24 BOOKS
    
    THE TIMES HIGHER NOVEMBER 2 2007
    
    THE TIMES HIGHER NOVEMBER 2 2007
    
    BOOKS 25
    
    Constantine Sandis
    
    Insearchoftheelusivecommonsense
    n this rich, scholarly tome Daniel Heller-Roazen presents the most comprehensive account to date of Aristotle’s notion of a common sense and the philosophy it inspired. Aristotle seems to have maintained that in addition to the five “classical” senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste human beings have a sixth, common, sense. This is not the common sense of Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet (viz. the faculty through which the average person will or should find certain plain facts immediately obvious) nor that of so-called “common-sense philosophers” such as Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore (viz. what is generally or paradigmatically taken to count as knowledge) but a central faculty of sensation that enables animals to sense that they are sensing by “combining and comparing everything that is apprehended by the five senses”. The suggestion, then, is that we must posit such a unitary faculty in order to explain how it is that we can grasp what he referred to as the “common-sensible qualities” of objects. His account of these alters signifi-
    
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    to Aristotle and his legion of cantly from one text to another footnoters, from the early (the most significant being De Hellenistic commentators to Anima), but there are at least modern-day scholars (the motley three obvious candidates: (1) crew of those whose work is qualities that can be apprehenddiscussed includes Aëtius, ed through more than one (clasAugustine, Averroës, Avicenna, sical) sense, such as those of motion, rest, shape, number, fig- Bacon, W. Benjamin, Campanelure, unity, magnitude and so; (2) la, Descartes, Diogenes Laertius, Epictetus, Foucault, Galen, D.W. combinations of qualities excluHamlyn, E.T.A. Hoffsively bound to differman, Kafka, Kant, ent senses that we can The Inner Leibniz, Locke, Mearnonetheless perceive Touch: Proust, simultaneously — for Archaeology leau-Ponty,R. Sorabji, Rousseau, example, being both bright and sweet; and of a Sensation and P. Valéry). The author is equally con(3) the quality of By Daniel Hellercerned, however, to sensing (hearing, Roazen offer an original touching, and so on) Zone Books, 386pp, account of what this itself, which we are £19.95 elusive sense might somehow able to sense in ourselves. In ISBN 9781890951764 be. According to the each case he reasons Published ????? most popular current that, since none of the account, Aristotle’s five classical senses elusive common sense correappears capable of accounting sponds roughly to our modern for our ability to sense such notion of consciousness. Hellershared common-sensible qualiRoazen dismisses this idea quite ties, they must ultimately correearly on with the cryptic suggesspond to an overarching comtion that “it may be that the mon faculty of sensation (or significance of the primary sensense). sation of the classical philosoMuch of Heller-Roazen’s pher lies not in its proximity to instructive book is devoted to the modern notion of consciousetymological, exegetical and hermeneutical questions relating ness but to its removal from it”.
    
    In a crucial passage that gives the book its subtitle, he then asks: “What if the activities of awareness and self-awareness were forms not of cognition but rather, as Aristotle maintained, of sensation? What if consciousness, in short, were a variety of tact and contact in the literal sense, ‘an inner touch,’ as the Stoics are reported to have said of the ‘common sense,’ ‘by which we perceive ourselves’?” But it is not until the very end of the book that the obvious question is finally asked: “What would it mean for touch to be the root of thinking and for thinking, in turn, to be in its most elevated form a kind of touch?” Alas, the reader is never offered a clear answer but is left instead with a sense of being cheated akin to that caused by a disappointing detective dénouement. Could Aristotle have really had in mind an inner touch in the literal sense? And if he did, should we not simply reject his account as nonsense? Indeed, it is unclear whether it is at all helpful (let alone necessary) to posit a new faculty for every caption kind of ability or power that we
    
    have, be it conative, cognitive, or sensory. Mesmerising as the 25 jovial chapters that make up this book are, we are never quite told what lessons modern philosophy and/or science of perception can learn from Aristotle and the schools that followed him. In this respect Heller-Roazen never quite reaps all that he has sown. Be all this as it may, there is something important in HellerRoazen’s suggestion that we should set Aristotle’s common sense apart from the highly cognitive modern notions of consciousness. The key to this lies in the fact that sentience need not involve sapience, or even representation. Given that sentience requires intransitive consciousness, we might do better to save the baby from the bathwater by rejecting the premise that consciousness must involve sapience. As it stands, Heller-Roazen’s argument is a little touch and go, and the conclusion not commonsensical at all.
    
    Constantine Sandis is a lecturer in philosophy, Oxford Brookes University.
    
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