Bernhard Waldenfels died in Munich on January 23, 2026. Waldenfels had been amongst the founding members of the Society for Intercultural Philosophy 1992. Being himself a commuter across the borders of Germany and France, of philosophy and literature, of antiquity and the present, he devoted his thinking throughout his life to the phenomenon of the foreign/strange. We experience as foreign that eludes our grasp. However, there is nothing that is foreign per se; foreignness is not a specification of a general concept (the specification of a general concept is the other of the same order, not the foreign). Instead, everything becomes at least a little foreign as soon as we enter into a lived relationship with it and therefore encounter it in experience. Without at least partially eluding our grasp, that what is experienced would become one and the same with the experiencer, thus the experience would collapse. Foreignness is therefore not an exception, but a fundamental feature of every experience. Waldenfels thus exposes the essentializing use of foreignness in philosophical terms as a misunderstanding.
In line with the diversity of experiences, there are different degrees of foreignness. The familiar is less foreign than the unfamiliar, but even the familiar is not completely free of surprises; indeed, it is precisely the familiar—and above all, of course, the familiar person with whom we have a close exchange of experiences—that constantly reveals new nuances and deeper layers to us, which we do not even notice in the unfamiliar, which we only experience superficially. The better we get to know a person, the more multifaceted we experience them. It is therefore not surprising that Waldenfels repeatedly emphasizes that even our own selves remain foreign to us. Quoting Freud, he says that the ego is not “master in its own house.” The familiar and the foreign represent the poles of every experience and therefore cannot be described without reference to each other. Foreignness, Waldenfels writes, is a threshold phenomenon; a phenomenon of transition and uncertainty (in this, Waldenfels sees a great similarity to Plato's characterization of philosophy as wonder, taumazein). The threshold does not allow for mediation by a third party because it touches and affects us at our core. Waldenfels describes this affect as pathos. Experiences happen to us; we “suffer” them more than we initiate them. This is why Waldenfels speaks of a responsive phenomenology; it responds to what happens to us, what we do not have “under control” and what instead draws us into the openness of lived experience.
Similarly, foreign cultures are just as little “absolutely” foreign as one's own culture can never be “absolutely” one's own. One's own and foreign cultures only exist in the transition from one to the other, i.e., in their relationship with each other and in the responsive exchange of experiences. Waldenfels, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, with whom he himself studied in the early 1960s, speaks of the “inter-sphere” to describe the phenomenon of interculturality. Different cultures do not exist side by side; they do not share the same space and therefore cannot be analyzed comparatively. Instead, cultures are separated from one another by thresholds that simultaneously connect them. Strictly speaking, one's own culture exists only in the experience of foreign cultures, just as foreign cultures are experienced as foreign only in relation to one's own. Interculturality is not a description of a state of affairs; it therefore neither merges into multicultural forms of coexistence nor can it be subjected to transcultural standards. Interculturality is lived “interest” in the dimension of cultural belonging.
Waldenfels' phenomenological analysis of interculturality should always remain a thorn in the side of our thinking, preventing us from leveling the intercultural dimension of philosophy by subjecting different cultures and their philosophical traditions to some kind of generality. Beyond lived experience and responsive exchange, there is no such thing as one's own culture or foreign cultures. Waldenfels himself lived this simple truth by finding his own thinking as a response to French philosophy, with which he was in close exchange throughout his life.
Important Books by Waldenfels (all published with Suhrkamp):
Niels Weidtmann, im Februar 2026