Isn’t it Obvious?: Review, Sopia Rosenfeld’s Common Sense

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot…

Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

I walked into this class the other week, and so into a conversation. A few of my classmates, undergraduates, were enjoying their own bewilderment over the recent Donald Trump phenomenon. One of these bright young people had run into an unapologetic and—weirder still—an equally unironic Trump supporter. “I can’t believe he was serious,” my memory recalls this classmate saying. “How could anyone be so stupid?” was the unvoiced question. It’s common sense to my classmate that Trump is a fraud, a bully, disingenuous, privileged, a sexist, a racist. You’ve only to turn on the television and watch—no spin room necessary. It doesn’t take a Rice University education to figure this out.

   “Why dwell on the obvious?” This is the apparently unobvious question Sophia Rosenfeld takes up in her 2011 study, pragmatically and playfully titled Common Sense. Common sense isn’t really, wouldn’t you know it, just a matter of common sense after all. In proving her point Rosenfeld reaches all the way back to Aristotle, tracing the concept through the Renaissance, into its seventeenth and eighteenth century British, French, and Dutch variations, through revolutionary America (particularly with Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet), revolutionary France, and into modern political discourse. Common sense, Rosenfeld suggests, flourishes in, as they say, interesting times. As Rosenfeld puts it,

…common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself. (15)

A rhetoric of normalcy to ballast an otherwise listing ship of state—Rosenfeld sees that rather than righting us, that rhetorical bulk will right us right to the ocean floor.

   Rosenfeld’s study comes as in a tradition of complicating common sense (a touchstone study might be Clifford Geertz’s “Common Sense as a Cultural System”). Really the whole of academic endeavor is dedicated to complicating the obvious. No one dreads like the scholar dreads the mild words which could ultimately sound the death knell of one’s work: “Not bad. A bit obvious though, isn’t it?” And so we might see Rosenfeld eyeing rather an easy target. In fact her book turns on itself in a wonderful way: it’s really quite obvious that “the obvious” really isn’t that obvious after all. This is almost common sense, except unfortunately (according to Rosenfeld) it must not be, and so she had to write a book about it published by Harvard University Press.

   Common sense began in the body. It made us human, this super sense, this “koine aesthesis.” For Aristotle, common sense was a yoke for our other sensory faculties “comparing and coordinating the impressions received by [the rest of the senses]…and thus…allowing minimal judgments about sense objects to occur independent of reason” (18). An organizer and adjudicator. Historically its location has moved around: sometimes in the head and sometimes in the heart. But then something changed. Descartes, in fact, happened. Because he needed to get away from the body, Descartes took this super sense out of the body and altogether out of physicality. Rosenfeld writes that Descartes’s “mechanistic account of the body and brain, and his desire to root knowledge firmly in cognition rather than in sensation, rendered unnecessary the common sense as a specific, locatable mental faculty” (21).

   We’re coming closer to common sense as the wisdom of the ordinary. After Descartes, “[t]he watered-down Aristotelian notion of a common sense faculty merged…with the old Roman conception of sensus communis: the shared, though generally tacit, values and beliefs of a community” (22). Politicized common sense becomes a regulatory tool of the state. It could be rhetorically deployed to discourage ideological eccentricity; a tool, then, “in the creation of a noncombative common culture” (30). Common sense as common taste—not merely obvious, but shared, it could help maintain political stability (or political homeostasis). But Descartes would be, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, more a symptom than a problem. The ideological backdrop to her argument seems to be the threatening (and near constant) rise of skepticism. But Descartes’s answer to “How do we know anything?” and, really, “What makes things real?” simply didn’t take; not long after his 1637 settlement with epistemological skepticism, his cogito, his answer to the question of uncertainty, began to wear a bit thin. The problem of the era seemed to be “How do we live without certainty?”

   The drive towards common sense is, then, the flight from uncertainty. Rosenfeld’s history next takes us to Britain and the Scottish Common Sense school. David Hume was a particularly dangerous gadfly for eighteenth century anti-skeptics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid; Reid the founder of a rather self-congratulatory group called “The Wise Club.” These Scots of common sense were creating a new philosophy somewhere between Descartes and Locke. Rosenfeld calls Reid’s common sense “an amorphous set of basic judgments or propositions, evident in the common language in which it is entrenched, to which all sane adult people, anywhere, anytime, must subscribe” (72). Reid might have found a hero in Othello who also needed to know that he could trust his eyes: “Men should be what they seem.” Give me proof! Unfortunately, it is Iago rather than Othello still breathing at the end of that tragedy.

   So there came a taste for doubting in the wake of the Renaissance, and a counter rhetoric rose to combat the resultant epistemological anxiety. This seems obvious. But Rosenfeld is at her best when investigating the “radical” uses of common sense in Holland and France in the late eighteenth century. Eventually important to Holland, the early to mid-seventeenth century French le bon sens was “the very obverse of the kind of reasoning that formed the backdrop to the common sense philosophy of the Scots” (103). Le bon sens, or “good sense,” was the subversive French counterpart to British regulatory common sense. If British common sense loved its doxa, French le bon sens reveled in paradox. As with everything in France, this discourse eventually got classed. Rosenfeld points to the rise of “the philosophe” in this new “war over representation” (134). The other combatant? Common Sense de jour:

The philosophe, in other words, routinely chose unsettling language games over restoring the direct and long-established correspondence between words and things. His love of contradictions, like his refusal to follow either established authorities or the consensus gentium, pushed society in two directions: toward a generalized doubt about all that should be certain and toward the espousal of dangerous new absurdities under the banner of truth. (134)

We still find this formulation in variant forms of what we call “the culture wars,” often categorized by level of education, religion, geography etc. The Overeducated Coastal Snob (who knows quite a lot about very little) and the Ignorant Quasi-Bigoted Midwesterner, to make one generalized colorful example.

   Of course if Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” has any merit, French le bon sens likely never took much hold in America. Rosenfeld goes into great detail about American and French Revolutionary forms of common sense, but her most interesting thesis is that “in the radical Whig rhetoric of revolutionary Pennsylvania, we can locate the apotheosis of a brand-new and decidedly modern form of political legitimation known as populism” (167). Ours is a particularly provocative climate in which to be reading of the inchoate roots of populism. Rosenfeld continues, asserting that in Philadelphia was initiated a “style and form of politics that depended upon wrapping itself in the moral and epistemological notion of the collective common sense of common men more than any economic argument” (167). Her dismissal of the centrality of an “economic argument” is quite provocative and, the reviewer admits, not entirely convincing. She takes this interpretation as evidenced by a one-page pamphlet written by James Cannon in 1776; what he did “in a few short strokes,” Rosenfeld argues, “was turn a concept long associated with a plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-expert way of seeing the world—that is, common sense—into an ideal foundation for a new, and distinctly American, political order” (167).

   It’s a well formulated argument—smart and neat. If we distill the book down to one sentence it might just be: Ideas matter, and few would argue with that. But there’s something telling about the concluding chapter wherein Rosenfeld claims the common sense playbook, this anti-expert, anti-thinking rhetorical toolbox, as “increasingly the province of the right” (255). Palin, Huckabee, Beck, and The Great Communicator himself Ronald Reagan began “a second American afterlife” to common sense politics. This isn’t to undercut the value of Rosenfeld’s book which I found interesting, intelligent, and clarifying. But the problem connects for me to the conversation I sketched at the beginning of this review essay.

   Rosenfeld betrays, at times, the frustrations of the bewildered, beleaguered intellectual. So anxious about the cult of an American unthinking public, Rosenfeld has had to write a book ripping down the façade of the greatest rhetorical weapon of the “common sense conservative” —a book that will likely only be read by people already interested in why common sense isn’t a matter of common sense at all. Common sense is everywhere. Everyone uses it for divers purposes. Donald Trump has in fact said “I’m a common sense conservative,” but the political Left uses it with “common sense gun solutions” all the time. And most people realize that common sense is a rhetorical weapon of political whimsy; and most people don’t need to read Tristan Tzara and Pierre Bourdieu to figure this out. Thus when Rosenfeld closes with the injunction that “[i]t is vital that some individuals in the modern world consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” we see Rosenfeld waving at us from her self-regulated commonsense-free zone and we can thank her politely and keep on walking because it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to realize that wherever it’s located, and in spite of ourselves, we’re always bound to fall back on it. This doesn’t make us stupid, but it might make us vote for Donald Trump.

On Trollope's 'The Bertrams' and "understanding"

For an assignment in my 1859/60 seminar, we were to track a word throughout our reading of Trollope's The Bertrams. Wonderful novel, hardly ever read anymore. The assignment was fruitful, I think. Here are the results.

The Bertrams and “understanding”

    I chose to track some derivatives of “understanding” in The Bertrams since Trollope, it seems to me, shoos his characters through the plot primarily by means of a repetition of attempts—and often failures—by Trollope’s characters to understand/to know/to acknowledge the hearts and minds of their comrades and also, critically, of themselves.  I began searching recurrences of “understand,” more often than not finding the word in a negative mode e.g. “could not,” “cannot,” “will not,” “did not,” “do not,” or “hardly” understand etc. Other slight variations on this theme did catch my eye, however, and I tried to include a few in my catalogue such as “…he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind” (137).

    Thus we have a knowledge-problem spawning much pain and confusion for our lovers and friends. Though sometimes rendered brilliantly comic (as when Miss Todd and Adela visit Mrs. Leake) misunderstanding usually leads to suffering. And Trollope all the while gives us the sense that this suffering—by “stricken harts” and stricken hearts—is needless. In other words, this complex pain could have, indeed, should have, been avoided if George had tried harder to understand the complexity of Caroline; if Old Bertram had better known his own nephew’s character, or recognized better his own miserliness; if Arthur would have actually looked and actually understood Adela’s deep unswaying love (a love that had always been there for him); if Caroline had recognized her own capacity to love George, and her own need to be loved. This profound inability to know, to understand, to acknowledge one’s self and one another I actually do not find to be resolved by the end of the novel. Our lovers do find each other, do find a kind of understanding with one another. Recognition scenes, after all, are not absent from this very English tragicomedy: “Caroline Waddington had once flattered herself that that heart of hers was merely a blood-circulating instrument. But she had discovered her mistake, and learned the truth before it was too late. She had known what it was to love…” (445). But one senses from Trollope’s novel an inevitability: that to live is to suffer, to struggle, and to misunderstand.

    Two characters, Trollope’s heroes, escape this somewhat tragic condition: Adela and Miss Todd. Adela, “pure, true, and honest” always understood Arthur, and always understood herself. Similarly, the Falstaffian Miss Todd sees through the deceptions and misunderstandings of her friends and neighbors: all but once. Miss Todd does fail to understand Miss Baker’s attraction to Sir Lionel, and yet we might see here the success of that misunderstanding: Sir Lionel’s iniquitous seductions, we feel, are better kept far away from Hadley. Miss Todd we are told “does more good to others than others do to her”: to do so is to make a kind of heroic effort. Unlike Arthur’s orthodoxy, Miss Todd’s ethics requires not creeds but only an effort of understanding. 

The Bertrams and “understanding”

Volume One

·         Adela had never before known him to be solicitous about money for himself, and now she felt that she did not understand him. (Chapter 4, p44)

·         Indeed Mr. Bertram did not think very much about degrees. He had taken no degree himself, except a high degree in wealth, and could not understand that he ought to congratulate a young man of twenty-two as to a successful termination of his school-lessons. (55)

·         They did not understand each other; perceiving which, Sir Lionel gave up the subject. He was determined not to make himself disagreeable to his son. (89)

·         “…But you hardly understand me, or him either.”

“I think I understand him, George…” (91)

·         “…I hardly think you know or realize what my feelings to you are. I can only meet you to tell you again and again that I love you. You are so cold yourself that you cannot understand my—my—my impetuosity, if you choose to call it so." (135-136)

·         …he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind. (137)

·         "Ah! my dear fellow, you do not know her…” (166)

·         "Ah! you say that because you do not understand her…” (166)

·         "And occasionally cheese," said Harcourt, who could not understand that any rising man could marry early, unless in doing so he acquired money. (176)

·         "Yes, I do; at times very, very much; but I fear the time may come when I may love him less. You will not understand me; but the fact is, I should love him better if he were less worthy of my love—if he were more worldly."

"No, I do not understand that," said Adela, thinking of her love, and the worldly prudence of him who should have been her lover.

"That is it—you do not understand me; and yet it is not selfishness on my part. I would marry a man in the hope of making him happy." (184)

Volume Two

·         "But it was a fault of yours. Do you think that I cannot understand? that I cannot see?...” (238) 

·         …she had acted foolishly in that, certainly; had not known him, had not understood his character… (244)

·         "Trouble—trouble! But I will not make a fool of myself. I believe at any rate that you understand me."

"Oh! perfectly, Mr. Bertram."

But she did not understand him; nor perhaps was it very likely that she should understand him. What he had meant her to understand was this: that in giving her up he was sacrificing only himself, and not her; that he did so in the conviction that she did not care for him; and that he did so on this account, strong as his own love still was, in spite of all her offences. This was what he intended her to understand;—but she did not understand the half of it. (251)

·         Bertram did not understand her, and he showed he did not by his look. (253)

·         Mr. Bertram turned towards the table, and buried his face in his hands. He did not understand it. He did not know whence came all this opposition. He could not conceive what was the motive power which caused his nephew thus to thwart and throw him over, standing forward as he did with thousands and tens of thousands in his hand. But he knew that his request was refused, and he felt himself degraded and powerless. (314)

·         "I believe much that I do not understand. I believe the distance of the earth from the sun. I believe that the seed of a man is carried in a woman, and then brought forth to light, a living being. I do not understand the principle of this wondrous growth. But yet I believe it, and know that it is from God. But I cannot believe that evil is good. I cannot believe that man placed here by God shall receive or not receive future happiness as he may chance to agree or not to agree with certain doctors who, somewhere about the fourth century, or perhaps later, had themselves so much difficulty in coming to any agreement on the disputed subject." (334)

·         "Ah! you do not understand, George." (336)

·         “I do not know what you wish me to understand, Mr. Bertram.”

“Yes, Adela, you do; I think you do. I think I am honest and open. At any rate, I strive to be so. I think you do understand me.” (344)

·         She was in a twitter of sentimental restlessness, but she did not understand the cause of her own uneasiness. (377)

Volume Three

·         “Ah! you little know me.”

“I should but little know you if I thought you could esteem me in that guise.” (449)

·         "What is it you mean?"

"I will not deserve the name again—even from you."

"Nonsense; I do not understand you. You do not know what you are saying."

"Yes, Sir Henry, I do know well what I am saying. It may be that I have done you some injury; if so, I regret it. God knows that you have done me much. We can neither of us now add to each other's comfort, and it will be well that we should part."

"Do you mean me to understand that you intend to leave me?"

"That is what I intend you to understand."

"Nonsense; you will do no such thing." (455)

·         “But, Adela, do not misunderstand me…” (461)

·         “Well, I don’t suppose you know your own mind, as yet.”

“Oh, sir! indeed I do.” (464)

·         "Well, all things are possible; but I do not understand how mine are to be cured. They have come too clearly from my own folly." (471)

·         But he knew himself to be a handsome man, and he could not understand how he could be laid aside for so ugly a lout as this stranger from England. (484)

·         Much as his uncle understood, he had failed to understand his nephew’s mind. (516)

·         His lordship had given directions at the lodge that she was not to come up, and could not understand how it had come to pass that the lady had forced her way to the hall-door. (534)

·         “My lord, if you’d only give yourself the trouble to understand me—“

“I don’t understand a word you say...” (537)

·         She felt sure that if Lord Stapledean would only be made to understand the facts of the case, he would yet take her part. (538)

·         “…Now we may fairly trust that we do know our own minds…” (541)

·         His uncle, he knew, had misunderstood him. (555)

·         “Father, you do not understand this matter.” (566)

Scribblings on Othello: Honesty, Skepticism, Irony, Tragedy

This scribbling is for my purpose. I'll be teaching Othello soon, and want to get some ideas down. I've never taught Shakespeare, but I think this play while complicated will be very teachable i.e. easy to get students interested, even immersed in the aesthetic swirling of this play--so much is going on! I've quite a bit of time to simply scribble before formally planning anything. I'm reading Hazlitt, Goddard, G. Wilson Knight, Bloom, Bernard McElroy, Jan Kott's fabulous Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Millicent Bell's Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. The students are undergraduates, so I want to approach with close reading rather than beat them about with wonky theory. Theory can open up new worlds of a text, but you really need to read it with a clear head first. Scribbling begins:

Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:

"I am not what I am."

 "Speak of me as I am."

"Men should be what they seem." 

Moral vs. intellectual truth. Does one prevail? Do both fail? Shakespeare vs. Iago. Which author/manipulator wins? What is the significance of Iago's silence at the end of the play? Are Othello's last words to be trusted i.e. are they honest words?

The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.

Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."

Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.

Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.

Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.

Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.

Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!

Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":

"Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is...