Like spiritual exploration, philosophical exploration shows the fly the way out of the bottle. This is a form of enlightenment and is referred to (with deliberate paradoxical intent) as ‘beginner’s mind’ in the Zen tradition: the freshness of insight before intellectualising dimmed it. At the end of his career, Husserl admitted that ‘the first result of reflection is to bring us back into the presence of the world as we lived it before our reflection began (Lebenswelt)’.
