Below we find a clip from The Cruise, a 1998 documentary by Bennett Miller that follows the now-infamous New York City tour bus guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch on some of his untraditional excursions into the “total cacophony” that is New York. In the clip, Levitch recalls a conversation wherein he denounces the city grid plan, only to be met with the response, “everyone likes the grid plan.” Levitch diagnoses this response as a form of the exclusionary power intrinsic to common sense. In this way, he allows us to appreciate Gilles Deleuze’s critique of “opinion,” as opposed to “thought,” in a refreshing light.
In teaching Introduction to Philosophy, I find that conveying the difference between thought and opinion, critical insight and common sense, can be one of the most difficult tasks. While students often prove eager to weigh in on particular debates or passages, it can be challenging to grasp the difference between a well-argued position and an unscrutinized belief, a philosophically grounded argument and an expression of personal agreement or preference.
A course that proceeds unconcerned with these distinctions tends to get bogged down by routine objections to philosophical texts on the grounds that they do not cohere with one’s distinctly modern “worldview,” that they contradict some pertinent majority’s experience of the world, or that they simply do not agree with a given student’s religious convictions or cultural predeterminations.
While it remains a distinctly difficult text in many respects, I find that certain passages of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? serve as a pedagogically helpful tool in this effort of discernment. I thus assign sections of it at the beginning and in the middle of various introductory courses, in an effort to communicate the essential difference between the practice of critical thought and the expression of commonsense opinion—urging students to go beyond the latter and toward the former in their discussions, journal entries, and papers.
In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari warn against an “image of thought,” a model or a conception of thinking, that remains tethered to the criterion of majority rule. They call this image of thought “opinion,” writing that, “in its essence, opinion is the will of a majority, and already speaks on behalf of a majority” (1994, 146, translation modified). Within such conditions, conformity to majority opinion matters far more than critical insight—and “truth” becomes functionally identical to a given statement’s conformity to the majority opinion. “A true opinion,” the pair write, “will be one that coincides with that of the group to which one belongs by expressing it…you must express your opinion, but you ‘win’ (you have spoken the truth) if you say the same as the majority of those participating in the competition” (146). Say the “right” thing and get rewarded. Say the “wrong” thing and be ridiculed. True opinions are but badges signaling membership to a majoritarian camp.
The victory of majority opinion over genuinely critical or creative thought comes with predictably disastrous political consequences. Majority opinion verifies and validates its own beliefs, measuring truth in relation to its own standard while ignoring, discounting, or otherwise vehemently rejecting all counterclaims, all critical scrutiny—a lesson that has recently been put on full display in the Texas A&M gender debacle and its draconian aftermath, wherein an English professor was unceremoniously fired for, it seems, teaching material that went against a student’s religious beliefs (i.e., she called into question a dominant, normative understanding of gender). Here, and in a similar instance at the University of Oklahoma, the intervention and reassertion of dominant opinion quite literally brings the project of critical thinking to a halt. While the latter constitutes a particularly dramatic and alarming example of this pattern, I would argue that it occurs in miniature in classrooms across the country with rather extreme frequency. To save itself from the tyranny of “opinion,” thought must sharpen its critical tools—and students must develop an interest in such inquiry, together with the ability to distinguish the redundant repetition of majority opinions from the careful examination of conditions, cases, and ideas.
On one hand, the gist of Deleuze and Guattari’s point, at least for the purposes of an introductory course, may well be distilled as a warning against circular reasoning, against a political situation that measures truth in terms of conformity with majority opinion. On the other hand, it opens onto something more than that. And, in any case, the prose is itself rather difficult for many undergraduates to parse. For that reason, I have found the above clip from The Cruise to be immensely helpful in the instruction of the material.
As mentioned above, the image of the individual sleeping under a white comforter, “cuddled up under 44th Street and Broadway, existing on the concrete of this city, hungry and disheveled, struggling to crawl their way onto this island,” as Levitch puts it, reminds him of a vexing conversation he had some time ago with a woman about the city’s grid plan. “To me, the grid plan is puritan; it’s homogenizing,” Levitch recounts himself saying, “in a city where there is no homogenization available.” The woman replies, with a blink and twitch of the ear reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s portrait of the modern bourgeois: “Whoa, I never even thought of that. I can’t imagine it. Everyone likes the grid plan.”
This subtle invocation of the phrase “everyone likes” crystallizes the circular, majoritarian, and, indeed, quietly tyrannical logic of opinion quite well. We can reconstruct the quotidian statement in the following manner: Everyone likes the grid plan. I am part of “everyone.” Therefore, I like the grid plan too. Liking the grid plan is right. Whoever does not like the grid plan must be wrong and, ultimately, not a part of this “everyone.” And, indeed, this is precisely what Levitch’s subsequent question indicates for us.
“And of course the question is like: who is everyone?…What does [the person cuddled up under 44th Street and Broadway] think about the grid plan?” Like Levitch, this person does not “count,” does not “belong,” by right, to this “everyone.” The exclusionary and politicized function of majority opinion is here on full display. Indeed, we might say that opinion, commonsense, the subtle tyrant of “everyone likes” homogenizes thought in the same way that the grid plan homogenizes the cityscape. It paves over difference, insulates itself from critique, and pretends as if it’s the only and obvious option available.
Levitch’s next observation connects the dots between this exclusionary function and the silencing of critical inquiry: “I think most noteworthy is this idiom, I can’t even imagine changing the grid plan.…It’s like saying, oh, I can’t imagine altering this civilization. I can’t imagine altering this meek and lying morality that rules our lives. I can’t imagine standing up on a chair in the middle of the room to change perspective. I can’t imagine changing my mind on anything. In the end, I can’t imagine having my own identity that contradicts other identities.…When she says to me, after my statements, ‘Everyone likes the grid plan,’ isn’t she automatically excluding me from everyone?” Why, yes! And that is precisely the danger of the image of thought to which many classroom discussions remain implicitly beholden.
In classic Levitch fashion, his soliloquy crescendos into a beautifully scathing, effortlessly cool diatribe about how that exclusion is not just bad for Levitch and the person under 44th Street and Broadway, but also bad for the future itself insofar as it implicitly announces allegiance to a civilization that is being slowly cannibalized. In three short minutes, the link between as innocent a phrase as “everyone likes the grid plan,” to civilizational neuroses and downfall has been brilliantly drawn—a link that exposes the implicit violence in an image of thought that submits itself to and weighs its own merits in accordance with majority opinion. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s own exposure of the presuppositions behind phrases like “everyone knows,” and “everyone thinks,” its exaggerative extravagance distills the beating heart of their text to students—asking them to hesitate a bit before defaulting to similar expressions in the remainder of the course and their studies.
Sources and Possible Readings
- Anders, Günther. 2025. The Obsolescence of the Human. Translated by Christopher John Müller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Césaire, Aimé. 1953. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by John Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 47–53.
- Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. “The Image of Thought.” In Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton, 129–67. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1994. “Prospects and Concepts.” In What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, 135–62. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Snir, Itay. 2017. “Making Sense in Education: Deleuze on Thinking Against Common Sense.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 50(3): 299–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1344537
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Eric Aldieri
Eric Aldieri is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State University where he teaches classes in early modern philosophy, feminist philosophy, and political philosophy. His research focuses on the twentieth century reception of Spinozism in France. His work can be found in Derrida Today, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Hypatia, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
