From Sensus Communis to Social Imaginary

By John Thomas Brittingham

Human beings are many things, (perhaps flocking animals, perhaps a little less than
angels, and occasionally rational) but if Aristotle is to be believeda seriously open
question to be surethen human beings are creatures of habit. We are creatures that
imitate actions and develop on the basis of practices. Within the hermeneutic tradition of
thought, these repetitive practices which are handed down to us and which we imitate
might be called the tradition. Traditions tend to constitute something of a horizon for our
thought, a kind of Petri dish of understanding out of which our own thought emerges. For
hermeneutic phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, another way of talking about the tradition or
horizon of our thought is to speak of imaginative practices. That is, when we engage in
attempting to make sense of the world, we engage in certain habitual practices of imagining
our possible actions, values, locations, etc. These imaginative practices Ricoeur named the
social imaginary. The danger here is that such practices become reified or fixed in such a
way that they become insurmountable. Development would have a ceiling; critique would
be a farce.
Yet, such imaginative practices have not the final say when it comes to the
development of our thought. The primacy of the imagination for Kant not only serves
cognition but in its reflective employmentthat is, as sensus communisserves as the
transcendental basis for a critique of these potentially reified practices of the imagination.
However, we are left with several questions. What is the social imaginary? What is sensus
communis? How is it that the two are related? Therefore, it is the task of this paper to (1)
explain what Kant means by sensus communis, (2) explain what Ricoeur means by social
imaginary, and (3) demonstrate how the social imaginary must presuppose a Kantian
notion of the sensus communis if it is to have any critical power whatsoever. What is at
stake in our investigation is the manner in which our social imaginative practices are
dependent upon the very transcendental structures that bind us to each other. Without a
thorough understanding of sensus communis we run the risk of being slaves to our
traditions. Thus, it is to Kants notion of the sensus communis that we must now turn.

Common Understanding, Common Sense

When Kant speaks of the sensus communis in the third Critique, he does so in
relation to the necessity associated with a particular kind of reflective judgment, namely, a
judgment of taste. Cognitive judgments have a determinate objective principle which
makes them unconditionally necessary. This is to say, determinative judgments are
judgments that have an object that is subsumed under a concept. Thus, determinative
judgments have unconditional necessity because, so long as there is an object presented to
us, our understanding will seek to subsume it under a concept.
1
However, judgments of
taste do not have the same kind of unconditional necessity. Rather, such judgments have a
subjective principle that determines them, not on the basis of concepts but on the basis of a
feeling, though nonetheless with universal validity, what is liked and disliked.
2
Kant says
that this subjective principle is the sensus communis; a common sense taken as the effect
arising from the free play of our cognitive powers.
3

Still, we might ask, why is the necessity in a judgment of taste found in the sensus
communis? and secondly, what exactly is this sensus communis Kant speaks of? Kant tells

1
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987. P.87 (237-238).
2
Kant, CoJ, 87.
3
Ibid, 87 (238)
us that a judgment of taste requires universal assent. In other words, We solicit everyone
elses assent because we have a basis for it that is common to all.
4
When I make a
judgment about the beautiful, I make a judgment that is possible for all human beings, thus,
common to all. On the basis of this common possibility for judging a beautiful object,
judgments of taste have the necessity that Kant speaks of. The name given to this universal
assentno one can disagree that an experience of the beautiful is possibleis that of
sensus communis or common sense.
Describing what, exactly, the sensus communis is requires us to first explain what
Kant means by sense as it pertains to common sense. In section 39, Kant begins by
distinguishing between several kinds of sense. The first kind of sense is Sinnessempfindung,
or sensation proper.
5
This is called sensation proper because it has genuine sense (sinn)
instead of feeling. What this means is that sensation proper has to do with what is real in a
perception and referenced by cognition. However, this kind of sense is conditioned by its
object and therefore lacks universal communicability. In other words, the sense that
pertains to objects is determined by the particularities of said objects and cannot be
communicable to everyone. For example, if I have an experience of seeing Picassos
Guernica in person and others have not, the sense that pertains to my perception of the
painting cannot be communicated to those who have not seen it.
The next kind of sense Kant refers to is that of agreeableness and disagreeableness
concerning the perception of one and the same object of sense. Keeping with the
aforementioned example of Guernica, say two people are standing next to one another
while viewing the painting and they begin to talk to one another. And let us say that they

4
Ibid, 86 (237)
5
Ibid, 157 (291)
have divergent opinions regarding Picassos masterpiece. One person finds it magnificent
and the other doesnt seem to get why its such a big deal. This kind of sensewhich Kant
calls enjoyment (Genub)is dependent upon the feeling of pleasure (or lack of it) one
experiences when sensing the same object. It is because this enjoyment occurs when we
are passively sensing an object and the sense remains focused on the object that we cannot
demand that everyone assent to the agreeableness or feeling of pleasure one might derive
from seeing an object of sense like Guernica. Even though this kind of sense is based on a
feeling, it is still connected to an external object and, therefore, lacks the conditions needed
for universal assent, namely, a subjective basis.
6

Needing a subjective basis for the necessity associated with a judgment of taste,
Kant turns to the third and final kind of sense. To describe this kind of sense properly,
however, Kant must go through the course of an argument concerning subjective liking. In
contrast with the previous two kinds of sense delineated above, Kant says,

when we like an act for its moral character, this liking is not a pleasure of enjoyment, but one that
arises from our spontaneous activity and its conformity with the idea of our vocation. But this
feeling, called moral feeling, requires concepts and is the exhibition of a law-governed, rather than
free, purposiveness. By the same token, the only way it can be communicated universally is by
means of reason, and, if the pleasure is to be of the same kind in everyone, it must be communicated
through quite determinate practical concepts of reason.
7


The kind of liking that Kant describes here is not that of enjoyment (which is, as we have
already said, still object bound) but that of a subjective activity. Any an all persons, insofar
as they are subjects, must have the pleasure of spontaneous activity in conformity with the
idea of ones vocation as a possibility. It is only on the basis of this pleasure as something
that arises from the structure of a human person and not from the object that we can begin

6
Ibid, 158 (291).
7
Ibid, 158 (292).
to inquire into the basis of subjective universal assent. Still, the only way that this moral
feeling can be communicated is by means of reason, thus, determining its communication
on the basis of practical concepts of reason and not by way of free purposiveness (i.e.
without a concept).
8

On the other hand, Kant tells us, the pleasure we take in the beautiful is a
pleasure neither of enjoyment, nor of a law-governed activity, nor yet of a reasoning
contemplation governed by ideas, but is a pleasure of mere reflection.
9
This is to say, the
liking we have in an experience of the beautiful is the subjective pleasure of reflectionof
an activity we doand not a pleasure based in the object. This kind of pleasure isnt
guided by any kind of purpose or concept; rather, it is the kind of pleasure that
accompanies our ordinary apprehension of an object by means of the imagination.
10
The
ordinary apprehension of the object occurs by a procedure of judgment that the
imagination carries out not for the sake of providing us with an empirical objective concept
(a la the schematism of subsuming intuitions under concepts from the first Critique) but for
merely perceiving that a presentation is adequate for giving rise to the harmonious activity
of the cognitive powers in their freedom. In other words, when I have an experience of the
beautiful, in order for me to even perceive that the experience is beautiful, the imagination
must be in free play with the other cognitive powers thus providing me with a feeling of
pleasure.

8
Ibid, 158 (292).
9
Ibid, 158 (292).
10
Ibid, 159 (292).
It is this pleasure arising from the free play of the cognitive powers, not the pleasure
arrived at in my enjoyment of an object, which provides us with the basis for universal
assent. As Kant puts it,

This pleasure must of necessity rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective
conditions for the possibility of cognition as such, and because the proportion between these
cognitive powers that is required for taste is also required for the sound and common understanding
that we may presuppose in everyone. That is precisely why someone who judges with taste
(provided he is not mistaken in this consciousness and does not mistake the matter for the form, i.e.,
charm for beauty) is entitled to require subjective purposiveness, i.e., his liking for the object, from
everyone else as well, and is entitled to assume that his feeling is universally communicable, and this
without any mediation by concepts.
11


On the basis of the conditions for the possibility of cognition as such we are able to ascribe
universal assent (a.k.a. necessity) to our judgments of taste. An experience of the beautiful
which gives rise to the feeling of pleasure I get when my cognitive powers are in free play is
an actual experience that I have. And if it is actual for me, then it is possible for all human
beings.
It is at this point that Kant makes the transition from talking more or less
exclusively about aesthetic judgments to talking about judgment as it relates to the sensus
communis. Although still unnamed, Kant gestures towards talking about the necessity
found in a judgment of taste in terms of sensus communis when he speaks of the relation
between the proportion in the cognitive powers required for taste and for sound and
common understanding. This relation is a simple one at this early stage, but it will provide
the basis for connecting the kind of sense experienced in a judgment of taste with the kind
of sense that is found in sensus communis. The relation is this: the subjective conditions
that provide a judgment of taste with universal validity are the same conditions that
constitute the basis for any understanding that is shared by human beings. What Kant

11
Ibid., 159 (292-293).
means by this common understanding is unclear at this point and thus it is to his discussion
of common understanding and common sense that we must turn.
Kant begins his focused analysis of sensus communis by stating that we call the
power of judgment (urteilskraft) a sense when we notice its result. We then speak of a
sense of truth or justice even though we know that sense cannot contain these concepts
because these concepts could never enter our thoughts if we were not able to rise above
the senses to higher cognitive powers. This is to say, when we see the empirical effects of
actions taken in pursuit of truth, we do not say that truth is reducible to these effects or
even these actions. Rather, we say that we get a sense of truth, a feeling enlivened by the
free play of our cognitive powers when we witness or participate or benefit from these
actions taken in pursuit of truth.
12
This sense, however, is entirely uncultivated. It is, to
borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace, our default-setting.
13
Kant has his own name
for this default-setting: Common Human Understanding which he describes as mans sound
but uncultivated understanding.
14
We are entitled, according to Kant, to expect this
understanding from everyone who refers to himself or herself by the name human being.
Common Human Understanding, then, is nothing special; little else but the most basic
structure of sense required for being human.
On the other hand, we take Sensus Communis to mean the idea of a shared power to
judge that takes account a priori of everyone elses way of presenting something. Sensus
Communis operates not on the level of the free play of cognitive powers but on the level of a
power itself. It is our ability to judge and interpret our world on the basis of what everyone

12
Ibid, 160 (293).
13
Wallace, David Foster. This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant
Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Co. 2009.
14
Kant, CoJ, 160 (293).
is capable of feeling. Sensus Communis takes this communal or interpersonal approach in
order to do two things. First, it compares our own judgment with human reason in general
and secondly, it attempts to escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking
subjective and private conditions for objective ones.
15
In our default-setting it is easy to
mistake our own private experience with those that are universal. A colloquial example of
this we might call the case of the high-strung roommate. It is a common experience in
collegiate social life to live with certain people who believe that their own deeply subjective
and deeply private experience is, in fact, a kind of universal law. Such aforementioned
high-strung roommates tend to demand universal assent to their ridiculous household
rules when there is little else going on other than the over-extension of their position
regarding such household ordinances as the correct procedure for containing and
disposing of waste products, the proper method wherein the dried and encrusted remnants
of foodstuffs are to be removed from cooking implements, and the like. Kants point about
the sensus communis is that it avoids such over-extension by engaging in a procedure
whereby human beings take into account what is proper to human beings as human beings
and not as the particular being which they themselves are.
What, then, is this procedure? Rudolf Makkreel summarizes the procedure nicely in
the following manner: The sensus communis uses reflective judgment to abstract from the
private empirical aspects of our subjective representations in order to generate what might
be called a communal or intersubjective perspective.
16
More specifically, this abstracting
procedure for the operation of the Sensus Communis requires two steps that unfold in the

15
Ibid, 160 (294).
16
Makkreel, Rudolf. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. University of Chicago Press:
1992, 158.
following way: First, we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with
the merely possible judgments of others, thus putting ourselves in the position of everyone
else. This first move is to be expected from Kant given his placement of the possible above
the actual. By making a reduction of sorts to the merely possible judgments of others, we
bracket the empirical particulars of our experience and think on the level of human
possibility rather than simply my possibilities. Still, how does this bracketing work? In the
second step, we enact this bracketing of our own actual experience by abstracting from the
limitations that happen to attach to our own judging. Such abstracting is accomplished by
leaving out as much as possible whatever is matter, sensation, presentational state, etc. and
by paying attention to the formal features of our presentation or presentational state. As is
the case with the universal assent required in a judgment of taste, the procedure for the
sensus communis requires us to concentrate only on the formal aspects of judgment
because such formal features must be true for all human beings.
17

However, the operation of reflection exemplified in the procedure of the sensus
communis seems like a laborious undertaking but nothing, Kant tells us, is more natural to
us than this process. Indeed, what Kant has described as the procedure of sensus communis
is something human beings do all the time without consciously engaging in this activity.
This is not to say that sensus communis cannot be cultivated. In fact, we might say at this
point that what Kant is describing in his discussion of common human understanding and
sensus communis is the transcendental way in which we are connected to all other human
beings. Furthermore, Kant understands such a connection to be developmental. That is,
for Kant, common human understanding and sensus communis can be cultivated and

17
Kant, CoJ, 160 (294).
enlarged. Simply put, it is possible for human beings to become better at being what they
are.
The question that arises from the possibility for the development of ones humanity
is also simple: How does one develop ones humanity? In order to answer this question,
Kant returns to a further discussion of Common Human Understanding and the possible
cultivation of the faculties of cognition that make up the structure of human subjects. Thus,
Kant turns to an elucidation of the three humanistic principles that further expound upon
the principles of Common Human Understanding. The first principle is to think for oneself.
That is, to engage in an unprejudiced way of thinking; a thinking in which reason is never
passive. Through the removal of ones prejudices and the development of active reasoning,
human beings are able to achieve the liberation from superstition (the highest form of
prejudice) that Kant calls enlightenment. This is the maxim of the understanding.
18

The second principle of common human understanding is to think from the
standpoint of everyone else. This is also thought of as a broadened way of thinking that
involves putting thinking to purposive use. That is, in overriding the private subjective
conditions of a persons judgment and reflecting on ones own judgment from a universal
standpoint, the scope of our thought is expanded. This is the maxim of Judgment. This is
also the sensus communis.
19

The third and final principle of common human understanding is to always think
consistently. According to Kant, cultivating a consistent way of thinking can be attained
only with a combination of the first two maxims. This is to say, only with the removal of
prejudice and the enlargement of ones thought is it possible to think consistently. In fact,

18
Ibid, 162 (295).
19
Ibid, 162 (295).
in order to think from the perspective of everyone else is to already remove the prejudice
of the primacy of ones own experience. Moreover, to remove a prejudice is to think from
the perspective of someone who does not have such a prejudice, thus enlarging ones
thought. When these are done in conjunction, human beings begin to think consistently.
This is the maxim of Reason.
20

Thus we have the three humanistic maxims or principles of common human
understanding that stem from three faculties of the human person. We have not, however,
mentioned the fourth faculty; the faculty of imagination. Indeed, imagination is the key to
the entire operation of developing ones humanity. Kant puts it the following way:
The aptitude human beings have for communicating their thoughts to one another also requires that
imagination and understanding be related in such a way that concepts can be provided with
accompanying intuitions, and intuitions in turn with accompanying concepts, these intuitions and
concepts joining to [form] cognition. But here the harmony of the two mental powers is law
governed, under the constraint of determinate concepts. Only where the imagination is free when it
arouses the understanding, and the understanding without using concepts, puts the imagination into
a play that is regular [i.e. manifests regularity], does the presentation communicate itself not as a
thought but as the inner feeling of a purposive state of mind.
21


It is through the free play of the imagination that human beings are capable of universal
communication of feelings of pleasure. This free play is characterized by the interaction of
the imagination with the understanding in such a way that it excites the understanding but
does not produce a concept nor subsume an intuition under a concept. Instead, the
imagination in this free playotherwise known as what occurs when someone makes a
judgment of tastecan be seen as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in
a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept.
22
Indeed,
the universal communicability of a judgment of taste becomes one of the constitutive

20
Ibid, 162 (295).
21
Kant, CoJ, 162 (295-296).
22
Ibid, 162 (295).
elements of human beings as such. Thus, the imagination comes to play the crucial role in
connecting human beings with one another at this fundamental level.
Kants two notions of common human understanding and sensus communis operate
in such a way that, through the work of the imagination, human beings have a sense that
connects them to each other. Yet, this sense is not object-oriented; rather, it is subject-
oriented, taking on an intellectual character in common human understanding and an
aesthetic character in sensus communis. Furthermore, these two notions are capable of
development or, to use the language of the maxim of Judgment, capable of enlargement.
However, in the reflective practices that enlarge ones thought and develop ones sound
understanding and common sense, is it not possible that something like a habit is formed?
Could we not say that the free play of our imagination, when it is engaged in judgments of
taste, takes on the form of imaginative practices wherein a specific context for thought
provides some kind of guidance for the work of the imagination? These are the questions
that animate the discussion of the social imaginary as it is found in Paul Ricoeur and it is to
his discussion of the social imaginary that we now turn.

The Social Imaginary in Discourse and Action
As we turn to the notion of the social imaginary in Ricoeur, we turn from a
discussion explicitly focused on the transcendental structures of the power of judgment
found in the Kantian subject to a contemporary conception of the imaginative practices
found in human societies. There are numerous distinctions that separate Kant from this
contemporary scholartheir conceptions of selfhood and language chief among thembut
there is little doubt that Kants emphasis on the work of the imagination was crucial in the
development of his theory concerning the social imaginary. Thus, we will bracket the
distinctions concerning differing conceptions of subjectivity and focus instead on the
theories of the imagination operant in Ricoeurs work.
In his essay Imagination in Discourse and in Action
23
, Ricoeur attempts to think
about the imagination not from within a visual or imagistic framework but from the
perspective of discourse. This is to say, Ricoeur recognizes that a purely visual notion of
the imagination eventually runs aground upon the problem of representation. In an
attempt to avoid such problems, Ricoeur relates the imagination to the notion of semantic
innovation, characteristic of the metaphorical use of language.
24
The metaphor, for
Ricoeur, figures discourse in such a way that it brings together diverse semantic fields in
such a way that their difference produces semantic shock; the spark that gives rise to a
multiplicity of new meanings. Indeed, above all, imagining is restructuring semantic
fields.
25

This restructuring functions in such a way as to transcend the merely linguistic
realm of metaphors and texts and extends into the practical sphere. As Ricoeur says:

imagination is indeed just what we all mean by the word: the free play of possibilities in a state of
noninvolvement with respect to the world of perception or of action. It is in this state of
noninvolvement that we try out new ideas, new values, new ways of being in the world. But this
common sense attached to the notion of imagination is not fully recognized as long as the fecundity
of imagination has not been related to that of language, as exemplified by the metaphorical process.
26



23
Ricoeur, Paul. Imagination in Discourse and in Action in From Text to Action: Essays in
Hermeneutics II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, Northwestern
University Press: 1991. Pp. 168-187.
24
Ricoeur, Discourse, 171.
25
Ibid, 173.
26
Ibid, 174.
Thus, Ricoeur argues that the sensus communis is not recognized except when understood
from within a linguistic context. That said, Ricoeur has also pointed out that the
imagination assists us in practical life, providing us with a way to evaluate and play with
the aforementioned possible values, ideas, and ways of being in the world. Still, it is only
through the imaginations ability to bring together diverse fields of discourse that the
possibilities of practical activity are enlarged. This enlargement, itself, has a procedure that
it follows. Beginning with the simple schematization of my projects the imagination then
figures or shapes my desires in such a way that it can end with new imaginative variations
of the I can. This progression points towards the idea of the imagination as the general
function of developing practical possibilities, Ricoeur tells us, It is this general function
that Kant anticipated in the Critique of Judgment under the heading of the free play of
imagination.
27

It is this procedure that constitutes the basis for Ricoeurs notion of social imaginary
as imaginative practices or habits of the imagination. For, what else is going on but the
recognition of a project, the shaping of what I desire on the basis of that project, and the
development of possibilities for being in relation to that project, when I engage in the
imaginative procedure expounded by Ricoeur. There is, however, one final step missing
before we can treat the social imaginary proper. The missing step in this discussion of the
imagination is that of moving from a theory of the imagination that is fundamentally a
personal oneepitomized in the idea of expanding the possibilities for the I caninto an
intersubjective theory of the imagination. Ricoeur holds that there is a superior principle
of analogy that binds human beings together. He says,

27
Ibid, 178.

This superior principle is the principle of analogy implied in the initial act of pairing between diverse
temporal fields, those of our contemporaries, those of our predecessors, and those of our successors.
These fields are analogous in the sense that each of us can, in principle, exercise the I function in
the same way as everyone else and can impute to himself or herself his or her own experience.
28


Indeed, it is the commonality of the I, the universal communicability of the I, which
allows us a connection to one another, albeit analogously. This analogous connection is not
an argument according to Ricoeur; rather, it is a transcendental principle according to
which the other is another self similar to myself, a self like myself.
29
It would appear, for
our intents and purposes, that Ricoeurs analogical tie is nothing less than the Kantian
sensus communis. However, this tie is not discoverable except through specific imaginative
practices. In other words, for Ricoeur, sensus communis is accessible only through the
social imaginary.
The truth of our condition, Ricoeur says, is that the analogical tie that makes
every man my brother is accessible to us only through a certain number of imaginative
practices, among them, ideology and utopia.
30
In this essay, Ricoeur explains the idea of
the social imaginary through these two specific imaginative practiceswhich, for thematic
reasons, we will not explorealthough he never says they are the exclusive practices of the
social imaginary. Indeed, it would appear to be the case than any and all historical
institutions that foster the analogical bond between human beings, which must be kept
alive in thought, are believed to be part of the social imaginary. However, a very brief look
at ideology and utopia will yield a greater understanding of what Ricoeur means my social
imaginary.

28
Ibid, 179.
29
Ibid, 180.
30
Ibid, 181.
The imaginative practices of ideology and utopia define themselves as mutually
antagonistic which, when observed in their pathological modes, is undeniable. The positive
aspects of these practices, though, actually contribute to the constitution of the analogical
tie between others and myself.
31
We can define ideology, then, as the impulse to pattern, to
consolidate, to provide order to action. It functions to conserve, and make preserved, the
human order that could be shattered. Yet, The shadow of forces capable of shattering a
given order is already the shadow of an alternative order that could be opposed to the
given order. It is the function of utopia to give the force of discourse to this possibility.
32

Utopia, then, functions to imagine otherwise, to call into question any given order of society
or dominant system of ideas. In other words, the positive function of ideology aligns
somewhat with the function of the Kantian schematism and the function of utopia aligns
with the function of the imagination in the mode of sensus communis.
These two positive impulses, then, are something like the transcendental structures
that condition the possibility of their particular and historical employment. However, they
are not accessible except through their historical and particular employment. Ricoeur
characterizes this the following way:

The irreducible feature of the social imaginary is the fact that we reach this sphere only through the
figures of false consciousness. We take possession of the creative power of the imagination only in a
critical relation with these two figures of false consciousness. As though, in order to cure the folly of
utopia, we had to call the healthy function of ideology, and as though the critique of ideologies
could only be conducted by a consciousness capable of looking at itself from the perspective of
nowhere.
33



31
Ibid, 181.
32
Ricoeur, Paul. Ideology and Utopia in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II.
Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1991. Pg. 318.
33
Ricoeur, Discourse, 187.
It is only through the particular historical employment of these imaginative practices that
we are able to gain access to the positive impulses beneath them. It is also only through the
critique of the reified structures of meaning called ideology that we are able to gain access
to all that is good about organizing ones thought. This critique, for Ricoeur, goes by the
name of utopiathe view from the no place or elsewhere.
What we have therefore seen in Ricoeurs theory of the imagination is that, although
the imagination might function in a way similar to that of Kants, our social imagination is
accessible only by wading through the distorting structures of imaginative practices. The
free play of the imagination, lauded by Ricoeur, appears to be tempered by the effects of
historical practices that transform imaginative activities into something like imaginative
habits. The result of such habits is that the removal of our prejudices, the expansion of our
knowledge, and the consistency of our thought appear to be seriously called into question
by this notion of a social imaginary. Could it be the case that the sensus communis reaches a
horizon in practice it cannot transgress and thus remains at something of a plateau? Or,
could it be the case that the very notion of a social imaginary presupposes the sensus
communis thus requiring the possibility of a critique of these habits and the true expansion
of our knowing, doing, and being?

Why Kant Wins and Ricoeur is Confused.
Although Ricoeur raises an important issue regarding the connection between the
social activity of the imagination and historical particularity, he confuses a few key notions
in Kants theory of the imagination that actually must be presupposed if Ricoeurs own
imaginative theory is to be correct. In this, our final section, we will attempt to clarify the
places where Ricoeur confuses the operation of the imagination in its
determinate/theoretical employment and in its reflective employment, attempt to explicate
that sensus communis is functional without a linguistic context, and demonstrate that sensus
communis is actually the condition of possibility for the social imaginary. Our goal will be
aside from saying (begrudgingly or not) that Kant winsto show the importance of Kants
notion of sensus communis and the free play of the imagination for the idea of a social
imaginary as operant in social practices be they organizational (ideology) or critical
(utopia).
First, when Ricoeur speaks of the joining together of disparate semantic fields in
metaphor and connects this process with that of the imagination, he construes it as a
process not unlike the schematism from the first Critique. That is, his emphasis is on the
way in which the imagination gives an image to an emerging meaning. Or, to put it in the
language of the first Critique, the imagination gives a concept to sense, subsuming the latter
under the former. However, Ricoeur then refers to this as the process by which the
imagination unleashes possibilities for action and meaning.
34
The mistake here is that
Ricoeur confuses the schematizing operation of the imagination, which is a process of
determinate judgment, with the free play of the imagination found in the reflective
judgment of taste. Thus, for Ricoeur to refer to the procedure of the social imagination as
being anticipated by the free play of the imagination in the third Critique is to confuse
determinate judgments with reflective judgments. Ricoeur cannot get to anything like
universal assentcannot get from a me to a weif he maintains this confusion. If the

34
In schematizing metaphorical attribution, imagination is diffused in all directions,
reviving former experiences, awakening dormant memories, irrigating adjacent sensorial
fields. Ricoeur, Discourse, 173.
imagination is primarily schematic for Ricoeur, then it cannot unleash possibilities for
anyone but me. In other words, the problem of historical particularity, of my historical
particularity, remains something of an impassible problem.
Second, because sensus communis is felt, it does not require a linguistic context. The
universal communicability is a transcendental structure of human beings recognizable
without requiring linguistic expression. When someone is experiencing the beautiful, we
are able to recognize this on the basis of a communal sense that such an experience is
possible for any and all who are human beings. For Ricoeur to insist that this only makes
sense within the context of language is for him to misunderstand the kind of sense Kant is
talking about when he speaks of sensus communis as common sense.
Finally, Ricoeurs notion of the social imaginary cannot get off the ground without
presupposing the universal communicability of the sensus communis. This is to say, when
Ricoeur speaks of imaginative practices, of a kind of habitual path traversed by the
imagination in unleashing possibilities, he cannot speak of such practices on a social level,
or even on an individual level without presupposing the kind of communal sense found in a
judgment of taste. In other words, sensus communis, as our ability to enlarge our
understanding by imagining possibilities from the standpoint of everyone else, is the
condition of possibility for social imaginative practices. Without recognizing that this
function of the sensus communis operates as a critique of the very historical particularity of
these imaginative practicesbe they ideological or utopianRicoeur cannot get from the
pathological pole of these practices to their more positive pole.
35
In fact, the very

35
Makkreel is also quite helpful here. Although he is talking about Gadamer, the same
problem of tradition and horizon applies here with Ricoeur. If orientation is derived only
from our horizon, then interpretation is liable to become historicized or tradition-bound.
practice of utopian thought cannot function without the critique of the prejudices built up
through ideology and the expansion of our thinking through imagining ourselves in the
position of all others. Thus, sensus communis stands as the fundamental presupposition of
social imagination and should be acknowledge as such. The function of the imagination in
this social mode is not schematic or determinate as Ricoeur depicts it; rather, it is reflective
and expressed through the free play of the imagination and the understanding without the
mediation of a concept.
We, therefore, arrive at our conclusion. We have attempted to understand how
Kants notion of the sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment is understood as the
fundamental presupposition of any imaginative practices that would be referred to as part
of our social imaginary. We have also attempted to see how this presupposition is not one
concerned with the determinate or theoretical employment of the imagination
epitomized in the schematismbut have attempted to show that it is the reflective
employment of the imagination in free play that provides the universal assent required to
even think on the basis of a social imaginary. Indeed, without the Kantian notion of sensus
communis, we would be bound by the ideological practices of the social imaginary in its
pathological mode. Only through understanding the importance of the transcendental
nature of the sensus communis are we able to critique such imaginative practices thereby
removing our prejudices, enlarging our thought, and thinking more consistently. In other
words, it is on the basis of the sensus communis that we are able to become more fully what
we are, more fully human.

The tradition and its authority would become overwhelming if we could not touch base
with those transcendental conditions of our sensibility and common humanity that make
critical reflection possible. Makkreel, Imagination, 159.