~ The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it. ~

In perceiving the world there is more than just an immediate awareness of objects in the world. Concepts are now developed to describe the properties of objects. The moment is frozen, as it were, and can be reflected upon, it can be given meaning. However, when experience is described rather than lived, the richness of the moment disappears. When saying what it was that was once lived, only one dimension of the experience can be brought in focus, one dimension to the exclusion of all others.

Words fail to capture the experience in its totality no matter how carefully they are selected or how many are chosen. There is the experience itself and there is the perception of the thing and the two cannot be the same.49 Hence it is at one and the same time other and not other. 50It is not therefore a single unity but rather has an element belonging the realm of the sensuous and an element that is universal.

Alone in the world, oneself can be neither subject nor object. The self needs the other to confer its status.∂