Postponed care: a historical critique of care from the existentialist perspectives of Heidegger and Arendt

ABSTRACT

In almost all cultures, intriguingly, care has both positive and negative connotations as in taking care of something or somebody and, at the same time, carrying the burden of something or somebody. This article claims that this contradictory use of care is a result of the historical development of the meaning of care and that this is a hindrance to understand the meaning of care in our lives. In the course of its historical development, care has been understood as a means to an end; either as care for the self or for others, or as a transition to a higher end. Only in the phenomenological-existential rehabilitation of care in the twentieth century, it has been examined beyond this instrumental conception and placed at the center of who we are. To explain these claims, the article has two sections: the first section offers a historical outline of some of the main theories of care that have been developed; the second section explains the novelty of Heidegger’s and Arendt’s theories of care. The latter section aims to demonstrate the necessity of understanding care as the source of our existence, and why care cannot be postponed.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• Heidegger
• Arendt
• existentialism
• instrumentality
• historical development of care

In different societies, one thing remains the same with regard to care: its negative connotations in the everyday usage of different languages, as seen in the phrases ‘why do I care?’ or ‘keine Sorge’. The pragmatics of language works contrarily in these expressions, serving to remind each other that life is too short to be worried about something or somebody for too long. The message is simple: people would do better to stop caring, to exclude the burdens of care from their lives, and to continue just living.

The aim of this article is to show that these expressions are not simply habitual uses of language, but reveal something deeper. Indeed, they are the result of a historical meaning of care developed over time and reveal how we inherently understand care. In the first part of this paper, to illustrate this claim, I investigate this historical heritage in four exemplary models of care that were developed in different periods of history. The main argument in this part is as follows: up to the phenomenological-existential rehabilitation of care, the term itself has rarely been treated as an end in itself, but rather as a means to serve either self-care as a matter of dignifying oneself or others, as an instrument of common wellbeing, or in the form of a duty. Moreover, in these conceptions of care there is an immense difficulty in uniting the care of the self with the care of others.

The instrumental use of things and persons is a major problem in Arendt’s writings. In order to indicate the historically legitimized roots of the idea of means and ends, and its turning into an ideological tool as instrumentality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arendt included an immense number of references to historical texts in her writings. The selections of periods and philosophers in the first part of this paper are some of the philosophers to whom Arendt also referred in different writings related to her investigations on the historical development of means and ends. In the first part, the inclusion of her remarks, particularly in following her reading of Augustine, will allow us to proceed more coherently to the second part of the paper.

In this second part, the claim will be that the phenomenological-existential conception of care is not only able to unite self-care and care for others but that it also provides us with a notion of care as an end in itself. To this end, I investigate Heidegger’s and Arendt’s conceptions of care as a constitutive mode of whoness. Unlike Heidegger, Arendt’s writings have never been treated as a source for developing an understanding of care. As this article intends to show, the strategy that Arendt develops between self and plurality can be a inspiring venue to see that neither care of the self nor care for others is sufficient on its own to understand the meaning of care. The analyses in the second part will show that only when care is understood as an existential mode of life can it include both self and others in the unity of life, and can be saved from being a partial or fragmentary mode of relation. In contrast to our contemporary usages in different languages, which recommend our ‘forgetting’ to take care of things, in the following analyses ‘remembering’ will play a crucial role in understanding what care is.

1. ‘Care of others’ or ‘care of the self’: a historical outline

In Ancient Greek and Roman theories, care is mostly considered in a polarized way. It is appropriated with an emphasis either on ‘care of the self’ or on ‘taking care of others,’ rather than in a broader understanding that includes both sides. Despite important alterations in later centuries, the polarization of the notion of care has hardly been changed. The brief historical outline in this section aims to explore, first, the distinction between the ancient Greek and the Stoic understanding of care. As will be shown, the misleading emphasis on either the self or on others is a significant obstruction to conceiving the notion of care in its inseparable relation between two sides. The second point will concern the changing meanings of the term neighbor and the term transit from Augustine to Hobbes. These changes reveal, first, how care turns into a matter of transit to something other than itself and, secondly, indicate the opposition between Augustine’s and Hobbes’s conception of the neighbor as the exemplary form of the other. As we shall see, Hobbes is not only the most prominent philosopher of the modern state, but his conception of the neighbor is also still influential today. The third and the last point will be based on Kant’s understanding of care as duty, which is an equally influential and problematic conception of care today.

1.1. Care of others

The provocative remark that life is too short to take care of things and people is challenged by the Ancient Greeks. In fact, the relation between the limited time span of human life and care is essential to the Greek understanding of the latter. The earliest examples of a solution oriented towards the limited life span of humans can be found in Homer. The Homeric allegories generally begin with praising individual glory or suffering as the remarkable moments of a life, and present the characters and heroes as exemplary forms of a dignified human capacity to ‘be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds,’ of unforgettable things.¹ Various examples can be found of these narratives about one’s words and deeds, which challenge mortal lives by an immortal fame. Despite the short span of human life, people have the capacity to become immortal among their fellow people by their deeds and words; and hence, everybody can surpass the limits of physical appearance. For them, immortality means remaining in the memories of others, which provide an immortal home for mortal beings. In the ancient world, the remembrance of doing and saying unforgettable things demonstrates the importance of care for others in public life², whether it concerns a political event or an event during a war or a journey. The aim and the importance of these texts consist in their emphasis on collective memory and on the question of how one can devote one’s life to others as an exemplary figure.

A similar motive can be found in Greek tragedy. Great deeds and great falls do not only deliver immortal names³ to its characters: tragedy establishes a special bond between characters and spectators. The tripartite structure of the Greek theatre – the actor, the spectator and the chorus – represents the inseparable unity between the individual and the public, which are both spectators and chorus at the same time. The tragic character finds its immortal home in the memory of the spectators who are always potential actors themselves as well. If there is a sacrifice, the chorus – the collective memory – will always remember what has happened. Hence, this twofold structure of care – the character’s care of others and the chorus’s care for the characters – can be found as a veiled voice in all tragedies, a voice that reminds us of what we can do, and of what will be remembered about this person: in the Ancient Greek understanding, the ultimate meaning of life and care manifests itself in the immortal home of collective memory.

1.2. Care of the self

An entirely opposite solution in regard to the limited span of human life arises from the Stoic and Epicurean understandings of care. For them, since the world is the realm of despair and conflicts, the quest for internal peace makes it necessary to keep as much distance from the world as much as possible. The ascetic ideals of stoicism, particularly their emphasis on the futility of human life and human institutions, and on the ideal of internal happiness, suggest another aspect of living, namely, living beyond any ideal of having or being preserved by collective memory. Even more, in some versions of Stoicism the ideal of individual happiness is found to be in utmost opposition to public life. Indeed, if we have nothing to change in the miserable order of the world – except for ourselves – why be concerned with something or somebody else? To use a term from a different epoch, the Stoics demand a necessary alienation from the world and from others, and from all the events that these can bring into one’s life.

For the Ancient Greeks, taking care of others and events transposes an individual into a plural figure who endures in the memories of others, whereas the Epicureans suggest that the utmost individuality should be enfolded in the care of the self and is based on a sheer isolation from others. Although almost nothing has survived from Epicurus’s work Of Human Life⁴, what remains is his recommendation of the ‘withdrawal from the many’ and the most notorious slogan of the Epicureans recommending ‘lathe biōsas,’ to ‘live unnoticed.’⁵ ‘Unnoticed’ here is the translation of lathe, which also means to forget and, according to this interpretation, it becomes the recommendation of not remaining in others’ memories. The Epicurean demand is also clear in three other suggestions: ‘freeing men’s mind from fear of death’, having ‘security from men’, and ‘being very confident from neighbors’ as Hermarchus, Epicurus’s successor, clearly formulates⁶. All these remarks show the necessity of keeping one’s distance from everything that can distract one from self-care.

In the later periods of Imperial and Republican Rome, examples can be found of both poles, theories that praise immortal fame as well as theories that recommend distance from the world. If we follow the impact of the latter, it is not unexpected that we see the following historical development growing out of it: monotheistic religions and their worldview that reduce immortal fame into nothing but the hubris of humankind.

1.3. Care of the ‘neighbor’

The influences of Rome upon the new Christian era can be found in Augustine’s Confessions. In regard to the aspect of care, this work not only investigates two forms of appetites: ‘cupiditas’ and ‘caritas’, worldly and unworldly love, but also examines the role of memory in human life. Augustine famously argues that the time of the past and the future takes place in the storehouse of memory. Memory gives a location and stability to everything that exists in life: like time, life ‘comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer’.⁷ In this constant mode of not yet and no longer, memory makes possible a unity of time and of life: ‘I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it.’⁸ This explains why the storehouse of memory is the only capacity that can create a measure of things. Memory is the storehouse of what people have done and how they can find salvation from their deeds.

In her dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine, Hannah Arendt investigates Augustine’s work particularly from the aspects of worldly and unworldly drives. For her, Augustine’s thoughts on human life show in opposition the internal drives of the fear of death and the external drives of the love of one’s neighbor, which, according to Arendt, are the exemplary figures for an understanding of human relations in Augustine’s text. The love of the world, described by the notion of cupiditas, concerns the world of fear. This world is of such a nature that no one becomes fearless without distancing him or herself from it. Yet a fearless state of mind is the only way to achieve freedom, and hence one has to forget everything that is relevant to the world, and if possible, one’s self, too: ‘God must be loved in such a way that, if at all possible, we would forget ourselves.’⁹ Arendt comments upon this passage as follows: ‘[D]esire itself is a state of forgetfulness’ and is such a desire that, when a lover forgets himself in the pursuit of the beloved, this transit (transitus) shows the characteristics of all craving¹⁰. Augustine’s term transit finds its utmost form in caritas – the ‘craving love’ of God – which is ‘the ‘transit’ to future eternity.”¹¹ Although, according to Augustine, care is ultimately rooted in eternity and the only possible transit toward it, Arendt reads these passages and interprets care differently, as I will discuss in the second part.

The references to the essential notions of ‘fear of death’ and ‘transit’ intriguingly reappear in a different context in the seventeenth century. While describing the formation of the modern state, Hobbes depicts the image of Leviathan as a figure of togetherness. Yet, the historical roots of care for the other have almost disappeared in this influential text. According to Hobbes, the neighbor is the closest person who can put someone into danger. Despite his remarkable emphasis on rights, Hobbes’s political theory puts fear at the center of his thought, in which one can find significant similarities to the Epicurean fear of others. Moreover, not only fear, but ‘transit’, too, appears in Hobbes in a relevant and new context: as a result of the demand of well-being and rights, all rights need to ‘transit’ to the law:

Right is layd aside, either by simply Renouncing it; or by Transferring it to another. By Simply RENOUNCING; when he cares not to whom the benefit thereof redounteth. By TRANSFERRING; when he intendeth the benefit thereof to some certain person, or persons. And when a man hath in either manner abandoned, or granted away his Right; then is he said to be OBLIGED, or BOUND, not to hinder those, to whom such right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and that he Ought, and it is his DUTY (…) transferring of right is introduced, is nothing but the security of a mans person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life (…).¹²

Only when one transits one’s rights can one live in a society free of fear. In Augustine, care dissolves in eternity; in Hobbes, it dissolves in the law. Hence, in neither aspect does the term ‘transit’ present a ground for care as such. Moreover, from the aspect of care, one can claim that Hobbes’s text is particularly problematic, since it leaves us with a question concerning the presumed transit of rights: who will take care of the neighbors? Is it the task of the individual or of the state in which the individuals transit their rights?

For Hobbes, care expresses one of the major tasks, responsibilities and promises of the state, since the state is constituted on the very ground of the equal wellbeing of the citizens.¹³ The main reason for the transition of rights is that citizens are to be taken care of by the state and by law. Yet, can one suggest that care is completely an institutional matter? Today, it is not difficult to see that the application of this transition is still influential in our understanding of care. Because, as it was then, today the transfer of rights still refers to our secondary role of taking care of public matters and of others. This means that an individual can take care of another individual, whereas only the state can take care of them all, just as it takes care of the relation to other states. Although this appears as an almost natural order of care, the urgent question is whether or not there is any ‘order’ in ‘care.’ If we treat care as a matter of responsibility and transit, the question is whether it is sufficient to posit care as an institutional matter. The other urgent question is, when institutions are not sufficient and when an individual has the capacity to take care of others, who will be this other and how can it be decided who is the subject in need of care?

1.4. Care as ‘duty’

The modern division of the role of the institution and the role of an individual in matters of care can be observed in the Kantian formulation of duty. What is striking in Kant’s approach is that responsibility and duty are not only the strongest bond of the relations between state and individual but also regulate the relation between oneself and others. In Kant, the moral law presents the ultimate transit, and in this way finds its most effective field of application. Duty as the principle of moral law has become one of the most influential replacements of care today, and therefore Kant will be the last figure in this historical outline.

In his complex theory of the subject and practical philosophy, Kant’s brief, yet highly influential essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ clearly indicates how reason and duty were posited as the two essential points of practical philosophy. This essay clearly expresses the essential points of reason and duty by referring first to Kant’s insistence on reason, an insistence which becomes evident in his conviction that only reason can save us: reason is the way for ‘the escape of men from their self-incurred tutelage,’ secondly, the text clearly states Kant’s maxim that one should not ‘act contrary to his duty as a citizen.’¹⁴

These descriptions are particularly important for the two final questions of the previous section, namely, the questions of whether care can become a matter of responsibility or duty, and how to decide who is the subject of care. In Kant’s formulation, reason is not only a guide for ethical acts and decisions but is also what frees us from any form of ‘tutelage.’ In a wider sense, in his theory, law refers to both the internal law of reason and the external law of state and opens the horizon of what we can do. Duty, then, is that which binds these two laws and turns into the key for how the transit to the law cannot remain external but has to be internalized. This binding also describes the duties and responsibilities of a citizen and of a state. Nevertheless, from the perspective of common wellbeing, the rational order prioritizes the law of the state, despite its recognition of a rational critique. In this frame, whether coming from the state or from an individual, care is part of a rational decision and part of a certain form of responsibility; it is part of a duty, contrary to which people cannot act.

This formulation can also be interpreted in reference to the notion of transit: a transit of care into duty. Yet, the role given to ratio makes it harder to answer the latter question. If people find themselves in a state of needing to be taken care of by others, doesn’t this show that this state is their own fault? Or as Kant formulates: is it not because of a state of ‘self-incurred tutelage’?¹⁵ Or, otherwise, should they need to prove that they should be considered worthy of being taken care of? As a result, who are the subjects of care that need to be taken care of, and who will decide who are proven to be worthy?

In the contemporary political era, and among other instances, in the refugee crisis it is not unusual to see the hidden tone of accusation in public as well as state policies. When we follow the rational argument, we can see the following: if people in need find themselves in a miserable or fallen state it is their own fault because of not using their reason properly and thus find themselves in need of being taken care of by the accumulation of the other’s wellbeing. To put it in Kantian terminology, immaturity causes such a fall, and only maturity – namely, the capacity of using reason sufficiently – can save people from this state. The difference between Kant and the earlier examples of care is a categorical one, because it somehow repeats each time we see someone in a ‘fallen’ state: it reminds us to say that it is their fault, and it is mainly their responsibility to change the situation they find themselves in. From the perspective of the Enlightenment, Kant’s claims are clear in respect of his own time. The unfortunate situation is that some centuries later, after seeing other aspects, this voice of blame is still in us, a voice that is fundamentally other than the invisible voice in tragedy.

In no sense can this current observation can be directly related to Kant’s practical philosophy. Nevertheless, if ratio is taken as the principle of wellbeing, and duty becomes its most essential part, there is hardly any space left to distinguish between an act motivated by duty or by care. In this new description, obviously, the subject in Kant is neither a potentially immortal being in the Ancient Greek sense, nor an isolated being among others, as with the Stoics. Life, for Kant, is an ethical life in its utmost sense, and duty is the corner stone of this life. In its internal and inseparable relation to human life and reason, duty, by definition, can concern something that a person or an institution does not wish to do. Yet, in either case, duty will guarantee what this duty necessarily demands. However, can either people or institutions take care of somebody or something beyond their wish, or due to a necessity? If the answer is yes, would it be care in the positive sense, or would it be closer to a certain form of ‘necessary evil’?

In the final analysis, the aim of these questions is to indicate whether we can treat care as an external drive in human relations or whether it should be posited differently. As I intended to show in the preceding review of historical understandings of care, none of the above questions are answered sufficiently, telling us what care is. On the institutional level, not care, but only duty and responsibility are the relevant terms. On the personal level, care cannot begin simply as a result of rational argumentation or with a judgment of who or what is worthy of being taken care of: it must be a drive prior to it. In the coming section, I will argue that care needs, rather, to be understood existentially and that it at the same time belongs intrinsically to human plurality, which is far from notions of duty or responsibility. In order to demonstrate this argument, I bring together Heidegger’s and Arendt’s approaches on care.

2. Care as existential condition

The outline of the previous section shows that, despite their differences, historical approaches to care share the common feature of delineating care as a means to an end. In these descriptions, care appeared as an instrument towards immortality, towards individual happiness, as a transit to divine love or common wellbeing, or as a mode of fulfilling responsibilities. In order to replace these reductionist approaches with a wider concept of care, it is possible to follow another way to think care, namely to think it as a ‘beginning’ in terms of an act in itself, rather than as an ‘instrument’ directed towards something else. This new approach underlines care as an act in itself and sees its existential meaning: care appears here as the beginning of selfhood and as a principle of human plurality.

Towards this aim, this second section will explore Heidegger’s and Arendt’s interpretations of care, since their work provides us with some basic arguments that enable us to arrive at this fundamentally different understanding of care. Heidegger and Arendt interpret care as a binding and in-between mode of self and others. Although Heidegger and Arendt give different weight to each side, they both provide answers to the question ‘why do I care?’ By emphasizing the binding role of care, both philosophers develop arguments against understanding care as a means to an end, that is, a way of gaining something through something or somebody. The first part will discuss some of the basic terms that Heidegger introduces in Being and Time, and the second part will show how Arendt’s interpretation provides us with a more complete picture of care by demonstrating that only through plurality we cannot ignore and ‘forget’ to care.

2.1. Heidegger on care

Care is one of the most prominent terms of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time. In this text for the first time, care is articulated as the most fundamental constituent of human existence: Dasein’s existence is an event of care. In order to explain the role of care in existence, Heidegger repeatedly refers to the primordial structure of care: ‘Dasein’s Being reveals itself as care,’¹⁶ ‘“Cura prima finxit”: in care this entity has the source of its Being’¹⁷ and ‘Being-in-the-world is essentially care.’ Although the meaning of these descriptions can neither be summarized nor comprehended without the remarkable context in which they are used in Being and Time, we can be guided by his continuous references to the relation between ‘care’ and ‘disclosure’, ‘potentiality of being’ and ‘understanding.’¹⁸

For Heidegger, the meaning of disclosure is particularly important, since it accompanies each existential relation of Dasein. What is disclosed in these relations is always in the open field of two horizons: first, the temporal horizon of what has ‘not yet’ arrived, in Dasein’s directedness toward future, and second, the spatial horizon of the world, where Dasein dwells as a Being-in-the-world. At the same time, these open fields indicate the phenomenological-hermeneutical horizon of Dasein’s being in which its potentiality-for-Being discloses itself. The disclosure of something temporally refers both to ‘disclosed’ present possibilities and to ‘not yet disclosed’ future possibilities and potentialities. The emphasis on the ‘not yet’ of Dasein is particularly important, since the Being of Dasein is described as a ‘potentiality-for-Being-a-whole.’¹⁹ These possibilities disclose who each Dasein is – their task of becoming themselves. In the process of becoming, care first refers to the taking care of these potentialities with a certain ‘anticipatory resoluteness’²⁰ which is grounded in the ‘horizontal schemata of future.’²¹ Describing Dasein in its potentiality for Being in this horizon, we can also find an enlarged notion of care regarding the totality of relations in which Dasein finds itself. The inexhaustible possibilities that take place in this temporal horizon are Dasein’s encountering of the world, of others and of itself. The potentiality, here, turns into an encountering and understanding of the world in its relationality (Verhältnis). For Heidegger, the utmost existential mode that motivates this encountering is care. Without care, potentiality of being cannot be actualized, or in other words; care bestows a condition to actualize Dasein’s existence.

For each Dasein’s existence, this openness finds its limits in the phenomenon of death, which both signifies and delimits Dasein’s temporal-spatial presence. In the text, Dasein’s material and physical daily life, and its existential call to actualize itself as an individual are investigated. Heidegger describes the integrated segments of Dasein’s life in terms of the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Although death limits these segments, it does not indicate a negative limitation that would preferably be forgotten or ignored, but rather turns it into a positive reminder for the potentialities of Dasein that have not yet been actualized. These potentialities do not primarily refer to the physical or daily occupations, but rather indicate the capacity of Dasein’s relation to Being and of giving meaning to the world and its existence. In that sense, the occupations and relations are not only fundamentally different from each other but also almost work against each other: they open a gap between ontic and ontological levels. The occupations of daily life are mostly defined by necessities and take place in Dasein’s involvement in the social community, whereas Dasein’s existence is singular and cannot be related to any form of necessity. These two types of relation create a distance between the ontic and ontological level, of which Heidegger says that our presence here and now is distant from understanding the structure of our existence. Famously, he describes this distance as follows: ‘the entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest.’²²

Only by remembering to take care of the distance, can the distance be closed so that Dasein can get closer to its own existence. Nevertheless, the daily concerns of life are repetitive, indulging and generating themselves constantly. Therefore, the only possible, and strongest, interruption of this cycle comes from an intrinsic fact of life that cannot be denied; it can come only from death, which is the fact that announces the end of repetition. This fact, and the shock of death, present a positive role for Dasein’s factical life. Yet, the shock would not promise anything, if the ‘end’ did not remind Dasein of the potentialities that it has and can fulfill. Only if Dasein sees itself in the open horizon of its potentialities and its capacity to encounter them, can it elude its daily occupations. As we can see in this schema, if death reminds Dasein of its finitude, care is the endless possible relation of Dasein to Being. Therefore, existence and care are complementary and indispensable sides of Dasein’s existential analytic.

In Heidegger’s analysis, these complementary structures – Dasein’s finite existence and care – open an in-between: the potentialities of Dasein can either be fulfilled or they can be lost in the cycle of daily life. Heidegger shows a particular interest to the term cycle and he examines it in §§ 61–66 in more detail. In these sections, cycle and circularity are elaborated both as a wider term to include the continuity of life, and as a movement that bridges the ontic and ontological segments of life. Heidegger calls for a leap into this circle: ‘We must rather endeavor to leap into the “circle”, primordially and wholly, so even at the state of the analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have a full view of Dasein’s circular Being.’²³ As he further explains, the cycle is not only the circular move of understanding but also the basic character of care, which is misunderstood by common sense.

Common sense, for Heidegger, is mostly characterized by misunderstandings and it represents ‘concernful absorption’ in the ‘they.’²⁴ The repetitive call for concerns are rather limited and ‘what is distinctive in common sense is that it has in view only the experiencing of “factual” entities.’ Since it is embedded in daily concerns, it neither allows for a leap nor does it understand what can be factually experienced: ‘And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as “violent” anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding, or attempt to go out so far.’²⁵ Common sense becomes the source of facticity and falling, which describes the state of forgetting to relate to Dasein’s Being, and which characterizes its state of being together with others. Hence, being among others is a state of restriction and can violate Dasein’s existence in several manners. This state refers to the deceptive replacement of Dasein’s whoness by its whatness, which reduces its ontological potentialities to its ontic capacities. The whoness of Dasein can be disclosed by staying distant from the interference of common sense. In his presentation of the issue, the voices of others are nothing but noises making us deaf to the call of Being and vice versa; as much as the others become silent, we can hear the call: ‘Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the “they”, it fails to hear (überhört) its own Self in the listening to the they-self ’ because neither the call, nor what is disclosed in the mode of care is ‘about world events.’²⁶ This form of interaction with others not only suggests a disconnectedness of Dasein from others but also constitutes a realm of Dasein that excludes all possible forms of plurality.

These remarks show that, for Heidegger, Dasein’s selfhood and its whoness can be understood in its relation to Being, rather than being together with others in plurality. Dasein needs to keep the circular movement between ontic and ontological levels in its singular existence; only then, the mutual cycle of understanding and of care can take place in the open temporal horizon of ‘not yet’. Care in this given sense holds together Dasein’s potentiality and its selfhood in its open horizon and in its Being. The existence and care in Heidegger’s analysis clearly distinguishes the existential level and an ontic field of Being-in-the-world, either in the form of being among others or being involved in daily occupations. Care is in the disclosure of Dasein’s existence not in terms of its whatness, but in its whoness, that can be built in the constant circular movement of returning to itself.

These formulations of Dasein’s existence cannot simply be described as care for the self²⁷. Rather, it goes to the deeper level of Dasein’s self understanding, which becomes transparent in care. Understanding is circular and care is a taking care of the potentialities and the possibility of disclosure of Dasein’s life in its circularity. Therefore, taking care is affirming and exercising these potentialities until the end. As Heidegger describes it: ‘care is Being-towards-death.’²⁸ These conclusive remarks are aimed at providing an inner circular consistency with the Being of Dasein, what Heidegger calls ‘constancy of the Self.’²⁹ For him, this is the only possibility for a stabilized understanding of care that can give resoluteness to Dasein’s selfhood. In the complete internal structure of Dasein’s analytic, care needs to be understood as the mode of isolated existence of Dasein, in its ‘“that-it-is-and-has-to-be” from its Being-its-Self’.’³⁰ As clarified earlier, for Heidegger, existence manifests and discloses itself in the face of death or the end. As a result, his investigations can only be coherently followed from the aspect of Dasein as Being-towards-death. For that reason, Being and Time can be seen as a preparatory text for understanding being in the world and being with others, since it leaves open the transition of Dasein to the world to others.

Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein has a significant novelty when compared to the earlier theories of care. Care is the structure that describes how Dasein owns it to itself to fulfill its selfhood and in this regard, it can indeed be seen as the source of understanding for the meaning of care. He also clearly expresses that the object of his book will not be any philosophical anthropology, but the existential analytic of Dasein. Nevertheless, if care is understood in detachment from others, in a form of isolation, and in the negative connotation of concern in relation to common sense and daily occupations, it is difficult to develop a more extensive theory of care from what Heidegger presents. Can care not be located in relation to others? And is there no other source of care than the ‘call’ that echoes from death? To discuss these questions, one needs to turn to Arendt’s phenomenological political theory of natality and the beginning.

2.2. Arendt on care

In her works, Arendt neither conducted a systematic work on care similar to Heidegger nor did she use care as one of her central terms. Yet this does not mean that the role of care is not central to her work. On the contrary, as will be shown in this section, for Arendt, it is not only the potentialities of human life but also the question of how to protect them from totalitarian instruments, that are central for her. In her approach, care manifests itself by taking care of the potentialities that are revealed and disclosed in action and speech. From this point of view, her phenomenological-existential theory of action is devoted to exploring the meaning of whoness, which turns out to be her way of interpreting the potentiality for Being. Heidegger’s and Arendt’s accounts of whoness cannot be seen as variants of each other, but rather their difference indicates a fundamental ontological difference. Expressed in Heidegger’s terminology, the difference concerns the emphasis on the meaning of potentiality in fundamental ontology. In Heidegger’s case, the encounter with this potentiality is only possible in the phenomenon of death, whereas for Arendt, understanding the meaning of potentiality is possible only in light of the phenomenon of birth and its intrinsic capacity of beginning something new. This reversal between death and birth has radical consequences for their views on selfhood and plurality, and consequently on care. This section aims to show that both philosophers’ views supplement each other on the existential level.

The temporal and spatial horizon of life has equal importance to both philosophers. Yet, for Arendt, the spatial horizon of the world, and being with others in the world, comes together in her term ‘plurality’. There is a coherent line that explains the meaning of plurality in relation to the ‘love of the world’ from Amor Mundi to The Human Condition. In this line of investigation, in which she gathers caritas and plurality together, plurality may have appeared to Arendt as an essential feature of human existence after what she had witnessed during World War II, and made clear to her the consequences of isolation from the human plurality. As she observes, all forms of violence can be far more effective in isolation, and the only remedy to the fragile condition of singular existence is to build communities, a plurality acted in concert³¹.

As she states, the absence of plurality in human life and the isolation of individuals are the strongest instruments of totalitarian regimes, which they use to manipulate lives and use them as a means to a desired end. Her remarks on the threat and the termination of life are not limited to protecting biological life. Human life should be protected in a wider sense, namely in the sense of Aristotle’s bios politikos, human life characterized by the capacity to speak to one another, which in Arendt’s interpretation is a life characterized by speech and action. This enlarged understanding of politics is prior to all other practical implications: whenever we speak, we are already in the midst of an inquiry of who we are, and are thus on level of the politics. Therefore, the primordial condition for remaining human is taking one’s place in plurality of human beings, which is thus an existential condition of human life.

In this existential approach, Arendt interprets the circular model of understanding in plurality as a result of a dialogue with the others. The circularity of understanding, for her, does not refer to a call that Dasein hears only when others are silent; on the contrary, dialogue is its precondition. For Arendt, understanding is a reflective activity, as it is for Heidegger, yet it needs the model of dialogue, which is more than speaking with oneself since it necessarily takes place in plurality. The existential structure can reach its unity and coherence with the irreducible feature of plurality that she calls the ‘plurality of aspects.’³² With this emphasis, Arendt is not stepping into the field of philosophical anthropology, from which Heidegger had kept distance, but rather revises Heidegger’s existential analytic by claiming, first, that ‘potentiality’ and ‘understanding’ are only possible in plurality and can only be understood in plurality and, secondly, the question of whoness cannot be answered within the limits of the question of ‘who am I ?’ but has to include the symmetrical question of ‘who are you?’ Care, in this context, cannot only be a taking care of our own existence but must include taking care of others’ as well, by letting them remind us of the question of whoness and letting us remind them of it.

As explained above, in Heidegger’s existential analysis this reminder comes only from death, when Dasein realizes that it ‘does not have time to go on’ to understand and fulfill its potentiality, which at the same time illustrates the end of the circularity which it is headed towards³³. With the prospect of an inevitable end, it is the potentialities still ahead of Dasein that saves Dasein from a nihilistic attitude. In this way, for Heidegger, this circularity almost follows the perfect circle in the metaphysical tradition that is marked by an inner circle and inner perfection, which represents how one can be free from any external causes. The call to fulfill its potentialities resonates between death and care in Dasein’s temporality, and although this call can be interrupted by others, the inner resonating calls Dasein back to itself. In such a circularity, the only possible question that is left Dasein is the question that it can pose to itself: ‘Who am I?’

For Arendt, however, this internal dialogical model has to be expanded by making the differences between others and me explicit. Potentiality, then, can only expose itself in the form of a dialogue with others in which we can understand ourselves in our distinct, singular existence. The revision she suggests here is not minor. Care is not only a mode that can remind Dasein of its potentiality in an internal dialogue but also belongs to the question which only the other can ask and remind me of, in the form of the question ‘who are you?’³⁴, thus motivating me to access the meaning of singularity. Posing the question in the form ‘who are you?’ has a threefold consequence: first, it can be seen as an affirmation of temporal and spatial change, since each question motivates a ‘new’ answer. Moreover, it does not only presuppose circularity between the question and answer but forces Dasein to ‘encounter’ the meaning of circularity, which is not a repetition, but a disclosure of what is different and new in each answer, and is consequently an affirmation of singularity. Secondly, it reflects the dia-logos, which is the exemplary model for understanding and for how language discloses what is new by us witnessing the other’s speeches, those others who can affirm the novelty by understanding and responding to what has been said. Thirdly, if, for Dasein, selfhood is the promise of caring for its own existence, then, as Arendt would say, any promise that has no witnesses can be easily forgotten and can decay³⁵. Therefore, only when others remember and remind us can this remembrance be an invaluable source of remembering ourselves.

In light of this threefold impact of plurality, Arendt explores the ontological ground of potentiality for the self in new beginnings, a ground that is, for her, the ontological correlate of temporal and spatial change. This alternative to the role of death in Heidegger has extensive implications for understanding the basic structure of care. In order to ground her new approach, she suggests, in The Human Condition, two pivotal lines of argumentation in order to disclose the intrinsic relation between whoness and human plurality. The first line of argument is her reinterpretation of Heidegger’s distinction between ontic and ontological in terms of beginning. In her distinction between first and second birth, she indicates that neither of these beginnings are one’s own doing³⁶. The first beginning, one’s physical birth, is not one’s own doing for the simple reason that birth always means coming into a pre-existing world and arriving among others. It is a beginning of someone of whom we do not know how he or she will influence the constellations of events in our lives. At the same time, this brings the principle of open possibilities into human life and maintains the principle of the unpredictability and unexpectedness in human life.

Arendt uses the term second birth to refer to the disclosure of one’s existence through speech and action. Performing these capacities means fulfilling one’s potentialities in interaction with others³⁷. This interaction constitutes an open horizon for each singular existence, so that everyone can experience his or her unique, singular point of view. To exercise this capacity is to insert oneself into human plurality and give birth to oneself by designating the way of this insertion. Second birth, then, is the event of taking an initiative about something, which discloses itself in the form of action and speech, changing former constellations and announcing a new beginning. Because in each case an initiative starts a new process, it gives people the opportunity to encounter ‘who they are’ which can become manifest only in the course of these new constellations. For Arendt, therefore, only with these beginnings can one understand the meaning of potentiality. Potentiality cannot be limited to the inner voice of a call, but it needs to be understood as an unexpected actualization of one’s capacities among others. Human plurality remains as a reminder of these capacities and future potentialities for each of its members and the beginnings that will attach to it by posing the very question ‘who are you?’ Care, in this interpretation of potentiality, (i) turns into a form of intentional directedness that becomes transparent in whoness, and (ii) links potentiality to actuality, in which actuality and potentiality are in an interplay that is only possible when we are together with others. The process here, already refers to a certain directedness towards the future. Yet from the perspective of temporality, what grants to the future its decisive character is not its inevitable end, but rather the new processes that can be initiated in it and the potentialities that will reveal new beginnings for each person.

If these potentialities have to be figured out in human plurality, and if there is no singular action and speech that one can perform in isolation from others, the intentional directedness of the mode of care has to include others from the beginning and it has to be in this world, because as she emphasizes, understanding is ‘striking roots’³⁸ (Verwurzelung) in this world. Arendt’s appropriations of Augustine’s terms amor mundi and caritas have their significance in this context. In this interpretation, it is essential to keep the meaning of love and care together, as Augustine does. In De Civitate Dei, Augustine explains the relation between love and care: ‘amor is no different from caritas.’³⁹ In her reading of Augustine’s text, Arendt mostly translates caritas as love and, in this regard, love of the world (amor mundi) and care for others turn into a wider concept; they exceed the limit of being an existential condition for a singular existence and become the decisive mode for plural existence as well. Only ‘if I care’ for others and am cared for by others does the interaction turns into a process that discloses who we are in plurality. In this way, the question of whoness will not be understood as an abstraction, but as an event of disclosure in action and revelation in speech⁴⁰. This articulation begins by conceiving the question of whoness as something that cannot be asked of oneself, but rather has to take place in dialogue, in the form of a question that I can receive and ask of others.

In her remarkable reversal of death and birth, Arendt deconstructs the structure of Heidegger’s term ‘call’, which refers to the anxiety that echoes from death, from the end of the potentialities for Being. In Heidegger, only this call can remind Dasein of the end and hence be a reminder for Dasein of its task of distinguishing existential care and everyday concern⁴¹. Arendt deconstructs this model of inner voice in her analysis of the promise. According to her, a promise that we give to ourselves never binds us to our deeds. She claims that if we promise to ourselves to do or not to do something, this promise has mostly no effect on our future deeds, since the promise remains vulnerable to being forgotten when it has no witnesses⁴². For her, the reality of things, words and actions comes only from being seen and being heard, and where there is no one to witness this reality it can decay without being noticed. For the same reason, when others witness each other’s promises they acquire a reality, and this reality can be a subject of remembrance. The striking feature of her argument is that, even if it is me who was at the center of an event, the reality of the event can only be constituted in plurality and in the recollections of others. Therefore, an inner voice that calls us to do or to take part in something can only be actualized in plurality and never in an isolated manner. Hence, the circular motion in understanding, meaning giving, taking initiative, or any other act, cannot reach its whole completion without the presence of others, including care, since it is not only a potentiality but an actuality as well. Common sense, in her interpretation, is no longer a voice that prevents me from hearing my inner voice, but is rather the reminder of the possibility of new understandings and new potentialities, which are covered by the term of new beginnings⁴³. As these analyses show, Arendt’s appropriation of the figure ‘love of neighbor’ has its utmost meaning in her transposing the term into human plurality. In such a transposition, care turns into caritas toward not only a singular isolated conception of potentiality but also, in the way Arendt interprets it, turns into a gathering of potentiality and actuality.

3. Conclusion

In the first section, historical analyses showed us that the question of ‘why do I care?’ can be answered by providing an external references other than care itself. According to these analyses care is posited as a means to ends such as immortality (Ancient Greek), individual happiness (Stoics), a transit to divine love (Augustine) or a transit to common wellbeing (Hobbes), or a mode of fulfilling responsibilities (Kant). If one reduces care to one of these ends, one is left with the dichotomies of either care of self or care of others, of care as an internal or as an external mode, which makes it a matter of judging what is worthy and unworthy of being taken care of, or posits it as a matter of transit; a matter of institutional versus individual duty.

Section two showed that, in their existentialist approach, Heidegger and Arendt deconstruct the meaning of care as an existential category. Especially for Arendt, care indicates an inseparable unity of care of the self and care of others, and, for both of them care refers to an existential constituent of life, which cannot be referred to any external motive such as responsibility, ethical norm or law. In his analyses, Heidegger investigates and introduces care as the key term to fulfill our potentialities. According to him the end of those potentialities is a reminder for us to remember the meaning of care. Care is what discloses who we are⁴⁴ and hence it holds the general indication for the directedness of our existence, which should be separated and protected from daily concerns. Arendt follows Heidegger’s distinction between daily concerns and existential care and their disruptive nature for fulfilling our potentialities. However, her elucidation of the question of whoness follows a different venue. For her, whoness cannot be achieved in isolation or within a form of inner circularity that leaves others external to our lives. As she emphasizes, others are not external to us.

Heidegger and Arendt clearly distinguish the existential motives in their works from any utility-oriented activities that presuppose an instrumental use of things. For them, a human life can be defined by care in existence and can be experienced as an end in itself, not as an instrument. In this regard, they present an understanding of selfhood ‘which is included in care’⁴⁵. Despite the differences of their interpretations regarding plurality and the emphasis on death or birth, they introduce an understanding of care that in its new temporality cannot be postponed to an indefinite future any longer.

As a result of their account of ‘mutual care’ the question of ‘why do I care’ cannot be answered in singularity. Neither from the perspective of biological life nor as a singular person have we an isolated existence. Therefore, the question of whoness cannot be sufficiently answered in isolation and needs, rather, the dialogical model; we need others to remind us why we should care for our whoness. As Arendt shows, care belongs not only to the reflective model of the existential analytic of Dasein but necessarily has also to be seen as an awakening potentiality in the existential model of plurality. In contrast to Heidegger’s sharp distinction between voices, Arendt interprets the voice, not as a soundless dialogue between me and myself – ‘eme emauto’⁴⁶ – similar to the voice of the philosopher’s solitude, but rather through emphasizing the dialogical model that includes others’ voices. If, in Heidegger and Arendt, these potentialities are the venues of Dasein’s own existence, this venue must have remained open to the entire sphere of being in the world; to the spatial and temporal horizon of the world and being together with others. Both philosophers’ views on circular continuity of understanding encourage this interpretation and become transparent in continuity in terms of ‘caritas’ and ‘care.’

Out of the circular movement of understanding, care can turn into a means to an end and thereby misses its existential ground. In this case, care is destined to be postponed since there can always be found more ‘effective’ means among others and each of them can turn into another means in the endless chain of instrumentality⁴⁷. In the instrumental frame, it can also be taken as a matter of transit, which points to another person or institute to take responsibility. Only when care turns into the existential condition that constitutes each singular self among others can care ‘be conceived as an entity which occurs in time and runs its course “in time,”’⁴⁸ something that can no longer be a matter of transit or of postponement.

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Notes on contributors

Sanem Yazıcıoğlu

Sanem Yazıcıoğlu is Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, Department of Philosophy and affiliated Associate Professor at Istanbul University. She works on contemporary philosophy, particularly on the theoretical background of phenomenology and hermeneutics and their application in aesthetics and political philosophy. Her research is devoted to the investigation of the different fields of human potentiality, such as temporality, perception, memory and identity. She published several articles on these topics and edited volumes such as M. Heidegger H. Arendt, Metaphysics and Politics (2002; co-editor), Hannah Arendt on Her Birth Centenary (2009) and Das Zwischen/In-Between (2013).

Notes

1. Homer, Iliad, IX, 443; Arendt emphasizes this capacity as being ‘the doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words,’ The Human Condition, 25.

2. Raaflaub, “Poets, Lawgivers,” 29.

3. Arendt, Crisis of the Republic, 165.

4. Epicurus in Laertius, Lives of Prominent Philosophers Vol. II, x.28. This work has been referred to as On Life x.119.

5. Epicurus in Laertius, Lives of Prominent Philosophers Vol. II, x.143; and cf. Schofield, “Epicurean and Stoic Political Thought,” 437.

6. Epicurus in Laertius, Lives of Prominent Philosophers Vol. II, x.139–144; and cf. Schofield, “Epicurean and Stoic Political Thought,” 438.

7. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 14; and Augustine, Confessions XI, 21, 27.

8. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 15; and Augustine, Confessions XI, 27, 35.

9. Ibid., 28.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Hobbes, Leviathan, 92–93. See chapter 14 for further explanations on ‘transferring.’ This passage is particularly intriguing, since it already refers to the relation between transferring and duty, which will be a major theme for Kant.

13. As Arendt emphasizes, for Hobbes, to this end all measures can be taken, and in his new political philosophy, he invents the means and instruments with which to ‘make the artifical animal (…) called Commonwealth’ in The Human Condition, 299.

14. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 56, 58.

15. Ibid., 58.

16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 227/182. The page number behind the/is the page number in the German original.

17. Ibid., 243/198.

18. Ibid., § 65.

19. Ibid., 371/324.

20. Ibid., 370/323.

21. Ibid., 416/365.

22. Ibid., 359/311.

23. Ibid., 363/315.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 363/315.

26. Ibid., 315/270.

27. For Heidegger, ‘care for oneself (Selbstsorge)’ would even be ‘tautological,’ see Ibid.,366/318.

28. Ibid., 378/329.

29. Ibid., 369/322.

30. Ibid., 329–30/284.

31. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179, 244 and 324.

32. For a clear description of plurality as the gathering of existentially unique human beings, see, Arendt, The Human Condition, 8.

33. Heidegger, Being and Time, 378/330.

34. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

35. Ibid., 237.

36. Ibid., 176–77.

37. Ibid., 201, 209.

38. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:332.

39. ‘I thought that this was worth mentioning in view of the fact that a number of people believe that dilectio or caritas is one thing and amor is another, for they say that dilectio is to be taken in the good sense, and amor in the bad. (…). But it was necessary to impose the fact that the scriptures of our religion, whose authority we rank above all other writings, indicate that amor is no different from dilectio or caritas, for we now shown that amor is used in the good sense.’ Augustine, The City of God XIV, 2.1–4, 9–12.

40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

41. Cf. Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and Professional Thinker, 164.

42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 237.

43. For Arendt’s historical analyses of the sensus communis, see The Life of the Mind, 45–65.

44. ‘When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood.’ Heidegger, Being and Time, 370/323.

45. Ibid., 351/303.

46. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 185.

47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 154.

48. Heidegger, Being and Time, 375/327.