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remains imprisoned by it” (DR, 134). Common sense imprisons us by restricting our thoughts to
well-worn paths. Common sense does not so much lead us into error as foster stupidity. It
contributes to “remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities,
ordinary ‘points’ confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems” (DR, 153).
For Deleuze, philosophy ought to break with doxa in order to think more creatively.
The second reason that philosophy ought to break with common sense, for Deleuze, is
that it is dangerous.
In so far as the practical finality of recognition lies in the ‘established values’,
then on this model the whole image of thought as Cogitatio natura bears witness
to a disturbing complacency…. Recognition is a sign of the celebration of
monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the
Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure
form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object. (DR, 136)
In its articulation of established values, doxa is complacent and close-minded. Doxa does not
question the State, the Church or the Family because it sustains and is sustained by these forces.
Doxa is the soil of fascism. The ethical responsibility of philosophy, then, is to shake doxa out of
its complacency. For Deleuze, philosophy abdicates its role when it restrains itself to “clarifying”
or “protecting” healthy common sense. “Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy”
(DR, 139).
A new image of thought, for Deleuze, requires a new doctrine of the faculties. What are
the requirements of such a doctrine?
Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls
prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that
which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the
ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise). (DR, 143)
There are several ways to attain a “discordant harmony” of the faculties. First, one may
experiment with the proportions of one’s faculties. That is, one may think with one’s sensibility,
Convention