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Self-Evident Truths: America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense. Scott Philip Segrest. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

 

Scott Segrest begins with the remark that it will be a study of the “significance of something called common sense philosophy.” The common sense philosophy he has in mind is that of the Scottish realist thinkers in the philosophical tradition of Thomas Reid. Scottish moral and common sense philosophy shaped the Scottish model of the Enlightenment and, according to Segrest, is the key to the philosophical attitude of the American founders, or what Eric Voegelin has called “the form of the American mind.”1

Common sense philosophy is a cognitional theory that perpetuates Greek classic philosophy within a common sense approach to the knowledge of reality. Because Voegelin has written in his autobiography about the direct influence of this philosophy on his own thought and has brought common sense theorizing into his (Voegelin’s) own philosophical syntheses, Segrest’s book should be of great interest to anyone who admires Voegelin’s political philosophy.

As the title indicates, Segrest’s study is not focused simply on Sottish common sense, but rather on how American thinkers confronted this tradition of philosophical realism and interwove it into the foundations of American political thought. Hence, after a first chapter that fully explains just what common sense philosophy really is as well as how it is rooted in Aristotelian notions of induction, he examines the evolving character of this philosophy in the early American centers of academic thought.

Parenthetically, it should be remarked that Segrest is especially well informed on classic views of induction and is thus able to incorporate its clarifying power into his ananlysis. In fact, the first chapter is superbly informative about Aristotle’s theory of induction and could be employed by itself as a comprehensive reference on this theory.

In chapters two and three Segrest both summarizes and analyzes the common sense tradition’s appearance in the writings of John Witherspoon and James McCosh. Both of these philosophers were academics at Princeton University: Witherspoon, a most influential teacher, and McCosh, one of this historic university’s presidents. Segrest explains in detail with many useful quotes how the tradition of common sense philosophy becomes a central influence of each scholar’s thinking. But he also pinpoints the specific creative newness given to Scottish common sense realism when it is adapted by these American scholars in response to the American exigencies of political life.

These first three chapters are an invaluable resource for understanding just what common sense philosophy is, what “its basic elements are,” and how this philosophy supports realism as the goal of political debate. The essence of common sense lies in its inductive, intuitive, first hand grasp of reality–its immediate recognition of elemental principles–as a first step in a comprehensive reasoning towards truth. Thus Segrest roots the definition of common sense in two “related notions: common sense as ‘judgment: the capacity to recognize self-evident truths,’ and common sense as the body of knowledge constituted by such truths,” and carried in the common understandings and values of a society.

Along the way Segrest compares Scottish common sense thought to both Aristotle’s recognition of a human common sense and Vico’s research into the sensus communis and demonstrates how each tradition has contributed to Scottish realist philosophy. The reader is provided with such scholarly clarity on the classic antecedents of common sense philosophy that that alone is enough to make the book worth reading.

However, a retrieved understanding of perhaps a lost or forgotten epistemological tradition so importantly influential on American political philosophy is not the main purpose of Segrest’s study. It is rather to reveal the intimate connection of Scottish common sense philosophy with the only completely home grown, native American philosophy–that is, American Pragmatism. Explaining and elaborating on this connection is the main purpose of this book. Scott insists that American pragmatism in the writings of its first thinkers, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, is a novel adaptation of traditional common sense philosophy.

The remaining chapters of the book sketch this connection through an exhaustive examination of the writings of William James, once again with interesting details and all the necessary quotes. All of James’s writings are intimately known to Segrest; he ably resources them in making his thesis–from the early Principles of Psychology to James’s writings on pragmatism and ethics, and finally his last works on radical empiricist philosophy and religious experience.

This thesis is that the two kinds of realism–Scottish common sense and James’s pragmatic radical empiricism–are compatible with one another, but deficient or incomplete on their own in grounding assurances of truth. The philosopher’s truth claims depend not only on common sense’s “discovery or first principles” but also pragmatism’s stress on “perceptual experience and the dynamic quality of knowing.”

Hence Segrest states, a “complete common sense philosophy would bring together the creative realism of Vico and James and the intuitional realism of Aristotle and McCosh.” A synthesis of a truly “comprehensive realism” is this book’s project, and in Segrest’s view, all successful unfolding of truth will depend upon the union of these two philosophical paradigms. They “cannot survive apart,” he insists.

Segrest first demonstrated the contribution and new insights that American common sense philosophy had made to its inherited foundation in Scottish realism through the synopses of the thought of Witherspoon and McCosh. He then explores and articulates the core fundamentals of James’s philosophy in chapters five and six to argue his thesis. Segrest sets out to prove that William James is in the end a dynamic common sense thinker in both his ideas on cognition and in his moral theory.

The first step of his argument comes in chapter five, “The Common Sense Basis of James’s Pragmatic Radical Empiricism,” with its explanation that for James, common sense is the most reliable variety of truth because it is closest to the concrete reality of the universe. Reality is still “directly in view” and is moreover, “the first form of truth in the order of time” in common sense thinking. While it is not infallible, it is certainly adequate. And what makes common sense theory so credible is that its concepts are derived directly from percepts that carry understandings which are experientially informed.

Segrest’s exhaustive investigation into James’s writings on perception do reveal the originality of James’s cognitive philosophy, one that highlights the irreplaceable function of the percept. The percept is prior to and other than the concept in capturing the details and meanings endemic in the human engagement with reality. Once again the information in this chapter is thorough, wonderfully explained, and illustrated with the exactly appropriate quotes from James. It is well worth reading in itself.

Chapter six, “The Common Sense Basis of James’s Moral and Social Theory,” also relies on James’s distinction of the percept as human understanding supplied through experience. Because moral perception lies behind the dynamic Jamesian common sense ethics, it becomes the focus of Segrest’s inquiry. Segrest defines moral perception as a particular given moral sensation informed thus with a coherent moral meaning or fact. The process is the same as that of cognition in general and it is tied to classic notions of common sense comprehensively understood. Hence there are “common sensibles” taken up and given meaning in moral perception that become the common moral concepts, which when taken collectively constitute society’s stock of moral truth. And this stock of moral truth tied as it is to the percept that never leaves experience is once again trustworthy and universally acceptable.

Segrest also demonstrates how moral truth can be verified psychologically, metaphysically, and casuistically (can be compared to existing rules). Finally, Segrest presents his case–using several quotes from James–that God is the final measure of moral truth because He is both the “ideal observer” and the acting moral claimant on human beings. Segrest writes that James’s moral theory displays “a moral energy here far exceeding even that of Socrates.” In this writer’s view, Segrest saved the best chapter for last; it could easily be the basis for an entire course in ethics.

In his conclusion, Segrest recapitulates the portrait of the united common sense philosophy he has synthesized by bringing together Scottish common sense realism and American common sense pragmatism in its Jamesian form. He writes, “common sense is a certain mode of consciousness by which to attain maximal clarity about the essences of things experienced;” it is knowledge intimately grounded in immediate experience.

Common sense political thought is a unique American tradition that supports American civilization. It is a tradition dependent on both virtue and freedom motivated in experiences of higher reality. Segrest calls for a renewal and a revitalization of common sense political language, given its genius in funding political community. He concludes with the imperative, “We had better get started.”

However, one must also write, that with all this information plus the ambitious project to provide a new interpretation of William James, Segrest may have attempted too much for just one book. There are many many interpretations of James in print. There is the pragmatic James, the non-philosophical James rooted to the psychological scientific paradigm of human existence, the James that has a “divided self,” the doubting James who agnostically “wills to believe,” and the James who can elaborate on religious experience with an observer’s detachment. These interpretations of James often are depicted as main-stream or marginal, depending on the reviewer.

Because diverse approaches on how James should be read are argued vehemently in several contemporary public forums–in essays, books, scholarly papers and societies devoted to pragmatism, Segrest’s proposal of a God-fearing James needs to take account of this larger conversation. Segrest is a master of the Jamesian corpus and has the skills to make his view of James persuasive. Hence, this reviewer would suggest that Segrest might want to consider writing a prolegomenon, a book to be read before this one, on American and common sense philosophy in which he enters into the argument about which James is the real one.

If he makes the case for the James that he has introduced within the contemporary debate, I believe America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense will command the wide readership it justly deserves. I found in this book classical and common sense philosophy as well as masterful new interpretations of James as an unrecognized common sense realist. The information it provides fills in the gaps about induction and common sense missing in many compendiums of Western philosophy.

 

Notes

1. Eric Voegelin, On the Form of the American Mind. Edited by Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper. First English edition (translated from the German by Ruth Hein), Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1995. Currently available from U. of Missouri Press.

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Macon Boczek is a Board Member of VoegelinView and has been an active member of the Eric Voegelin Society since 2001, after she earned a doctorate in Roman Catholic Systematic Theology from Duquesne University. She has a B.S. in Education and M.A. in both Religious Studies and Philosophy. She has taught at John Carroll University in Ohio and Kent State University, where she is currently on the faculty of the Religious Studies Department.

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