“Only connect,” writes James Dickey in a poem about a powerline worker. I make a few small connections from time to time, and they always give me pleasure. Not much to do with them otherwise but report them, so here goes.
Here’s one: We have all frequently heard the phrase “common sense,” usually together with the popular remark, on the verge of cliche itself, that it isn’t really common at all. I suspect there is a confusion here between two senses of the word “common.” In the modern sense, we mean “to be found anywhere.” I suspect the phrase originally meant “common” in quite another way. The older meaning is “basic, fundamental.” In other words, if you had even the elements of the most basic rules of making sense, you had common sense. The implication is that it does not require a genius of logic or philosophy to tell what is what, but that even “common” or basic sense will suffice.
Common sense in that sense is not “common” at all in the modern sense of course. Few have even the rudiments and the basics, much less an advanced understanding.
Here’s another: When Hamlet says to Horatio that there are things not dreamt of in “your philosophy,” the typical modern interpretation is that Hamlet is dissing Horatio’s understanding. But this hardly makes sense, since they are dear friends and in every other instance Hamlet honors Horatio. It is much more likely that the “your” is to be understood as an article and not a possessive pronoun. You have your mathematics, your poesy, your music, your philosophy. In this time, when even coaches are supposed to have a “philosophy on life,” we have lost sight of the fact that philosophy is a discipline, not a possession. You cannot walk into a store and buy a philosophy. You must engage in it day after day in order to train your mind and learn, perhaps after the manner of Boethius (whose prison meditations on philosophy are strongly reminiscent of the meditations of the sages on the divine—hmm). You cannot own it. So what Hamlet is saying is not that Horatio is shortsighted, but that there are things on heaven and Earth so strange that even the noble discipline of philosophy (today to be understood as including science, or “natural philosophy”?) cannot explain.
Finally, my favorite: Years ago, when I was young and foolish, and not, as I am now, old and full of tears, I was re-reading Yeats’s poem that begins “Down by the salley gardens.” (“Down by the salley gardens/My love and I did meet./She came to the salley gardens/On little snow-white feet.”) I wondered what a salley garden was, and investigated. It turns out a salley garden is a willow garden. I began to understand when I discovered that the botanical name for willow is “salix”—the black willow is salix negra, for example. The final piece fell into place when I remembered that various native American tribes chewed willow bark for toothache. Why? Because it had a pain-killer in it, the pain-killer which is in fact aspirin. The chemical name of which is salicylic acid—an acid that may be found, that is, in the bark of trees from the genus salix.
Pardon the typos. “Meditation” should have been “meditations” in both its occurrences, and I meant “including science,” not “include science.”
I’m reading posts backwards tonight, and I am delighted to assume that you are plowing through a bucket of the Bard lately, with a dictionary at your side. I love meditations on the origin of words, especially those which have become so common as to avoid investigation. I’m about to revisit a number of America’s founding texts (so to speak—Locke, Hobbes, and the like), and I think “Common Sense” in this respect is exactly what Mr. Paine intended.
Please more wordsmithing! And I made the changes you noted above.
Jack, love your thoughts. I’ve been studying education this year and no child left behind and all that. I certainly don’t know the solution to the ed-crisis, but “common” might be a clue. American students are fed so much edu/entert/int/ipod/text-formation that they have googles of stuff in their brains, but it seems they lack the common denominator that would allow them to make philosophical sense of it all.