The politics of struggle

When one desires to be ruled, one also desires and expects a certain kind of ruling that is appropriate to the power ratio. One craves for a certain amount of severity, deception and cruelty from the ruler, and may even call it 'love'. But when the ruler rules with a different or a lesser degree of severity (perhaps due to curiosity or pity or boredom), then the ruled seeks revenge and becomes ferocious. The latter creates a turmoil until the power ratios are restored. He calls this his 'revolution'. For, a deep concern with the restoration of the ratio is what determines the ruled as the ruled. The ruler, on the other hand, is a revolutionary in an entirely different sense because he is haunted with the creative spirit to tremble and upset the existing order of power relations, at times, even risking losing the power which is given to him over the ruled. The secret tragedy of the ruler arises from his disdain for the comfort of a rote repitition. The revolt of the ruled interprets this tragedy as the decadence of the ruler.

Under the sheets

The commonest form of self-deception is taking one's own inventive skills to be merely passive skills of discovery. A kind of underestimation of one's own ingenuity. And then one holds onto these truths as if they have been given to one by some mysterious external source. At the same time, one congratulates oneself for discovering these truths, which one believes to be available for all in the same form of hue and dilution in which one has uncovered them. One then sets up and passionately advocates justice and objectivity. It is only by virtue of a prior act of self-deception that one invents philosophy (a.k.a. phenomenology).
But these truths are only lenses through which one views everything in one's field of vision. They are 'truths' precisely because these lenses makes all truth possible, as such. A Kantian act of self-invention by the virtue of which one gives to oneself what one has already given to oneself. The 'as such', the golden commandment of phenomenology, has nothing but this structure of self-bestowing. (And didn't Kant mean by 'critique' precisely a way of unraveling this un-Gordian knot?).
A self-invention, which relying on its obscurity to itself, kids itself to be a modest self-discovery! And beyond the realm of this self-giving, oscillate infinite reverberations of terrible self-contradictions, dark-spots and abysses, against which one does one's best to guard oneself. But this dark arena is the secret source of philosophy, the Hades from which it springs and to which it passes away, where one being discourses with the other even though an infinite distance hangs between them.

Difference between beer and wine

What an individual genius is for a German is a cultural phenomenon for the French. What speaks of profundity and gravity for the German is frivolousness, shallowness and play for the French. What is speech for the German is song for the French. What is Romanticism for the Germans is Napoleon for the French. What is life for the German is love for the French. What is philosophy for the Germans is art and coffee for the Frenchman.

A rhetorical invitation

At least, at a basic level, everybody projects oneself onto the world. By doing thus, one feels comfortable and familiar. The uncaniness of the world is tamed. However, because of this self-projection one also fails to take delight in the simple discoveries of the world, the things that constitute the world and one's own place in this world. One fails to notice the uniqueness of one's own vision of the world, one's "constructivism," since one has already compromised one's singularity in order to feel at home. One becomes ever so slightly: dogmatic. But then can one avoid this self-projection if one has already limited oneself? And still: who can avoid this self-limitation and still go on living?