L0la L33tz on Nostr: The reinterpretation of common sense began when we started to assume that common ...
The reinterpretation of common sense began when we started to assume that common sense is not a sense which constitutes a shared world around us but a capability which we have that anyone is able to act on. This capability is the capability of logic, the fact that we may say in unity: two plus two equals four. But this capability, even if we all possess it, is completely incapable of guiding us through the world or capture anything at all. It merely underlines the most outer subjectivity, even if we may assume (unjustly, of course), that all subjects are the same.
By this line of thinking we must arrive at the idea of the 'normal person' – the normal people who are all the same, because the world which they could share is missing. And because this is impossible you'll end up in a situation in which everyone who is 'not normal' needs a psychoanalyst or a god who knows what they need so that they can become like the others, meaning like somebody who is nobody in the literal sense of the word.
Hannah Arendt, Letters to Mary McCarthy, 1954
By this line of thinking we must arrive at the idea of the 'normal person' – the normal people who are all the same, because the world which they could share is missing. And because this is impossible you'll end up in a situation in which everyone who is 'not normal' needs a psychoanalyst or a god who knows what they need so that they can become like the others, meaning like somebody who is nobody in the literal sense of the word.
Hannah Arendt, Letters to Mary McCarthy, 1954