A word to the wise

Abstract

Heinz Streib’s appeal for a wisdom that takes seriously the deep problem of “the other” is not only profound but timely. In my comments I ask if this question might even benefit from a research agenda or if that is a distraction and then I suggest an additional point of view, based on the work of the late John Shotter, that might assist us in understanding how we come to know from within our activities rather than “about” our activities. Will this lead us to be wiser? I don’t have an answer to this but I provide a plea for a psychology that is focused on the everyday.

That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

Plato, The Apology of Socrates 22b-c.

What we can mean by “wisdom” is surely not fixed or timeless. That is as it should be. For to be wise, as Heinz Streib points out, will differ from culture to culture but also across time. No universalism here, at least for now. For to be wise in Nepal in 1750 under the Shah dynasty is surely different from being wise in Mexico in 1915 during its revolution just as both are different from its predecessors today (to choose a couple randomly). And then we are immediately immersed in the question of how one translates “wisdom,” that deeply westernized concept that might not even translate quickly or easily to other places and times. Is wisdom in Spanish sabiduría or should we use sabiduría profundo. And which Nepalese word is best suited to the occasion in which it is used?

Of course, there is a long tradition of the use of wisdom and its derivatives, certainly from the ancient Greek use of sophiā forward so I don’t want to be churlish about the terminology itself as it is used by wisdom theoreticians and researchers such as Streib. Indeed, that there is a community of wisdom researchers is itself a sign of both the importance as well as the ambiguity surrounding the nature of the word. For where there are disputes concerning the nature of a phenomenon, there will be a need for refinement, definition, and timely debates about just what we mean and how we are to get it right.

Streib however is already on to a much more important project, to wit, how to understand wisdom and alterity as imbricated concepts. Indeed, this is almost true by definition one might argue in the Smedslundian vein of psycho-logic (Lindstad et al., 2020; Smedslund, 1988). That is, surely wisdom implies a care for the other, a knowledge of the other, and a life worth living in a community of others whose importance to life the wise only know too well. But Streib would, I suspect, argue that this is surely not enough: he draws on Waldenfels’s (2007) responsive phenomenology to elaborate on intellectual humility and perspective-taking, both antidotes to othering or the estrangement from the other. As Streib notes, “… a more decisive and explicit focus on the Other, understood in light of Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, would strengthen the innovative potential in the self-other relation for wise and responsive reasoning and behavior” (p. 159). Without rehearsing the entire argument, this eventually leads Streib to what he calls a xenocentric responsiveness, the “finding of wise syntheses in a never-ending dialectical process” (p. 169).

This compact and complex paper on wisdom and the other is filled with a new series of ideas that are worthy of consideration, even if the research agenda that presumably comes out of this is unclear. The latter is largely due, first, to the highly abstract nature of this proposal. Yes, othering is “an immense challenge” but surely not the only challenge one might consider in our highly polemic and bifurcated contemporary life. And, second, politically such claims are limiting, they preclude a kind of dialogue that is called for in the real-world conflicts of war, class divisions, and the injustices of many varieties. Furthermore, othering is also a question of the material differences between those who are “othered” and those who do the “othering.” The migrant arriving on a dinghy from the Mediterranean or via the Rio Grande is at multiple disadvantages, not merely that of being “othered.” Abstract questions of wisdom are certainly a worthy pursuit, but I am somewhat leery of researchers such as Sternberg who find a way from one abstraction to another that are quantified as mere “variables” without ever settling on anything that goes beyond a listing of personality characteristics and a theory that mimics every other functional theory in human psychology.

Streib achieves more in his article and his theoretical work is surely an advance on Sternberg’s for adjudicating, through Waldenfels, a view of wisdom that opposes xenophobia. Although it is not clear to me how the research program Streib wishes to introduce will evolve or how it can evolve. Eschewing a Piagetian developmental model, Streib nonetheless seeks out a “typology” of “styles of responsiveness.” At the very end of this article, he abandons any claims of universal applicability, but here is the rub. Talk of typologies and styles immediately invites implicit claims of universality, otherwise why categorize the way in which the styles fall out. Nonetheless, let me assume that there is a research program lurking in the wings and that this program will bring forth a wide and rich variety of expressions of xenocentrism, then there is some reason for jubilation. For it is difficult not to see some promise in a theory and a research program that offers to help us overcome the limitations and deep divisions that characterize European and North American societies, not to mention the violent tragedies unfolding elsewhere in the world. If I have expressed a degree of skepticism, it is only because I fail to see just how the research will proceed but perhaps that is my problem, not Streib’s.

Knowing from within

What I would like to do in the remainder of my brief comments is to harken back to an earlier theoretical program that might (or might not) elucidate some aspects of wisdom and further, it might make for a useful addition to Streib’s work. In particular I am going to rehearse elements of John Shotter’s work on the notion of knowledge of the “third kind.” In addition to sound judgment, wisdom is also a kind of knowing as well as implying that one has the social capital to live soundly. All of these terms are of course open to further interpretation. I will return to the broader question of wisdom at the end of this comment, for now I wish to focus on just the issue of “knowing” and the other since Streib himself is also focused here.

In a series of articles and books, John Shotter worked through the problem of “joint action” and the other by invoking the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as Giambattista Vico, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Volosinov, and Mikhail Bakhtin (Shotter, 1993, 1995, 2003, 2006, 2011). Shotter’s argument can be summarized as a series of moves. From Vico, Shotter argues that we have neglected the lived aspects of a civil society, one which constitutes a tradition. These are not however fixed but living traditions. Lived traditions are never fully embodied in one person, they form a background to our everyday activities. Between the categories of individual actions and natural events Shotter (1993) argues we are engaged in “joint action.” Joint action occurs when our activities are not planned or scripted, but spontaneous. This most obviously and most frequently occurs in dialogue with others. Formulating utterances in conversations leads to unintended consequences since these utterances must be formulated in a context of which we are not fully aware while responding to another who is also influencing our responses.

Shotter introduces the notion of “knowing from within” to understand the kind of knowledge that Vico discusses as knowledge that is garnered through activities and experience. It is neither of the types Ryle (1949) famously identified as the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” Shottter (1993) instead argues that there is a third kind of knowing which “is a separate, special kind of knowledge, sui generis, which is prior to both, and, in being linked to people’s social and personal identities, determines the available forms of these other two kinds of knowledge” (p. 7). This knowledge depends in part on the other, it is a moral kind of knowledge since one only has it from within a social situation and as such must take into account the others in that situation or institution.

From Bakhtin, Shotter approaches the question of dialogue by arguing that we have a “spontaneously responsive kind of understanding” that we take for granted. It is a “relationally-responsive form of understanding (or a withness-understanding) to contrast it with the representational-referential) or (aboutness-) understandings more familiar to us” (Shotter, 2006, p. 590). What this means in practice is that, for Shotter (1993), our task is to make “rationally visable the communicative resources our ‘background’ makes differentially available” (p. 15). In other words, we are dialogically and responsively linked to both previous actions and future actions (Shotter, 1995). Or again, in a later paper, Shotter (2011) argues for understanding “a much more immediate and unreflective, bodily way of being related to our surroundings than the ways that become conspicuous to us in our more cognitive reflections, a way of relating or orienting toward our surroundings that becomes known to us only from within the unfolding dynamics of our engaged bodily movements within them” (p. 439). Rather than presenting our interactions in a formal, systematic, or analytic way, Shotter focuses on the dilemmatic nature of dialogic activity in the hopes of bringing it to light in a practical form.

Elsewhere Shotter (2003) refers to this as “real presences.” This “is a realm of activity in which individuals may express meanings quite unique and particular to themselves—meanings related to their own unique attitudes and inclinations toward aspects of their surroundings often unnoticed by, or of no initial interest to, the others around them—and still have them nonetheless, to some extent at least, understood by those others” (p. 436). What Shotter is particularly interested in is the nature of tacit knowledge, the kind of knowing that is necessary for human interactions to occur from the most mundane, ordinary interactions to the most complex of relational events which leave us ecstactic or unhappy or simply puzzled. ¹ All of these interactions are premised on this kind of knowing which is largely invisible to us at the moment in which it occurs but required for us to carry out our lives with others.

There is one final note I wish to bring in from Shotter to this response without overly complicating it. This is his use of Bakhtin’s “superaddressee.” What Bakhtin (1986) refers to here in in the context of our dialogues is the inclusion of that other that always haunts our speaking. We address someone in our conversations and are ourselves present as well. But beyond the speaker and addressee, the author of the utterance invokes or implies a superaddressee “whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed” (p. 126). This is not just some additional frame of reference but a party that “is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it” (pp. 126–127). For Bakhtin this other who is present as a superaddressee can be science, history, God, truth, etc. But it acts as a voice in conversation itself, and for Shotter (1995), the most important claim is that it acts as a “background between dialogue partners, to decree the options open to them or the limitations upon them, that is, as if to set momentary rules between them” (p. 50). There are also similarities here with George Herbert Mead’s notion of the generalized other but I have no space here to unfold that.

Although this is much too brief an exposition of the work of John Shotter, I hope the main argument is clear: responsiveness to the other is always an open question in relationships, and as such, always open to creative expansion or violent retraction. I would agree that the other can indeed be a source of wisdom, even when that other is well-known to us or an intimate. But that will unfold inside an ongoing, moment to moment, joint action. I understand why Streib wishes to introduce a notion such as xenosophia to have us connect wisdom to the other and Waldenfels is an important resource in this context. But I fear that that this is a move that stands above, analytically, our relationships to the other. What I missed was just such an account as Shotter’s which gives us a way of looking at relationships with the other without first leaping into abstractions.

I think Streib expresses this when he notes that a responsive phenomenology, in the context of the “radical Other, as extraordinary Alien …. requires that we realize that this Other is at play before interpretation, objectifying, and prejudice come on stage. The Other as Alien requires a response” (p. 156). However, I would argue this is not just true for the radical Other, it is true in any of our social activities and it was just such a responsive phenomenology that Shotter tried to build. The reversal of perspectives, where the Other is “like a sting” (Streib, 2024, p. 158), “intiates a dynamic of pathos and response” (p. 158), is indeed a new way of considering communicative action. Streib’s work here comes together, more or less, with the issues Shotter addressed over many years. However, Shotter did not do so in the tradition of Husserl and the phenomenologists but instead in the traditions of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Wittgenstein. The aim is similar but the process is different. It begins with the taken-for-granted world of utterances and activities instead of with a question of minds and intentions or even with a radical Other. It simply begins in the here-and-now with our daily activities.

Wisdom, redux

In the final part of this comment I would like to come back to the question of wisdom. Although I have not said much about the multiple ways in which wisdom is used, it is only because it seems to me a somewhat different discussion. Streib wishes to expand our definitions of, understanding of, and the research on wisdom through a xenosophic humility. I laud the attempt even if I do not necessarily agree with the means. For in generating the argument, Streib has produced an important standpoint, namely that our limited and narrow views of the other have consequences for what we take to be wisdom. Is it possible to be wise if we carry a deep dislike or hatred of the other? Surely no theory of wisdom would make such a case. Hence, this article carries within it radical consequences. For calls to violence, rejection or exclusivity are surely the appeals of the unwise.

Streib ends however with a call for more research. Carefully, he notes this should be qualitative research in the first instance. However, by linking his notion of wisdom to four “styles” we find ourselves in the realm of variables, scales, and the use of methodologies to settle the question (as if it could be settled this way) of just what wisdom might be. For example, Streib asks, “Included in this investigation is the focus on changes from one style to another. And when documenting the existence of change and development, a more complex set of questions arises: Why does an individual move upward, stay, or move down in the hierarchy of styles?” (p. 171). This is the perennial problem of human psychology, delimiting with a methodology the question at hand. But, as so many critics have repeated for several generations now, such forms of methodolatry largely restrict their objects of investigation at the outset. That is, whatever wisdom might seem to be, it will be lost in a maze of personality variables as just one more way in which we can characterize individual differences. But wisdom might not be something we care about as an individual difference so much as a way of living, understanding, and being in the world. In that sense, Streib’s questions at the conclusion of his article (“Are the styles of responsiveness, and the style of xenocentric responsiveness in particular, predicted by traits such as intellectual humility, openness to experience, compassion, emotion regulation, or mystical experiences? What are the outcomes on scales for generativity and psychological well-being?” p. 171) seem to undermine the entire project, a project that seems so full of promise to begin with.