Should Philosophy be Commonsensical?

Should intuition play a role in our reasoning?

In an interview that delves into his intellectual biography, Christian debater and apologist William Lane Craig confesses —

“I am what I would call a commonsense philosopher. I think that if you are led to metaphysical views that are outrageous to commonsense, that you’re probably on the wrong path.”

For that reason, Craig accepts a tensed view of time, meaning for him that “temporal becoming is real, that things really do come into being and pass away, that I don’t exist as a sort of tenseless four-dimensional object, and that the difference between past, present, and future is real, not just perspectival.”

Craig is even asked whether there’s any commonsense view he’s ever abandoned after researching the matter more deeply in the scholarly literature, and Craig answers — in a halting, hesitant tone suggesting perhaps some unconscious embarrassment on his part —

“I don’t think so. Not with respect to commonsense views. I think in every case I developed viewpoints that are in line, I believe, with commonsense.”

This is a very revealing admission on Craig’s part, since Western philosophy began with the ancient Greeks who waged intellectual war against commonsense and intuition, using reason to subject our simplistic, rash, parochial, feel-good opinions to rigorous skeptical questioning.

Socrates became infamous for humiliating powerful Athenians who took their received, common views for granted, revealing they knew nothing after all. And Plato defined “philosophy” as the love of knowledge as opposed to opinion, where opinion is precisely the knee-jerk, subjective sort of belief that can merely feel right while lacking independent justification.

More important than the semantic issue of whether “commonsense philosopher” is an oxymoron, there’s the question of whether this dogmatic deferral to commonsense begs the question of theism.

Let’s assume, for example, that theistic religion has been almost universal in societies around the world for thousands of years, because theistic beliefs and practices are sustained by what Daniel Dennett calls a hyperactive triggering of our “intentional stance” (our social instinct). In that case, the appeal to intuition not just as a guide in the search for whether God exists, but as the arbiter in the matter is bound to bias the proceedings in the theist’s favour.

Instead of dwelling on the showman’s tricks that Craig could be expected to deploy to foster the illusion that his defense of Christian theism isn’t hopelessly circular, we should reflect on the role commonsense and intuition ought to have in authentic philosophy.

Commonsense and Authentic Philosophy

There’s no sense in demonizing commonsense or intuition or in being automatically opposed to every intuitive proposition on the assumption that they’re tainted and worthless. We know from cognitive science that there are two main ways in which we can reason: slowly, algorithmically, and logically, on the one hand, or quickly, heuristically, and holistically on the other.

We evolved to make snap decisions to overcome desperate situations and to avoid being slaves to procedure. Sometimes we need to break the mold or sum up our attitude or our total body of knowledge in a flash of insight. In that case, we appeal to intuition, to our gut instinct to get to the bottom of the matter. Without intuition, we wouldn’t survive, if only because we don’t always have time to ponder every facet of a problem. In the real world, we often need to compromise, to cut matters short, to prioritize certain sources of information while giving others short shrift.

However, building up a worldview by lionizing commonsense or deferring, on principle, to intuition on all deep questions would be an egregious dereliction of our intellectual and ethical responsibilities. The analogy here would be with someone who never learns how to think as an adult, but who retains a sense of childlike wonder and naivety without ever questioning her natural impulses. Indeed, Jesus said that those who inherit the kingdom of God are childlike, presumably in being innocent of worldly doubts (Luke 18:15–17).

What, though, is the relation between intuition and commonsense? Intuition, again, is one of those two modes of reasoning, immediate apprehension of what feels like the truth. At its best, when an intuition proves to be correct in hindsight, we call the intuition an insight. Likewise, at its best, intuition can free us from a rut and be instrumental in creative or otherwise practical pursuits, as when we suddenly see a new way of proceeding.

“Commonsense” is defined as sound practical judgment that’s independent of specialized knowledge or training. By not deriving from specialized sources or experts, commonsense is our “normal native intelligence.” In short, commonsense is what the average person would say about a matter if left to his or her devices, without the aid of inside information.

At its best, commonsense pertains indeed to practical decision-making, as when we have to judge whether someone is lying and we trust our gut. At its worst, commonsense is prejudicial and narrow-minded, as in the case of what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness.” This is especially so when the issue isn’t the practical one of what we should do in a situation, but what the facts are in the first place. The intuitions and heuristics that are responsible for our snap judgments evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago to enable us to thrive as hunter-gatherers, not to fathom the nature of the universe.

Here, then, is the crux: philosophy has both practical and theoretical tasks, although both have been largely eclipsed by other fields such as psychiatric therapy and science. Still, for the very general questions that are still in its purview, philosophy deals both with normative issues of how we should live in moral and political terms, and with issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and conceptual analysis that clarify the facts.

Perhaps intuition and commonsense have a respectable role to play on the practical side of philosophy, and they may even be decisive in fulfilling that role. But they seem to have no special authority in the understanding of facts. Indeed, to rely on commonsense in coming to grips with the facts is a barrier to understanding them. Common sense gives us a rough estimate of how things are, especially in the social world with which we’re most familiar as higher mammals, but amounts to a woeful ignorance of the wider universe of facts.

To rely on commonsense in a philosophical exploration of the facts is to reduce the world to the humanized image that our intuitions evolved to project. It’s like wanting everything to be a nail so you can always use your hammer.

This is sheer human-centered personification of the world, the result being the religious mindset that’s biased our judgment for millennia. We treat the universe as though it were a wider society of minds with whom we can bargain.

As we know from history, natural philosophers and scientists made a mockery of that traditional indulgence in commonsense, as when we learned not only that there are no spirits in the “heavens” of outer space, but that we, too, have brains and mental programs rather than immortal souls. Physics tells us also that the tensed view of time is subjective and illusory, not a fundamental part of nature, contrary to Craig’s commonsense conviction.

Manifest and Scientific Images

The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars distinguished between the manifest and the scientific images of our nature. The first is how we naively or pre-reflectively appear to ours, as conscious, feeling, thinking, autonomous minds and persons. That’s the commonsense and intuitive view. Then there’s theory of what we are that’s based on counterintuitive, scientific investigation, which reveals our physical, chemical, sociobiological aspects. That’s the objective, empirical, highly-rational view.

For Sellars, the problem is that both perspectives seem valid, yet they often conflict with each other. Consequently, the philosopher performs a balancing act, deferring to the sciences while not dismissing intuition and commonsense. I think the paradox is resolved if we avoid thinking of either perspective in absolute terms. The scientific methods reveal our objective nature, while our intuitions and native perceptions present us with a useful but simplified and idealized model of that same nature.

Holding both pictures in our minds requires not just a philosophical balancing act, but an ironic, postmodern attitude. Assuming we care about intellectual integrity, we’re obliged to acknowledge that science shows us the deepest reality, the way things are as they are regardless of how we feel about them. But we also realize we’re forced to simplify and to resort to intuition to live a worthwhile life. It’s just that in relying on our comparatively feeble native resources for figuring things out, we recognize that ultimately the scientific perspective invalidates our naïve self-image, just as the cosmic facts will one day invalidate all human attempts at understanding, including the completion of our scientific endeavours.

Wisdom, Cynicism, and the Noble Lie

There are, then, two reactions we can have to the fact that scientific explorations of the facts have proven that nature is counterintuitive and inhuman, having revealed everything from the astronomical size and age of the universe, to the relativity of space and time, to black holes, quantum mechanics, and the natural selection of species.

• We can accept the humiliation of our native powers of understanding, distrust intuition and commonsense as being inadequate guides about the nature of reality, and surrender to the horror that we higher primates who feel more comfortable in the bubble of our self-serving illusions don’t belong in the wider universe and can only eavesdrop on the cosmic goings-on as minuscule intellectual voyeurs.
• Alternatively, we can take Craig’s route and serve the narrow, “traditional” interests of humanity as dogmatists and propagandists, in which case we’ll have abandoned the philosopher’s pledge to serve the truth regardless of the consequences. The Craigian anti-philosopher protects the bubble that’s been puffed up by our parochial prejudices and narrow-minded hunches, instead of bursting it with the hubristic modernists.

Which is the wiser course? The political philosopher Leo Strauss thought that for all its technical successes, modernists such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Freud are foolish for trusting society with such unvarnished subversive truths as that religious myth are childish delusions, morality is a con, and life is absurd. Strauss inferred that the wiser philosophers were the ancient Greeks who hid their far-ranging insights with doubletalk or “noble lies.”

The American neoconservatives under George W. Bush applied Strauss’s meta-philosophy and conned Americans into the Iraq War. Their contempt for the average American citizen bubbled to the surface in their recklessness and incompetence in waging the war and in devising the cover story about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. These academic neoconservatives had book-smarts but little in the way of street-smarts. Whether they were justified in condescending to the rest of the country and to the world at large is doubtful, since their foreign-policy blunders discredited neoconservatism, paving the way for the lunacy of Trumpian anti-elitism on the American right.

However, philosophy itself wasn’t brought low by that failure, because as I said, the authentic philosopher — as opposed to the obsequious dogmatist — should be humbled by the discovery that our common, inherent capacity for understanding is dwarfed by the magnitude of the cosmic facts that can be known. If you’ve been chastened by that asymmetry, you’re less likely to condescend to the average person and pretend that academic excellence make you fit to run a war or even to concoct a suitable lie or myth for the masses.

Secular humanists and existentialists have greater intellectual integrity in confronting nonphilosophers with the grave implications of science. But again, is that philosophical candidness wise? More to the point, the question is whether Craig’s type of naïve or cynical unleashing of commonsense and his retreat to the bubble of convenient, petty delusions is ironically the wiser course.

Mainstream religion is comparable to the neoconservative’s lie about Iraq’s WMD, even if the leading proponents, say, of Evangelical Christianity are true believers rather than duplicitous manipulators of lay people’s gullibility. What the Evangelicals and Straussian neoconservatives have in common is that both of their mainstream views were manufactured to appeal to commonsense in opposition to the facts on the ground. The neoconservatives knew they were lying, while some Evangelicals presumably are just naïve and terrified of the prospect of recognizing nature’s inhumanity.

The question of which solution is best can be deflated, to some extent, since different kinds of people will gravitate to the sources of information that suit them. Those who want to be fooled will dismiss subversive modernity whenever they come across it, while the intrepid, arrogant, or masochistic individuals who are attracted to the idea of alienness will dismiss, in turn, the lame anachronisms of conservative pseudo-philosophy.

Of course, this was the idea behind Jesus’s parables: he who had ears to hear would do so, while the rest would be equivalent to the swine before which Jesus dropped his pearls of wisdom. Then again, there are two responses to Jesus’s identity. Was he a divine being, as we’re prompted to suspect by our primitive, anthropocentric intuitions?

Or was Jesus a charlatan like the Bushian neoconservative, a phony elitist who claimed to have esoteric knowledge about the imminent end of our world and about the deeper reality of an all-encompassing supernature, but who was proven wrong and naïve? The world kept spinning with no Second Coming, and Rome absorbed the Church and bastardized Jesus’s radical message of asceticism, pacifism, and moral purity.

The Common Ground of Humiliation

There’s a second way of undermining the dichotomy between apologist and philosopher, since the two meet in the middle in mysticism. When pushed, even the apologist admits that the literal-minded dogmas thrown up by our self-serving intuitions and instincts indicate something more troubling, namely God’s impersonality and inhumanity. We’d rather think of God as a king, a father, a friend, an architect, or as a CEO; we grasp for whatever metaphors comfort us in the moment, but the resulting picture can’t help but be incoherent, irrational, and obsolete.

When an adult takes to painting but can produce only a finger-painted mess, she’s likely to be embarrassed by her efforts. But she’s saved by the friendly ideology of inclusion, by the platitude that the journey matters more than the destination, that the exploration of artistic media is more important than the results of the work. In the same way, mysticism saves the literal-minded religious dogmatist from total humiliation, since she can retreat to the idea that even if the commonsense anthropomorphic picture of God makes no sense, especially not with the scientific worldview looming in the background, God works in mysterious ways.

The commonsense view of God is highly metaphorical since the images are anthropocentric. God “himself” must transcend such metaphors, in which case we have no idea whether God is even a person or whether God really cares about justice, morality, or any of us. “God” becomes just a label for the great mystery.

Likewise, the philosopher who’s reluctant to surrender to the comforts of intuition and of commonsense, who sacrifices her chances of normality and of contentment as she strives to accept reality as it is will reach for the principle of cosmicism. Beginning with scorn for self-serving intuitions and dogmas, the philosopher infers that the deepest truths are likely to be shocking and inhuman. She takes even the scientific picture of the world as a mere model, as a tool or a weapon in our collective pragmatic struggle for survival and dominance. The world as it really is when no one’s watching it is, then, a monstrous unknown.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers treated the noumenal world as a tantalizing mystery that unveils itself to intellectuals in the form of clues or cyphers — but that, too, is anthropocentric and unreal. Life isn’t a game since there can be no grand purpose if the cosmic mystery isn’t literally personal.

Still, the theistic propagandist’s mysticism and the philosopher’s cosmicism or mysterianism make for fitting common ground, since both sides are humbled and provided an intimation that life’s entire saga on this planet must be something far different than anyone’s ever imagined. Along with our commonsense and scientific explorations, that saga is an inhuman reality. Instead of using empty words as placeholders for that mystery, we might try suffering to confirm we’ve understood our tenuous existential situation.