‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense

Abstract

One of the most hotly debated issues in present-day Arendt scholarship concerns the status of common sense or sensus communis in Arendt’s theory of judgment. Is her notion of common sense a priori or a posteriori, i.e. empirical? What is at stake in this debate seems to be no less than the promise of a reconciliation of a commitment to the situatedness of judgment with the universalistic aspiration to transcend mere partiality and subjectivism. My intervention in this debate focuses on a neglected aspect of Arendt’s thought, her hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The fact Arendt analyzes common sense in a hermeneutic-phenomenological fashion, implies that the very question whether it is an a priori faculty or refers to a particular community is not pertinent. Instead, she shows that common sense is co-original with the common world. Common sense both presupposes a common world and fits human beings into it.