For the idealist the self or absolute subject is the ground of all appearance and so necessarily of all reality. The alienation of the self from itself gives rise to experience, but is illusory, and hence experience has a direction and terminus in the self's restoration to itself. This kind of metaphysical scheme is nothing more than a mental projection which subtly objectifies that which can never be an object. The experience of consciousness in the mind is of some kind of self-referential system which functions just outside of pure contradiction through a cunning teleology of deferrals and disjunctions. We are convinced that there is some thing doing this, and that what we keep on just missing is actually there, and will show its face some day; but the essence of this doing is that it can't be an object, much less a thing, and certainly not a subject-thing. The sense of a self that arises is the product of a sleight of consciousness, but such a powerful trick could not be effective unless there were something it were playing off, an original and veridical knowing which while fully there is utterly out of reach of the mind's fecund profundities of self remystification. The purpose of philosophy is not to lead us to a grasping of what can't be grasped, but to delineate precisely the limit of any such grasping.