Appeals to common sense and proportion serve reigning power, not truth
Evidence
Common sense, the correct assessment of situations, the worldly eye schooled by the market, shares with the dialectic a freedom from dogma, narrow-mindedness and prejudice. Its sobriety undeniably constitutes a moment of critical thinking. But its lack of passionate commitment makes it, all the same, the sworn enemy of such thinking. For opinion in its generality, accepted directly as that of society as it is, necessarily has agreement as its concrete content. … One need only have once heard a diehard representative of a ruling clique say: ‘That is of no consequence’, or note at what times the bourgeois talk of exaggeration, hysteria, folly, to know that the appeal to reason invariably occurs most promptly in apologies for unreason. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 84
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The ‘sense of proportion’ as a disguised ideology — reason invoked most promptly in defense of unreason — is a dense, paradigm-shifting inversion.
- XREF: Connects to the general critical-theory diagnosis of instrumental reason and ideology critique running through Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. — connects to: Common sense is ambiguous and conservative, resisting new truths; Intellectuals must speak complex truth to power rather than simplify it — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 1208; Common sense is a key route to hegemonic power in democracies (+15 more)
- APHORISMS: ‘The appeal to reason invariably occurs most promptly in apologies for unreason’ reads as a durable diagnostic maxim.
Broader Connections
- Common sense is ambiguous and conservative, resisting new truths
#corroborates(0.90) - Intellectuals must speak complex truth to power rather than simplify it
#responds-to(0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1208 - Oppositional movements win by rearticulating common sense, not by armed insurrection
#complicates(0.80) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 145 - Common sense is the sediment of past philosophy, not fixed belief
#expands(0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 123 - Common sense is contradictory and only validates truths by their historical spread
#expands(0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1513 - Economic doctrine wins power only when translated into moral common sense
#exemplifies(0.80) - Becoming common sense is a key route to hegemonic power
#corroborates(0.80) - Common sense is a key route to hegemonic power in democracies
#corroborates(0.75) - Common sense merits only a limited empirical trust, not philosophical authority.
#qualifies(0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1247 - Reason adapts humans to power rather than unifying subject and object
#corroborates(0.75) - Philosophy and common sense differ in degree, not kind
#complicates(0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 808