Senso comum e juízo político em Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This research aims to reflect on the potentialities inherent in common sense from which Hannah Arendt will think the effectiveness of a political judgment. The first impressions of a systematic reflection of the author on the subject show that the reasoning from human common sense, as opposed to philosophical thinking, is directly related to a mundane reality where everything comes to be in its own “appearance”. At this moment, common sense is responsible for bringing together all the particular impressions of men and conforming them to standards compatible with the human condition of sentient beings. Here, the common sense is literally understood as a sense that guarantees to men the worldly reality of "appearances." From dialogical reading with Kant, Arendt discovers that there is a direct link between common sense and the judgment of taste, or reflexive judgment. In this context the common sense is understood as sensus comunnis, or as a sense that establishes community. The purpose of the sensus comunnis is to ensure that our reflective judgment, or our judgment of taste, reaches a common agreement between the members of the same community. This understanding goes back to the humanist tradition that, since Cicero, already recognized the political potential contained in the cultivation of the sensus commum that guided men to always judge on the basis of the values shared by the community. We emphasize that common sense, in both contexts presented by Hannah Arendt, is invariably oriented toward the judgment of the world. Judgment from common sense, whether by sensible criteria compatible with the condition of sentient beings or by the very reflective nature of the judges of taste, constitutes a political judgment par excellence.