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.