Bourdieu and Common Sense

Abstract

roots go back to the Greek terms koinos nous (common mind-the mental equipment we all, presumably, bear), koine aisthesis (common perceptual sense, on which I will elaborate below), and koine ennoia (common notions, beliefs or ideas). The Latin term sensus communis uneasily combines all these senses, a fact that accounts perhaps for some of the continuing vagueness of its definitions (Bugter 83-84). In one form or another, the phrase has never gone out of use, but as a result of its complex history, it does seem at times to carry contradictory meanings. Sometimes common sense is that plain feet-on-the-ground sense of reality available to any clear-thinking person, which can emerge when all the fancy talk of the so-called experts is swept away. Alternatively, common sense is quite the opposite: that collection of provincial, conventional wisdom, superstition, and false consciousness that can be recognized as such and overcome through rigorous thought, rationality, and science. Does common sense refer to those universal properties of mind, rationality, and sense that all humans have in common? Or does it signify the fact that we are all members of particular and specific social and historical communities of sense and knowledge?' It is instructive to note that while Samuel Johnson's famous kick at a stone has long been understood as a defense of common sense against Berkeley's philosophy, Berkeley himself understood his own philosophical work to be a defense of common sense. While skeptical commonsense thinking, with its ability to debunk and demystify, found Enlightenment defenders and champions from Descartes to Voltaire to Thomas Reid, a concurrent strain of philosophical inquiry-sometimes including the same thinkers-understood common sense itself to be that body of received ideas that must be overcome by means of skeptical philosophical reflection. More recently, G.E. Moore has explored the articulation of common sense in ordinary language, while Chomsky's work has occasioned a related debate on the idea of common notions and innate knowledge. An excellent