If there is a world then there is distinction and if there is distinction there is that peculiar asymmetry that is marked by the labels self and other. Other is correlative to self, neither is prior. Otherness is essential to the knowledge of a world, a world of things, stable, but not entirely so. If the self seeks to resolve this otherness, reunite with it, it it only fans out, branching into fuller and yet more remote efflorescences. Merely because we can discover a common nature with the other and so can infer or perhaps even experience the subjective pole reaching right into the originating springs of being, does not mean that otherness gives up its opposition, surrenders and admits that it was all a bluff from the start. No, if the self seeks, otherness insists and defends its obduracy, making the objectivity of the world yet more pure and self-sufficing. There is no let-up in the rules just because we have exposed them by way of our probing.