This
site is about ethics of care: a philosophical reflection on the
action of man as a caring being. In philosophy, care is always
treated somehow in a stepmotherly fashion: it was "women's
business", which in consequence, one had not to be taken too
seriously. It was Martin Heidegger, this great but also a dubious
thinker of the twentieth century, who perhaps gave care for the first
time a central place in his work. He called it an "existentiale
of the Dasein": a fundamental feature of our being human. Men
stand caring in the world.
Later
on, thinking about care was taken to heart by feminist thinkers like
Joan Tronto. She also approaches care as a fundamental feature of our
being human. Her definition of care is similar to this of Heidegger,
but she looks from another perspective. Heidegger approaches care
from a metaphysical outlook. He doesn't focus on realising real
changes in the lifeworld. Joan Tronto, who really wants to move
concrete stones in the river of our daily existence, makes ethics of
care into political ethics. What by her is at stake, is our
responsibility for each other as vulnerable beings and the just
distribution of burdens and delights in care.
I look
at ethics of care from a very specific perspective: we are all people
of modernity, a cultural philosophic constellation who bears
wonderful possibilities in it, but at the same time has it created in
some degree an unsteady concept of man. In the centre of the daily
experience of modernity, stands the Cartesian cogito: " I think
therefore I am." Only because I, as a human being, observe the
world, it gets sense and meaning. Modern man constitutes the world
with his thinking. He sees himself as a "humanistic hero",
who can give shape to his place in the world on his own. He is an
"I", an "Ego", a "Self".
But at
the same time with the modern man, also arose modern science, which
thinks only objectifying: it doesn't look after the fundamental
features of the things, but it only wants to figure out how they are
functioning. This was at the same time a blessing and a disaster for
humanity. A blessing because this reduction enabled science to make
significant discoveries. Think for instance of medicine who made it
possible to heal so many terrible diseases. But at the same time,
modern science with its objectifying regard caused a lot of problems:
it considers the earth as an object of which man can dispose of as he
pleases. That provoked among other things gigantic environmental
challenges.
But
there is still another consequence of this duality: modern science
also leads to a somewhat unsteady concept of man. About at the same
time as the emergence of the Cartesian cogito, began the
objectivation of man in science. In premodern times, we regarded
ourselves as God's chosen children, created in God's image, but in
modernity, man and his body became gradually objectivated. Our body
turned into a machine; blind evolution caused our existence, and our
ego became a desperate horseman, who tried in vain to drive two
fractious horses, the Es and the Über-Ich. In the end, our brain
became devaluated to a computer in which only blind laws of nature
were at work. Freedom doesn't exist anymore: our brain dictates all
our so called actions of free will.
So in
modernity, the thought of human autonomy was worshipped, but at the
same time, the existence of it was held to be impossible. Of course,
this has not happened on one day: it took more than for hundred
years. But at the end of this evolution, we can only come to the
conclusion that modern men are desperately at odds with himself. With
Charles Taylor, we can state that modernity is a paradoxical
constellation. Modern man can only approach the world and himself
from a first person perspective, this of the autonomous ego, but at
the same time, we can only look at ourselves and the world in the
third person, as an object. Michel Foucault expresses this in another
manner: he defines man as a transcendental-empirical doublet: someone
who gives meaning and is an object of investigation at the same time.
Thus it is not the case that we are a subject of an object: we are
always both at the same time.
This
manifests itself pre-eminently in care. Gily Coene en Koen Raes state
that in care, two entirely different language games are applied: a
scientific language game that reduces man to a number of variables
who escape at his conscious will en therefore at his responsibility
and an ideological language game in which freedom of man and
consequently his responsibility has a central place. Both positions
are constantly mixed up. They seem to be intertwined with each other
in an inextricable knot. The question is, therefore, how we can
disentangle this knot.
References
(The complete bibliographic data you can find on the page:"Bibliografie - Bibliography")
- Coene Gily en Raes Koen (2008)
- De Kesel Marc (1998)
- Descartes René (1637)
- Foucault Michel (1966)
- Heidegger Martin (1967)
- Taylor Charles (1989)
- Tronto Joan (1993)
- Tronto Joan (2013)
Version 1: 8-04-2017
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