Genealogie del senso comune: percorsi settecenteschi

Abstract

The trajectory of common sense follows the various philosophies that intersect throughout the eighteenth century, from Baumgarten to Kant, from Hume to the different definitions of materialism. The issue is present from the outset in the libertine and clandestine eighteenth century, opening up before history a conflict – also political and revolutionary – that the question of common sense clearly illustrates. On the one hand it is judgment; on the other, the living dimension of desire: no form expresses it, no community embodies it. In this way, one moves beyond the dream of a common law for common sense and perceives in the eighteenth century impulses that surpass its critical meaning, dismantle its normative aspects, and shatter its interpretations. If, then, the search for common sense was one of the century’s aims, capable of generating new and free forms of equally diverse modes of subjectivity and its conceptualizations, there emerges progressively – mirroring that very search – the often destructive need to draw boundaries around one’s own present, destructive because common sense itself shuns the spirit of laws and the order of formal reflection, forcing reason to revolutionize itself, pushing it to confront the dark and negating forces of unreason.