Epilogue

Abstract

A new quality is seen to be emerging within this dialogue: linear sequential crowding has given way to hesitations and small silences. Continuities are disturbed. A question mark appears over thinking itself that, until this hour, had covered the entire surface of consciousness. There manifests in thinking, a nascent realization of itself as phenomena, and not as the special consciousness of defined individuality coinciding with a particular organismic contour. The self-image of thought consisting of its habitual association with a specific body is displaced by a new kind of openness that is progressively free of sentimental clutter. Heraclitus thought of it as drying of the soul, that is, getting rid of ‘sticky dampness’ that obstructs the inner fire. The transcendent categories have been displaced by an immanence that is the preparation for a readiness. But readiness for what? For a phenomenological leap into the beyond, or beneath, that of assumed categories, and derived temporal sequences. This leap is by no means the abandonment of reason understood here as the search for a life beyond contradiction. Instead, the fatal confusion of reason with the piety of thought is reversed. It is the demonstration of the power of philosophy when we truly allow ourselves to come under its transformative sway.