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| Ethical Perspectives |
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| Issue : 16/3 (September - 2009) |
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| Truth, Meaning and Common World |
| Remi Peeters |
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Page : 337 - 359 |
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Unlike the majority of philosophers, Hannah Arendt was not inclined to look down on common sense. She became convinced of common sense’s invaluable significance for our common world, especially when she came to understand that totalitarianism consists of its undermining. No matter how important the role of the concept in her thought, however, its meaning remains ambiguous insofar as it refers to two related, yet different ‘faculties’, common sense as a cognitive faculty on the one hand and common sense as a faculty of judgment on the other. The aim of this two-part paper is to clarify this complicated relation.
The first part sketches the development of the concept and demonstrates how the polemic created by Eichmann in Jerusalem sharpened Arendt’s understanding of the difference between truth and opinion, knowing and judging. Subsequently, it focuses on Arendt’s analysis (mainly in Thinking) of common sense as a cognitive faculty, i.e. as a ‘sixth sense’ that enables us to grasp the common and worldly context of our experiences (section 1) and therefore also enables us to tell truth from falsehood. It is not thinking, with its search for meaning, but our common sense that warrants the revelation of truth and with it the possibility of (scientific) knowledge (section 2). Because truth compels the mind and precludes debate, Arendt distinguishes it sharply from opinion, which is never self-evident.
Nevertheless, this distinction does not end, as in Plato, in the hierarchical subordination of opinion to truth (section 3). At the same time, Arendt was aware of the powerlessness and vulnerability of truth in the public forum, in spite of its compelling character. This paradox calls for a discussion of Arendt’s view on the possibilities and limitations of modern mass-manipulation (section 4) |
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| Recent issue 17/2 (2010) |
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