Self-care and total care: the twofold return of care in twentieth-century thought

Jussi Backman

doi:10.1080/21692327.2020.1786301

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper studies two fundamentally different forms in which the concept of care makes its comeback in twentieth-century thought. We make use of a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that the ancient and medieval ‘ascetic’ ideal of self-enhancement through practice has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the form of a rehabilitation of the Hellenistic notion of self-care (epimeleia heautou) in Michel Foucault’s late ethics. Sloterdijk contrasts this return of self-care with Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world as ‘total care’ (Sorge), an utterly ‘secularized’ understanding of the human being as irreducibly world-embedded that rejects the classical ascetic ideal of world-secession. We examine further the historical roots and emergence of these contrasting contemporary reappropriations of care in the Western tradition of thought and show them to be rooted in two different ontologies and ethics of the self as either world-secluded or world-immersed, autonomous or constitutively relational. The historical point of divergence of these two approaches to care, we argue, can be found in the Christian transformation of Hellenistic ethics.

Highlights

Sloterdijk: self-care vs. total care ‘If one had to summarize the main difference between the modern and ancient worlds,’ writes Peter Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life, it would have to be the following: the modern era is the one that brought about the greatest mobilization of human powers for the sake of work and production, while all those life forms in which the utmost mobilization took place in the name of practice and perfection are ancient.[1]
In Sloterdijk’s rendering, twentieth-century philosophy rehabilitated the concept of care in two different and profoundly contrasting ways: as the Foucauldian Neo-Stoic self-care, which is part of the modern anthropotechnical reawakening of the exercising consciousness underway since Nietzsche, and as the Heideggerian total care, which marks the climax of modern secularization in the sense of human reintegration with worldly concerns
We show that the Christian devaluation of care into a ‘worldly’ concern for temporal matters, and the further development of this ‘secularization’ of care in post-Reformation Protestant thought, provides the intellectual genealogy for the Heideggerian concept of world-oriented ‘total’ care as the core dynamic of human temporal life

Summary

Introduction

Sloterdijk: self-care vs. total care ‘If one had to summarize the main difference between the modern and ancient worlds,’ writes Peter Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life, it would have to be the following: the modern era is the one that brought about the greatest mobilization of human powers for the sake of work and production, while all those life forms in which the utmost mobilization took place in the name of practice and perfection are ancient.[1].

Results

Conclusion