 If I treat the other person as purely external to me, as a ‘Her’, a generic Ms. X, I encounter her “in fragments” as it were. I encounter various aspects of the other person, elements that might be used to fill out a questionnaire or form (name, occupation, age, etc.). I am not present to the other person and I am closed off and indifferent to the presence she offers me. However, in encountering the other person in this manner—not as another person but as a case or example of certain functions, roles or characteristics—I myself cease to be a person, but take on the role, speaking metaphorically, of the pen that would record these disparate elements onto the form. Any other person could encounter the other in this impersonal manner. If this is the case, I myself have become interchangeable, replaceable. I have ceased to encounter her in the absolutely unique communion of our two persons. This functional view of the other and, consequently, of the self, is a direct result of the “spirit of abstraction.” When the other is encountered as a generic case, I who encounter am myself a generic case in the encounter. But the situation can be otherwise.