Critique of life is quite different from phenomenology of life. The former is a creative style of venting, the distinctions it makes are clever and tactical, but haphazard, confined to the context, like sardonic jokes. It provides a sort of comfort, even if it is largely defensive, attitude formation to ward off death, nothingness, helplessness, and most of all dumbfoundedness, speechlessness, insignificance. Reading such works feels to be as satisfying as creating them, its readers feel a special sort of participation in the texts - although the writers may seem quite indifferent to them, having got them out of their system, until the next attack. Phenomenology is concerned with making the most functionally correct distinctions, cutting up the subjective-objective mass in just the right way. The observer in both of these modes is paradoxical since neither can fully accommodate the position from which their utterances are made, but critique can overcome this impossibility through irony, which in this case is an empty pseudo-consciousness. Phenomenology, however, must coexist with it, to the detriment, perhaps, of its style. Phenomenology, falling into an attitude becomes critique, hence in so far as it remains in the purity of its mode of reflection the operative distinction is between a thinking that goes against the current of life in relation to every thing that matters, and one going against it in relation to mattering tout court.