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“Cura (Care) was crossing a river and saw some clay. Thoughtfully, she took it up and began to shape it. Jupiter came along, and she asked him to give it spirit, which he granted. Then they argued about what to name the creature. Earth (Tellus) claimed it should be named after her, since she provided the material. To resolve the dispute, Saturn was asked to judge. His decision: Jupiter would receive the spirit back upon death, Earth the body, but as Cura first formed it, she would possess it during life. And the creature would be called homo, because it was made from humus, earth.”1

If you’ve encountered the philosophy of Martin Heidegger before, you’ve heard the term Dasein, which is the being-there way that humans show up in the world. What makes us different from other things that exist in the world — like rocks, or trees, and other animals — is that we are the only beings who care about what it means to be what we are.2 A tree just exists — so the thinking goes — while we find ourselves constantly asking, Who am I? What should I do? What’s my purpose? We question our own being, and that concern inherent in our self-questioning lies at the heart of what Heidegger calls Care.

Care is fundamental to being human. It shows up in the most practical ways.  Here is the common example of the hammer: Imagine you are a carpenter using a hammer. When you are really in the zone, hammering away at something, you are not thinking about how the tool that you are holding is made of wood and metal so that it can do it’s job, but are rather focused on hitting the dang nail, motivated by your desire to build the thing that will benefit you. The hammer almost disappears as it becomes an extension of your desire and will. The hammer is integrated into a whole network of tools and tasks that are there, ready to be used. In this way, the hammer is what Heidegger terms ready-to-hand.

But then, the hammer breaks, and the flow is broken. Now you, the carpenter, look at it as an isolated object, a hunk of wood and metal, now heavy in your hand. Examining it, the broken hammer becomes a curious object, to be examined. Why or how did it break? Why is it not working as expected? The dead weight is no longer ready-to-hand, and is now merely present-at-hand. It withdraws from its functional role, and is there as something to be observed, examined, or theorized about, rather than used in practical activity. For the most part though, we humans organize our worlds according to our goals, aspirations, desires, and that organization is a manifestation of our involvement in the world through our Care.

The fable Heidegger tells us about the collaboration of Care, Earth, and Jupiter in crafting the human, positions Care as fundamentally woven into us from the moment we are formed. It is not just an aspect of being human, it is what it means to be human. Our questioning nature, our concern for our being, that’s care. It isn’t just worrying about stuff, everything we do and are flows from care. If you have ever wondered what the meaning of life is, now you have your answer: it is Care.

Care unifies all the parts of being human: the fact that we are thrown into this world and into a situation that you didn’t create, but that provides you with a certain concrete and unique set of possibilities. It’s our unique potential to be. It’s our ability to ask, what am I gonna do? Who am I going to be? And then, we project ourselves towards those possibilities and organize our worlds accordingly. We are not stuck with whatever is given to us, but strive to reach more, and that striving is also care. No other being consciously projects itself into future possibilities like we do. This is our existentiality.

Most of the time, we tend to go with the crowd, and act to fulfill other’s expectations of us. This is a third element Heidegger calls fallenness. It describes our tendency towards inauthentic existence. It’s how easily we can fall into just doing what one does, following social norms, trends, the herd mentality. In doing so, we are immersed in a self that belongs to others. You can easily loose yourself in the crowd and do things because they say so, not because you authentically chose it. In doing so, you surrender your uniqueness. Our concern for our situation sets the stage (1.thrownness) , our drive towards future possibilities (2.projection) and even our tendency to get lost in social mores(3.fallenness) all stems from our fundamental care about existing. We care about our situation, who we might become, and we are shaped—often unconsciously—by the worlds we inhabit.

Care shapes how we understand things in our world. Care isn’t just about external actions or structures. It shapes how the world appears to us. One way is through our moods — our basic feelings of happiness, sadness, anxiety. These aren’t just internal states, but are expressions of care in our relation to where we find ourselves. Coloring how the world shows up for us, moods literally change how we understand reality. In that sense, moods are fundamental to how things strike us or grip us. Ignoring mood is ignoring a basic way we are in the world.

Understanding is not theoretical but the practical, embodied knowledge of how things fit together for us. It’s grasping the meaning and possibilities within our situation, like seeing how the hammer fits into the larger project of building something, and this understanding changes how we experience our spaces and embodiment.  The kitchen sink might be physically further away than a book sitting on the table in front of you, but functionally it feels “closer” because you want some tea, and in that moment that kitchen sink is what is most relevant to what you care about. In this way, we can bring things closer to us through care, overcoming distance and strangeness. We make the world our own, make it familiar by living in it, using it. Things find their place in relation to our projects, our care.

One mood is particularly important: Anxiety isn’t just a negative feeling to be avoided, but it arises from our deep concern for our own being, our possibilities, and the idea that our possibilities may come to an end (our finitude). Feeling the feeling we get when thinking about our own eventual and certain death is unsettling, but it’s also a potential catalyst for authenticity. Anxiety can shake us out of that comfortable fallenness, out of just doing what they do and following others. It confronts us with our own unique existence and the need to take responsibility for our own choices.

Living authentically means taking over your choices where it comes to the things that matter to you, and actively choosing the things that will bring you closer to your future as you imagine it. It is making manifest a future that is uniquely yours, it’s about owning your potential, in rebellion against your own mortality. It is part of our given situation, that we will die someday. Facing our own death, feeling that existential anxiety or dread, can shock you out of your typical complacency, to ask the question of what really matters to you. Until you ask this question, you have no chance at living a fulfilled life. Anxiety isolates you in a way that makes authentic choice possible.

It’s also important to know that those moments of clarity are few and far between, and that we cannot help but fall back into complacency. The transcendence, described by philosophers and religious leaders for as long as we have roamed the planet, is not a posture you can maintain in the long term. So when that anxiety shows up, pay attention to it because it has something very important to teach you. You don’t achieve transcendence and then are done with it, but if you are lucky you endure it for a limited time in order to bring some of what it can teach you into your conscious life choices. You are going to die anyways, so you might as well do what you really care about however insignificant or nonsensical it might seem to others.

Our conscience calls us to be authentic, to stop (as he puts it) being distracted by distraction from distraction. Make choices that you can affirm, and defend those choices against all the other choices that you did not make instead. Because every chose is a delimiting of possibilities — choosing one thing is also a choice against many other things precisely because we have limited time. We cannot manifest all possibilities, and make all choices. There is an inherent debt or guilt in this, in existing and having all these possibilities, but our guilt too is part of caring and of being fully human.3

Lest we make this sound very individualistic, we should add that Care necessarily involves our relation to others. Heidegger speaks in terms of being-with-others, an essential dimension of Care.4 We are never isolated, atomized selves. We are always embedded in a shared world with others whose lives and concerns matter to us. This shared involvement forms the groundwork for what we might call empathy: our capacity to feel-with, to be affected by the joys, sorrows, and struggles of those around us. Heidegger writes much more about our fallenness, where others keep us from ourselves, but the capacity for an authentic relation to another, and to the Stranger, is a part of our Care structure that remains very opaque. (Levinas will intervene here, more on this soon.)

Care underlies our relations to ourselves, others, and our environment including nature. (Even not caring, in modes of indifference, pity, hatred, etc., are just deficient modes of care. We have the capacity for indifference only because Care underlies all of our relations.) We may think that care for ourselves is foundational, and that we must care first and foremost for ourselves, but this is myopic. In philosophy, we distinguish between something being prior in time (chronologically) and something being prior ontologically—meaning it comes first in terms of foundational significance, not in time, but in the structure or conditions of being. Our relations of care with others is prior in both senses. We learn to care for ourselves in the context of caring relations of/to others, first of all our first caretakers, often a mother. We have the capacity to care for ourselves because we are the kind of being for whom others care. Care is primordial.

We must recognize that we are who and what and who we are, as particular individuals but also as a humankind, because of others. Others can be other beings like us, other people, but we can also encounter otherness in art, artifacts, the natural world, books. Otherness is embedded in us as well, there is a stranger in us all. The West has made a virtue of being self-centered and has idolized individuality. I love being me, an individual. This is not wrong, but it must be recognized for the phase that it is, and we must work past it if we are going to survive as a species.

In closing, a little etymology: The word consciousness comes from the Latin conscientia, translated as “knowing with.” Consciousness, then, is an acknowledgment of the relational and communal root of knowing—a co-knowing in a co-world. It is also the root of the related word conscientious, which means acting with or from what one knows to be true, right, or good. The suffix “-ous” signals a state of being: to be full of conscience. A conscientious person acts in accordance with their consciousness. They are conscious of something, know with in relation to someone or something else, and act in a way that respects and honors that relationship. To care is to be affected by the vulnerability of another; it is to allow their situation to trouble your awareness (conscientia) and then to respond from that awareness with integrity (conscientiousness). In this way, care becomes a practice that unites consciousness and conscientiousness—a way of knowing with and acting for another.

To be continued…