Might the Other be a source of wisdom, rather than separation and conflict?
In this article, the author asks whether the figure we most fear and exclude, the Other, might be the source of wisdom. He starts from a bleak premise: xenophobia, war, and ecological collapse are tangled together in self-reinforcing loops.
“Othering is an immense challenge for which I note two examples, a world plagued by xenophobia and endangered by a threatened environment. […]
Othering begets othering. Another vicious circle regards othering nature, subduing the earth, commercial exploitation, neglecting ecological devastation, denial of the problem despite increasing evidence, global warming past the tipping points. And one vicious circle appears to superimpose the other: going to war delivers not only the killing of people on a massive scale, but immense pollution, perhaps radioactive, and scorched earth.
Are there remedies for xenophobia? Is there a countermovement to the vicious circles of othering? Can the Other be the source of wisdom?”
The author, Heinz Streib, answers yes to the closing question and coins the neologism “xenosophia” (wisdom from the Other) as the true opposite of xenophobia. Drawing on Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, he argues that the Other is not something we understand and file into our categories. It stings us out of ourselves and demands a response before interpretation or prejudice sets in. Othering is what happens when that encounter is repressed. Wisdom is the willingness to stay open to it.
He then uses this to rework two staples of wisdom research. Intellectual humility becomes humility toward the Other, and perspective-taking becomes “perspective-getting”: listening rather than imagining what others think. He proposes four styles of responsiveness (egocentric, conventional, negotiatory, xenocentric). They are not rigid stages, since earlier styles can resurface under stress. He concludes that the other is not the problem but the source of the new possibilities that wise action needs, and the “Other” explicitly includes nature.
Reading this alongside Vanessa Andreotti’s work on metarelationality, through which she goes a step beyond Streib’s thought exercise to problematize, more generally, the idea of subject-object, suggesting instead that the separation of self and Other is itself a fiction of modernity, and that we are always already entangled in a web of relations that precedes and exceeds the categories we use to divide ourselves from one another, from other beings, and from the more-than-human world.
