Bourdieu and Common Sense

THE TERM “COMMON SENSE” HAS A LONG AND COMPLEX HISTORY. Its 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?