Sensus Communis

I have pointed my old domain, www.sensus-communis.com, at this blog. Before I left for Sri Lanka, I used to run a server at that address from my apartment. It was mostly for getting email and for friends and family to play around on, and on the homepage I had put the following definition:

"..we must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general... Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else..." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, p160; Ak. 293-294)

My friend Bill actually made a facsimile of the general structure of my old page.

I'm pleased that this idea that I chose to represent my web presence so many years ago (I think I've had that domain for about 15 years) fits so well with my current interest in Buddhism. After all, how could we engage in such common metta practice as contemplating phrases like "Just as I wish to be happy, so do all beings wish to be happy; may all beings everywhere be happy" without something like the sensus communis in us? This ability to put ourselves in the place of others is surely one of the foundations of compassion and sympathetic joy.