This study is divided into three parts. In the first I survey various incidents in which the oscillating friend/foe pattern between philosophy and religious consciousness is played out, and seek to determine the nature of this alternating complicity and conflict. In the second part, the implications of attributing a posture to thinking are examined. Here I argue that human thought always occurs within, and is shaped by, a fundamental will and feeling toward reality. In the third part I argue that (...) rational consciousness has a structural tension built into it: the tension between acknowledgement and conformity to the other and assertion and enactment of the self. (shrink)