“I believe in common sense”, Felix said.

“But not everyone has common sense”, he added and smiled.

“In a perfect world, common sense would be a common good, and laws would not be necessary.” I wanted to know more about this common sense, and Felix explained: “To me, common sense is somewhat in opposition to scientific approaches. In some cases, it is simply not necessary to check something scientifically – I only have this rather stupid example in mind, but think of people wanting to jump out of a helicopter with or without parachutes and wanting to test which type of jump is safer for the human body to survive. Common sense tells us that it is safe to use a parachute.” 

I really had to think about how to create his smallest. It was not obvious to me.

I felt I had to learn more about it before creating Felix’s smallest accurately.

It should represent this believe, and, at the same time, I wanted to accommodate what I learned when I did more research on common sense. As I read more about common sense, a chasm of differing perspectives on the assumptions necessary for a common sense to exist became undeniable. 

Somehow, the image of a rotten apple came to my mind. And this is what I painted. 

It symbolises the believe in common sense, and it answers to its various critiques. The apple is rotten: Common sense tells us not to eat it. The apple is a picture and not real: Common sense tells us it is not edible. The apple has fallen from a tree, so, we can assume that this is prove of a force that eventually got to be known as gravity. But the discovery and naming and testing of gravity somehow seems to defy and challenge common sense. Who would have questioned with common sense that an apple falls to the ground in the first place? It is thanks to examining this, that gravity became a concept to grasp and describe, make predictions based on its variables. Same goes for mould. How rotten has an apple to be for us not to consume it anymore? But what about mouldy cheese? And… hasn’t the hardship of human experience (at least according to the Bible, which is a different story) by someone eating… an apple that should not have be eaten, but that looked perfectly fine? Common sense could tell us that this story is simply made up, or a metaphor, at least. So, I leave you with this rather open-ended and, for once, challenging smallest, also for me! Common sense is a common idea, and yet, there are so many ways to disagree on it…