Philosophies and world-views make a difference in what is possible, and do so only by rebalancing your attunement to matters and things, not by providing a more correct picture of an unknowable reality. A philosophy cannot be compared with what it purports to describe; but the way of proceeding that it gives or permits can be roughly made out and assessed. This ought to be clear if you look aside from the contents of such systematic reflections and consider the earnestness and even passion with which they are held. Philosophies seem to provide a scheme for the way that individual lives differ from each other; at best there is an elaborately courtesy in disputations which veils the underlying bottomless incredulity and contempt for the opponent. If the error in your position appears clear to me then you seem to be wasting your life on a futility. The value of a position then cannot be exhaustively determined from the outside, at least not by a wholly rational or argumentative consideration of its terms, but must also depend what it offers to someone who takes it on. This is the problem with religion, where you must believe before you can know. But whether it is a philosophy or a religion inconsideration, we judge it after reserved consideration by means of a sort of gut reaction, a judgment of the quantity and kind of life that it contains. This judgment takes the form of the presence or absence of a recognition of something already known but not explicit. It is not an image of ourselves that we seek so much as a restoration of some alienated intensity of self-presence - the sort of self-presence that might lie precisely in the most rigourous askesis of all naïve versions of self-presence. The energetic figures that are embodied in this interplay of life and understanding are as baroque, and perhaps as exhibitionistic, as in any perversion.