It doesn't make a difference whether the objective engulf the subjective or the subjective engulfs the objective. Once that takes place neither is what they were, but if you can still get hold of it somehow negation is no longer possible. You would step out of it without negation, or even negation of negation. The gap between you and experience isn't in any direction, and it's the same even here, in the storm of conditions.

In everyday waking awareness you strongly project an objective world filled with real things and a ghostly mind that is present in it, that knows it via symbolic representations and somehow is able to interact with it. When this structure is examined more closely the boundary between the inner world and the outer world slides all the way out so that the inner world engulfs the outer world and at the same time the outer world engulfs the inner world. The result could be called the world of transcendental consciousness. But this world too loses its anchoring when subjected to further scrutiny. Consciousness in its most developed form now plays the role that the objective world first played. One way to describe this is to say that consciousness is inherently conceptual and symbolic but is blind to whatever it might be that enables it to be what it is; it is a functioning, a revealing, that cannot account for the source of its own functions or revealings. It poses a problem which cannot be solved in the terms with which it is posed. This is what is meant by its ungroundedness. Thought can bring you to the edge of thought, can show you the limit but can't traverse that limit, being completely ineffectual beyond it. There is no analogy that can be of any use, and yet this is what is, what you are, the very being of experiencing.

Experiencing is structured discursively. It is not intelligible per se, but as a project towards its own intelligibility, and since that is inherently dualistic, as intelligibility is social, the self appears as its indispensable pivot. The project of intelligibility, however, aims to eliminate the self from the picture, to achieve the view from nowhere. Eliminating the self in these terms is impossible since it is a structural feature of the very means by which it would do away with itself. The great hope of the mind is to complete the functionalist programme, completing the circle by which every part acquires its meaning from the meaning of the parts on which it depends, and if this occurs in a sufficiently complex way then meaning, igniting out of nothing, out of a mystification of its own failure, can finally be grounded. You can't think your way out of this, but perhaps you can think your way into it so thoroughly that all escape, all pretext, is cancelled.

• Unfocused anxiety is is like insomnia, as if your waking consciousness is turned up high and stuck on. What is unpleasant in it is the being stuck in energetic alertness. Is this a case of consciousness turned on itself? What frightens you is awareness of awareness, its facticity, contingency or ungrounded nature. That it is a state of something, of your mind, that it is about something however, is an idea, a representation of a situation, perhaps even an attempt to insert yourself into it, by way of a certain narrative that is not wholly convincing. Your consciousness is stuck on and it doesn't need you at all. You can barely accept that you have been locked out of it. You thought that you were identical with awareness and you find that awareness doesn't need you or respect your interest.

There is a Zeno-like paradox to Phenomenon, to appearance. Appearance cannot be the reality because in itself it is ungrounded, insubstantial, s not the kind of thing that would be needed to account for itself. You could say that it has being, but no substance. So there is something behind appearance. You could think of this as noumenon in some lofty sense, or as matter, or as events in a brain. Whatever it is it doesn't appear as it is, it has no power of self-exposure. But if it doesn't appear, has no dimension of appearance, then how can it give rise to appearance? How can what doesn't appear give rise to appearance? If what is real does not appear then it is complete in its non-appearance, there is nowhere for appearance to take hold of it. This is why some thinkers go for the panpsychic chimera, a sort of philosophic unicorn, or else deny that appearance appears at all, that the word has a stable meaning.  It is not enough to assert that something underlies appearance - you can assert this metaphysically, but metaphysics doesn't answer to what is required. It's not the being of appearance that needs explanation, which is what a theory of being tries to serve, but the appearance of appearance. If being, or the in-itself, were to construct a sort of screen on which it could appear, it could set this up as elaborately as possible, but whatever it did it could not create the appearance of the screen.

Thought solves problems, makes plans, reconsiders histories, loses itself - this antique instrument. That's not what you want it to do, but that what it wants you to do, and so it's what you do, willy nilly.

If idealism were true, then it wouldn't be idealism, since everything that makes up the concepts with which we stake out that position: consciousness, subject, objective world etc., would be so far surpassed that the concepts would no longer stand. The same is true for every metaphysics: if materialism or naturalism were true then matter or the laws of physics would no longer be what we take them to be. In a purely intellectual sense all such views would self-destruct if they could ever be finally validated. This is perhaps why metaphysics is understood to lead to nihilism. Behind all such positions there are inferences about what kinds of experience are possible or impossible, about what can be relied upon, what is worth pursuing, what kinds of attitudes can stand or fail to stand the test of possible experience. In the end all that remains after the inessential is released are kinds of faith, comportments of the heart towards reality. All the rest, the arguments, the systems, are elaborate distractions.