Sometimes, during a philosophy workshop, an adult or a child insists on defending a fanciful idea, a situation to which I was content for a long time to react with a small smile or timid reserve.
I did not dare to put the other person's idea to the test, to impose a limit to the expression of his subjectivity, which I thought I should respect as such.
However, philosophizing, alone or with others, implies giving up the unlimited expression of our subjectivity.
I cannot be satisfied with saying whatever I want, just because I feel like it, but I have to make sure that my idea makes sense to others.
Otherwise, I am not in dialogue but in soliloquy, I remain closed in myself...
For an authentic philosophical dialogue to exist, I must accept that others question me when they judge that my idea is dubious or that it goes against what is reasonable to assume.
Common sense corresponds to a capacity for pre-reflective judgment, inherent in all human beings, which allows them to recognize what is obvious, what it would be unreasonable to doubt, and what is illogical or absurd. This common sense would be both a sense of logic, of the rational, of the reasonable, and a sense of reality and of human experience.
In a philosophy workshop, summoning "common sense" allows us to immediately evaluate the reasonableness of an idea, the fact that it makes sense not only for the person who expresses it, but for every human being who uses his reason.
Comments