giambattista Vico (Vico 1948; Bayer 2008). Both traditions, however, stress the universality of the feature to which they refer – either a universal human capacity for sensibleness (Reid 2005) or universal human capacity to develop shared assumptions and ideas (Bourdieu 1977).4 This universalism is repeated by present-day philosophers when common sense is treated matter-of-factly as something that should – at least in principle – be shared by everyone (Chisholm 1982; Elio 2002; Pollock 2002; Lemos 2009). This universalism has even been transplanted into other disciplines, including psychology (e.g. Bogdan 1991) and anthropology (see below).5
These philosophical deployments of “common sense” – in various languages – to discuss the twin universals of reason and the co-creation of culture are a worthy enterprise in their own right, about which much more could be said. But here, it is sufficient to note their role as the root stock onto which the vernacular phrase of “common sense” was grafted. But while that vernacular draws strength from philosophical discourse, as its etymology shows, it has grown in a quite distinct direction.
“Sons of the Soil”: etymologies of common sense
Through much of the Middle Ages, common sense was known as “common wit” (Simpson and Weiner 2009). But from the 1500s, we begin to see discussions in English of “the common sense” – “sense” and “wit” conveying identical meaning in Early Modern English. By and large, the understanding of “the common sense” shown at the time was squarely of the Aristotelean sort. But we see the beginnings of something different in the debate between George Joye and William Tyndale over the nature of the resurrection in 1543. Joye remarks that Tyndale cannot be so far from his “common senses” as to believe that the dead can hear the voice of Christ.6 Here, we see a connection being drawn between sensory perception and reason. The truth, here, is evident in universal sensory experience – seeing is believing. The rhetorical force Joye attributes to the senses has, in the English cultural imagination, been commanded by them ever after. This marriage between thought and sensation gathered momentum after the Reformation, so that in 1744 James Harris remarked: “Common sense … a sense common to all, except lunatics and idiots.” At the same time, we see common sense acquiring a distinctive, normative flavour too. In 1726, the poet and political writer Nicholas Amherst produced a speech in which he claimed that:
There is not (said a shrewd wag) a more uncommon thing in the world than common sense, … By common sense we usually and justly understand the faculty to discern one thing from another, and the ordinary ability to keep our selves from being imposed upon by gross contradictions, palpable inconsistencies, and unmask’d imposture. By a man of common sense, we mean one who knows, as we say, white from black, and chalk from cheese; that two and two makes four; and that a mountain is bigger than a mole-hill: in short, when we say a man has common sense, we only say, he is not a fool which (as uncourtly as it may sound) is a very great character; a character, which most men indeed pretend to, but what very few deserve. For though common sense, as before defined, is what the most vulgar and unlearned think themselves possess’d of; yet is it in the most learned often wanting: we are all born without it, and most of us educated in defiance of it; such obstacles and prejudices lie in its way, that it is attained (if at all) with great struggle, pain, and anxiety; and when attained (a melancholy consideration!) it comes accompanied with infamy and contempt.
(Amherst 2004)
Amherst’s wry commentary is revealing in two ways. First, it hinges on the ironic claim that common sense is, in fact, quite uncommon – a remark I encountered in the field on numerous occasions, and to which I return in Chapter 5. Common sense is often invoked at times of disagreement, or when someone has made some obvious mistake (“She just has no common sense whatsoever!”; “I mean, it’s common sense to wear a coat when it’s raining, but he just didn’t bother”). On such occasions, it is used to point to the obvious folly of an “other”, such as an officious bureaucrat or an unreasonable neighbour, in contrast to the reasonableness of the speaker and the listener. The fact that common sense is often most conspicuous in its absence points to its normative, and even political, significance – being used to exclude some people from communities of shared understanding, while including...
