Perception of the real world depends on shared common sense among plural men

Evidence

Taken in itself, without consideration of its recent historical causes and its new role in politics, loneliness is at the same time contrary to the basic requirements of the human condition and one of the fundamental experiences of every human life. Even the experience of the materially and sensually given world depends upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense which regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would be enclosed in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are unreliable and treacherous. Only because we have common sense, that is only because not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth can we trust our immediate sensual experience. Yet, we have only to remind ourselves that one day we shall have to leave this common world which will go on as before and for whose continuity we are superfluous in order to realize loneliness, the experience of being abandoned by everything and everybody. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1079

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt ties sense-datum reliability itself to intersubjective commonality — a dense epistemic claim that loneliness is not merely affect but a rupture in the very constitution of perceived reality.