In every reflexive snapshot of the ongoing there are certain givens that lie outside the clearly contingent. That the view can be altered and these can then fall within the the most differentiating and hence most doubtful region of attention says less than it seems. The power to doubt undermines its own boot-strappings. It's not that you build wisdom out of doubt but out of your struggle with the economy of those very givens by which you clumsily worked your way into broader realisation or more-straightened disenchantment. In this sense others appear starkly as a world of ontological signalling. If this one, like the hero of a bildungsroman, appears to embody assumptions you once might have made, that one reflects back to you the futility of the assumptions accepted and that you have not yet earned the right to expose. You look at other paths you might have chosen, or that you imagine were possible, and see yourself reflected back from still other possible paths that would have gone further. Your thought founders in a morass of modalities, like diseases that appear on the shadow-skin of consciousness.