Friends At Table
Concepts are Vagabond
A concept is fuzzy or vague not because it lacks an outline but because it is a vagabond, non-discursive, moving about on a plane of immanence. ….it is the event as pure sense that immediately runs through the components. It has no number…for counting things that display its properties, but a combination that condenses and accumulates the components it traverses and surveys. The concept is a form or a force….. There are only philosophical concepts on the plane of immanence, and scientific functions or logical propositions are not concepts.
What About Opinion?
Opinion proposes a particular relationship between an external perception as the state of a subject and an internal affection as passage from one state to another. We pick out a quality supposedly common to several objects that we perceive, and an affection supposedly common to several subjects who experience it, and who, along with us grasp that quality.
For example, we grasp a perceptual quality common to cats or dogs and a certain feeling that makes us like or hate one or the other: –the society of those who like cats or detest them. So that opinions are essentially the object of a struggle or an exchange.
And Of Philosophy?
Is not the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversation? Rival opinions at the dinner table—is this not the eternal Athens, our way of being Greek again? The three characteristics by which philosophy was related to the Greek city were, precisely the society of friends, the table of immanence, and the confrontation of opinions. One might object that Greek philosophers were always attacking doxa (received opinion) contrasting it with episteme—as the only knowledge adequate to philosophy.
But this is a mixed up business, and philosophers, being only friends and not wise men, find it very difficult to give up doxa.
-Excerpts What is Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari p. 144-145
