What would you say to a people for whom love had no power?

Or those for whom power had no love.

It's a great question Doug, but on further thought I'm not sure how to read it. Some thoughts:

One can generally say that performance artists are driven by love and politicians by power, but if you look deeper, for no serious artist is Love really what they are trying to accomplish. Sure, Laurence Olivier, Rubinstein, they wanted the love ot the audience but they were searching for something deeper - to become a great actor, a great musician. Politicians want power, but Clinton wasn't simply looking for power, he was looking to make the world a better place, in a deep way.

You could say that Clinton's search was driven by love for humanity. That the artists search is from love of humanity, of art, and of themselves.

One could ask, which is the basic tool? Which one do people use as methods of getting to where they want, but this case seems just as lacking.

One can think of Freud Vs. Jung, or sex-drive versus power-drive, but sex is not love. When people act because they want sex do they do it out of love or out of power?

The question seems more at home in people's day to day actions which seem to be driven mainly by one of the two, but what about happiness? Where would the drive for happiness stand?

So, there's a famous point in Being and Time where Heidegger says:

"Truth (uncoveredness)... Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression -- 'a-lethea'?"

Let's say that, as he describes, the world does not, a priori, want to reveal whatever it is that we desire. So one more focused question is: what's a person's basic strategy for getting at truth -- at whatever they want deeply, or experience as truth? How do they feel that understanding is best accomplished? Is the idea to love the world so much that it lets down its defenses? To see below the surface by dissolving difference into yourself? To accumulate such great power that it comes to you out of submission, or demanding protection?

What is the role of love and power in the search for truth -- and in persuading the truth to be revealed?