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The concept of “common sense” is best interpreted through the English version – common sense. If we try to translate it literally, we get something like “common understanding”. It's a bit clumsy, but it conveys the message correctly: in fact, “common sense” is nothing more than a set of beliefs that are common in a particular culture. For example, for the ancient Greek, “common sense” included such things as the geocentric system of the world and the flat earth, and if we talk about modern “common sense”, then it probably includes the heliocentric system of the world and the spherical earth.
Literally, to quote the Philosophical Encyclopedia (Moscow: Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 1983), common sense is “people's views on the surrounding reality and themselves that are spontaneously formed under the influence of everyday experience, which are the basis for their practical activities and morals. In essence, 3. s. is a non-critical element. a combination of naive realism with traditional ideas prevailing in this society.”
The attitude to ” common sense “in the history of philosophy was ambiguous, but, in general, philosophy, like science, was born as a overcoming of”common sense”. For example, the idea of the ancient philosopher Democritus that things are made up of tiny particles – “atoms” – was at odds with the” common sense ” of the ancient Greek. Democritus explicitly stated that neither sensory experience nor general opinion can lead us to the truth. Only rational evidence can lead us to the truth, revealing the true reality.
In fact, as Bertrand Russell wrote in the twentieth century, philosophy is a continuous process of questioning the “obvious”, the goal of which is to go beyond the illusory simplicity and evidence to the true reality through overcoming the conservatism and dogmatism of thinking inherent in the ordinary worldview.
The concept of ” objective definition “is a very good illustration of what is the result of the installation of the concept of”common sense” in the consciousness. It is assumed that there is a point of view from which the subject can view his object unbiased, i.e. from the standpoint of common sense.
If for a person a certain conclusion follows from common sense, then he can consider this conclusion as something that “goes without saying”, i.e., in other words, something that is understood without the participation of the subject himself, by means of natural laws of nature or society that do not depend on the subject. Any such laws are based on ideological premises, their logic is based on the values proclaimed by one or another ideology. In most cases, this is the ideology of common sense, which easily solves the everyday problem of choosing a particular behavior in favor of values that are formulated by “folk wisdom”: your shirt is closer to the body, God protects the protected, fear the cow in front, and the horse in the back, and so on, i.e. sets ethical guidelines.
In short, common sense is what guides you to live your life in the way that most people in the society where you live think is normal. This is a (mostly unconscious) ideological attitude towards normality and success.