Towards Being Sensible

There is a strange way in which expertise becomes quite unhelpful if it sits in the saddle of practical judgement. Everything gets reduced to a theory which then gets applied. An example is perhaps the National Health Service which at the same time warns of the inevitability of a pandemic yet closes wards, or which was proposing to wait till both eyes were affected before treating a disease. The Russian bear has recently got prickly but NATO and the EC have been coming up to its back door perhaps following some impeccable logic of strategy. The United Nations plans to spend 45 Trillion (45 British GDPs) combating climate change. Local authorities in Great Britain propose vigilantes to deal with dog messes and rubbish bins. We witness a political class following political theories to solve practical problems, and losing common sense in the process.
It is somewhat surprising to learn that Aristotle thought moral judgement had a different basis from theory, so to know about morals one must study good men. Theoria was one thing; phronesis another. With our modern mind set we imagine it is perfectly OK for a politician to be hopeless in his personal morals so long as he is a good politician and does his job well. Good conduct, phronesis, depends on all the virtues being acquired, for Aristotle, for good practice depends upon dealing with everything. Plato sought a philosopher king. Aristotle thought a good king would need to know only so much about philosophy.
St Thomas Aquinas translates phronesis by ‘prudentia’ and man must combine worldly prudence with supernatural prudence. ‘Common sense’ is reduced to meaning a faculty which combines all the sense data into a grasp of the situation. If though one recalls that sense data can convey meaning St Thomas’ thought might support a richer understanding than at first appears. I have a sense that the Catholic moral tradition tends to inform prudence with certain conclusions: ‘thou shalt not . . .’, some based on natural law (contraception) some based on divinely revealed law (the indissolubility of marriage) but when it comes to how to be or what to do we have not theory but the example of Our Lord, Our Lady and the Saints. Our positive way forward is thus based very much on concrete examples.
Vico found himself dealing with the emergent mathematical certainty of the sciences and so emphasised probable arguments, images suitable for teaching the young, rhetoric and common sense. By ‘common sense’ he meant the virtue that makes community. Common sense led to knowledge as certain as the scientific axioms. It was a virtue formed by growing up in a people and valuing the traditions of public and social life. It has not been shown, one suspects, in the emasculation of the House of Lords from the time of Macmillan and in recent changes to the office of Lord Chancellor. Rather a political theory has come down from ‘above’.
In England ‘common sense’ became a remedy for the ‘moonsickness of metaphysics’ (which probably included Catholicism) but it was seen as a virtue, care for the common good and humour among friends (Shaftesbury). Hutchison, Hume, Reid – ‘The Rights of Man’ – and Adam Smith drew on the notion. The quest was for a moral philosophy that really does justice to the life of society. In this respect the movement was against metaphysics but also against scepticism.
In France the concept – le bon sens – was an uprightness of judgement which stemmed from right order in the soul. It is important to realise that the movement was against the inhuman consequences of a purely scientific attitude as well as an anti Catholic mentality building a post feudal world. The movement was on the side of the angels in that it was moralistic.
In Germany – not so politically developed – the notion was lost. Instead, with Kant, moral precepts arrived – never treat another person as a means – which lost the sense of ‘common sense’ or as we might put it today, a sense of ‘the common good’. There was though a pietist, Oetinger, who made use of the concept theologically, and interestingly identified common sense with the heart.
‘Common sense’ appears from time to time in political agendas. Perhaps the last time in England we experienced it was in the Second World War. Since then perhaps we have been spoken to by an increasingly expert political class. Alongside de facto top down power there is a presumed top down expertise. Who could object if in fact this were the case?
One of the motivations Lonergan had in working at Economics was to show what was wrong with Major Douglas (who thought every citizen should be paid a salary whether they worked or not) and to show what was wrong with John Maynard Keynes (who thought it belonged to experts and the government to achieve full employment). For Lonergan the world belonged to man and the world of economic progress lay in the free choices of consumers and producers. He aimed at a simple understanding of how the economy worked which would help everyone to play their part in freedom. He was thinking of a common sense of the good as well as personal self interest, but the common sense required a certain understanding.
One finds the experts incapable of understanding Lonergan’s thought, and so maybe the strategy should be to enlighten the multitude or maybe to enlighten neighbouring sciences. A great but painful cause of people thinking anew about macro-economics will be if our present recession proves to be a major slump – one cannot hope this will be the case because of the suffering involved and its relatively simple avoidability.
While Lonergan’s concern for Economics shows his ‘Common Sense’, ‘Le bon sens’, he actually uses the term common sense to describe the world we all enter when we leave the simple world of immediacy in the nursery and enter the world ‘mediated by meaning and motivated by value’, the world where words matter as much as things. That little verse is quite untrue ‘sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you’.
The values operative in this world may be mainly pleasure within the law or without it. The world of common sense does not mean ‘the sense of the common’ or ‘le bon sens’. He says somewhere ‘a good man is much less rare than a good people’. But ‘le bon sens’ is precisely a matter of operating and cooperating with others for the good which includes but goes beyond the personal good. As the Germans in the eighteenth century did not have the structure socially to take on board the idea, so it may be more dream than reality. We may touch it in a good cause, but it is about all good causes and a magnificent collaboration. Maybe ecclesiastical life is the last repository of ‘le bon sens’.
Lonergan who writes of three conversions, religious, moral and intellectual sometimes referred to religious conversion as affective conversion which has three dimensions, to God, to family and to mankind. One could there find le bon sens operating where religious conversion entails the love of mankind and practical policies to be adopted. Le Bon Sens involves immediate and world wide solidarity today.
In addition to common sense, Lonergan has several ‘differentiations of consciousness’ which may be attained, the scientific, the scholarly, the religious and the philosophic. As attained, these differentiations involve speculations but also judgements. Insights coalesce to form ones horizon. May one suggest that the word one hears moves one into the horizon one has attained? The dog hears the words ‘Come here’ and using ‘common sense’ obeys and moves. A man reads an article in the paper and the word read has to meld with the whole horizon attained, with its conversions and differentiations. Man full of sense is also full of intellectual attainment, which is activated by the word.
He responds to what he has read in an appropriate way, aware by common sense of who he is and who is listening and what the effect of his words is likely to be. The response made shows the depth of the human attainment. So Our Lord responds to the question about tax by calling for a coin, confirming that it has Caesar’s head on it, and saying ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’. The answer that he gives opens one to his entire mind.
So by words man is immediately present to his entire achievement in the way of forming an horizon with its real assents in common sense and differentiated areas and affective conversions. There may be a pause as he gathers his being. This is Aquinas’ ‘Common Sense’ transformed into ‘le bon sens’. ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks’. or as Gadamer puts it: ‘Cultivated consciousness goes beyond each of the natural senses . . . It is a universal sense.