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The origin of the term is in the works of Aristotle. The most well-known such case is De Anima Book III, chapter 2, especially at line 425a27.[8] The passage is about how the animal mind converts raw sense perceptions from the five specialized sense perceptions, into perceptions of real things moving and changing, which can be thought about. Each of the five senses perceives one type of "perceptible" or "sensible" which is specific (Greek: idia) to it. For example sight can see colour. But Aristotle was explaining how the animal mind, not just the human mind, links and categorizes different tastes, colours, feelings, smells and sounds in order to perceive real things in terms of the "common sensibles" (or "common perceptibles"). In this discussion "common" (koinos) is a term opposed to specific or particular (idia). The Greek for these common sensibles is ta koina, which means shared or common things, and examples include the oneness of each thing, with its specific shape and size and so on, and the change or movement of each thing.[9] Distinct combinations of these properties are common to all perceived things.[10] In this passage, Aristotle says that concerning these koina (such as movement) we already have a sense, a "common sense" or sense of the common things (Greek: koinē aisthēsis), which does not work by accident (Greek: kata sumbebēkos). And there is no specific (idia) sense perception for movement and other koina, because then we would not perceive the koina at all, except by accident. As examples of perceiving by accident Aristotle mentions using the specific sense perception vision on its own to see that something is sweet, or to recognize a friend by their distinctive colour. Lee (2011, p. 31) explains that "when I see Socrates, it is not insofar as he is Socrates that he is visible to my eye, but rather because he is coloured". So the normal five individual senses do sense the common perceptibles according to Aristotle (and Plato), but it is not something they necessarily interpret correctly on their own. Aristotle proposes that the reason for having several senses is in fact that it increases the chances that we can distinguish and recognize things correctly, and not just occasionally or by accident.[11] Each sense is used to identify distinctions, such as sight identifying the difference between black and white, but, says Aristotle, all animals with perception must have "some one thing" which can distinguish black from sweet.[12] The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions (or symbols or markers; Greek: sēmeion) of what the specialist senses have perceived.[13] This is therefore also where a type of consciousness originates, "for it makes us aware of having sensations at all". And it receives physical picture imprints from the imaginative faculty, which are then memories that can be recollected.[14] The discussion was apparently intended to improve upon the account of Aristotle's friend and teacher Plato in his Socratic dialogue, the Theaetetus.[15] But Plato's dialogue presented an argument that recognizing koina is an active thinking process which happens in the rational part of the human soul, making the senses instruments of the thinking part of man. Plato's Socrates says this kind of thinking is not a kind of sense at all. Aristotle, trying to give a more general account of the souls of all animals, not just humans, moves the act of perception out of the rational thinking soul into this sensus communis, which is something like a sense, and something like thinking, but not rational.[16] Avicenna became one of the greatest medieval authorities concerning Aristotelian common sense, both in Islamic and Christian lands. The passage is difficult to interpret and there is little consensus about many of the details.[17] Gregorić (2007, pp. 204–205) has argued that this may be because Aristotle did not use the term as a standardized technical term at all. For example, in some passages in his works, Aristotle seems to use the term to refer to the individual sense perceptions simply being common to all people, or common to various types of animals. There is also difficulty with trying to determine whether the common sense is truly separable from the individual sense perceptions and from imagination, in anything other than a conceptual way as a capability. Aristotle never fully spells out the relationship between the common sense and the imaginative faculty ("phantasia"), although the two clearly work together in animals, and not only humans, for example in order to enable a perception of time. They may even be the same.[14][16] Despite hints by Aristotle himself that they were united, early commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Al-Farabi felt they were distinct, but later, Avicenna emphasized the link, influencing future authors including Christian philosophers.[18][19] Gregorić (2007, p. 205) argues that Aristotle used the term "common sense" both to discuss the individual senses when these act as a unity, which Gregorić calls "the perceptual capacity of the soul", or the higher level "sensory capacity of the soul" which represents the senses and the imagination working as a unity. According to Gregorić, there appears to have been a standardization of the term koinē aisthēsis as a term for the perceptual capacity (not the higher level sensory capacity) which occurred by the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias at the latest.[20] Aristotle's understanding of the soul has an extra level of complexity in the form of the nous or "intellect" which is something only humans have, and which enables humans to perceive things in a different way to other animals. It works with images coming from the common sense and imagination, using reasoning (Greek logos) as well as the "active intellect". It is the nous which identifies the true forms of things, while the common sense identifies shared aspects of things. Although scholars have varying interpretations of the details, Aristotle's "common sense" was in any case not rational, in the sense that it implied no ability to explain the perception. Reason or rationality (logos) exists only in man according to Aristotle, and yet some animals can perceive "common perceptibles" such as change and shape, and some even have imagination according to Aristotle. Animals with imagination come closest to having something like reasoning and nous.[21] Plato, on the other hand was apparently willing to allow that animals could have some level of thought, meaning that he did not have to explain their sometimes complex behavior with a strict division between high-level perception processing and the human-like thinking such as being able to form opinions.[22] Gregorić additionally argues that Aristotle can be interpreted as using the verbs, phronein and noein, to distinguish two types of thinking or awareness, one being found in animals, and the other unique to humans and involving reason.[23] Therefore in Aristotle (and the medieval Aristotelians) the universals which are used in identifying and categorising things are divided into two. In medieval terminology these are the species sensibilis which are used for perception and imagination in animals, and the species intelligibilis or apprehendable forms used in the human intellect or nous. Aristotle also occasionally called the koinē aisthēsis (or one version of it), the prōton aisthētikon, the first of the senses. (According to Gregorić this is specifically in contexts where it refers to the higher order common sense which includes imagination.) Later philosophers developing this line of thought, such as Themistius, Galen, and Al-Farabi, called it the ruler of the senses or ruling sense, apparently a metaphor developed from a section of Plato's Timaeus (70b).[19] Augustine and some of the Arab writers, also called it the "inner sense".[18] The concept of the inner senses, plural, was further developed in the Middle Ages. Under the influence of the great Arab philosophers Al-Farabi and Avicenna several inner senses came to be listed. "Thomas Aquinas and John of Jandun recognized four internal senses: the common sense, imagination, vis cogitativa, and memory. Avicenna, followed by Robert Grosseteste, Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon, argued for five internal senses: the common sense, imagination, fantasy, vis aestimativa, and memory."[24] By the time of Descartes and Hobbes, in the 1600s, the inner senses had been standardized to "five wits", which complimented the more well-known five "external" senses.[18] Under this medieval scheme the common sense was understood to be seated not in the heart, as Aristotle had thought, but in the anterior Galenic ventricle of the brain. The great anatomist Andreas Vesalius however found no connections between the anterior ventricle and the sensory nerves, leading to speculation about other parts of the brain into the 1600s.[25] Heller-Roazen (2008) writes that "In different ways the philosophers of medieval Latin and Arabic tradition, from Al-Farabi to Avicenna, Averroës, Albert, and Thomas, found in the De Anima and the Parva Naturalia the scattered elements of a coherent doctrine of the "central" faculty of the sensuous soul."[26] It was "one of the most successful and resilient of Aristotelian notions."[27] |
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