PHILOSOPHY OF THE SENSUS COMMUNIS. THE PUBLIC, THE INDIVIDUAL, THE CULTURAL PRACTICES

The idea of the sensus communis is something of a crossroads for many cultural issues and practices in eighteenth-century Europe. It was at the heart of aesthetic, moral, political, religious, educational and legal concerns. Conceived as an inner sensibility or a sense of belonging to a community under the aegis of a set of common values, the sensus communis was one of the main themes of the investigations into human nature of 18th-century authors such as Shaftesbury, Voltaire, Vico, Hume, Kant, Herder and others. At the same time, it inspired a whole series of cultural operations that referred to the idea of a collective taste that cultural operators sought to encounter, stimulate and educate. From this perspective, the idea of the sensus communis not only further defines the modern idea of the individual, but also sheds light on the heterogeneous genres and new cultural practices that emerged in the eighteenth century, on the then dominant notions of audience and ‘cultural industry’, and on the emergence of an unprecedented philosophy of the ‘spectator’.