But there is a problem: self-reflection is largely an intellectual capacity. At the very moment that we bring an originally obfuscated intuition up into the field of self-reflection, we place it in the intellect and, therefore, confine it to language. And since language cannot capture transcendent truths, the whole exercise seems to defeat itself. If we try to apply self-reflection to a transcendent idea, we end up losing its very transcendence through the filter of language; we end up with a well-elaborated circle, but miss the cylinder altogether.
