This development of the concept of sensus communis in eighteenthcentury
Germany may explain why it is so closely connected with the
concept of judgment. "Gesunder Menschenverstand" (good sense), sometimes
called "gemeiner Verstand" (common understanding), is in fact
decisively characterized by judgment. The difference between a fool and a
sensible man is that the former lacks judgment—i.e., he is not able to
subsume correctly and hence cannot apply correctly what he has learned
and knows. The word "judgment" was introduced in the eighteenth
century in order to convey the concept of judicium, which was considered
to be a basic intellectual virtue. In the same way the English moral
philosophers emphasize that moral and aesthetic judgments do not obey
reason, but have the character of sentiment (or taste), and similarly Tetens,
one of the representatives of the German Enlightenment, sees the sensus
communis as a judicium without reflection.49 In fact the logical basis of
judgment—subsuming a particular under a universal, recognizing something
as an example of a rule—cannot be demonstrated. Thus judgment
requires a principle to guide its application. In order to follow this principle
another faculty of judgment would be needed, as Kant shrewdly noted.50
So it cannot be taught in the abstract but only practiced from case to case,
and is therefore more an ability like the senses. It is something that cannot
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TRUTH AND METHOD
be learned, because no demonstration from concepts can guide the
application of rules.
Consequently, German Enlightenment philosophy considered judgment
not among the higher but among the lower powers of the mind. In this
respect, it diverged considerably from the original Roman sense of sensus
communis, while advancing the scholastic tradition. This was to be
especially important for aesthetics. Baumgarten, for example, is quite
certain that what judgment recognizes is the sensible individual, the
unique thing, and what it judges in the individual thing is its perfection or
imperfection.51 It must be noted that by this definition judgment does not
simply mean applying a pregiven concept of the thing, but that the sensible
individual is grasped in itself insofar as it exhibits the agreement of the
many with the one. Not the application of the universal but internal
coherence is what matters. As we can see, this is already what Kant later
calls "reflective judgment," and he understands it as judgment according to
real and formal appropriateness. No concept is given; rather, the individual
object is judged "immanently." Kant calls this an aesthetic judgment; and
just as Baumgarten described the "iudicium sensitivum" as "gustus," so
also Kant repeats: "A sensible judgment of perfection is called taste."52
We will see below that this aesthetic development of the concept of
iudicium, for which Gottsched was primarily responsible in the eighteenth
century, acquired a systematic significance for Kant, although it will also
emerge that Kant's distinction between determinant and reflective judgment
is not without its problems.53 Moreover, it is difficult to reduce the
meaning of sensus communis to aesthetic judgment. From the use that
Vico and Shaftesbury make of this concept, it appears that sensus communis
is not primarily a formal capacity, an intellectual faculty to be used, but
already embraces a sum of judgments and criteria for judgment that
determine its contents.
Common sense is exhibited primarily in making judgments about right
and wrong, proper and improper. Whoever has a sound judgment is not
thereby enabled to judge particulars under universal viewpoints, but he
knows what is really important—i.e., he sees things from right and sound
points of view. A swindler who correctly calculates human weakness and
always makes the right move in his deceptions nevertheless does not
possess "sound judgment" in the highest sense of the term. Thus the
universality (Allgemeinheit) that is ascribed to the faculty of judgment is
by no means as common (gemein) as Kant thinks. Judgment is not so
much a faculty as a demand that has to be made of all. Everyone has
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TRANSCENDING THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION
enough "sense of the common" (gemeinen Sinn)—i.e., judgment—that he
can be expected to show a "sense of the community" (Gemeinsinn),
genuine moral and civic solidarity, but that means judgment of right and
wrong, and a concern for the "common good." This is what makes Vico's
reliance on the humanistic tradition so impressive, for against the intellectualization
of the concept of the sense of the community, he firmly retains
all the wealth of meaning that lived in the Roman tradition of this word
(and to this day is characteristic of the Latin race). Similarly, when
Shaftesbury took up the concept it was, as we have seen, also linked to the
political and social tradition of humanism. The sensus communis is an
element of social and moral being. Even when this concept was associated
with a polemical attack on metaphysics (as in Pietism and Scottish
philosophy), it still retained its original critical function.
By contrast, Kant's version of this idea in his Critique of Judgment has
quite a different emphasis.54 There is no longer any systematic place for the
concept's basic moral sense. As we know, he developed his moral philosophy
in explicit opposition to the doctrine of "moral feeling" that had been
worked out in English philosophy. Thus he totally excluded the concept of
sensus communis from moral philosophy.
What appears with the unconditionality of a moral imperative cannot be
based on feeling, not even if one does not mean an individual's feeling but
common moral sensibility. For the imperative immanent in morality
totally excludes any comparative reflection about others. The unconditionality
of a moral imperative certainly does not mean that the moral
consciousness must remain rigid in judging others. Rather, it is morally
imperative to detach oneself from the subjective, private conditions of
one's own judgment and to assume the standpoint of the other person. But
this unconditionality also means that the moral consciousness cannot
avoid appealing to the judgment of others. The obligatoriness of the
imperative is universal in a stricter sense than the universality of sensibility
can ever attain. Applying the moral law to the will is a matter for
judgment. But since it is a question of judgment operating under the laws
of pure practical reason, its task consists precisely in preserving one from
the "empiricism of practical reason, which bases the practical concepts of
good and bad merely on empirical consequences."55 This is done by the
"typic" of pure practical reason.
For Kant there is also another question: how to implant the stern law of
pure practical reason in the human mind. He deals with this in the
"Methodology of Pure, Practical Reason," which "endeavors to provide a
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TRUTH AND METHOD
brief outline of the method of engendering and cultivating genuine moral
attitudes." For this he in fact calls on ordinary human reason and he wants
to exercise and cultivate practical judgment; and certainly aesthetic
elements play their part also.56 But that moral feeling can be cultivated is
not really part of moral philosophy, and in any case it is not relevant to its
foundations. For Kant requires that our will be determined only by
motives founded on the self-legislation of pure practical reason. This
cannot be based on a mere commonness of sensibility, but only on "an
obscure but still securely guiding practical act of will," to clarify and
strengthen which is the task of the Critique of Practical Reason.
The sensus communis plays no part in Kant—not even in the logical
sense. What Kant treats in the transcendental doctrine of judgment—i.e.,
the doctrine of schematism and the principles—no longer has anything to
do with the sensus communis.57 For here we are concerned with concepts
that are supposed to refer to their objects a priori, and not with the
subsumption of the particular under the universal. When, however, we are
really concerned with the ability to grasp the particular as an instance of
the universal, and we speak of sound understanding, then this is, according
to Kant, something that is "common" in the truest sense of the
word—i.e., it is "something to be found everywhere, but to possess it is by
no means any merit or advantage."58 The only significance of this sound
understanding is that it is a preliminary stage of cultivated and enlightened
reason. It is active in an obscure kind of judgment called feeling, but it still
judges according to concepts, "though commonly only according to
obscurely imagined principles,"59 and it certainly cannot be considered a
special "sense of community." The universal logical use of judgment, which
goes back to the sensus communis, contains no principle of its own.60
Thus from the whole range of what could be called a sense faculty of
judgment, for Kant only the judgment of aesthetic taste is left. Here one
may speak of a true sense of community. Doubtful though it may be
whether one may speak of knowledge in connection with aesthetic taste,
and certain though it is that aesthetic judgments are not made according to
concepts, it is still the case that aesthetic taste necessarily implies universal
agreement, even if it is sensory and not conceptual. Thus the true sense of
community, says Kant, is taste.
That is a paradoxical formulation when we recall that the eighteenth
century enjoyed discussing precisely diversities of human taste. But even if
one draws no skeptical, relativistic conclusions from differences of taste,
but holds on to the idea of good taste, it sounds paradoxical to call "good
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TRANSCENDING THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION
taste"—this strange distinction that differentiates the members of a cultivated
society from all other men—a sense of community. Taken as an
empirical statement that would, in fact, be absurd, and we shall see how
far this description has meaning for Kant's transcendental purpose—i.e., as
an a priori justification for undertaking a criticism of taste. But we shall
also have to ask how the truth claim implicit in the sense of community is
affected by narrowing the concept of the sense of community to a
judgment of taste about what is beautiful, and how the Kantian subjective
a priori of taste has affected the self-understanding of the human sciences.
