As soon as another person figures in consciousness, not simply as an object in the world but as alter ego, as freedom to see things differently and to behave differently, the traditional taken-for-granted character of the world is upset and its complexity manifest in a quite new dimension, for which there are no appropriate ways for the time being by which it can be grasped or absorbed.

XREF: Connects to phenomenological philosophy — Berger and Luckmann's social construction of reality, and Levinas's ethics of the Other.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 135