A term like 'seeing through the illusion of self' comes to us highly freighted and ambiguous in the reigning intellectual culture, so much so that it oughtn't to stand, because the various meanings, which immediately include respective agendas, are so intertwined. Some say that to do so, to have the will to exercise insight into the self's emptiness, is an immediate good, equating self with limitation, with an imposed idea, with a personal history embedded in a cultural history - these with perennial imprudence look forward to a new and far more fluid dispensation. Others, with as much justice, see the seeing through as itself the illusion, and one of insidious intent, asserting both that you cannot dissolve your self but only burden it with incoherent ideas, and that whatever it is, it is the kind of thing that can be threatened with dissolution and so rendered unfit to serve its rightful purpose. Both of these tendencies are mistaken since they implicitly take the self as the proper subject or knower of its own putative nullity. The reference, in so far as it is to some positive purpose and not just an abstract speculation, ought more properly be to a process of inquiry that begins with a phenomenological epoché. The subject of this inquiry, the true inquirer, is not known or knowable beforehand, and the motive is simply that whatever the self may be, the possibility of such an inquiry is intrinsic to it. If the epoché is not maintained with the gentlest, even the tenderest, expediency the whole project soon degenerates into farce.