As thinkers from ancient times have noted, humans have a desire to express themselves, to project and assert their selfhood and their dominion over their environment, to understand, grasp and master their reality. Plato famously wondered about the human capacity and insatiable desire to know oneself and one's environment, to express oneself as a quintessential human, even to portray oneself as a philosopher (Republic V, 475c). In doing so, humans construct self-portraits for others to appreciate, understand, and to contest. The possibility of a global philosophy is at least partially predicated on this insight that humans feel the need to compose, fashion, create, project, inscribe and express their selfhood in thought and the arts, though one needs to investigate further epistemologies and praxes of the south to find philosophising everywhere, without attempting to universalise a particular European trajectory of it. This desire for self-expression stems directly from the desire to know, to uncover truth, and to arrive at some certainty. It seems that we want to think that we are not tricked or deluded in our understanding of the world; in this endeavour, the very self, as the ancient Indian sages note, can act as the agent of concealment but also as the instrument of revelation. Philosophy then as an expression of the self and as the discovery of reality holds within itself both the ability to reveal and occlude.