Doxa

(ancient Greek; from verb dokein, “to appear”, “to seem”, “to think” and “to accept”) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion.

We have opinions
on everything that we see or that affects us,
to the extent the human sciences
can be seen as a vast doxology.
—but things themselves
are generic opinions
insofar as they have molecular perceptions and affections,
in the sense that the most elementary organism
forms a proto-opinion on water, carbon, and salts
on which its conditions and power depend……

–excerpt What Is Philosophy
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari page 155

Everyone has an opinion about everything. To live and to have opinions about lived reality—is life. That’s not changed over the passage of millennia. We 21st century humans are no different from our ancestors in Periclean Athens of 500 BCE. Philosophy strikes me as a mining operation, a mining for/of concepts from the bedrock of popular opinion. Opinion is not science. Opinion may be and often is folk wisdom. Science is discovery of how-things-work, the functioning of lived experience. (Taking an aspirin is more effective, more functional to treat a headache than applying river mud to the forehead as per folk wisdom) That’s science. Philosophy on the other hand is about: why reduce suffering at all? What do we mean by suffering?  What does suffering indicate? Why do we agree that suffering is un-satisfactory? Philosophy is about concepts, mining from the lived experience of the 21st century the concept of a society that reduces suffering.

And that is what we need to do, right now, right here –on this battlefield of opinion.

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And as a post script, just for fun, –do not even molecules have a right to their opinions?

Opinions, turtles all the way down….