An except from Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère on polarity

 ... And then, she continues, there are the people who turn off the light when they leave a room and those who don’t, the people who take the elevator downstairs and those who don’t even understand that you can do such a thing, the people who give money to beggars and those who don’t, the people who cede to temptation and read the diary of the person they love if they come across it and those who don’t, the people who act the same way whether someone is watching or not and those who act differently when they’re being watched. 

This last distinction strikes me, the way you can be struck by something that’s obvious but that had never struck you as obvious until now. I haven’t read Kant, but from the little I know of him that could be a Kantian thing: acting the same way whether someone’s watching or not seems to me like the cornerstone of morality. We agree on this point, we’re happy to agree, we definitely agree on a lot of things, and throughout dinner, almost yelling, we get a kick out of drawing up a list of the divided classes of humanity: those who see the glass as half empty and those who see it as half full, those who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican, those who prefer Dostoyevsky and those who prefer Tolstoy—in the French version it’s Voltaire and Rousseau, in the American Faulkner and Hemingway—those who, when they’re in someone else’s kitchen, figure out for themselves where things go and put them away without asking, and those who stand around and ask, “Is there something I can do?” There, I admit that I belong to the second category. On that note, I ask her what she knows about yin and yang, the poles that are at the heart of Chinese thought...