If there were a direct knowing of reality then it would be entirely incommensurate with spatio-temporal experience and its language, dialogue would be impossible, so that even describing it as 'direct knowing of reality' would be a confusion. The problem is partly that the idea of such a knowing, even if unrealised, is essential to the constitution of any systematic understanding of ordinary experience. Further, language is such that it can immediately address its own points of failure so in its elf-understanding there is no question or relation that cannot be posed. Language seems universal in a more extensive but analogous way to computability. Language's thoughts about itself, however, necessarily have no power to legislate whatever is beyond language. They cannot even constrain it. The considerable amounts of ground gained historically by metaphysical attempts to think, or point beyond itself, amount to exactly nothing at all.