“Can the radical other be operationalized?” A commentary to Heinz Streib’s article “Wisdom and the Other: Responsiveness in development between the egocentric and xenocentric style”

I am thankful for the opportunity to comment on Heinz Streib’s article not only because it was an interesting text but also because it signals a broader development: the opening of a discourse on the applicability and application of Bernhard Waldenfels’ thinking to problems of research across a variety of disciplines. That a field which could be called “Applied Waldenfels Studies,” or “Applied Responsive Phenomenology” seems to announce itself on the horizon is indicated by the fact that the motif for my invitation to comment consists solely in my work in this area. I am not an experimental psychologist, or a philosopher, nor have I worked on the problem of wisdom from an anthropological perspective. The presumption of my competence to comment relies exclusively on my experience in translating Waldenfels’ thinking for use in an empirical discipline, cultural anthropology in my case.

I find myself in general agreement with the intuition that motivates Streib’s preoccupation with Waldenfels in this article: like the author, I regard Waldenfels’ philosophy as extremely relevant for finding new ways of conceptualizing and theorizing a wide range of research problems in the empirical social sciences. Like me, Streib takes Waldenfels seriously and has read his work widely and deeply. In the process, he will inevitably have encountered the problem of Waldenfels’ massive output and the consequential nuance and differentiation in his thinking. This is not a systemic philosophy or theory that can be satisfactorily summarized in one defining text; as a true phenomenology, it is a living and moving thinking that attaches and applies itself to a potentially infinite range of topics. For the project of adapting such a thinking for the purposes of empirical disciplines this open-endedness presents certain challenges. In such a case, it is particularly important to get the foundational ideas of the philosophy right and translate them in a way that does justice both to the spirit of the philosophy and the research needs of the scientific discipline in question (for cultural anthropology, see Leistle, 2022).

With Waldenfels, the scientific translator runs immediately into a problem that seems insurmountable: his central concept of radical otherness, or alienness, cannot be made evidential because its phenomenal being consists in its withdrawing from objective experience. It appears in the paradox mode of a present absence, or absent presence (Waldenfels, 1997, pp. 26, 30). In my opinion, any “faithful” adaptation of Waldenfels’ thought for empirical, hermeneutical purposes must take this paradox seriously by formulating it as precisely as possible. In order for me to truly engage with Streib’s text, I feel compelled to provide a quick overview of how I read Waldenfels. This will relate in particular to my understanding of a “responsive ethics,” as the conception of wisdom in Streib has deep ethical undertones.

The paradox of the alien consists therein that with it we find ourselves in an experiential relationship with something that cannot be experienced in the traditional phenomenological sense. Experience requires orders like “simultaneity,” “corporeality,” “intentionality,” and meaning in phenomenology is defined by something appearing as something in consciousness, something in the world taken in a certain sense by a self or subject. But the alien (German: das Fremde) in Waldenfels’ conception does not fulfill these criteria of meaningfulness: it doesn’t appear as something, it presents itself precisely by eluding the grasp of our consciousness and experiencing. Since orders are constitutive of experience, and the alien can only appear as out-of-order, extra-ordinary, order and alienness must be understood as complementary and mutually defining. In other words, the alien can only be defined in relation to an order (of experiential meaning) from which it escapes; and conversely, orders can only be defined as partial and incomplete, because they always exclude something as alien from the domain of ordering. Meaning and alienness, order and excess, are inseparably intertwined in Waldenfels’ phenomenology.

In my reading, his emphasis on the inevitability of orders of experience and meaning distinguishes Waldenfels from other philosophers of radical otherness, esp. from Levinas. His concept of the alien is not an “absolute” or “infinite” Other, as it is in Levinas. The alien in Waldenfels is a radical Other that can show itself only indirectly, in traces, overdeterminations, surpluses of meanings; in the ways in which a particular order shows its partiality, exemplifying the contingency of every order. To reiterate the crucial point: Waldenfels’ alien is radical and at the same time relational to specific orders, related to a situation or “occasion”: “A positionless ‘absolute alien’ would be like an ‘absolute left’ – a monstrous idea…..” (Waldenfels, 1997, p. 23, my translation). For Waldenfels, only a relational, indirect alienness can lay claim to thinking the Other radically; even assigning it negative attributes like inaccessibility, incommensurability, or infinity, means to appropriate the alien, distorting its appearance in experience as a “hyperphenomenon” that presents itself by absenting itself.

From this follows that ambiguity, indeterminacy and in-betweenness become central terms in Waldenfels’ phenomenology. We are inevitably caught in ambiguity because we can never fulfill the alien demand we respond to; if we were it would mean that the demand was not alien; at the same time, we are only in relation to alienness through the inevitability of a response it provokes.

“We cannot not respond,” Waldenfels is fond of saying, often referring to the psychologist and system-theorist Paul Watzlawick (see e.g. Waldenfels, 2007, p. 29), and yet this response can only be imperfect, inconclusive so to say, because the order created by it must remain partial and preliminary. Waldenfels expresses this ambiguity in sentences like this: “[Thus] responding runs over a small ridge which separates bondage [Hörigkeit] from arbitrariness [Beliebigkeit]. This means: whenever we respond, we invent to some extent that which we respond, but we do not invent that to which we are responding” (Waldenfels, 2007, p. 34, italics in original).

What does an ethics look like developed on the basis of this conception of experience, a “responsive ethics”? If the relation to the radical Other or alien is only possible through responses that are both imperfect and related to specific orders, then the boundaries between Good and Evil, Justice and Injustice become indeterminable in an absolute sense. In an essay with the title “responsive ethics,” Waldenfels makes this explicit: “Such a sudden demand is able to extricate us from our habits and to shake our whole existence. Morality can no longer be taken for granted. The voice of amorality, invoked by Nietzsche, reveals the weakness of morality and what I call the ‘blind spot of the moral’. No ethics and no morals are sufficiently supported by the aims, values, norms, and utilities which they invoke. What is the Good good for? Why should I obey to the law? Why should I first of all try to preserve myself?” (Waldenfels, 2012, p. 425).

On first reading, this seems to open the door to moral relativism, but Waldenfels’ position is as far from relativism as it is from universalism. That there is no universally valid, infinite law, or morality, doesn’t mean that all moral systems are equal or that there are no ways to distinguish just from unjust laws. Morals have their origins in responding to alien demands that have an intrinsic ethical dimension. The response is inevitable and compulsory; “no answer is also a response,” as Waldenfels says, in translation of a German saying. The fact that we cannot arrive at an absolute Good for everybody doesn’t exempt us from the responsibility to search for the best answer we can come up with. In responding we inevitably engage the standpoint of the Third, acting in a “cultural and intercultural intermediary sphere” (p. 428). Although lack of space doesn’t permit to clarify the steps by which Waldenfels arrives at such statements in the field of ethics, I want to point out their consistency with what I said about the relationality of the alien: the alien that places demands on us is not absolute but related to specific orders as extra-ordinary; so is the response, which refers to orders, but is not determined by them. An ethics based on such a conception of experience can only be a situational and relational ethics:

On the whole, a responsive ethics does not postulate new rules and new aims.

Instead it raises the simple question: ‘What are we struck by and what we are responding to while saying this or doing that?’……A responsive ethics starts from the Other's demand which arises here and now and always anew. So it goes deeper than the attempts of a communicative ethics and a rational morality, focused on common aims and universal norms. It goes back onto a pre-final and pre-normative level of experience. (p. 424)

After this lengthy, but in my opinion necessary, excursus in responsive phenomenology, I am now ready to state the differences between my reading of Waldenfels and what I believe to be Streib’s. Overall, I think Streib undervalues the relationship to order and meaning in Waldenfels responsive phenomenology, in favor of a one-sided emphasis on the inaccessibility of the Other; thereby he approaches a conception of the Other as absolute alien, closer to Levinas than to Waldenfels. It is this understanding of alienness that he draws on and attempts to mobilize for the construction of more xeno-centric (i.e. more focused on the radical Other) models for psychological wisdom-research. This emphasis is quite subtle because Streib is an attentive reader of Waldenfels, but it carries itself through the text and is central to the author’s project. Consider as an example the following suggestion that “intellectual humility” should not be restricted to the self’s attitude toward other persons:

From a perspective of responsive phenomenology, intellectual humility is more than that. The other-focus should not be excluded or downgraded; on the contrary…..the other-focus should be specified more clearly as a focus on the radical and extraordinary Other. And thereby also humility is radicalized to designate a humble openness to the pathic encounter with the Other. (p. 161)

Or the similar argument with respect to modeling “perspective-taking” in a PCM (Perspective Cognition Model?): “….I would suggest that a shift of focus from self to the Other be included in the PCM. Perspective-taking and other PCMs…can and should reflect the radical shift of focus from self to the Other.” (p. 162)

What concerns me about this form of operationalizing the radical Other in the constructing of psychological models is that it contains an implicit affirmation that this Other can become an object of experience that can be measured against a scale, and ultimately quantified into numbers. As I have tried to show above, I think that this is a misunderstanding of Waldenfels’ conceptions of alienness and responsivity. According to him, it is only in and through responding to its demands that we are in relation to genuine alienness, that is, only indirectly, through the insufficiency and imperfectness of our answers.

In my opinion this is the feature that makes Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology so relevant, one could say congenial, to empirical social-scientific research. After all, this philosophy gives full weight to the orders of meaning through which we live our lives, and which constitute the traditional subject-matter of the social sciences. It suggests that we have to go through the thicket of the life-world in order to catch an indirect glimpse of how our reality is constantly built in an incessant exchange of demand and response. Isn’t it surprising that Streib doesn’t seize this offer forcefully?

This is only so at first sight; on second thought, there is a logic in this particular reading and mode of application motivated by the objective the author intends to achieve, that is, to produce “better,” “more adequate” models of wisdom whose ultimate purpose is to be tested in experimental settings. Not being an experimental psychologist, I don’t have the competence to evaluate the quality of the models discussed in the article. But I feel justified to point out that treating the radical Other as “object” is a prerequisite for integrating it into a testable model. Only something that can appear as itself, with stable attributes defining it as what it is, can be scrutinized and manipulated in the manner necessary for conventional scientific study. The alien or radical Other in Waldenfels’ phenomenology is no such thing: we can only look at it askance, through the lens of a necessary transformation, that is, through responding to it. Because of the objective of Streib’s effort, instrumentalizing Waldenfels for an empirical psychology of wisdom, he has to disregard this transformation which, within the experimental paradigm, means a distortion. Streib’s insisting on the radicality of the Other, its incommensurability with order, reflects one of Waldenfels arguments: that even the negative characterization of the alien as “outside” and “inaccessible” is still a form of objectifying and appropriating it.

I don’t mean all this to sound as critical as it probably does. To repeat, Streib’s reading of Waldenfels is sophisticated and the differences between him and me are subtle, but consequential. I regard the project of operationalizing the radical Other as problematic and in danger of contradicting the fundamental ethos of the philosophy from which the concept is borrowed. It is true that Waldenfels (2008) regards the construction of models as an irreducible feature of scientific work, and not as in itself problematic (ch. 2); but he also speaks against models that forget that the origin of the order they impose on things lies outside of themselves. It is also true that Waldenfels engages with many empirical disciplines, especially psychology, but likewise it is no coincidence that he feels particularly drawn to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and not to experimental psychology. As Gurwitsch (1966, pp. 89–106) has argued there is a defining difference between phenomenology and psychology in their conceptualization of consciousness and experience. While psychology regards consciousness as an object that can be investigated from the outside, phenomenology insists on the fact that even this investigation by necessity takes place in the medium of consciousness. Phenomenology’s task is thus to reflect on this medial and transformative role of consciousness. The question then becomes what kind of model we need to do justice to this irreducibility of consciousness in phenomenology. Is it enough to just add a phenomenological element to an existing style of modelling?

This question becomes particularly urgent for a radical philosophy like that of Waldenfels and is further highlighted by the specific psychological phenomenon that Streib sets out to study, wisdom. This is one of the classical topics of philosophy; at the very least, it is one of the attributes used to describe philosophers and individuals in other cultures who devote themselves to similar pursuits. Based on what I learned from Streib’s article, it appears that wisdom research agrees on a number of traits defining wise thinking and behavior, such as “intellectual humility, perspective-taking, moral aspirations, context orientation” (p. 172). When looking at this list, it becomes immediately obvious that wisdom thus defined is something to be furthered and cultivated, that wise behavior is ethically good behavior. Streib is quite explicit about this normative dimension: “Wisdom is desirable as a remedy and should be part of education in school and public education. When it is important to apply wisdom to contemporary world problems, othering certainly needs to be addressed in wisdom research.” (p. 170) As a response that rejects the demand of the Other and refuses to acknowledge their perspective, “othering” is unwise and unethical. By contrast, an approach that puts the focus on the radical Other, a xeno-centric style of responding is conducive to wisdom and goodness. When this style is adopted: “Products are the emergence of new insights about the Other and their demands, which includes potential future needs – the invention of wise reactions to the Other and their demands. Xenocentric responsiveness aims at the invention of something new, creative, and innovative, the finding of wise syntheses in a never-ending dialectical process.” (p. 169, my italics)

The last passage raises a number of questions for me: How can an emergence be a product, a word that suggests an intention to produce, which the word emergence denies? Along the same lines, and more obviously, how can something new, creative and innovative be aimed at, when “aiming” presupposes a goal in view? I am sure that psychologists can produce sophisticated answers to these questions, but here they arise in the context of a concept of the Other that explicitly reaches beyond the intentional and instrumental.

To my knowledge, Waldenfels has not written about wisdom. But I find it safe to predict that he would be skeptical of the confident definition of specific traits of wise behavior and thinking. This does not mean that Streib is not correct in pointing to a relation between wisdom and alienness. But if, as I have argued, an ethics derived from Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology needs to be a relational and situational ethics, more caution is warranted when ascribing universal characteristics to “wisdom.” Just like the radical Other is only accessible to us in the medium of our responses, so wisdom cannot, from a phenomenological perspective, be defined outside of a cultural, historical, political context. My objection does not only spring from my interpretation of Waldenfels, but also from my training as a cultural anthropologist: complex human behavior is too varied to be subjected to universal categories, and a notion of wisdom built around “humility,” “perspective-taking” etc. strikes me as valid only, if at all, in the context of “Western culture.”

Waldenfels may not have written about wisdom, but he has talked quite a bit about Socrates, one of the paradigmatic examples of the “wise man” in Western philosophy. Streib also mentions Socrates several times in his article, mostly in confirmation of the defining attributes of wisdom, in particular, intellectual humility, which seems to be condensed in Socrates' famous claim that he knows to know nothing. At one point, Streib even reproduces a quote from Waldenfels which compares the “sting of the alien” to the “sting of the gadfly, the symbol of Socratic questioning” (p. 157). At a recent conference, I had the opportunity to attend with him, Waldenfels credited the figure of Socrates with first exposing him to the problem of the alien. Throughout his writings (e.g. Waldenfels, 2015, p. 333), he refers to Socrates in Plato’s words as atopos, placeless, or not placeable. He elaborates that Socrates was on the one hand a citizen of Athens but also didn’t fully belong. Through his relentless questioning of taken-for-granted “wisdom,” he made a nuisance of himself, made others uncomfortable, like the gadfly to whom Plato likened him. In the end, the society of Athens put him to trial and executed him; according to Plato’s Apology, not even in the face of death did Socrates compromise his questioning. Is this “wise behavior,” let alone intellectual humility? In what sense? I cannot answer these questions, except saying that this Socrates is different from the one appearing in Streib’s paper. It seems to me that one reason why we are still talking about someone who died more than 2,400 years ago and about whom we only know through the words of others, has to do with the fact that his “wisdom” was more ambiguous and more alien than can be operationalized in a model.