Before taking this up, let us say a word about the other objection which was addressed to us: you go back to the unreflected; therefore you renouce reflection. It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection. Left to itself, perception forgets itself and is ignorant of its own accomplishments. Far from thinking that philosophy is a useless repetition of life I think, on the contrary, that without reflection life would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itself or in chaos. But this does not mean that reflection should be carried away with itself or pretend to be ignorant of its origins. By fleeing difficulties it would only fail in its task.
One of the essential figures of the divine light is that it continually augments and perfects itself through reflexive or returning beams, which is why every "outward" light journey must have a corresponding, varyingly symmetrical "homeward" journey; this was developed with due formality in Neoplatonic reflection. Hence the primal light not only plunges centrifugally into the immeasurable and irretrievable from its first point of emission, but returns home - in an eternal conservative revolution - from a precisely determined turning point to its source[...] It is beyond doubt that without this harboring reflection, the rays sent out by him would dissapear into a homecoming-less "bad" infinity and never return to the point [...] In [Nicolas of Cusa's model of the cosmos] the outermost ring is described as "confused chaos": a region in which the emanations of the light center have become so attenuated that they no longer have any formal effects on the substance — Sloterdijk
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