Senso comum e realidade em Hannah Arendt: a formação de um mundo compartilhado.

Abstract

This investigation concerns the political thought of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Its guiding line is the concept of common sense such as it is used by her. Common sense has been the object of Arendt’s attention since her early writings, when Arendt identified the deflation, in the Modern Era, of concepts and experiences inherited from the past. It is also a main subject of Arendt’s reflexions the possibility of human action as a capacity to joint enterprise in a lasting and publicly accessible space, as well as the exchange of judgments about common experiences in order to reach agreements. In all these cases, the concept of common sense is central to the argumentation. In this research we present reasons to sustain that the concept of common sense is not univocal in Arendt’s philosophy, but has three different, although connected, meanings. The concept refers, in the first place, to the human faculty responsible for the unity of perceptions produced by sense organs, thus permitting real experience; such faculty points to intersubjectivity, once it searches for the acknowledgement of others in order to confirm individual impressions. Further on, Arendt makes reference to common sense when talking about costumes, traditions and beliefs disseminated in a community. Finally, common sense designates a standard used to formulate judgments through which the individual subject takes into account the opinions of others in the process of making his own. These different meanings to the same concept are connected, they point out to basic common experiences, though they exert different argumentative functions. Thus, common sense must be made explicit in order to be understood in its different features, especially when one has in mind the public and political life in arenditan terms.