It takes confidence to philosophize, partly because in the process you start to realize whatever liberation narratives — freedom narratives — you’ve shored around yourself like potshards are basically crap; philosophy means addressing yourself as a prisoner in the Present Age: it’s a message slipped under the door of the cell.
The art of self-observation is the science of self-criticism. If there is freedom, if any kind of freedom is available to us, it’s the anti-freedom, the freedom of negation, that comes through acknowledging all the ways you are not free: chipping away at the marble of illusion until all that’s left is what you really are.
