On the Way to the Other: Dread, Wonder, Awe

ABSTRACT Imagine a young child who shrinks from—but can’t take her eyes off—a Stranger who’s been invited into her home. This child’s dread-charged awe before the Stranger brings into focus the tension fundamental to our lives—our being torn between openness to the unprecedented future and the desire to protect ourselves from it. Dialoguing with Loewald, Freud, and Heidegger, I consider the radical anxiety the child experiences when exposed to the dreadful not—the absence of the needed. Dialoguing with Aristotle, I discuss how wonder draws the child into harmonious play with alterities that are intelligible to her. However, from the beginning the child is surrounded by alterities whose transcendence overwhelms her. We recoil from such transcendence because it fills us with dread, are drawn to it because it fills us with awe. Dread-charged awe in the face of the other, especially the human Other, is, I argue, the quintessential human experience.