We have arrived at the image of ourselves as sense-making animals facing the world, individual representatives of a community of minds. This was an affirmative note since it underlined the extent to which we are liberated, through thatter, particularly in the form of knowledge, from our material surroundings and indeed from the biological mire that supports sentience. Our flesh of course is a necessary condition of our being sense-making animals; and the needs of the flesh give sense-making its primary, although not its sole, purpose, contributing overwhelmingly to its content, in virtue of supplying the needs that are its first and last agenda. Those needs are, of course, transformed over history and the viewpoint from which that agenda is pursued and its knowledge is acquired and organised is not socketed in an ecological niche as is the case with other animals. Looking on a world that for the most part does not look back at us, is the ultimate basis for our ability to bring about events, to utilize material happenings as handles that can be used to shape what happens in accordance with our goals, and to be the authors of genuinely free actions. The present chapter is less optimistic and prepares the way for a critical examination, in the final chapter, of the seemingly uncontroversial idea of absolute cognitive progress and the perhaps more obviously questionable hope of our getting ever closer to a complete understanding of the world (including ourselves as part of it.)

The idea of the subject facing a world of objects is of a relationship. The quorum for the cognitive tango is two – something that is reflected in the connection-across-separation that is our mode of relating to and engaging with the world and is most clearly acknowledged in the correspondence theory of knowledge and truth. Unless we subscribe to idealism, the two relata will be in some important sense external to one another; there will therefore be an irreducible otherness in what is known – the first relatum. Less obviously, there will be an otherness within the knower – the second relatum.