The capacity to tolerate one’s own ignorance of others so that difference is not reduced to sameness. Where empathy projects the self into the other’s position to find identification and understanding, xenopathy starts from the acknowledgment of difference and builds care from that acknowledgment rather than from understanding or love. In HDI, xenopathy is a named sapient capacity: the developed tolerance for one’s own ignorance of others, and for the anxiety that ignorance produces.
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