ABSTRACT Can “facts” survive the advent of modern political practices of lying? This essay revisits Arendt's “Truth and Politics” to explore this question. Arendt ties the fate of facts closely to that of common sense, which both depends upon facts and is charged with combating the lies that would assault not only individual facts but factuality itself. Arendt hewed closely to our two major philosophical traditions of common sense. While she recognized the ways in which common sense as koine aisthesis, (...) or an individual faculty of epistemological coherence, could be co-opted by totalitarian ideology, she was less aware of how her own notion of “community sense” could be pressed into the service of an accelerating democratic/capitalist conversion of facts into opinions. Given the co-optation of these traditions of common sense by modern practices of political lying, I argue for an alternative approach, inspired by Aristotle and rooted in perception, where “sensing in common” nurtures a sense of [what can come to be held in] common. (shrink)

Sunaisthesis is a generally overlooked or misconstrued concept central to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, and therefore to his entire ethical and politicalproject. As opposed to Stoic uses that presuppose ethical self-relation, in Aristotle’s coinage, sunaisthesis indicates the genesis of a self-relation mediated through the friend. Both the “merged selves” and the “mirrored selves” approaches to Aristotelian friendship distort this peculiar mediation. Through a close reading of relevant texts, I show that sunaisthesis provides the missing link between the De Anima’s non-reflexive (...) perceiving self and Aristotle’s requirement of a robustly reflexive yet socially inculcated ethical self. Sunaisthesis accounts for ethical responsibility while reinforcing rather than denying our embodied and socially embedded nature. (shrink)

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt quotes from Antigone: “But great words, counteracting the great blows of the overproud, teach understanding in old age.” She quotes Sophocles to exemplify the original, pre-philosophical and even pre-polis belonging together of words and deeds. She then cautions: “The content of these lines is so puzzling to modern understanding that one rarely finds a translator who dares to give the bare sense.”.

Drawing on phenomenology and everyday affective encounters of grieving, befriending, rearing, and bonding, Flakne warns against the disorientation and division implicit in what we think we mean by common sense. Instead, she invites us to relearn sensing together as key to an inevitable ethics of interembodiment.

: Judgment -- Moral and ethical aspects. The application of "thick" ethical concepts is best understood as a process of reflective rather than deductive judgment. Taking the form "B is as X as A," where X is a thick ethical concept and A and B are narrative wholes unified through X (for example, "Those who hid Jews from the Nazis were as brave as Achilles"), reflective judgment opens thick ethical concepts to transformation. Though interpretive, such reflective judgment may still be (...) able to provide validity without recourse to "thin," purportedly context-neutral terms. (shrink)

The application of “thick” ethical concepts is best understood as a process of reflective rather than deductive judgment. Taking the form “B is as X as A,” where X is a thick ethical concept and A and B are narrative wholes unified through X, reflective judgment opens thick ethical concepts to transformation. Though interpretive, such reflective judgment may still be able to provide validity without recourse to “thin,” purportedly context-neutral terms.