Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives [1 ed.] 9042937114, 9789042937116, 9789042937123

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Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Sophie Bourgault and Elena Pulcini

VOLUME 6

Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Ethics of Care Editorial Board Prof. dr. Hellen Kohlen, Vallendar Prof. dr. Sandra Laugier, Paris I – Sorbonne Prof. dr. Frans Vosman, Utrecht, chief editor Advisory board Prof. dr. Andries Baart, Utrecht Prof. dr. Guillaume le Blanc, Paris Prof. dr. Sophie Bourgault, Ottawa Prof. dr. Fabienne Brugère, Paris Prof. dr. Elisabeth Conradi, Stuttgart Prof. dr. Chris Gastmans, Leuven Prof. dr. Per Nortvedt, Oslo Prof. dr. Annelies van Heijst, Tilburg Dr. Linus Vanlaere, Leuven Prof. dr. Marian Verkerk, Groningen

Cover from a painting by the German Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944). Site of the Museum of his work: http://www.osnabrueck.de/fnh/10508.asp. Nussbaum has—while firmly rooted in the European tradition of modern art— given the atrocities of Nazism a face. We honor his life and work by pointing at his artwork on the covers of this series Ethics of Care. Felix Nussbaum The Pearls (Mourners) (1), 1938, WV nr. 333 Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm Private collection Foto © Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück Permanent loan from the Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung

Ethics of Care Volume 6

Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Sophie Bourgault and Elena Pulcini

PEETERS Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT 2018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-90-429-3711-6 eISBN 978-90-429-3712-3 D/2018/0602/89 © 2018 – Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION Sophie Bourgault and Elena Pulcini

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EMOTIONS AS MOTIVATIONS AND SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE: CRITICAL RETURNS, FEMINIST OVERTURES 2. What emotions motivate care? Elena Pulcini

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3. The work of emotions Fabienne Brugère

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4. Love, gender and moral sensibility: a political (his)tory Patricia Paperman

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EMPATHY, PITY AND SYMPATHY: CRITICAL REASSESSMENTS 5. Care between sympathy, imagination and humility Caterina Botti

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6. Rethinking the moral importance of empathy Monika Betzler

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7. Affective coexistence. Pity as a connection between emotion 115 and ethical knowledge Inge van Nistelrooij 8. Care and birth. Emotional sharing as the foundation of care relationships 137 Guido Cusinato

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CARE FOR THE SELF AND FOR OTHERS: PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 9. Affective self-understanding: a means to the care for the self 167 Luigina Mortari 10. Care as attentiveness: Weilian reflections on the affective and cognitive dimensions of care 191 Sophie Bourgault 11. Existence, care and emotions Vincenzo Sorrentino

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12. Emerging emotions and empathy maps amongst migrant care-workers in three cities in central Italy 231 Rossana Trifiletti Contributors

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Index

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1. Introduction Sophie Bourgault and Elena Pulcini

The view that there is a strong link between the affective sphere and care (understood here both as a practice and an ethical ideal) seems, at first glance, uncontroversial. Indeed, the association between the two seems to be such an evident part of our imaginary that one may think that it hardly requires interrogation or elucidation. How could there be caring or solicitude for another without some form of love, empathy, compassion or generosity? And yet, once we scratch below the surface, the connections between care and emotions appear to be anything but obvious. This is in part because any study of these connections will have to face, in one way or another, some of most complex themes that have animated contemporary thought—take for instance, the question of the very relationship between ethics and politics, or the problematic implications of the public/private split from a feminist standpoint. Adding another layer of complexity, we are dealing here with two concepts that have been largely relegated, throughout the history of ideas, to the margins rather than the center of moral and political theory. If care has typically been devalued by political philosophers and confined to the intimate/private sphere, the emotional sphere has also been the object of much devaluation and even of some trepidation—in part thanks to a pervasive reason vs. passion dualism and to a dominant This volume is an English, slightly modified version of the book Cura ed emozioni. Un’alleanza complessa, edited by Elena Pulcini and Sophie Bourgault [Bologna: Il Mulino, 2018].

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conception of the sovereign male subject (and of the public sphere) that assigns great significance to a particular (detached, sober, impartial) type of rationality. To reflect upon the interconnections between care and emotions might very well first entail, then, extricating these two terms from their long history of devaluation and marginalization in Western ethico-political thought. This is indeed one of the objectives that care ethicists have pursued ever since the theory’s first articulation in Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice [1982]. In that pivotal work, Gilligan sought to unearth and rehabilitate the value of an alternative voice to that of the rationalist, Kantian subject and its particular approach to justice. As readers will recall, the responses of the now famous Jake and Amy spoke volubly as to the different ways one might tackle complex moral dilemmas: whereas Jake’s response was driven by a deep concern over principles and rights, Amy’s was informed by a deep concern for relationships and by affectivity. Amy’s particular relational posture and her attunement to the emotional dimension of moral dilemmas turned out to be fundamental for Gilligan’s characterization of the ‘different’ voice— the voice of care. Since 1982, countless care theorists have proposed accounts of morality and politics that embrace Gilligan’s presupposition that there are significant connections between affectivity and care—or at the very least, that care is at its best when some emotional investment accompanies it. [e.g. Noddings 1984; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993; Molinier et al 2009] But despite this quasi consensus, relatively few books in care ethics have had, as their principal object of study, the issue of emotions (notable exceptions here include Slote [2007] on empathy; Leget, Gastmans & Verkerk [2011] on compassion; Paperman [2013; cf. 2009] on the emotions more generally). Moreover, most scholars have shied away from analyzing at length the more negative or less attractive emotions involved in care work (think for instance, of disgust, resentment, anger, grief). Our collection of essays hopes to enrich care ethics by bringing more sustained attention onto the wide range and the complexity of the emotions that can motivate or hinder caring for others, for ourselves and for the world.

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More specifically, the general aims of this volume are threefold. First, the volume takes stock and assesses the past contributions of care ethics scholarship on the issue of emotions’ ties to moral knowledge and care work. Several of the pieces that follow propose critical reassessments of important works in care ethics such as those of Carol Gilligan [1982; 2011], Joan Tronto [1993], Annette Baier [1995], Eva F. Kittay [1999] and Nel Noddings [1984]. These investigations seek to advance debate partially by drawing out some of the strengths, ambiguities and blind spots found in existing accounts of the connections between emotions and care, or by bringing greater precision to the discussion. The second intention of our volume is to widen the scope of care ethics by considering the connections between affectivity and care through broader existential/phenomenological lenses, and by bringing new (or little heard) voices to the conversation—e.g. those of Emmanuel Housset [2003], Maria Zambrano [e.g. 1997; 2006], Laura Boella [2006; 2012], Eugenio Lecaldano [2013] and Andrea Pinotti [2011]. While these authors might be familiar in many European intellectual circles, they are less well known to care ethicists from the Anglo-American scholarly world. Our volume wishes to contribute, in a modest but important way, to the internationalization of care ethics and to cross-national dialogue—following here in the footsteps of Elisabeth Conradi and Frans Vosman, whose rich and ambitious Praxis der Achtsamkeit [2016] brought together numerous voices from different parts of the world. Finally, this edited volume hopes to shed new light on the subject of care and emotions by offering readers a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Indeed, the chapters that follow marry insights from disciplines as varied as social anthropology, literature, developmental psychology, gender studies, political science, paleo-anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Moreover, many of these texts also travel freely in time, from 18th century moral philosophy to 21st century political philosophy. The chapter by Caterina Botti, for instance, brings together Enlightenment moral sentimentalism and feminist poststructuralist work. Similarly, the text offered by Guido Cusinato draws on the work of phenomenologist Max Scheler and that of 21st century psychologist Michael Tomasello and anthropologist Ian Tattersall.

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Nevertheless, despite the great diversity of scholarly disciplines, texts and methodologies used in this collection of essays, the texts collected here remain traversed by a set of shared premises. First, contributors to this volume all, implicitly or explicitly, embrace the basic phenomenological/Heideggerian premise that our being-in-the world, our existence is always an affectively situated one. There is no possibility for human beings to somehow step outside of affectivity— and as such, care relations obviously cannot be positioned outside either. Not only can one never be the perfectly detached, autonomous individual extolled by certain Kantian accounts of morality, but one ought also not to desire this emotionless detachment. Indeed—and here is a second idea shared by most authors in this book—a life well lived ought to include some attachment, some “emotion sharing” and some “affective coexistence”, to use the terms employed by Vincenzo Sorrentino and Inge van Nistelrooij in their respective chapters. And as Guido Cusinato underscores in his essay, “emotion sharing” need not come at the expense of our search for individuality: both are reconcilable. Third, most of our contributors share the view that since humans are fundamentally vulnerable creatures, sentiments and affectivity must be placed at the center rather than at the margins of any decent sociopolitical or moral theory (Fabienne Brugère’s chapter, in particular, explores the connection between vulnerability and affectivity at length). Fourth, what a few of our authors underscore in their chapters is the need to look more closely at the negative type of emotions and passions that care often entails. For example, Cusinato’s chapter briefly considers the cases of grief and of envy, and Pulcini’s tackles that of resentment, pity and disgust. If it is a truism that not all care is good care, it is obviously equally true that not all care work is accompanied (or could ever be accompanied) simply by sentiments as appealing as compassion or generosity. Our all-too-human daily practices and engagement with the world reveal that what prompts, nourishes or comes out of care is typically a thorny mixture of negative and positive feelings (including guilt, anger, pride, pity and joy)—and a whole gamut of emotions located in between.

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Another key claim that traverses many of the texts that follow is that our affective sphere is (and will always be) partially opaque. Indeed, as several contributors underscore, our affective and emotional lives are not solely defined by unpredictability and messiness (in part the inevitable result of our interdependencies), but also by an impenetrability that cannot be overcome even with the best reflective efforts or tools. What is to be gathered from this sober conclusion is not a resigned outlook on our perceptive and reflective capacities. Rather, as Caterina Botti and Luigina Mortari both underscore in their chapters in their own particular manners, this conclusion ought to be regarded as an invitation to have more humility in our care relations and in our moral judgments. After all, if our capacity to give a good account of ourselves and of our needs is always limited, imperfect and incomplete, so too is our ability to identify correctly the needs of others. In the first part of this collection, contributors provide a set of critical assessments of care ethics’ treatment of emotions. The volume opens with a chapter by philosopher Elena Pulcini, who offers a critical review of numerous accounts of emotions that have been proposed in the literature on care in the last decades. While acknowledging the important insights of this scholarship, Pulcini nevertheless decries the lack of precision it sometimes contains: the term empathy, in particular, has too often been used interchangeably with the terms compassion, sympathy or love—with significant consequences in her view. Seeking to bring more articulacy to care ethics, Pulcini proposes a typology of different types of caring: private (care out of love), social (paid or unpaid care work) and finally, global (caring for the distant other). For Pulcini, each type of caring relationship and activity entails a distinctive account of the needy Other and each relationship is nourished by a particular emotion: love, compassion and generosity, respectively. Pulcini’s goal is not simply to identify how these three positive emotions can motivate care: of equal importance to her is to identify the negative emotions that can act as obstacles to care (e.g. resentment, pity, disgust). One of the insights of Pulcini’s piece is that a more fine-grained analysis of the emotions might help us theorize the care for distant others: if intimate love cannot be stretched widely, there is a type of generosity that is fit

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for the global in her view. And in this stretching of our moral universe, a significant role is to be played by the imagination according to Pulcini (a view also defended by Betzler and Botti in their essays). The following two chapters take a close look at the politics and controversy attached to care ethics’ thorny relation with sentiments and the ‘feminine voice’. More specifically, drawing on both contemporary care ethics scholarship and 18th century authors, the chapter penned by Fabienne Brugère offers a series of reflections on the ‘work’ done by our emotions in judgment and care practices. Her chapter has the following objectives: first, to explain why what necessarily flows from an anthropology of vulnerability is an ethics that gives a pride of place to affectivity and to the ethical significance of our mutual dependencies. (To reflect on the latter, Brugère proposes a brief excursus into the account of dependency proposed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile.) Second, Brugère wishes to underscore the messiness and the irrégularités of the affective sphere, which she thinks intimately tied to our interdependencies. Here, Brugère draws on Hume and Smith, whose accounts of moral sentiment she considers, with the likes of Joan Tronto and Annette Baier, of utmost relevance for care ethics. Finally, Brugère seeks to show that our emotional life and its connections to gender socialization, power dynamics and care practices are far from ‘given’ or fixed. They can (and constantly ought to be) the objects of deconstruction and reconstruction; and the contribution made by the ethics of care in the last decades can be taken as a powerful testimony to that very malleability. Patricia Paperman’s chapter continues, in many respects, this reflection on the feminist politics attached to care ethics’ treatment of emotions and its deconstructive potential. Her contribution can also be read as an answer to those who have seen in care ethics’ treatment of emotions like compassion something encouraging a tepid political project. The arrival of care ethics in France sparked much controversy—one that momentarily spilled over into the media and into the pronouncements of politicians like Martine Aubry.1 Many fought over whether care ethics could nourish a progressive, feminist project or whether, on the contrary, it merely reinforced patriarchy. Paperman argues that far from reinforcing old patriarchal and liberal dichotomies (e.g. emotion

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vs. reason; women vs. men; private vs. public), care ethics aims at deconstructing them—largely via its rich account of moral sensibility. Indeed, for Paperman, care ethics’ great strength is that it ‘puts sentiments in their place’: it takes them out of where liberal thought sought to confine them (namely, in the private sphere) and positions them squarely in concrete yet ordinary practical activities that are world building. Drawing on the work of Annette Baier and Eva F. Kittay, Paperman also considers at length the treatment of parental love in care scholarship. What care ethicists have underscored, she argues, is not only the beauty of parental love, but also its risks (for domination) and the heavy political implications that flow from its regrettable exclusion from the public sphere. Thus, far from unwittingly buttressing patriarchy or gendered practices, care ethics calls them into question. In the second part of the volume, we turn to a constellation of affective phenomena that have been central to the ethics of care ever since the early 1980s: namely, compassion, empathy, love and sympathy. Some of these articles aim at briefly disentangling these phenomena, while others seek to clarify the connections between empathy and morality. In chapter four, Caterina Botti offers a critical reexamination of sentimentalist interpretations of care ethics. One of her ultimate aims is to underscore the difficulties of ‘giving an account of oneself’ and, in light of these difficulties, to insist on the need for more epistemic humility in caring practices. Botti’s sentimentalist rereading of care first takes us back briefly to Hume’s work and to that of A. Baier and M. Slote—to indicate both the richness and the limits of their accounts of sympathy. But Botti also proposes to read Gilligan through a sentimentalist lense and she seeks to identify what is at the root of our sense of connection and responsibility towards others. The answer is to be found, Botti argues, not chiefly in verbal communication (e.g. listening, dialogue) but rather, in ‘sentimental communication’ (e.g. empathy). This interpretation of Gilligan opens up new avenues for theorizing care towards distant others. It is also quite helpful because it underscores the significance of symbolic/social needs and the opaque and always-mediated character of needs identification. Botti thinks readers have insufficiently appreciated the extent to which Gilligan underscored the great difficulties of recognizing and voicing one’s own

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‘true’ needs (and those of others). It is here, in light of this ‘humble’ assessment of our self-awareness, that Botti brings Gilligan into conversation with critical feminists Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler (who have both indicated that our efforts to enlarge our perspectives via the work of the imagination is always partial, limited.) One of Botti’s key insights for care ethics, then, is that there must be more humility in our encounters with others—a more modest estimation of our ability to imagine correctly what the other is going through or what her needs might be. It is humility that opens us up, Botti insists, to generosity. In the following chapter, Monika Betzler interrogates a common topos found in moral philosophy and care ethics: namely, that there is an obvious or necessary connection between the human capacity for empathy and the capacity for ethical behaviour. What Betzler demonstrates is that such a connection is anything but evident. After a brief review of different ways to approach the links between empathy and ethics (e.g. those of Slote, Noddings, Steinberg, and Hamington), Betzler proposes to turn to a novel by Elena Ferrante to make the case that while empathy is neither sufficient nor necessary for morality, it nevertheless has tremendous relational value. Empathy has, first, intrinsic relational value: when we experience it, we are given access to certain mental states that are good in themselves. But empathy also has extrinsic relational value according to Betzler: it can lead to additional co-created goods—goods that are not directly rooted in the experiential qualities of empathy as such, but that have value for well-being (e.g. attachment, increased self-esteem, recognition). Having made her case for the relational value of empathy, Betzler then argues that while we have a duty to empathize in our relationships, this is no absolute duty. For one thing, if we do often have moral reasons to empathize, we may also have, in certain cases, moral reasons to withhold empathy (for instance, if we are at risk of emotional exhaustion). The chapter concludes with brief remarks about how the inevitable partiality of empathy does not render it incompatible with impartial considerations in our moral lives. In some respects, Betzler’s text could be read as an answer to those we could call ‘empathy skeptics’; it considers the risk of mental exhaustion and the problem of partiality—the latter having been regarded as one reason why empathy might be deemed inappropriate for political life.

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If empathy has been an object of concern to many scholars, it is pity that has been the target of the most virulent criticisms. Indeed, few contemporary philosophers have defended the value of pity—most have followed in Nietzsche and Arendt’s footsteps and claimed that to offer pity is the hallmark of contemptuous, unequal or paternalistic relationships. The following chapter by Inge van Nistelrooij takes a bold and counter-intuitive position by seeking to defend the value of pity. To make her case Van Nistelrooij draws on two main authors: first, Nel Noddings, whose insight on the motivational pull of emotions in care deserve appreciation, despite its overly dyadic account of care (which renders the politicization of care ethics difficult). Second, she draws on the work of Emmanuel Housset, which is particularly helpful because it allows for the politicization of care ethics and offers a fine rebuttal to pity’s harshest critics. For Housset, pity is something that comes from the outside (it is an unconscious event that seizes us). It can thus lead to a decentering of the self, a self-effacement; and it is thanks to the latter that one might be able care for another. Pity is hence ‘community-building’. For Van Nistelrooij, there is in Housset much to offer to those seeking to counter the politics of distrust, isolation and ‘wall building’. And it is precisely here that she locates the criterion to judge what makes an emotion ethically relevant for care: “feeling is ethically relevant if, and only if, it is an opening (rather than a closing) to the other”. Stated differently, only if there is the possibility of a genuine sharing (an affective coexistence) can pity be desirable. Guido Cusinato’s chapter broadens the reflection on the intersection of care and affective co-existence, and it opens up nicely the third part of our book, which is chiefly dedicated to a series of reflections on the relationship between caring for the self and caring for others. Cusinato, more specifically, turns to the concept of ‘sharing emotions’ in order to propose a phenomenological/existential account of care. As readers will readily appreciate, Cusinato’s account is a deeply relational one, where care is characterized as an encounter with another that takes place at the trans-subjective rather than intersubjective level.2 This chapter finds much inspiration in the works of Max Scheler and Michael Tomasello—two authors who consider human beings as defined chiefly by their ability to engage in emotion-sharing practices. These practices

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are responsible both for various “social units” and for individualization processes, and as such, sharing emotions need not entail a negation of our singularities. Now, why exactly do humans seek to share emotions such as joy or grief? Cusinato argues that human beings do so in order to confirm and strengthen their very affective bonds. By underscoring at length what takes place on a trans-subjective level, Cusinato does not wish to minimize the significance of the concrete care work that addresses physical needs and repairs the world. But his goal is to invite his readers to give due regard to how care (as emotion-sharing) also answers much higher human needs. In the following chapter, Luigina Mortari proposes a phenomenological perspective on the complexities of our affective lives and the challenges these complexities lead to in care of the self practices (the imprint of Husserl and Heidegger on her reflection is significant). Building on the basic premise that we cannot have happy, flourishing lives without care, Mortari invites us to look more closely at what living well might entail in terms of our responsibility to care for ourselves. Her objective is not to disparage the importance of other-oriented care: she insists that the latter does enrich self-care. Nevertheless, she thinks it is crucial to understand that one cannot care well for others without first having taken care of oneself. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Michel Foucault, Mortari first invokes the example of Socrates, for whom to care for oneself entailed, above all, to know oneself: to know how one thinks (received opinion ought to be questioned), but also, Mortari insists, how one feels. Indeed, for Mortari, we must examine our ‘thinking’ and our ‘feeling’ together—and that was a key Socratic insight. But given that our affective lives are so complex and often opaque, how should we proceed in our search for self-understanding? Here, Mortari invites us to turn to the work of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano and in particular, to her phenomenological account of introspection as requiring an “open and receptive attention”—a slow, patient waiting for the unveiling of our sentiments. What is needed, according to Zambrano, is a kind of waiting, a ‘passivity’. Sophie Bourgault’s chapter pursues these reflections on attention and the kind of patient, passive receptivity that caring often entails.

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That there should be a resonance between Mortari’s chapter and this one is no coincidence: we know that María Zambrano was deeply influenced by Simone Weil (the key author examined by Bourgault) and more specifically, by Weil’s account of attention. Like Mortari, Bourgault is convinced that attending to the world and to others requires a genuine openness to alterity, a kind of “passive presence” [Mortari 2008, 11]. But contra Mortari, she shifts the focus back onto the other (rather than the self). More specifically, the aim of Bourgault’s chapter is to disentangle the affective and intellectual-cognitive aspects of attention—by returning to Weil’s account of attention (it has been, after all, the main one invoked by care ethicists). In their discussion of Weilian attention, most care ethicists have drawn intimate connections between love, compassion and attention; what Bourgault argues is that scholars ought to be careful not to sentimentalize Weilian attention. If Weil and her heir Iris Murdoch were both adamant that attention is love, what they understood as love was heavily informed by their rationalist Platonism. For Weil, compassion could facilitate attention, but it was not a prerequisite for it. What she regarded as most central for the purest attention was a desire for truth and justice—a desire that had to be free of selfish concerns. For Weil, indeed, caring attention to another demanded a crushing of the ego—a self-annihilation, a decreation. As Bourgault briefly indicates in her conclusion, a slightly more de-sentimentalized portrait of attention might open up new possibilities for theorizing state institutions that are caring and attentive. Like Bourgault, Vincenzo Sorrentino argues that a loss of self—a ‘forgetting’ of oneself—is part of what care often entails. Indeed, as he writes: “Those who do not manage to forget themselves […] and remain constantly enclosed within self-concern… [are] incapable of loving others.” Sorrentino’s discussion of this self-forgetting is part of a wider reflection on the different emotional tonalities that can inform care, which he understands, in its most basic and widest sense, as a “movement of opening up to the other”, an ecstatic opening. It is an opening that exposes us and that makes us vulnerable, but also that allows for wonder, pleasure, love and gratitude, Sorrentino insists. For him (and here he is clearly in agreement with other care theorists), it is misguided

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to regard care solely in terms of practices or activities. Care is also (if not more importantly in his view) a matter of internal disposition, a matter of feeling (“it is not just a doing, but it is also a feeling”). But what kind of feeling does care entail exactly? Sorrentino’s detailed answer (built on the works of such different authors as C. Taylor, M. Heidegger, L. Boella, H. Arendt, A. Pinotti) is plural rather than singular. Indeed, Sorrentino proposes a typology of different modalities of experiencing/opening oneself up to the world, each entailing a distinctive conception of care and a particular ‘affective tonality’. One of the many insights of Sorrentino’s chapter is that for caring encounters to be as free as possible from humiliation or paternalism, there has to be a genuine “emotional participation”, an active sharing, a genuine ability to listen and an availability to the affective life of the other. Finally, in chapter twelve, sociologist Rossana Trifiletti offers an empirically based study of the affective lives and experiences of home care migrant workers. Based on numerous biographical interviews conducted with Italian home-care assistants who work with elderly or disabled individuals, Trifiletti analyses the vast array of emotions that are involved in these care practices. Her chapter builds on the “emotional turn” that informs many contemporary studies on migration in sociology. She takes an approach that underscores the agency of care workers, and she shows that these care workers’ resilience vis-à-vis the challenges tied to their ‘labor of love’, to the issue of pay/wages and to negative emotions like disgust, is partially shaped by factors like age, cultural capital and gender. Trifiletti’s text also highlights the search for social recognition that permeates many of the narratives offered by home care workers and their understanding of care work as something that ought to be the object of pride (an emotion that has been somewhat neglected in the care ethics scholarship). Indeed, as many of the interviews nicely reveal, home care workers regard the work they perform as a significant and valuable public, common good. We hope that this volume will serve to bring renewed attention to the complexity of the relationship between care and emotions, and their mutual and fruitful influence. Care practices at once demonstrate and test the profoundly relational nature of the emotions [Manghi 2009];

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in turn, the study of the emotions reveals that care (as both practice and disposition) is not solely edifying and positive, but can also be negative and disheartening. As such, the study of emotions reveals to us the profound ambivalence of care relations. As many of our contributors argue, care is the testimony par excellence of the ethical potential of the emotions, and it is by developing a finer-grained analysis of the emotions involved in care—both positive and negative—that we might be able to find new tools for distinguishing between merely adequate care and good care. And it is our hope that through a finer account of the emotions that can accompany care, scholars might be able to think anew the issue of how to extend even further the bounds of the care relationship to the global level—a question that today has become inescapable. This means, to use a terminology proposed recently by the philosopher Rahel Jaeggi [2016], that care ought to be considered not merely as a practice and an affective disposition, but as a true “form of life.”

Notes 1

On this controversy, see Padis [2010]. The difference for Cusinato is that whereas inter-subjectivity suggests an exchange between two separate individuals who remain auto-referential, trans-subjectivity captures better the type of sharing that can take place beyond autoreferentiality. 2

Literature Bagnoli, C. ed. [2011], Morality and the Emotions, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Baier, A. [1987], “The Need for More Than Justice”, in Held, V. (ed.), Justice and Care. Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder, Westview Press, 1995. Baier A. [1995], Moral Prejudices, Cambridge Mass.-London, Harvard University Press. Boella, L. [2006], Sentire l’altro. Conoscere e praticare l’empatia, Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Boella L. [2012], Il coraggio dell’etica. Per una nuova immaginazione morale, Milano, Raffaello Cortina. Conradi, E. & F. Vosman ed. [2016], Praxis des Achtsamkeit. Schlüsselbegriffe der CareEthik, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag. Gilligan, C. [1982], In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C. [2011], Joining the Resistance, Cambridge-Molden, Polity Press. Held V. [2006], The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political and Global, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press.

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Housset, E. [2003], L’intelligence de la pitié. Phénoménologie de la communauté. Paris: La nuit surveillée. Housset, E. [2011], “The paradoxes of pity”, in C. Leget, C. Gastmans and M. Verkerk eds, Care, Compassion and Recognition: An Ethical Discussion, Leuven, Peeters. Jaeggi, R. [2015], “Towards an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life”, Raisons politiques, 57 (1), 13-29. doi:10.3917/rai.057.0013. Kittay, E. [1999], Love’s Labor. Essays in Women, Equality and Dependency. New York, NY: Routledge. Lecaldano E. [2013], Simpatia, Milano, Raffaello Cortina. LeGoff, A., [2008], “Care, empathie et justice. Un essai de problématisation”, in Revue du MAUSS, 2 : 32, pp.203-241. Leget, C., Gastmans, C. & Verkerk M. eds [2011], Care, compassion and recognition: An ethical discussion. Leuven, Peeters. Manghi, S. [2009], Legame emozionale, legame sociale, Prefazione a P. Dumouchel, Emozioni. Saggio sul corpo e il sociale, Medusa, Milano. Molinier, P., Laugier S., Paperman P. [2009], Qu’est-ce que le care ? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris, Payot. Mortari, L. [2008] “The ethic of delicacy in phenomenological research”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, 3:1, pp.3-17. Noddings, N. [1984], Caring. A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, BerkeleyLos Angeles, University of California Press. Nussbaum, M. [2001] Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Padis, Marc-Olivier [2010], “La polémique du care. Un débat qui mérite mieux que des caricatures”, Esprit, vol. juillet, no. 7, pp. 119-129. Paperman, P. [2009], “D’une voix discordante. Désentimentaliser le care, démoraliser l’éthique”, in Molinier P., Laugier S., Paperman P. (eds.) Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris, Payot. Paperman, P. [2013], Care et sentiments, Paris, PUF. Pinotti, A. [2011], Empatia. Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano, Rome-Bari, Laterza Pulcini, E. [2012], “Donner le care”, Revue du MAUSS, 1 (n° 39), pp. 49-66. Pulcini E. [2015], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotions Review, pp. 1-8. Robinson, F. [1999]. Globalizing care: Ethics, Feminist theory, and International Relations, Boulder, Westview Press. Ruddick, S. [1989], Maternal Thinking. Toward a Politics of Peace, Beacon Press, Boston. Slote, M. [2007], The Ethics of Care and Empathy, London-New York, Routledge. Tronto J. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York - London, Routledge. Zambrano, M. [1986], Claros del bosque, Barcelona: Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Zambrano, M. [1996], Persona y democrazia. La historia sacrificial. Fundatión Maria Zambrano– Madrid: Ediciones Siruela. Zambrano, M. [2007], Filosofía y Educación. Manuscritos. Málaga: Fundación María Zambrano.

2. What Emotions Motivate Care?• Elena Pulcini

Since its birth with Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice [1982], the ethics of care has given an important role to the topic of the emotions, starting from a critique of the liberal paradigm of justice. From Gilligan to Tronto, Noddings, through Held, to Kittay [Held 2006; Kittay 1999; Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993], albeit stressing different points, care theorists have questioned the abstract and rationalistic nature of the ethics of justice, based on the individualistic presuppositions of rights and autonomy, and proposed integrating it with the ethics of care: namely, with a perspective that aims to underscore the importance of relationships and interdependence, and consequently the essential role of sentiments and emotions. While agreeing with this ethical approach, I would like to underline one problematic aspect consisting of the fact that, while they stress the importance of the affective element for an ethics of care, care theorists nevertheless give a generic meaning to the affective and emotional dimension. My aim in this paper is on the contrary to emphasize the distinction between various emotions that inspire care. Starting from this distinction, I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action as defined by an ethics of care, in three different and exemplary contexts; second, to survey different potential obstacles to these emotions and propose how they might be overcome in order to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. But first I would like, albeit briefly, to make some preliminary considerations on the link between emotions and ethics. There seems to

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be no doubt, as has been the case for some decades now, concerning the cognitive function of emotions and the need to overcome the traditional reason/emotions dualism. Emotions are not blind and irrational forces; they are not, in the words of Jon Elster [1999], “sand in the machinery” of rationality.They are, rather, the motivational forces that presuppose the beliefs and judgments guiding our actions and our choices, both at an individual and social level. The definition by Martha Nussbaum [2001] of emotions as “upheavals of thought,” with their own peculiar intelligence, appears particularly convincing in this regard. Without adhering to an “Apollonian” conception of emotions, of which she recognizes the inherent dynamism and the perturbing function, Nussbaum proposes a cognitive-evaluative conception of the emotions. They are forms of evaluative judgment that ascribe to certain things and people a great importance and value for our wellbeing or flourishing. However, while it may be true that emotions always imply assessment, it is more difficult, as Nussbaum herself says, to understand whether and to what extent they allow a good evaluation; that is, what their role or contribution can be in an ethical perspective. Needless to say, the debate on this issue is too broad to be dealt with here. Suffice it to recall that while there is growing agreement on the cognitive role of the passions, their relationship with ethics still appears somewhat problematic [Bagnoli 2011]. In other words, can emotions be said to drive us to act ethically? And, if so, what kind of emotions? Modern and liberal philosophical thought, starting from Hobbes, gave us the idea that individuals are motivated primarily by self-interest and selfish emotions; and that the ethical response can only be entrusted to rational strategies and norms. However, recently we have seen the revaluation of a different school of thought, namely moral sentimentalism, which develops the ideas of some eighteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers, such as, among others, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Max Scheler, and affirms the existence of other and different motives for action, motives such as benevolence, generosity, and compassion. These are feelings that have their origin in that peculiar emotional quality that is sympathy, which, as many contemporary authors have pointed out,

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corresponds to what today we call empathy:2 namely, the ability to feel the emotions of another person. I will return to empathy, and to the difference between empathy and sympathy in its current meaning, and empathy and moral sentiments such as compassion, later on. Here I want to stress that according to this perspective, which tends toward a critique of moral rationalism [Lecaldano 2013; Nichols 2004; Slote 2010], it is starting from our moral sentiments as a constitutive part of human nature that we are able to make judgments about what is good and right, and act accordingly. This belief finds some confirmation today, as we know, in the scientific research of psychologists, biologists, and neuroscientists, which offers some evidence of the fact that we have the ability to understand and to “feel the other.”3 If it is true then that there is an indisputable link between emotions and morality, there is also no doubt that this opens up a number of questions, as is evident from contemporary debates: what are the moral sentiments? How can we distinguish them from the emotions in a broader sense? What makes them properly moral? I cannot, of course, go deeply into this matter here, but I want to emphasize at least two aspects that are quite relevant, as we shall see, to the link between emotions and forms of care. First, moral feelings are, in my opinion, not only “positive” feelings, as sustained by the tradition of moral sentimentalism, but also those passions that are traditionally considered “negative”: like, for instance, anger when it arises from indignation; or shame, when it implies selfcorrecting to avoid judgment from the other; or even fear, when it becomes, as I will suggest, fear for, fear for the fate of the other. Second, moral sentiments are not only those inspired by our immediate ability to empathize, but those we submit thoughtfully to our own approval. In other words, according to what has been called a “reflective sentimentalism,”4 the moral sentiments are the result of our ability to correct the partiality of our immediate sentiments, since we are able, through the faculty of imagination, to found them on an “extended” sympathy [Hume], or to submit them to the approval of an impartial spectator who represents the hypothetical “moral authority” [Smith].

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One of the main consequences is that we can always expand our circles of sympathy to include new and different subjects and contexts [Forman-Barzilai 2010], as we will see in the case of care for the distant other.

The Emotions of Care If we start from the presupposition, generally shared by all theorists, that care is not only a disposition, but also a practical and moral action5 inspired by emotions and feelings, we can therefore ask which sentiments might best motivate care, and how we might overcome certain potential obstacles to them. The question is all the more important precisely because, despite the enhancement of the affective dimension, the role of the different feelings has yet to be explored at length or with great precision by care theorists. Although Gilligan highlights the role of compassion and attachment in moral choice, Kittay traces care work back to love, and Held points out that individuals are not only motivated by selfish passions but also by empathy and responsiveness [Gilligan, 1982; Held, 2006; Kittay, 1999], their and other authors’ reference to the emotional dimension remains mainly generic. At the same time, some authors express a prudent skepticism toward feelings, not so as to deny their importance but to avoid them becoming the only foundation of the ethics of care [Laugier & Paperman 2006; Paperman 2013; Tronto 1993]. Tronto indeed argues that in modern thought the devaluation of care, and women, corresponded to the devaluation of the emotions as the negative polarity within the dichotomies of Western thought (male/female, reason/passions, public/private etc.). Consequently, to found care (only) on sentiments is to risk reproposing the reductive traditional image of a private and feminine dimension, and to preclude the necessary extension to the public and the social sphere (and the other sex): and hence the desirable universalization of care. For this reason, as Paperman says, we can recognize the importance of feelings for the ethics of care provided that they are “put in their place” (remis à leur place), namely, reconnected to the fabric of practices and relationships that form the care context,

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because it is only within that context that they take on meaning and value. I agree with this perspective, but I think that it might find further support through a more thorough investigation of the different feelings and emotions that motivate care. My suggestion is that we need to make deeper distinctions, for at least three fundamental reasons: first of all, to distinguish between the various forms of care and thus to propose not a single but a more complex and wider concept of care; in second place, to distinguish between the emancipatory and negative aspects of care; in third place, to identify what the effectively ethical dimension of care is likely to be. In other words, addressing the issue of care in terms of emotions allows us to better focus on the image of good care. I will assume, along with several scholars, that care presupposes the capacity for empathy.6 As I already mentioned, for some time now there has been a real and proper rediscovery of empathy in many different disciplines, from philosophy to neurosciences, which tends to enhance a relational image of the subject. As Edith Stein said in her seminal text [1917], the empathetic act corresponds to an “awareness” of the other’s feelings, while remaining conscious of the difference between oneself and the other [Vignemont & Jacob 2012]. Empathy is what allows us to enter a relationship with the other following the very discovery of her existence. It implies, in other words, “discovering the other” [Boella 2006], acknowledging her existence, that she is part of the world which we live in; it implies recognizing the other as being different from ourselves, but as having sentiments, thoughts, desires, like us. Therefore, we can generally agree with Michael Slote when, rooting the ethics of care in the tradition of moral sentimentalism, he claims that “caring motivation is based in and sustained by our human capacity for empathy with others” [Slote 2007, Introduction] and proposes the concept of an “empathic care.” Empathy, however, does not automatically produce an ethical response, since it does not imply a value judgment of the other’s emotion and experience. In other words, as a “fundamentally social capacity,” empathy is what allows us “to take part in the other’s affective situation, and adopt the other’s perspective” [Engelen & Röttger-Rössler 2012, 5]. Empathy permits us

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to understand and participate in the experience of the other. It is, as Hoffman says, “the spark of human concern, the glue that makes social life possible.” [Hoffman 2000, 3]. It is therefore a necessary precondition for the emergence of emotions that inspire moral action; but it is not sufficient, as it is not itself a moral sentiment [Lecaldano 2013; Nussbaum 2001, 327 ff.]. As is indeed confirmed by many authors, we must not confuse, for example, empathy with sympathy, which in its current meaning is “the mode of being for the other, in favour of the other”,7 or with compassion which, as we shall see, means feeling sorry for the other’s suffering;8 or with love, which promotes the well-being of the loved one [Scheler 2008]. In short, empathy is a morally neutral affective state that can give rise to a variety of (even negative) emotions, and each time this depends on who the other is and on the type of relationship binding us with her. Consequently, it is not enough to sustain that care presupposes the capacity for empathy: we have to ask what emotions are activated in the case of the care relationship in its different forms, and which are desirable insofar as ethically oriented. I would like to propose three models or types of caring relationships in which the figure of the other differs each time: three representative typologies (which I could define as private, social, and global) that are not meant to exhaust the multiplicity of forms of care9 nor the extent of possible motivations, but which allow us to focus on their diversity and on the role of different emotions. a. care out of love, that is, care toward someone to whom we are linked by a personal relationship (husband/wife/son/daughter, friend, brother/sister). In other words, it is a relationship in which the personal affective bond precedes the care; b. care work, namely care work in its particular dimension of care for the disabled, ill, elderly; among the many forms of care work, I will focus my attention on that which involves remuneration, so that the feeling can only follow the relationship, possibly arising inside it.

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c. care toward the unknown other, whether “distant” in space (people who live in poor and disadvantaged countries), or in time (future generations): as a significant example, today, of the possibility and the need to extend the ethics of care beyond family and close relationships. If we engage in these three forms of care, which emotions should underlie these relationships? Love, compassion, generosity? And what gives a truly ethical value to these emotions?

Care Out of Love In this first paradigmatic case I will focus on the relationships in which we take care of someone because we love them. Here the problem is to understand what type of love we are dealing with by questioning the very archetypes of this emotion: agape, eros, and philia. I cannot go into such a complex topic at present, but I would like at least to recall one of the most interesting definitions of love, given by Georg Simmel [1984] as a synthesis of these three dimensions: namely love as that special form of interaction which relates two subjects who are ready to expose themselves to the risk of a relationship with the other, without falling into the trap of forgetting themselves or cancelling the other. On the contrary, care is traditionally associated with an agapic and purely altruistic love that implies asymmetry and self-denial, as is the case of women and their history. Suffice it to think of the modern conception of conjugal and maternal love that concerns the role of women in particular. I am alluding to Rousseau’s vision of the woman as wife and mother that has persisted through the whole course of modernity [Rousseau 1979]; namely, the idea that women are naturally inclined to love and therefore care for the other (husband, children) since by doing so they realize their nature, their identity and their very destiny [Pulcini 1998]. Meant in this altruistic and selfless sense, love has ended up becoming a vehicle for inequality between the sexes, sacrifice and the domination of women. In the name of love, women have not only been relegated to the marginal role of caring subjects, confined to the private

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sphere and forced into a position of subjection, but also deprived of the passionate dimension of eros and desire, with the consequent grave mutilation of a fundamental aspect of their identity. It can legitimately be argued, according to a belief shared by feminist thought, that the first answer to this problem, which strives to avoid the risk of the traditional and sacrificial idea of care, consists of a re-appropriation of rights and justice. Indeed, this is what care theorists suggest when they propose distinguishing between a female and a feminist ethic. Women’s struggle for equal opportunities, to gain access to the professional and public sphere has long been, as we all know, the legitimate response to the condition of subordination and exclusion. But I would suggest that this is not enough. The conquest of dignity and rights in the public sphere does not necessarily imply the transformation of the imaginary and of the emotional sphere, as highlighted by contradictory situations which reveal the discrepancy between public and private. It may indeed be that a woman has gained a prestigious professional position or even a position of power in the public sphere, but continues to suffer oppression in the private realm where she is not able to assert her own rights because she is subject, in the name of love and of the bond, to emotional blackmail from her partner because of a distorted and possessive idea of love (as we can presently see in the increase of male violence towards women, from harassment, through stalking, to femicide). It is true then, as Anthony Giddens [1992] argues, that for some time we have been witnessing a profound transformation of intimacy, to which women have contributed significantly with their unprecedented achievements, giving the possibility of a “pure relationship” between the sexes, free from the constraints of reproduction and gender stereotypes. However, it is also true that, in the name of love, women are likely to remain imprisoned, despite the acquisition of rights, in an emotional subjection that is all the more powerful the more hidden it is under the veil of legal and social equality. The difficulty of exercising their own autonomy in the intimate sphere is therefore likely to return women to the traditional and Rousseauian image of care meant as that purely selfless and sacrificial dimension which finds

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further support in the rhetoric of maternal love, today paradoxically coexisting with the conquest of rights. Together with the sacrosanct defence of rights, we must then make a more thorough examination of the forms of love that inspire care, first of all by reintroducing an important dimension that is often overlooked, or even subject to blame and guilt, which is self-love: in accordance, for example, not only with the recent revaluation of this feeling proposed by Harry Frankfurt [2004] but also with some modern philosophers, from Spinoza to Rousseau.10 Holding significance in this regard are the words of Amy, the young protagonist of the moral dilemma presented by Gilligan [1982, 35], when she affirms the necessary link between caring for others and care for oneself: “[…] If you have a responsibility with somebody else, then you should keep it to a certain extent, but to the extent that it is really going to hurt you or stop you from doing something that you really, really want, then I think maybe you should put yourself first.” In other words, care for a loved one (partner or children) cannot be based on a purely altruistic and agapic idea of love, conceived of as natural dedication and selflessness. Hence, in this case good care implies overcoming the obstacle of a sacrificial idea of love and the ability to deem love, in the Simmelian sense, a conscious choice in which attention to the other does not exclude respect or self-awareness, and love for the other does not mean renouncing self-love.

Care Work This second typology is the one subject to most focus by both theoretical and empirical contemporary reflection. As well as multiple remunerated services (education, childcare, healthcare, care for the elderly), this care work also includes unpaid domestic work and various forms of volunteer work. To distinguish it from care out of love, I will focus on paid care work and in particular I will limit my analysis to work performed in the presence of the other’s extreme need, whether disabled, elderly or ill. Here the first problem concerns the presence of a monetary element. In this regard, the question that several authors have posed is

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whether it is possible to reconcile care and money. On one hand, as some maintain, it leads to the risk of commodifying affective work, since a material and utilitarian aspect irrupts into the care relationship, so to speak, corrupting the affective bond between the caregiver and receiver. As Negri and Hardt [2001] maintain for example, the distinctive feature of capitalism today is that it puts to work affections, bodies and emotions, thus exploiting the emotional component and people’s capability to create relationships (in the biopolitics of work) for its own ends (of acquisition and profit). To pay for affective work, or care work, therefore, is to risk commodifying emotions [Hochschild 1983] and alienating those doing it [Hardt & Negri 2004; Hochschild 2000]. On the other hand, according to the perspective that has been defined as the “love and money” frame [England 2005], some authors question the dualistic love/market view. They maintain that money and care are not necessarily antithetical and that the presence of remuneration does not corrupt the affective bonds [Nelson 1999; Zelizer 2010]. Some also suggest that fair remuneration, as a sign of respect and appreciation for the caregiver’s work, can even foster her attachment to the care receiver and save the “invisible heart” that nourishes the care relationship [Folbre 2001]. Fair pay can counteract the traditional devaluation of care work [England 2005, 381], because it implies that the state and institutions recognize the importance of care work and the dignity of caregivers, safeguarding their rights, and giving them suitable remuneration for their time and their skills. And this not only means that the payment of money is not in contradiction with the emotional relationship, but also that “the more that pay is combined with trust and appreciation, the less it drives out genuine intrinsic motivation—especially important in care work” [England 2005, 395]. In agreement with this statement, here I will assume that, despite the concern that pay may corrode affective bonds, both extrinsic (remuneration) and intrinsic motivations for care work can exist side by side. However, to come back to my initial question, we must now ask: what is this “intrinsic motivation?” or in other words, which emotions inspire care work? By taking into account many empirical works on the link between compassion and care,11 we can legitimately assume that the

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emotion that guides care work, or rather the sector of care work on which I am focusing here, could be compassion: which means, as I have already pointed out while distinguishing it from empathy, being sorry for the other’s suffering. To use the definition by Martha Nussbaum, compassion is a painful emotion caused by the awareness of the undeserved suffering of another person, because we assume the point of view of an impartial observer. It is one of those passions that, arising from the awareness of our own vulnerability, can “expand the boundaries of the self.” The moral sentiment par excellence, compassion requires the capability to identify with the other’s unease and suffering while remaining aware of the distinction between self and other [Nussbaum 2001].12 Compassion implies an extension of ourselves at the same time as attention to the other who is an important part of our own sphere of interest and aims, or, in other words, “circle of concern” [Nussbaum 2001, 336]. This means that compassion must not be understood in the charity-giving and altruistic sense of pity, but instead as a suffering-with, a common feeling that implies the recognition of a common humanity. It is therefore reasonable to expect that those who provide care, especially in situations of serious suffering and extreme fragility of the other, are motivated by compassion for the care receiver. In other words, this is what we would judge the “right” emotion to be felt in care work [Stenner 2005]. However, it is undeniable that obstacles to compassion may arise, due to the asymmetry of the care relationship. A first obstacle is essentially psychological, and it is due to what I would define as the rejection or the fear of vulnerability. Indeed, it may be, as Kittay [1999] observes, that the caregiver, or rather the dependency worker, abuses her power and establishes a relationship of domination, if not of violence, toward the other. It can be assumed that this is due to disgust toward the other’s dependency and the desire to exorcise this through an emotional detachment. And the opposite can also be the case: that it is the care receiver, first of all when sensing the other’s hostility, who exercises his power over the caregiver, through forms of tyranny and emotional blackmail that tend to humiliate her. In this case we can assume that the care receivers are driven by feelings of anger and resentment toward

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the person perceived as deciding on their well-being and controlling their life.13 In both situations, what emerges is the rejection of vulnerability, which is exorcised or exploited by exercising power over the other. A second obstacle to compassion can also be essentially material and social, because it originates in differences of class, status or race. The sensitivity to the other’s suffering can be compromised by social inequality and the strongly disadvantaged condition of the caregiver. Just think of the migrant women who come from poor countries in order to help the elderly and disabled people in the wealthy families of rich countries. A new phenomenon produced by globalization, these migrants’ condition is clearly a challenge to the caring relationship [Hochschild 2000; 2003]. It is often underpaid women who fill the gaps of a welfare state unable to provide adequate support for the problem of dependency, who leave their families for a long time to live in other households (live-in workers), entrusting their own children to other women. Arlie Hochschild speaks in this connection of a “global heart transplant” within “care chains” [see also Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2002; Zimmerman, Litt, & Bose 2006], in which these women are the weakest link because they are forced to sacrifice their ties with their family of origin. It is easy to imagine that the emotional bond with the care receivers, and compassion for their suffering, can be hampered by this sacrifice; as well as by the fact that the caregivers’ renunciation is not compensated by adequate economic support or a legitimate recognition of their work. Hence, we need to restore dignity to care work. In the first place this means dealing with a problem of justice, namely activating policies that assure the caregiver material and legal justice (protection of fundamental rights, fair remuneration). But it also requires a profound change in the cultural and symbolic dimension: we need, according to many care theorists from Eva Kittay [1999] to Marian Barnes [2012], to recognize the dignity of dependency and vulnerability. The myth of autonomy and independence on which the figure of the modern subject was built [Pulcini 2012a/b]14 has effectively removed the reality of our mutual dependence and constitutive “neediness”; it has obscured the fact that we depend on each other, and not only in conditions of extreme suffering and neediness.15

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It is because of this denial that feelings of disgust and fear are likely to emerge in the care relationship which—although they may not turn into forms of violence, like the physical and emotional abuse seen on the websites of medical and psychological associations—undoubtedly compromise the possibility of an emotional bond supported by the “right” emotions, such as compassion and sympathetic participation. In this second paradigmatic case, therefore, good care needs to overcome the obstacles to compassion and cultivate this intrinsic motivation so as to counteract the reciprocal reactions of disgust and resentment. Consequently, it can avoid the risk of domination and humiliation and promote the spirit of cooperation on the part of both members of the relationship.

Care Toward the Distant Other I now come to the third form of care to which I would particularly like to pay attention: a new form (that we can hope will come to pass) which implies that care can go beyond the limits of the face-to-face relationship. What this form requires first of all is an extension of the figure of the other because of global transformations. Today, the other is not just the family member, loved one, or neighbour in need: it is also the unknown other. A very broad figure indeed, including first of all “local strangers” or, to use Georg Simmel’s words, the “strangers within” [Simmel 1950]—from migrants to marginalized people living in the suburbs of our cities—who confront us with the new and endemic challenge of Otherness, and our inability to provide hospitality and care for those that our imagination stigmatizes as different.16 Here, however, I shall only concentrate on the distant other because I want to focus, as I mentioned before, on the global dimension of care, given the transformations of the very concept of distance produced by globalization. Nowadays, we live in an interdependent world in which distant people become important to us: not only people who are distant in space but also people who are distant in time. In the first case, I am alluding to the poor and disadvantaged peoples of the planet, afflicted by wars, hunger or famines; and also to people affected by a catastrophe or a

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dramatic collective event (earthquakes, tsunamis, environmental disasters). In the second case, I am alluding to those future generations who will inherit the world as we hand it to them. Before asking what motivations could lie behind caring for distant others, we must ask whether the ethics of care can be extended to them. We can say, following the proposal of Fiona Robinson [1999], that the very concept of distance has undergone a fundamental change in the global age: globalization in fact reduces distance because it produces an unprecedented condition of interdependence owing to what has been called a “time-space compression” [Harvey 1989]. In other words, globalization implies that not only those who live in the present and in our area, but that new figures, the other-distant-in-space and the otherdistant-in-time, become potentially significant for us too, since they become part of our “circle of concern.” 17 This means that, despite the skepticism shared by several care theorists, we can recognize not just the legitimacy, but also the necessity to expand the ethics of care to the distant other.18 Neverthless, the question is: what motivations can drive human beings to recognize this objective condition and consequently to take action for people to whom they are not bound by either a personal or professional relationship, to be concerned about their needs, to take their suffering and destiny to heart? What motivations and passions should come into play in the case of the distant other? In the first case, that is, of the other distant in space, it seems plausible to again assume the emergence of compassion. It is true that compassion involves the proximity of the other, the face-to-face relationship.19 However, we can assume it in a wider sense, as a love for humankind, a sharing of suffering that is prompted by recognizing a common belonging to humankind [Schopenhauer 1999; Hillesum 2002]. While it may be true, as I suggested at the beginning, that through imagination we can access different and far-off experiences, this also means that we can extend our feelings to people and situations that are not in our immediate proximity. Globalization, in other words, objectively promotes our capability to expand the figure of the other, whom we make the object of our moral sentiments. In this sense, we can agree

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with the recent proposal by sociologist Luc Boltanski [1993] who strongly reappraises what he defines as a “politics of pity,” given the current explosion of the “question of humanitarianism.” While wondering what answers and what forms of engagement are possible in the face of “distant suffering,” or better, of the “spectacle of suffering” put across by the media images, he emphasizes the fundamental role of emotions and especially pity (here, equivalent to compassion). Indeed, this emotion can grow even in the presence of media images, and turn us into “affected” spectators, able to actively involve ourselves and others through “affected speech”, namely by telling others about what we have seen and how we were moved by it. The ability to feel compassion for the other distant in space—I would add, touching a theme that I cannot develop here—also predisposes us to hospitality when, such as in the macroscopic case of mass migrations, the distant other crosses our borders and can potentially turn into the Simmelian “stranger within”, the one who comes in order to stay, whom I mentioned before [Simmel 1950]. While agreeing with Boltanski’s proposal, I would like to suggest, however, that the passage to involvement and commitment is probably more complex than he seems to think, as I will investigate shortly along with the second figure of the distant other, that is to say, the other distant in time. And I will now focus on this, owing to the particular challenges it poses for an ethics of care today. The problem of the other distant in time has been dealt with by philosophical reflection since the second half of the twentieth century, in view of the new challenges posed by the age of technology and the risks that it produces in a global world20. In particular I am thinking of the philosopher Hans Jonas [1985] who for the first time grasped that an ecological crisis was coming to pass due to the hubris of the modern individual, to the unlimited action of homo faber and his Promethean omnipotence. Against the evils produced by the technological age and the danger of humankind’s self-destruction, Jonas put forward an ethics of care and responsibility that restores sense and purpose to action and drives individuals to take charge of the future, and posterity. Faced with the specter of the “loss of the world,” the only possible answer for us is a responsible

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action that allows us to rediscover the sense of a limit and to give future generations a world in which life is worthy of being lived. Here I think it is clear that we cannot trust compassion to be the motivation for an ethics of care and responsibility for the future because, while compassion may not require the other’s presence and proximity, it does need the other’s existence, hence it cannot be activated toward the not-yet-born. We could instead agree with some recent reflections, such as those of Jeremy Rifkin [2009] and Peter Singer [2011], in pointing out the importance of empathy today and suggesting that the global age creates the objective conditions for the awakening of an empathic consciousness. The fact that we live in an interdependent world produces the awareness that we are part of one humankind, facing the same challenges and the same fate, above all united by the same condition of vulnerability. I have said, however, that empathy is only the presupposition for moral action, that it is not sufficient, by itself, to create a motivation, unless it is translated into a particular emotion each time. Therefore, we can take up Jonas’ proposal when he sees fear as the emotional source of an ethics of responsibility; an empathetic fear, we could say, which essentially appears not only as a fear of, but rather as a “fear for”: for the other and for future humankind, to whom we feel linked by an intergenerational chain [see Pulcini 2012a]. This is, in other words, a paradigmatic case of a “negative” emotion, as I mentioned at the beginning, such as fear, which may result in a moral sentiment provided that we are able to activate the faculty of imagination, detach ourselves from the immediacy of the present, foresee future scenarios and imagine the possible catastrophe of humankind. However, here a difficulty arises, common to both figures of the distant other, which concerns the subsequent passage to commitment and care. While supposing that these emotions will arise (compassion for the other distant in space, fear for the other distant in time), nevertheless the risk is that it will stall at the purely emotional dimension: the spectator’s commotion talked about by Boltanski in the face of media images of distant suffering, or the virtuous fear hoped for by Jonas of individuals aware of the risks of humankind, may in other

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words only go so far. That is to say, we may only feel these emotions; they may not be transformed into the engagement and mobilization that give rise to care (such as offering our own time and professional expertise to help people in remote and disadvantaged situations, or fighting destructive policies in order to protect the environment, resources, and common goods). Undoubtedly the risk of a lack of commitment also applies to other types of care, but it is much more likely in the case of the distant other. Indeed, in this third case, there is neither a personal relationship that concretely links us to the other, nor loving affection or professional interest. So, what I would like to sustain is that a giving attitude is required which, I shall immediately underline, must not be understood as pure altruism: it is rather a disposition toward gratuitousness and generosity that not only implies recognizing our own vulnerability, but also that we are ontologically indebted toward each other. And this is the logic of the gift as proposed by the authors of the MAUSS,21 which works in the social field, asserting and fuelling the value of the bond and sharing [Godbout & Caillé 2001; Mauss 2002].22 According to this logic, attention, solidarity, and solicitude toward the other derive from the fact that we are, and we recognize ourselves as involved in a cycle of reciprocity, or better in a circle of enlarged reciprocity, within which each one of us returns to a third person what we have in turn received or might potentially receive.23 As a gift, care presupposes an inclination toward gratuitousness, generous action, starting from the emotionally based awareness of reciprocal belonging and interdependence. As a gift, care is able not only to oppose the logic of individualism, but also to go beyond the same ethics of justice, guided by the symmetrical “logic of equivalence,” to affirm a “logic of superabundance” [Ricoeur 1996]: acting as concrete involvement and commitment toward future generations [Pulcini 2012a]. In this third case, therefore, good care first requires us to overcome the obstacle of distance through our imagination and include in our circle of concern someone whom we do not know and do not see, while recognizing that, in a global and interdependent world, they matter for us: this is the prerequisite for activating compassion (for the other distant in space) and an empathetic fear (for the other distant in time).

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Second, turning these emotions into commitment and practice requires, more than in the other forms of care, a giving attitude founded on the awareness of our own vulnerability and mutual indebtedness. This third form of care, I would also like to suggest, is that which is properly moral, because it is neither preceded by a personal feeling toward the other, nor “contaminated” by a retributive aspect. To conclude, we can reaffirm that what unites the three types of care is the importance of the relationship and the emotional bond. Without a doubt, one of the more fruitful aspects of feminist thought and the ethics of care is their having based care on a relational idea of the subject and emphasized the affective dimension of the care relationship. However, as I have tried to show, the quality and the shape of the relationship also depend on the different passions that inspire it. Understanding and distinguishing the passions not only allows us to counter the possible negative aspects of the care relationship and to engage in good care, but also to extend the concept of care (from the private to the social to the global), so as to give a better account, together with the multiplicity of motivations, of the unlimited potential of its range of action.

Notes •

This paper corresponds, except for a few variations and integrations, to the article of the same name published in Emotion Review, 2016, pp. 64-71. 2 See Darwall [1998]. On the complexity of the concept of empathy, in that it often contains other similar concepts, see Batson [2011]. 3 For an update on the empathy debate see Cuff B.M.P., Brown, S.J., Taylor L., & Douglas J. [2014], and Engelen & Röttger-Rössler [2012]. 4 See, among others, Frazer [2010] and Taylor [2015]. 5 Care, says Tronto, “is not simply a cerebral concern, or a character trait, but the concern of living, active humans engaged in the processes of everyday living. Care is both a practice and a disposition” [1993, 132]. 6 To cite just a few: Hoffman [2000]; Darwall [1998]; Gilligan [2011]; Mercer & Reynolds [2002]; Slote [2007]; Weiner & Auster [2007]. 7 The distinction between empathy and sympathy has been described as “feeling as and feeling for the other” [B. Cuff et al., 2014, 2]. 8 Compassion is “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help,” [Goetz et al., 2010]. On the distinction between empathy and compassion see also Nussbaum [2006, 302].

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9

On the multiplicity of caring relationships (in the family and friendships, with neighbours and strangers, etc.), see Barnes [2012]. 10 A self-love, we could say with Kristin Neff [2011], that was meant more as selfcompassion than self-esteem. 11 See in particular in the field of nursing care, healthcare and care for the elderly, aimed especially at professionals and educators [for example Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/is-compassion-a-necessarycomponent-of-healthcare]. There is even a Journal of Compassionate Health Care, http:// www.jcompassionatehc.com. Moreover, by visiting the websites of associations and care institutions it can easily be seen that a capacity for “compassionate care” is considered an essential requirement for those wishing to operate in these areas. See also some recent contributions by care theorists [for example Leget et al., 2011]. 12 Nevertheless, I would like to remember that for Nussbaum compassion is the passion that inspires justice. 13 On degenerative forms of care, see also Card [1990, 101-108] and Tronto [1993]. 14 It is a myth that now historical research has also proven wrong [Reddy 2009]. 15 While reflecting on justice and care, Nussbaum [2006] and Kittay [1999] put particular emphasis on the issue of disability. See also Susan Wendell [1996]. 16 These issues are at the center of important reflection in post-colonial studies, as can be seen in Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., Tiffin, H., eds, 2000, Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts, London, Routledge. 17 In the first case, because globalization breaks down the boundaries between inside and outside; in the second case, because future generations are the potential victims of the unintended effects of our actions; on these issues, see Pulcini, 2012a. 18 “The care that is valued by the ethics of care can - and to be justifiable must include caring for distant others in an interdependent world, and caring that the rights of all are respected and their needs met” [Held 2006, 66]. 19 See the definition of compassion cited in note 7, which is confirmed, we could say on the symbolic level, by the parable of the Good Samaritan. 20 Just think of the two main global risks: the nuclear threat and the ecological crisis, which are, respectively, the subjects of the reflection of G.Anders [1956] and H. Jonas [1985]. 21 Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste en Sciences Sociales. 22 For a philosophical reflection on the “Maussian” gift, see Pulcini [2012b], ch. 5. 23 As Marcel Hénaff reminds us, it is what Mauss calls “indirect reciprocity” [Hénaff 2010].

Literature Anders, G. [1956], Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. I, München: C.H. Beck Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin H., Eds. [2000]. Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Bagnoli, C. [2011], Morality and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnes, M. [2012], Care in everyday life: An ethic of care in practice. Bristol, England: The Policy Press.

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Batson, C.D. [2011], “These things called empathy. Eight related but distinct phenomena”, in J.Decety & Ickes W., Eds. [2009]. The social neuroscience of empathy [pp.3-16]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boella, L. [2006], Sentire l’altro. Milan, Italy: Cortina. Boltanski, L. [1999], Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Card, C. [1990], “Caring and evil. Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education by Nel Noddings”. Hypatia, 5 [1]. Cuff, B. M. P., Brown, S. J., Taylor L., & Douglas J. [2014], “Empathy: a review of the concept”, in Emotion Review, vol. 0. doi:10.1177/1754073914558466 Darwall, S. [1998], “Empathy, sympathy, and care”, in Philosophical Studies, 89, 261–282. doi: 10.1023/A:1004289113917 Elster, J. [1999], Alchemies of the Mind. Rationality and Emotions. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Engelen E. M., & Röttger-Rössler B. [2012], “Current disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates on empathy”, in Emotion Review, 6 [1]. doi: 10.1177/1754073911422287 England, P. [2005], “Emerging theories of care work”, in Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 381–99. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.31.041304.122317 Frankfurt, H. G. [2004], The reasons of love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frazer, M. L. [2010], The enlightenment of sympathy: Reflective sentimentalism in the eighteenth century and today. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ehrenreich, B., & Russell Hochschild, A., Eds. [2004], Global woman: Nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Folbre N. [2001], The Invisible Heart: Economics and family values. New York, NY: New Press. Forman-Barzilai, F. [2010], Adam Smith and the circles of sympathy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. [1992], The transformation of intimacy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gilligan, C. [1982], In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Gilligan, C. [2011], Joining the resistance. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Godbout, J., & Caillé, A. [2001], The World of the Gift. Montreal, Canada: McGill/ Queens University Press. Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon–Thomas, E. [2010], “Compassion. An evolutionary analysis and empirical review”, in Psychological Bulletin, 136[3], 351-374. doi: 10.1037/ a0018807 Hardt, M., & Negri, A. [2001], Empire. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. [2004], Multitude. War and democracy in the age of empire, New York, NY: Penguin Press. Harvey, D. [1989], The Condition of Postmodernity. London, England: Basil Blackwell. Held, V. [2006], The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hénaff, M. [2010], “Mauss et l’invention de la réciprocité”, in Revue du Mauss, n. 36, Paris: La Découverte Hillesum, E. [2002], The letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. Ottawa, ON: Novalis Saint Paul University –Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.

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Hochschild, A. R. [1983], The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hochschild, A. R. [2000], “The nanny chain”, in American Prospects. November. http://prospect.org/article/nanny-chain Hochschild, A. R. [2003], The commercialization of intimate life: Notes from home and work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoffman, M.L. [2000], Empathy and Moral Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jonas, H. [1985], The imperative of responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kittay, E. [1999], Love’s Labor. Essays in Women, Equality and Dependency. New York, NY: Routledge. Laugier, S., & Paperman, P., Eds. [2006], Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care. Paris, France: EHESS. Lecaldano, E. [2013], Simpatia. Milan, Italy: Cortina. Leget, C., Gastmans C., & Verkerk M. Eds. [2011], Care, compassion and recognition: An ethical discussion. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers Mauss, M. [2002]. The gift [1923], London, England: Routledge. Mercer, S. W. & Reynolds, W. J. [2002], “Empathy and quality of care”, in British Journal of General Practice, 52, 9-13. doi: 10.1002/wps.20146 Neff, K. [2011], Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. New York, NY: William Morrow. Nelson, J. A. [1999], “Of markets and martyrs: Is it OK to pay well for care?” Feminist Economics, 5[3], 43-59. doi: 10.1080/ 135457099337806 Nichols, S. [2004], Sentimental rules: On the natural foundations of moral judgment. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Noddings, N. [1984], Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nussbaum, M. [2001], Upheavals of thought. The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. [2006], Frontiers of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paperman, P. [2013], Care et sentiments. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France. Pulcini, E. [1998], Amour-passion et amour conjugal. Rousseau et l’origine d’un conflit moderne, Paris, France; Geneva, Switzerland: Champion-Slatkine. Pulcini, E. [2012a], Care of the World. Fear, Responsiblity and Justice in the Global Age. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Pulcini, E. [2012b], The Individual without Passions. Modern Individualism and the Loss of the Social Bond. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Reddy, W. M. [2009], “Historical research on self and emotions”, in Emotion Review, 1 [4], 302-315. doi: 10.1177/1754073909338306 Ricoeur, P. [1996], “Love and justice”, in P. Ricoeur and R. Kearney [Eds.], The Hermeneutics of action. London, England: Sage. Rifkin, J. [2009], The empathic civilisation. The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Robinson, F. [1999], Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Rousseau, J. J. [1979], Emile or on education [1762]. New York, NY: Basic Books. Scheler, M. [2008], The Nature of Sympathy [1923]. New Brunswick, NJ – London, England: Transaction Publishers Sen, A. [2009], The Idea of Justice. London, England: Allen Lane. Schopenhauer, A. [1999], On the Basis of Morality [1940]. Indianapolis - Cambridge, England: Hackett Publishing Company. Simmel G. [1984], A fragment on love [1921]. In G. Simmel, On women, sexuality and love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simmel, G. [1950], “The stranger” [1908]. In K. Wolff [Ed.] The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 402-408. Singer, P. [2011], The expanding circle. Ethics, evolution, and moral progress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Slote, M. [2007], The ethics of care and empathy. London, England-New York, NY: Routledge. Slote, M. [2010], Moral sentimentalism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Stein, E. [1964], On the problem of empathy [1917]. The Hague, Netherlands: M. Nijhoff. Stenner, P. [2005], “Emotions and rights or: On the importance of having the right emotions”, in History and Philosophy of Psychology, 7 [1], 11-21. Taylor, J. [2015], Reflecting subjects. Passion, sympathy, and society in Hume’s philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Tronto, J. [1993], Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. London, England: Routledge. Vignemont, F. de, & Jacob, P. [2012], “What is it like to feel another’s pain?”, Philosophy of Science, 79 [2], 295-316. doi: 10.1086/664742 Weiner, S.J., & Auster, S. [2007], “From empathy to caring: Defining the ideal approach to a healing relationship”, in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 80 [3], 123-130. Wendell, S. [1996]. The rejected body. New York, NY: Routledge. Zelizer, V. A. [2010], “Caring everywhere”, in R. Parreñas, & E. Boris [Eds.] Intimate labors: Cultures, technologies, and the politics of care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zimmerman, M. K., Litt, J. S., & Bose, C. E., Eds. [2006], Global dimensions of gender and carework. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

3. The Work of Emotions Fabienne Brugère

The ethics of care cannot be separated from emotional factors. For one thing, it addresses ethically significant relationships that cannot be reduced to rules, principles or practical reason. It also attests to ways of existing with others that serve to emphasize the importance of moral sentiments and affective dispositions (such as pity, compassion, solicitude, and sympathy). Within the epistemological exercise of attempting to understand the meaning of morality, the ethics of care focusses on emotions rather than reason, on the ordering of passions rather than argumentation. More specifically, certain kinds of emotions or feelings are brought to the fore, contrary to what is found within more dominant rationalist approaches related to Kant’s practical philosophy. From the perspective of care, ethical inquiries based in reason and rationalist deductions appear inadequate and hardly justified in their dominant status. Indeed, these Kantian approaches often sever the connection to the sensory world, which is urgently in need of being restored. Moreover, many rationalist moral theories put the emotions out of play altogether and automatically equate them with a hazardous partiality: selfserving inclinations and private interests may gain the upper hand, enabling bias and self-concern, hindering universality. Contrary to these rationalist theories, the ethics of care concerns itself with the realm of feelings, including those that are said to be “private” or partial, and asks which emotions are the most beneficial in ethics. Here, emotions are often said to be accompanied by relational qualities that are relevant to the social sphere (both interpersonal and

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institutional). Structured around concern for others or “taking care of”, this ethics thus looks at moral behaviours inasmuch as they involve dependencies on others or interdependency among people and within society. This interconnected society cannot be understood without examining the affective domain or without marshalling a labour of the emotions. The relationships between parents and their children, between a patient and a medical professional, or between someone with a disability and the people who assist them, for example, are indissociable from their affective components, from all the heaviness and hardships that may go along with them. The ethics of care is concerned with relationships that are fragile and open to emotion and that have a need for some form of rectitude for addressing the care of subjects in need and of vulnerable individuals. These relationships, which are asymmetrical yet always changing, need to be able to redress inequalities in the name of this concern for others. This conceptualization of ethics, as such, questions a philosophical tradition that has largely been structured around the endorsement of a universalist and corrective morality. Thus, for example, an ethics of care will recognize that all parents have a moral obligation to care for their children and to look after their needs until they become autonomous. However, this recognized obligation does not mean that all relationships between parents and their children are adequate to that end, nor does it mean that all children live in a family context that nurtures their personal development. This difference in perspective between a relational ethic and an abstract moral correctness was first put forward during the 1980s by Carol Gilligan. According to her, two orientations may be recognized and distinguished: the perspective of justice, which is the dominant perspective, and that of care (of “taking care of”) overlooked by the intellectual tradition and yet capable, according to Gillian, of constituting an alternative morality. As Gilligan writes, Theoretically, the distinction between justice and care cuts across the familiar division between thinking and feeling, egoism and altruism, theoretical and practical reasoning. It calls attention to the fact that all human relationships, public and private, can be characterized both in terms of equality

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and in terms of attachment, and that both inequality and detachment constitute grounds for moral concern. Since everyone is vulnerable both to oppression and to abandonment, two moral visions—one of justice and one of care—recur in human experience [Held 1995, 32].

The distinction between justice and care thus relates to another distinction, namely, the one between thought and emotion. Relations of care, according to Gilligan, are constituted in terms of attachment, which means that the emotional bond between a parent and child may serve as the model of care. Attachment consists in a relation to others based in a strong emotional dependency that involves having one’s needs met. Thus, parents are supposed to provide their children with physical and emotional security. For example, Winnicott’s “good enough mother” [1953] serves to underscore physical and emotional attachment that develops on a daily basis with the child. This attachment is primary and develops before any attachment to transitional objects; this bond consists of a love between two imperfect individuals, in which the mother often also adapts to her child. The “good enough mother” provides bodily care and meets her infant’s needs for love and emotional comfort. We could also say that she protects her infant from those parts of herself that could potentially make her resort to violence when the newborn continually screams and cries. By containing her own feelings of hostile resentment and rage toward her child in these moments, the “good enough mother” facilitates a sense of omnipotence in her child. All this is achieved when the mother is able to adapt her care to the infant’s needs, until such time as the infant gradually begins to feel secure enough to give up these beginning-stage emotions and this initial exclusive attachment to the one who cares for them on a daily basis. Around this time, the process of ego integration may begin as the infant develops a sense of what is “me” and what is “not-me.” A caregiver who is not able to contain her own emotions compromises the infant’s development process. What is crucial here is this concept of “dependence” and the fact that the infant follows a path that takes them from total dependence to relative dependence in a gradual way while feeling secure, so that the infant may begin to learn to tolerate frustrations from the outside world and outside the bond between

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themselves and the mother. This relation consists of a true labour of emotions that begins in the space of needs to be met. The example of the “good enough mother” gives substance to a kind of dependency that has to do with needs to be met. The newborn is far from self-sufficient; they are very closely connected with those who are instrumental and indispensable to the development of their life. They are vulnerable, and utterly so, in the case of abandonment. The issue of vulnerability and of degrees of vulnerability is of utmost importance to the ethics of care. Emotional development is accomplished in terms of moral engagement. The child’s connection to caregivers thus involves a bonded ego, for whom vulnerability and emotional responsiveness are essential. On the one hand, vulnerability presupposes a conception of human beings that reestablishes feeling or emotional relation as a basis for action and as something that permeates all ethical behaviour. But on the other hand, this emphasis on attachment as a model of care is not without its consequences and certainly warrants a critical discussion and evaluation on our part. Drawing the connections between love, emotion, and the relationship between a mother and her child implicates other connections between ethics and women, or ethics and the family. Moreover, drawing these connections also involves denouncing the abuses of power that can be committed in the guise of care. For Carol Gilligan [1982], the theme of care can be heard in the various, stifled voices of women, voices that express a form of individuation based in empathy, or in a capacity to experience needs (or feelings) and to appreciate vulnerability. By contrast, Gilligan identifies signs of detachment and a lack of concern for others as characteristically male rather than female. It is essential to analyze how, according to Gilligan’s account, relations with others according to one’s gender, figure in the construction of a kind of morality that strongly links women with the emotional. There are, of course, pitfalls involved in such an approach: how should we gauge analyses that invoke a feminine ideal bound up with the ethics of care—for example, a sentiment-based feminine nature? Are such naturalizations of female behaviour legitimate? Should we not “de-sentimentalize” the emotions, deconstruct

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them? The work of emotions requires a measure of appropriate distance within care relationships and may potentially appeal to other models of care than the maternal one. How, then, do we avoid stripping the ethics of care of its emotional plasticity without at the same time limiting it to a woman’s affair?

1. An anthropology of vulnerability and the sphere of emotions If the sphere of the emotions can be said to have been given its due within the philosophical tradition, this is mainly the work of Scottish philosophers such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, who all addressed moral life through the role played by moral sentiments. Thanks to them, the concepts of “moral sense” or “sympathy” became essential. They challenged the abstract rules of the dominant theories organized around the ideas that moral maturity is a rational matter and that rationality is bound up with the will or the autonomy of human beings. On the contrary, moral sentimentalism has insisted that to demonstrate the moral significance of affectivity is to posit that people have emotional needs that tether them to the world and to others and that shape their ways of living, which are not exclusively rational. This moral, or rather, ethical course, because it addresses ways of being in the world, accounts for interactions between individuals and their interdependence in a way consistent with a model of a decent society and with a view to a dignified life. This sentimentalist ethics consists in understanding human relations in a way that is quite at a distance from the model of a liberal society rooted in the ideal of autonomy and its emblematic figure of the subject of rights. Annette Baier, reflecting on Gilligan’s transformative In a Different Voice, thus opposes two moral approaches that account for the emotions differently: The emphasis in Kantian theories on rational control of emotions, rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion, is challenged by Gilligan, along with the challenge to the assumption of the centrality of autonomy, or relations between equals, and of freely chosen relations [Held 1995, 57].

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What, then, does it mean to cultivate desirable forms of emotions as opposed to keeping them under control? Annette Baier appeals to the role of the parent in order to elucidate her argument. Parents actually need to love their children, and not just to exercise control over the latter’s moods and whims. The parent-child relationship cannot be thought of altogether as equal: the child is indeed on an unequal footing vis-à-vis their parents. While they did not choose their current situation, they certainly need a kind of love that makes them feel seen and heard and makes them feel like they have a place within the family (assuming parental responsibility involves something other than power and control). Crucial in the care of children is a kind of attention and protection that does not exclude a significant depth and wide range of emotions. Love is surely emotional. Rethinking an ethic according to this model means redrawing the connection between the sphere of emotions and the preservation and development of human life. Human subjects are to be regarded as bearers of needs, as creatures defined by vulnerability: they are susceptible to harm or to having their life taken from them. They have a fundamental need for attachment and love. It is important to insist on our common human vulnerability. For one thing, to use the concept of “vulnerability” to define humanity opens the way to a subversion of modern individualism, specifically the kind of individualism developed in 17th century contract theory (in political philosophies as different as those of Hobbes and Locke). Challenging the conception of the isolated—and often calculating—individual makes new room for the emotions. Vulnerability has a Latin etymology—vulnerare—meaning to wound, to undermine. The vulnerable human being is this being who can be wounded, which should point to the impossibility of supporting or healing someone through perfect control. The other is that being who is able to harm me in my body, in my emotions, in my desires. In an ethics of care, vulnerability describes the positions of both caregiver and care receiver, who each affect and are affected by the other. This relational and non-individualistic conception of humanity not only functions as a criticism of the isolated individual who enters into a contract in order to protect themselves in some way from the

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violent actions of others (think of Hobbes’ political thought). It may also be used to articulate a powerful critique of neoliberalism, which views the individual in market societies as an entrepreneur, a performance-oriented, exclusive advocate of his or her own interests. This neoliberal subject continually seeks their own gain in a self-regulating market. Meanwhile, the ethics of care shows that this model of the combative, self-interested performer always presupposes unseen relationships that make this whole enterprise possible. These unseen relationships involve care, and thus implicate zones of vulnerability and the sphere of emotions. The victorious crusades of ostensibly self-made individuals are only possible because others, often women and individuals in need of sustenance (often low-paid workers or irregular migrants) are compelled to take on care work—caring at once for both these self-interested actors and for their own families. This labour of care, which is often rendered invisible, is at the same time the site of new kinds of social groups and new forms of exploitation and insecurity. Formulating a care ethics therefore also consists in showing that the market by no means stands on its own, that it depends upon occupations that are often poorly acknowledged and rewarded, without which the market would collapse. Articulating a care ethics also means putting into view the role of emotions and the reality of the fragility of human life, against all logic of control and power. It is an ethics that is deeply concerned with vulnerability and with how a society is able or not to address this vulnerability. This is the ethical perspective from which Joan Tronto thinks through the duty to “protect the vulnerable.” According to Tronto, an ethics of care must also be critical of the way that care of the vulnerable is actually practised, inasmuch as those who do the protecting present themselves as defenders of the vulnerable; therein lies the risk of abuse of power by caregivers, who may end up arrogating to themselves the right to define the needs of the vulnerable [Tronto 1993, 135]. Vulnerability is always an openness to the possibility of an abuse of power, insofar as the exchange is not one of reciprocity between two people who are equal in their capacity to respond. Establishing ethical relationships with the most vulnerable involves considering the other’s position as they themselves express

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it, being careful not to assume that they are exactly the same as we are. When a vulnerable someone is in need of protection, personal support, or attentiveness, this gives rise to an alterity, to a situation that is not interchangeable and that, as such, calls for a situationally appropriate response. This alterity is especially marked in all care situations in which caregivers and those close to the one being cared for are faced with the nearness of death and the possibility of disappearance. In The Breaking of the Butterfly [1988], Yoko Ogawa depicts all that goes into constructing alterity in the relationship between a young woman and her grandmother who is placed in a medical institution. The relationship passes through the acceptance of a grandmother who gradually fades from reality, leaving the young woman intensely lonely. What is it to “care” for a person who is, in a sense, absent even from the medical institution itself and from the family who relates to her? How does one support and tend to, in a non-abusive way, a life that is headed for erasure? If we are all vulnerable, the question arises as to what the appropriate response to this vulnerability is in terms of care. How do we, in particular, in one and the same lifetime, pass from a situation of dependence to one of independence? As Joan Tronto writes, “Throughout our lives, all of us go through varying degrees of dependence and independence, of autonomy and vulnerability” [1993, 135]. Nevertheless, depending on our social position, rich or poor, at the center or the periphery of power relations, we can, to a greater or lesser extent, afford to forget other people’s vulnerability while considering ourselves to be powerful and invulnerable. We forget that some lives more than others are experiences of vulnerability and we leave to others, the less powerful, the less recognized, the responsibility of answering to their needs, thus creating a society with chains of vulnerability that are at the same time chains of social precariousness. Surely, vulnerable lives are first and foremost lives that endure vulnerability; they are lives whose viability is threatened. They are also lives which the dominant forms of representation leave no room for because they are considered useless, disturbing, or abnormal. In short, some lives are more vulnerable than others and need to be protected and

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recognized as such to be able to liberate and express themselves. These are lives that could readily be annihilated through an exertion of violence or power, all the more so because moral and political liberalism is a powerful element of our identity and has taught us to view every human being, regardless of their situation, as an autonomous subject always already accepted by all others as responsible for their present situation. Beyond the scope of care ethics, Judith Butler’s work on injury in Excitable Speech [1997] or Axel Honneth’s analysis of disrespect in “Anerkennung als Ideologie” [2008] can both be read as identifications of different forms of vulnerability that socially index bodies and minds to a lack of power. The power of language to injure for Judith Butler, or the impossibility of realizing oneself for Axel Honneth, both speak to losses of socialization and of the power to act that makes these individuals all too vulnerable, for lack of recognition and subjective viability. In short, how ought we to understand the reference to vulnerability? Vulnerability concerns the subject of need, that is to say, a concrete subject in a situation too fragile for the viability of his or her life; or as Joan Tronto summarizes it, “by its nature, care is concerned with conditions of vulnerability and inequality” [1993, 134].

2. Dependency and the irregularity of sentiments There can be no recognition of vulnerability without a conception of the human being that includes the sphere of emotions and appreciates the potency of dependency. More specifically, understanding vulnerability involves an examination of that which harms, touches, and affects us—in short, various things that underscore relational aspects of our existence that may escape our control. The fact that we are formed through various relations with others generally escapes our awareness. Dependency relations, the dependent vulnerability of a newborn, for example, are what constitute the opacity of the subject, as Judith Butler writes about in Giving an Account of Oneself, The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge. […] If we are formed in the context of

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relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency [Butler 2005, 20].

These dependency relations indicate a basic opacity of the self. There is, of course, always a story of the self and of its own relationship with dependency and vulnerability to be worked out. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability as it relates to dependence historically begin with Rousseau’s Emile. Rousseau distinguishes two kinds of dependence: one in relation to other human beings and the other with respect to things. The first is social while the second is natural. Dependence on things is far less significant because it is not an obstacle to freedom. Where it concerns a dependence on other humans, however, Rousseau takes a very different approach. If a human being refers to themselves only through their needs, then they are socially very dependent. The contract in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is to be understood as a voluntary association that involves a hidden bondage.1 Is dependence exactly this kind of servitude? Perhaps not. In Emile (Book IV) Rousseau outlines another kind of dependence, one far more complex, which can be understood in terms of the opacity of the self as it develops. Dependence in fact has a certain kind of dignity about it and indeed cannot always simply be equated with servitude or submission. The example of children illustrates this dependence that is rooted in human needs. Children are far from self-sufficient: they are closely bound up with all those who are instrumental in the maintenance and development of their lives. Being children, they are unaware of their particular social position however. The opacity of the self in this case consists in this inability to occupy a social position, being too small. Opacity is a mark of this primary vulnerability. Rousseau writes about Emile (who is a child): first, children must have their vulnerability answered to and not suffer it. Second, if they are subordinate to others it is because they are beings in need and because these others are better able to determine what would be helpful to them. Third, saying that they depend on others in no way is equivalent to saying that they obey those others.

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The question of needs encapsulates children’s dependency, not in the sense of their submission to us, but in terms of their interdependence. What this means is that dependency must be structured according to a goal, namely, the child’s development. This goal has its upper limit according to the ethics of care: indeed, caring for a child has its limit, namely, what is good for the child. Dependency, however, is complex and is bound up in a particular context, in an interdependent social world. What does this interdependence entail or gesture toward? It refers to an irregular and unstable world in which emotions are omnipresent. What is at stake with Rousseau, but also with Englishlanguage philosophers of the eighteenth century, is the articulation of a homo sentimentalis (with Rousseau, it is, more specifically, an interplay of amour-propre and love of others). Does this homo sentimentalis, which emerged in the 18th century in order to explain human nature, have anything to contribute to an ethic of care, beyond the fact that we know that the world of feelings is developed socially? Care practices can be thought of as a labour of love (to cite the title of Eva Feder Kittay’s book Love’s Labour [1999]). Love, or more generally the sphere of emotions or feelings, is indeed the substance, the material for an ethic of care. Love, care, and the formation of feelings produce these relationships structured by the unequal character of vulnerability. And as we just saw, this inequality is compounded with irregularity and instability. Simply put, then, the realm of feeling is an uncertain or unpredictable one, because it depends on a context or a situation. Feelings or emotions are accidental, contingent. And in general, an emotion refers to what is intimate, what is not chosen or what does not permit equality. It gives rise to contradictions and conflicts because it is indicative of differences. When it develops into feeling, it is no less irregular since everything that is affective refers to what affects a specific someone. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith refers to “the irregularity of sentiments” as something that nonetheless makes action possible, Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of this irregularity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended the happiness and perfection of the species” [Smith 1984, 105].

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Nor is that irregularity of sentiments altogether without its utility, by which the merit of an unsuccessful attempt to serve, and much more that of mere good inclinations and kind wishes, appears to be imperfect. Man was made for action, and to promote by the exertion of his faculties such changes in the external circumstances both of himself and others, as may seem most favourable to the happiness of all [Smith 1984, 105–106].

Far from being a danger to human beings, the irregularity of sentiments even partly accounts for the happiness of the human species. More specifically, it plays a role in the practical engagement of individuals. Action brings about changes and a capacity to grasp the contingent character of concrete situations. If the affective domain is irregular, it is because this domain is itself plastic (capable of change, in view of reaching a goal). Reflection on the subject of concern for others cannot be limited to a merely rational understanding of problems. The affective domain (with all its emotions and feelings) can only enhance our understanding of our relations with others in the mode of “taking care,” as 18th-century philosophical works such as Emile, the Theory of Moral Sentiments or Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature have pointed out. We know that Hume’s discussion of morals in his Treatise of Human Nature is firmly entrenched in a philosophical defense of sentiments. It is, first of all, necessary to refer as much to the human heart as to human reason in order to understand moral behaviour (a view from which Kant’s philosophy departs considerably). More fundamentally, “the ultimate ends of human actions can never be accounted by reason. They recommend themselves entirely the sentiments or affections of mankind” [cited in Baier 1995, 56]. Hume’s analysis of the capacity for action yields his conviction that the various interpersonal relations attended by affectivity are fundamental and have consistently been underestimated by philosophers. Hume’s attack on “rationalist pretensions,” as Annette Baier puts it, can be read as an attempt to transgress a philosophical boundary between reason and the sentiments. It can also be read, according to Baier, “as an attack on a whole patriarchal theological tradition and on its claims about the relative authority of various human voices.”

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[Baier 1995, 79]. His was thus a radical enterprise that recast the role of the passions. The path taken by the ethics of care is not so very different, as it too questions the boundary that philosophers have traditionally drawn between reason and sentiment. A feminist project questions this boundary by critiquing the associations often made between reason and the male voice, and between emotion and the female voice. The ethical project is therefore best broached by paying greater heed to emotion and the female voice in order to show their ethical relevance. A critical analysis of Kantian moral philosophy is indeed in order, and thus also of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice [2005]. Such theories overlook what David Hume, but also the ethics of care maintain, namely that sentiment cannot be reduced to irrationality. Feelings (and this first stage made up of the emotions) will undergo complex development within a given context and incorporate the changes created by external circumstances. Feelings guarantee action and cannot be reduced to the private sphere. Indeed, surely they are not limited to the private, domestic, internal spheres. But the question is: do they guarantee what counts as care? We might consider the following comparison. Just as we can say that the moral sentiments of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers represent the losing side of eighteenth century moral philosophy with the triumph of Kantian universalist morality, care ethics makes up a presentday moral minority and likewise is not grounded in the impartiality of reason and a similarly universalist abstract theory of justice. In addition to this, care itself has no inherent value in a society so deeply informed by and structured by capitalism and neoliberalism. In Moral Boundaries, Joan Tronto discusses what she terms “marginalizing care” or “care as weakness.” She shows how an ethic rooted in concern for others places the idea of a homo sentimentalis at the forefront—but it is an idea which gradually came to be identified, post-18th century, with women and with the private sphere contra the male, public faculty of reason. Now, if we look at care in terms of work, in terms of a job or activity, we see that care is undervalued because of its association with the private, the emotional, and with needs. As long as our societies continue

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to privilege public affairs and uphold rationality and autonomy as values of the highest order, care is sure to be devalued, at least, that is, as long as these oppositions and these boundaries hold. Whether we regard care as labour or as a disposition, care continues to be devalued. Thus, everything having to do with “taking care of” becomes marginal within society. If care is made invisible and continues to go unrecognized, it is precisely because its value fails to be understood. Many have described care as an attitude or a disposition. For example, Nel Noddings formulates a care ethic that connects two moral sentiments: the natural impulse to care and the memory of that natural feeling that makes us able to look after others and not merely after our own interests [Held 1995, 9]. However, the universality that Nel Noddings relies on for her account is given little critical analysis and is instead simply posited as a naturalness common to all human beings: “I want to build an ethic on caring, and I shall claim that there is a form of caring natural and accessible to all human beings. Certain feelings, attitudes, and memories will be claimed as universal” [Held 1995, 8; cf. Noddings 1984]. Everything here hinges on a moral naturalism itself based on a maternal model of femininity. Nel Noddings does not espouse the idea that motherhood is a social construct that reduces women to the private sphere and its attendant emotionality. But care has also been closely associated with the emotional and posited in opposition to the rational. Here too, it has been devalued, through its association with the private sphere. And care is still, in fact, generally thought of in our culture as, ideally, a private matter that is the purview of women as mothers. Women are expected to take care of those living under their roofs and, more generally, of the people around them. The ethics of care addresses the fact that care developed in the private or domestic sphere, that its emotional bearing has thus come to be associated with the role of women in that domain, in accordance with the idea that authority and policy are men’s matters. It discusses, beyond this straightforward cultural division, the distribution of different care responsibilities. An ethic of care also underscores the fact that this distribution functions to uphold the privilege of those who are

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afforded the opportunity to remain unaware of certain forms of care: people who can forget about the whole business of care are thereby privileged individuals who do not have to concern themselves with concretely attending to the needs of others. According to Joan Tronto [1993], this is how “privileged irresponsibility,” and how the forms of exploitation of those who do the bulk care work, plays out. There is indeed an ideological context of care according to which care responsibilities get divided as a function of one’s social position of rich or poor, strong or weak, at the centre of power or at its periphery. To concern oneself with others or to care for them (care here understood in the sense of a disposition) are duties which the powerful may attribute to themselves in a way that elevates them in their relation to others, through basic acts of goodwill or empathy which serve to strengthen their social bond. The concrete acts of bodily care, those repetitive actions that constitute a day-to-day caretaking is often left to lower-paid individuals: low-income workers, migrants, housewives or women compelled to take on what is known as the double day (paid labour in addition to domestic labour). There are, of course, circumstances in which men, doctors, for example, “take care of.” It bears pointing out, however, that whenever a doctor takes care of a patient and is responsible for diagnosing and ordering care, there are always also nurses, assistants, and paramedics who provide both bodily and relational care. Where care concerns the body and involves private or local matters, powerful people forego this burden. In this vein, Joan Tronto writes, Out of this association of “taking care of” with masculinity, “caring about” also becomes gendered, raced, and classed: men and people of greater privilege take care of; they care about public and broader issues. [Tronto 1993, 115]

3. Gender Inequality How do we mark out the field of care despite the fact that it encompasses a variety of scarcely recognized occupations that are difficult to consolidate? In In a Different Voice [1982], Carol Gilligan associates care with the silenced voice of women. According to Gilligan, our inquiries

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into moral development should be anchored in a basic awareness of gender inequality: women do not have the same approach to moral problems as men and their voices are made vulnerable by the majority practice and dominant habitus of a moral rationality that considers itself free of any divisiveness or partiality. Yet this moral rationality is not neutral. It excludes from the realm of moral action anything that resembles empathy with others, or worse, a form of responsibility built on respect for the vulnerability or needs of others. Women’s voices are clearly not naturally different from male voices. But male domination has rendered them inaudible by drawing intimate connections between moral sentiments, the private/domestic sphere, and a supposed feminine nature (especially in the 18th century, when the conception of the public sphere was linked to the social contract and excluded all dependent persons—first of all women, but also slaves, domestic servants and low-paid workers). Gilligan argues that the voices of women must be rendered more audible; they must be championed in order to bring about equality between the two moralities sketched out in In a Different Voice. The first of these moralities, readers will recall, concerns the subject of law—one who is able to distance themselves personally from their activities; Gilligan calls this an ethic of justice because it is based on the standard of a neutral public sphere. The other morality concerns the subject of need to whom care is provided; this ethic involves a subject capable of acting for the benefit of others and within the framework of an ethic of responsibility. Of course, such an ethic (of responsibility or care) must heed the forgotten experiences of women that have been left out of consideration in moral psychological studies conducted by men (like Kohlberg’s study on moral development, cited in Gilligan [1982]). But above all, it must transform gender relations and eliminate the deep inequalities that result from the very different social positioning of women and men, and the disesteem of activities that involve concern for others that women are most often called on to engage in. A feminist ethic is needed to democratize society and to foster more equality between male and female voices, which would begin to break the barriers too hastily put up (for the sake of a normatively rational

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individual identity) between reason and the passions, the public and private spheres, politics and morality. Such an ethic should make women better aware of the need, given their moral history, to challenge the conventional exemplar of care as self-sacrifice, upheld as female heroism in many cultures throughout the world. From a care ethics perspective, morality must be regarded as always already deeply relational, which means that it integrates concern for others and concern for oneself on a situational basis and in the context of chains of vulnerability (chains that affect both care receivers but also caregivers). Achieving equality in the field of care requires that we engage with this vulnerability captured or defined by an ethics which, rather than inferring a moral deficiency in women from the standpoint of abstract rationality, demonstrates the maturity of a relational morality. This involves recognizing that our care relations have as their objective a collective exercise of responsibility, offering support to others when they are in the need, and addressing human vulnerability. Such an ethic begins, then, with a deconstruction of gender inequalities in moral matters, from the point of view of care practices and also more generally of the human species (in terms of its capacity for life-sustaining relationships, support, mutual aid, solidarity, etc). In short, from this perspective, the other is to be regarded as an object of a kind of concern that reflects a close consideration of their situation. The other is thus also to be regarded as a concrete being before being considered a generalizable other. This entails that we should appropriately exercise a particularist morality alongside a universal morality insofar as the abstract other is not sufficient to account for all forms of moral behaviour, and most of all does not make it possible to address a diversity of vulnerable situations that call for assistance or support. This ethic, according to Gilligan, is the ethic of a maturity reached in our relations with others. It defines what we might call a “caring” attitude. It is a viable ethic for women so long they are able to relinquish attitudes typically categorized as female and often naturalized: most notably self-sacrifice, an attitude which often results from an imbalance between the self and others (namely, a quasi-exclusive concern for others and a denial of the self).

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The deconstruction of gender inequality requires that women be able to distance themselves slightly from others, and more significantly, to distance themselves from the history of the female gender and from popular depictions that assign women to the emotional, private sphere. Emotions are beneficial when they can be partially controlled or disciplined, and when they serve to bring about a better awareness of their history, for both women and men. A feminist ethic thus informs an ethic of care in that it reminds us of the importance of establishing an appropriate emotional distance when engaging in care activities: in general, this means more concern for the self for women and more concern for others for men. Needless to say, emotions necessarily accompany the conceptions that societies have of “taking care”. They are not simply an immutable and inert given. They both are “at work” and are “worked on”. When they relate to dispositions to care and to care practices, they become subject to constructions, deconstructions, and reconstructions. They benefit from an ethical framework that guides them in the building of relationships with others. This framework has a prior condition: the recognition of human vulnerability and the need for supports that are free of abuses of power or of controlling influences. It is a question, therefore, of making the case for a humanity that is fundamentally both dependent and interdependent, and for an account of autonomy that is complex and that cannot be reduced to a mere (Kantian) ethical injunction. Nevertheless, addressing vulnerability should not be conflated with a discussion of the victimization of the most vulnerable; an ethic of care cannot be practiced without regard for the subjective singularity of the person being cared for. To be cared for is not simply to receive care but also to accept it, refuse it, transform it, displace it, or return it. Emotions, feelings, and affects are deployed in all this as powers of the subject that point both to the subjectivity of others and of their own. Emotions may be put to work, held at a distance, or conversely, constitute the very substance of an unexpected complicity. They may stand the tests of hatred, anger or indifference. They cannot be naturalized in a way that equates them with a female nature bound up with

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affectivity and the private sphere, which functions on the assumption that women are naturally reliant on their emotions, their bodies, even their sexuality. It is, rather, the task of a feminist ethic to deconstruct women’s assignment to an exclusive concern for others, to family responsibilities and domestic activities. Care refers in part to an ensemble of poorly paid tasks, often repetitive and dull, which involve caregivers in the private concerns of those who are cared for and put them in a delicate situation. It is often the site of, especially where it concerns the least recognized occupations, specific forms of exploitation in our late capitalist order, where nearly everything gets couched as a service. Emotions are thus an essential element in the ethics of care, provided they undergo deconstruction and a feminist reconstruction—a deconstruction performed in light of a reading of male domination from the perspective of care. The moral voices of care are thus voices of resistance that call for a morality that is invested by a kind of authenticity in the emotional modes of relating to others and to oneself. (Translated by Madeleine Taylor.)

Notes 1 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, “All ran headlong to their chains in hopes of securing their liberty” or Emile [2013, 237], “Since it is impossible in the state of nature that the difference between man and man should be great enough to make one dependent on another, there is in fact in this state of nature an actual and indestructible equality. In the civil state there is a vain and chimerical equality of right; the means intended for its maintenance, themselves serve to destroy it; and the power of the community, added to the power of the strongest for the oppression of the weak, disturbs the sort of equilibrium which nature has established between them.”

Literature Baier, A. [1995], Moral Prejudices, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press. Butler, J. [1997], Excitable Speech, New York, Routledge. Butler, J. [2005], Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, Fordham University Press. Gilligan, C. [1982], In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

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Held, V. [1995] Justice and Care, Colorado, Westview Press. Honneth, A. [2008], “La reconnaissance comme idéologie”, in La Société du mépris, Paris, La Découverte. [original: Honneth, A. [2004], « Anerkennung als Ideologie », in West-End. Neue Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, no.1, 51-70.] Hume, D. [1995], Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Hume, D. [1978], A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. by P.H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Kittay, E F. [1999], Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, New York, Routledge. Noddings, N. [1984], Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley, University of California. Ogawa, Y. [2009], La désagrégation du papillon, Paris, Actes Sud. Rawls, J. [2005], A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.J. [1964], Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard-Pléiade. Rousseau, J.J. [1966], Emile, Paris, GF-Flammarion. Smith, A. [1984], The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Raphael and Macfie ed., Indianapolis, Liberty Fund. Tronto, J. [1993], Moral Boundaries, New York and London, Routledge. Winnicott, D. [1953], “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 [2]: 89–97.

4. Love, Gender and Moral Sensibility: a Political (his)story Patricia Paperman

In care ethics scholarship, there has overall been little research done on the emotions and sentiments. Indeed, there has only been a modest amount of research devoted exclusively to exploring the ways attentiveness might be linked to (or be understood in terms of) particular sentiments, or to analyzing the political significance of various sentiments linked to care practices. Much might be gained, I would suggest, from reflecting on the possible reasons behind this quasi silence in feminist care ethics scholarship. Readers will recall that in Moral Boundaries [1993], Joan Tronto has argued that there is a great political risk attached to interpreting care ethics via the question of sentiment. Such an interpretation, she insists, risks feeding anew (rather than counteracting) the usual dismissal of care ethics, by reducing care ethics to a mere question of “good feelings”. For Tronto, what is imperative is for scholars to underscore the centrality of care in human life, in all its practical and political dimensions. We know that for Joan Tronto, care refers to a mixture of intertwined practices, to an intricate horizontal process whose organization constitutes, in itself, a political stake. Now, by proposing a political argument for an ethics of care and by expressing various qualms about excessively hasty associations between care and sentiments, Tronto is certainly not denying that the latter can be a significant aspect of this ethics. But she does caution her readers against placing emotions and sentiments at the forefront of care ethics if one is truly committed to proposing or building a resolutely feminist

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ethics of care. Only by proceeding in such a cautious matter on the issue of sentiments can one counter the old androcentric, rationalist philosophical tradition’s disqualification of care ethics. I have made a case for this in my previous work, where I have called for the “desentimentalization of care” [Paperman, 2009]. Adopting this position was particularly important to me because it seemed necessary to reply to various misogynist critiques articulated against care ethics in the spring of 2010 on the French political and mediatic scene. But my position was also aimed at responding to the criticisms that came from certain rationalist/universalist French feminist corners. Putting aside the strategic and defensive nature of my position, the core of my thesis deserves to be restated briefly here. It is worth restating not solely because my position rests on a gender analysis (which is, I would argue, important for care ethics). It is also because such restatement might help shed light on certain challenges that have plagued the scholarship devoted to the study of emotions and sentiments—the scholarship that has either sought to understand the latter as an autonomous dimension of action, or that has sought to tackle the emotions in a very general or generic manner. To speak of emotions and sentiments in too general a manner raises all sorts of difficulties—amongst them, I argue, the fact of unwittingly reinforcing all sorts of gender presuppositions. My work has sought to describe some of these difficulties—and quite emblematic of such difficulties is the recurrent tendency to produce an analysis of sentiments and emotions that is highly gendered. Indeed, these ‘general’ or generic approaches (whether sociological or philosophical ones) tend to embody and reinforce existing gender, class and racial relations—all of which feed oppositions (and hierarchies) between “collective” emotions and particular/“private” emotions, and oppositions between emotions that are deemed socially significant and those that are said to lack socio-political significance. All the while, these numerous distinctions come to reinforce existing hierarchies [Paperman, 2013]. The feminist perspective offered by care ethics, because it deconstructs these oppositions, allows us to revisit the question of emotions and to tackle it in a different way: namely, by privileging the lenses of

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“moral sensibility” (la sensibilité morale) over a more generic approach that would consider more indiscriminately the large categories of “emotions” and “sentiments”. Indeed, care ethics invites us to focus on the particular ways human beings partake into their social and personal lives, the particular ways they pay attention to others. Care ethics is also a perspective that gives pride of place to various details or situational aspects that would be considered insignificant from a majoritarian (or mainstream) philosophical standpoint. Finally, as I just noted, it is a perspective that encourages us to pay attention to particular sentiments, instead of considering them in a generic manner (as Elena Pulcini has also invited us to do [Pulcini 2015]. I will return to this below; but for now, let us first consider in more detail how a gender perspective might enrich existing accounts of emotions and sentiments.

When moral sentiments become women’s affairs…. In Moral Boundaries [1993], Joan Tronto helpfully reminded us that prior to the 18th century, theories of moral sentiments were not gendered. They were typically, in fact, analyzed within the context of larger discussions of the virtuous human being. The association between moral sentiments and gender came about at the very same time when women got more tightly confined within the domestic sphere. Tronto explains: The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers’ reliance upon moral sentiments as the way to create virtue in society and in individuals did not make the same parallel distinctions between men and women and reason and feeling. Prior to the eighteenth century, there was little discussion of women’s capacities to reason, nor a sustained discussion of their capacity to feel. Feeling has not always been the preserve of women; during the eighteenth century in English speaking countries, the capacity for sentiment was initially conceived as an important quality of the virtuous man. How then did the division of reason and feeling become so strongly engendered? [Tronto 1993, 52].

What concerns very much Joan Tronto is not to “rehabilitate” the moral perspective or the moral sentiments that are tied to some ‘woman’ experience, but rather, to better comprehend how “more domestic understandings of moral development and sensibility became gendered” [Tronto, 1993, 50].

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In her view, one reason behind the subsequent disqualification of sentiments can be unearthed by analyzing the socio-economic and cultural conditions under which a universalist conception of morality came to impose itself in the 18th century, against a more contextualist account of morality. “[W]hile there is no inherent reason why universalistic morality required the exclusion of women from its domain, in fact the historical circumstances of eighteenth century life led to the development of an argument which contained both women and moral sentiments within the domestic sphere.” [Tronto, 1993, 56]. Underscoring along the way the fact that such an exclusion of moral sentiments from ethical theories is unjustified from the perspective of the universalist theory itself, Tronto’s work is largely devoted to better understanding the circumstances under which our current ‘moral boundaries’ came to be established during the Enlightenment. Her analysis draws on sociological and political factors, or rather, on a wide range of socio-political circumstances that have led to the confinement of both women and sentiments within the domestic sphere. According to Tronto, if gender became such an apparently ‘evident’ prism through which sentiments had to be viewed, it is because the public vs. private distinction operated like one of the moral frontiers that determined what are the most legitimate and crucial concepts in morality and what were not [Tronto, 1993, 33]. The misleadingly ‘evident’ character of moral sentiments was then reinforced by two other “moral boundaries”: first, the separation of morality and politics, and second, the delineation of the “moral point of view” as one that must be impartial and impersonal. Meanwhile, the interplay between these moral boundaries led to a narrow conception of what caring for others might be said to entail (care viewed here in all its practical and affective aspects): namely, a mere ensemble of specialized activities or preoccupations with little moral significance.

Devaluing sentiments: the liberal distinction between private and public. Susan Moller Okin is well known for the critical position she adopted vis-à-vis the ethics of care’s apparent claim that it constitutes an alternative to a theory of justice and something specific to women’s morality.

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Nonetheless, Okin’s critical stance ought not to be read as a position that necessarily calls into question the significance of sentiments nor care’s sensibility or concern for justice. [Okin, 1989a] For Okin, it is clear that one can largely explain the undervaluation of caring sentiments and their importance for justice as the outcome of the liberal distinction between the private and public spheres, and the gender presuppositions in which this distinction is anchored. As William Kymlicka [1990, 254] correctly reminds us, it is hand in hand that liberals and non liberals alike have “accepted that ‘the confinement of women to the private sphere/domestic sphere is justified by reference to women’s particularistic, emotional, non universal nature’…”. The public/ private split informing this construction of femininity rests itself on a division and hierarchization of moral work along gender lines. One of the consequences of this common public/private dichotomy and of the relegation of women to the domestic sphere is that this set of binaries has led to a separation between reason and emotion (or phrased differently, between thought and sensibility), and has assigned each to a particular gender—producing all along a hierarchy amongst those groups and their assigned dispositions. The following logic seems to inform the overarching dichotomy: particularist, emotional and intuitive moral dispositions are considered as self-evident pre-requisites for women’s domestic lives; whereas impartial, cold and ‘rational’ modes of thinking are said to be the marks and requirements of men’s public lives. What this dichotomous framework readily indicates is that it is impossible to challenge the way women and emotions are viewed without first bringing to the forefront the numerous gender presuppositions on which liberal thought’s public/private distinction has nourished itself. Susan M. Okin insists that these ways of conceiving emotions and the particular ‘emotional’ nature of women will be best grasped if we link them to the ideology of the sentimental family, and in particular, to the ideology of the sentimental bond that is said to arise naturally between mother and child. This account of the maternal bond, more recent than the older conception of a “feminine nature”, came to reinforce the view that women do not possess what is required for socio-political life. [Okin 1981, 65-88] Okin’s work also shows how this

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ideological framing is clearly at work in the research of Lawrence Kohlberg and more specifically, in his conclusions about girls’ deficient moral development [Okin, 1990, 145-159, 288-291]—those very conclusions Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice came to challenge. The author of “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice” sees in the sensibility of care a key moral resource for justice—a resource whose origins, it ought to be said, are to be found within the unequal relationships between parents and children. In Okin’s view, the gender inequalities present within the family ought to be challenged precisely there—and one of the tools at our disposals to carry out this challenge, she insists, is a critical analysis of the public/private distinction. This meticulous analysis completes Okin’s reassessment of political theories that have overlooked the family and that have taken for granted the moral resource that feelings developed within the domestic sphere constitute. A gender analysis such as Okin’s is thus powerful for “politicizing” the sentiments that have been traditionally associated with care—in particular, parental love. And it is this very politicization that could be instructive not only for our research on sentiments but also for our efforts to better integrate within care ethics a robust analysis of the power imbalances present within intimate relationships.

Patriarchal disorder In The Birth of Pleasure. A New Map of Love, Carol Gilligan [2002] politicizes sensibility by analyzing closely the way gender shapes sentiments. She shows how our exposure to gender norms within patriarchy leads to the loss of a certain sensibility in individuals, a dissociation. More specifically, the exposure to and learning of gender norms leads individuals to suppress certain emotions and sentiments experienced within relationships that are not regulated by patriarchal, hierarchical rules. In turn, what this produces is the suppression of a wide range of knowledge, in particular that acquired through parent-child life experiences that might still be devoid of patriarchal gender norms. One could think, for instance, of cases where a child’s voice expresses with great clarity and insight the varying modulations of her mother or father’s

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voices. It could also be experiences tied to a love relation or to an encounter with others that is not tainted or shaped by patriarchal norms. For Gilligan, our capacity to feel the other and understand her position, to experience closeness, to grasp the subtle modulations of the voice of another, her needs and desires—all this cannot be maintained or cannot thrive within the confines of a hierarchical gender order. The aim of Gilligan is not so much to underscore the desirability of this or that emotion but rather, to rehabilitate sensibility itself as a way to be in contact with—in relation with—another but also with oneself. In order to make a case for the great significance of sensibility, she analyzes closely all the damage caused by the loss of this sensibility under patriarchy and its particular gender norms. For Gilligan, the very possibility to be in genuine contact with a fellow human being, to be attentive, to take care of oneself and of others—in short, the possibility of care itself—is compromised by our gendered order. What is also squashed along the way is a type of love that is typically not deemed lawful to experience.

Parental love Annette Baier has proposed her own articulation of a care ethics and an account of morality that sets itself up against a liberal perspective on morality—arguing, in part, that the latter rests on a public/private split that presupposes parental love without, however, truly recognizing the moral significance of such love. “Rawls’ theory, explains Baier, is attentive to the fact that parents typically love their children, but it treats this fact as something that is prior to moral reflection. One of the reasons for this is that obligations are contracted out between equals in a liberal conception of morality, whereas the relationship between parents and children is an inegalitarian one.” [Raïd, 2005, 247-261] The parental caring sentiments on which Rawl’s liberalism relies are not truly recognized as key components of morality: Rawls considers them to belong to the private sphere—the sphere of activities and relations taking place between individuals who do not possess that equality that is said to regulate the relations of contractual parties (where genuine public matters are said to take place under a Rawlsian

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framework). It could thus be argued that Rawls’s liberalism taps into our (private) affective resources, but without really integrating them into its account of ethics as moral resources as such. For Baier, caring/ loving sentiments (as well as various forms of attentiveness) are thus discarded from the pool of resources and dispositions considered key for justice. Moreover, the neutralization of gender that flows from this peculiar account of parental love underscores the fact that the family (and its gendered structure) are excluded from Rawls’ reflection on justice and that this exclusion rests on and reinforces in turn the public vs. domestic dichotomy. Annette Baier’s critique of Rawls certainly makes a compelling case here for the political significance of sentiments and more specifically, for the political consequences of sentiments’ disqualification from ethical life. Indeed, what gets disqualified through the disqualification of sentiments is, quite crucially, a wide range of practices and relations, as well as their accompanying responsibilities and attending activities—of which sentiments become, in a sense, the very symbol. In short, what comes under attack in these feminist critiques of the liberal distinction between the public and the private sphere is the very foundation on which an impartialist conception of justice is said to rest [Okin, 1989b; Pateman, 1987; Young, 1990]. And it is this private/ private distinction that constitutes in large part the context under which the emotions and sentiments associated with women and the private sphere (i.e. the domestic sphere) become paradigmatic examples of so-called ‘particularist’ and ‘partial’ actions. Baier [1987] proposes to use the sensibility of care to articulate a different account of morality (note that for her, this sensibility is at work in unequal relationships and in those relationships that we do not necessarily chose to find ourselves in). It is this sensibility that can help us partially overcome our ignorance of vulnerable parties or our ignorance of marginalized points of view (these marginalized perspectives are often those of individuals who are dependent upon the support of more powerful members of society). The problem underscored by Baier in her work is inherent to a rationalist conception of justice, which presupposes formal equality and as such avoids taking into

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consideration the inequalities that are nested within actual, real relationships. The interest of these feminist critiques—voiced against a conception of justice that eschews sentimental love—thus also rests in the fact that it brings our attention to a pivotal and complex characteristic of care relations: namely, the fact that care relations are often unequal or asymmetrical ones. It is generally the case for adults’ relationships with children, but also, more generally, with individuals (distant others or close kin) who are considered to be dependent because of a frailty, a sickness or a disability. Now, the inequality and the complex power relations nested within care relations are certainly something that feminist and critical scholars of disability had already brought our attention to. Indeed, these scholars have repeatedly underscored the risks of paternalism (the simple fact that many caregivers tend to presumptuously decide for others), of power abuses and of violence. These authors have insistently called for a clearer acknowledgment of the dark sides of care—those dark aspects that invite us all to look more closely at the sentiments of anger, disgust, humiliation and hatred that are often nested within messy power imbalances and abusive situations. Another important contribution made by disability studies that is pertinent for care ethics is to have made very clear the need to give greater importance to the perspective of care receivers, the perspective of those who are dependent on the help of others and that might be the objects of power abuses. In short, disability studies have served as a healthy reminder that care ethics ought never overlook the complex power relations that are found in care work [Damamme, 2012]. Power inequalities are also at the heart of Eva F. Kittay’s reflections on parental love. But the inequalities that Kittay focuses on are not those that are traditionally taken up within care scholarship. Rather than centering her analysis chiefly on the inequalities found within parent-child relations, she rather turns to the relations between majoritarian philosophy and (minoritarian) feminist philosophy. Kittay wishes to demonstrate that this unequal configuration in the academic world constitutes a major hurdle to a finer, enlarged

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understanding of care and of parental love—particularly maternal love [Kittay, 2009]. Following a series of exchanges with philosophers Jeff MacMahan and Peter Singer, who have both proposed detailed comparisons between animals and the mentally disabled, Eva F. Kittay considered leaving academia. The said comparisons between animals and the disabled (and the ensuing exchanges) took place within the course of a discussion in which the scholars considered what could possibly justify the moral demands of the mentally disabled—especially in light of the fact that the demands did not seem at first glance to be justifiable for animals. For Kittay, the academic discussion that took place was quite unsettling and prompted her to consider difficult questions: what is this philosophy that compelled her to discuss the comparison between her own daughter and a chimpanzee, a pig or a dog? What is this philosophy that led her to compare her relationship to her child to that between a fellow human being and a dog? And how could she keep having philosophical exchanges with these colleagues, after all that was discussed? Despite her significant distress, Kittay concluded that it would be unjust and incoherent to cease exercising her profession and to permit academic philosophy to remain as it is. The care responsibility that she owes her daughter—including the very quotidian care that is called for— demanded that she remains within academic circles. This care responsibility, in her view, included the responsibility to transform the world to make it more hospitable to her daughter and to ensure that the latter would be considered a fully human being—as opposed to what Singer and MacMahan saw as a being lacking the mark of humanity or a being that is inferior to certain non human animals. This responsibility entailed the voicing of a robust critique of these philosophers who immodestly tackle subjects about which they know so little, these philosophers who seemingly have no idea of what these academic, theoretical debates might mean for those described by their list of cognitive capacities. To take care of her daughter and to take care of the world were thus, in short, part of the very same combat—as the title of her 2009 article

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captures so well (“‘The Personal is Philosophical is Political’: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield”). Kittay insists that university philosophy as conceived of and practiced by Singer and MacMahan creates a violent and offensive (academic) world, by proposing false arguments and by failing to show much concern for the human beings that are directly concerned by particular philosophical musings. Eva Kittay speaks here as philosopher and as mother—the mother of a disabled daughter. Her position is that of a philosopher who seeks to combat incorrect and pernicious ideas about the disabled and, more generally, about human existence itself. It is also the position of a mother who genuinely cares for her daughter. This position compels her to serve as the spokesperson for her daughter and for all individuals who are not in a position to plead for themselves due to certain cognitive limitations. The account of care proposed by Kittay allows us to appreciate the significance of care for human life and of care’s political implications in a distinctive way. Her positioning as mother of a handicapped child permits her to bring new life to our existing reflection on care—especially vis-à-vis the scholarship that boiled care down chiefly to work. Kittay’s writings allow us to appreciate in a different way the great significance of the mother/parent-child relationship. This relationship, she insists, cannot be fully appreciated or understood if we restrict it to something dyadic or to something that is strictly private. As Kittay reminds us, “No child is simply the parent’s own private matter”. [Kittay, 2009, 623] The relationship mother (parent)-child is dependent upon a wide network of relations, institutions and norms that make possible and that oversee the work of parental love. This work consists chiefly in protecting the life of the child, to foster his/her development and to make sure that this child is socially accepted or welcome. To care for a child is clearly related to the social recognition of the value of a child—of all children indeed, including those with severe mental disabilities. By enlarging the theoretical perspective we have on the parental/ maternal-children relation, by insisting on widening it to include all children regardless of their capacities, Kittay is nonetheless not

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denying the specificity of particular, close relationships to kin—what she calls ‘love’s labor’. In fact, one could claim the very opposite. Readers of Kittay know quite well Sesha—they know about the love of music she shares with her mother; they know about her pleasures, her accidents, her love of delicacies—all these things that Kittay has told us about, that have made Sesha familiar to us and that, as such, have made it possible for us readers to better appreciate the questions that Kittay, as a spokesperson for her child, addresses to mainstream philosophy. In other words, what makes intelligible to us the experience on the basis of which Eva F. Kittay constructs her philosophy – i.e. to live and to care for a severely handicapped child—is the very love that permeates her life and her relation. What constitutes the basis, the nourishment of the knowledge that Kittay seeks to transmit to us? Isn’t this not this ‘extraordinarily ordinary’ relation of love—as Bourdieu would phrase it? It is because of the continuous work of care (which makes the life of Sesha at once possible and good) that we can obtain this knowledge about a human being and her deficiencies—deficiencies that are cognitive in nature, but certainly not affective, relational or ethical ones. But it is this very knowledge that is contested by certain philosophers—largely on the basis of the fact that such knowledge is said to be hardly objective (how could there be objectivity if it is based on the relationship of a loving mother with her very own child?). How can one adequately answer this common academic and positivist objection—one that speaks volumes about our hesitations and fears with regards to human attachments (too often regarded as a source of bias and error, and too rarely considered the source of knowledge and understanding)? According to Kittay, it is certainly possible to boldly respond that “the intimacy of parent and child and the parent’s caring labor gives us not a lesser grasp of the moral truth but a greater one—a truth born of the labor of the hand and heart as well as the mind” [Kittay, 2009, 614; emphasis added]. This account of care allows us to think anew the interest and the significance of sentiments in our effort to theorize a caring epistemology that is sensitive to gender. It also allows us to “put back sentiments in their place” (as I have argued previously): namely, to propose

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a robust account of sentiments’ significance without falling into the trap of an excessively generalizing analysis. The affirmation of the social and moral value of sensibility and of sentiments from a care perspective is clearly an answer to mainstream sociological and philosophical thought—which tends to underappreciate the ethical significance of commitments that are anchored in sensibility. Part of the richness of the care perspective derives from its refutation and forsaking of analytical frameworks that set up sentiments and sensibility as something ‘separate’—as modes of action or expression that are disconnected from relations and practical activities (within which, we should underscore, they are imbued with significance and effect). This separation or segmentation is part and parcel of a wide range of related dichotomies: sentiments vs reason, subjective vs. objective, passive vs. active, individual vs. collective… feminine vs. masculine. Now, in contrast to such dualistic theorizing, the perspective of care ethics brings sentiments and sensibility back to the only regions where they can be regarded as having social meaning, legitimacy and intelligibility: namely, within practical activities. Indeed, care ethics puts back sentiments where they belong—within the register of practical activity. It is in that sense that care ethics offers a distinctive perspective on sentiments—it is an alternative way to look not only at sentiments and sensibility, but also at morality and justice more generally. It does so on several counts. First, the analysis proposed by care scholars focuses on not sentiments in general, but rather, on certain types of sentiments and sensibilities and their deployment or expression in concrete, particular relations (especially those oriented towards others and towards the maintaining or flourishing of relationships). Moreover, particular sentiments are regarded as one dimension of complex/composite behavior (behavior that draws on sensible perception and reasoning about specific situations), and as an active response to the peculiarities of the situations in which we find ourselves in (rather than being regarded as the irrational manifestation or the mere motivation of a rational action). Finally, by putting sentiments back ‘in their place’, the latter can acquire anew a great significance, soundness and meaning— paradoxically perhaps, as expressions of ordinary moral points of view

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(ordinary partially in the sense of being rooted in and concerned by all-too-human, daily life). The ethics of care celebrates the importance and the value of caring activities and work oriented towards others—activities geared towards the development and maintaining of a shared world that is livable, that is fully human. Indeed, care ethics voices a genuine, active concern for the common or the shared world (le commun): this common world will not be safeguarded or cared for simply by considering—from a practical rationality point of view—a set of responses to the ‘how’ (i.e. how to do things together). It can truly be safeguarded if we also consider, in a substantive manner, what are these ‘things’ that we wish to do together. Care ethics allows us to better appreciate the value and centrality of these activities that build our world, and the moral sensibility that accompanies them. But this sensibility cannot be fetishized or hypostatized in an isolated register of sentiments (sentiments taken as disconnected from a practical register). Care ethics refuses this compartmentalization and invites us to consider sentiments and moral sensibility always with an eye to the concrete affairs of daily life, always with an eye to what is important, what matters to create and sustain a common world.

Conclusion One of the major contributions of feminist perspectives over the years has been to have forced a critical re-evaluation of the domain of informal (or so-called ‘personal’) relationships—whether they be those tied to the family, love, friendship or to neighborhood or other circles of help and solidarity. Countless feminists have drawn our attention to the great moral significance of relations for the identity and development of individuals [e.g. Friedman, 2000]. Many have also underscored the significance of relations in the lives of women—those very relations where women were supposed to be ‘in their place’ and taking care of ‘their business’ (affairs and occupations that were deemed insignificant for public/political matters from a patriarchal public/private dichotomous perspective). It is this same critical reconfiguration of moral theory—a reconfiguration that neither excludes the voice of women nor

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the (pre)occupations that have traditionally been assigned to them—that has led many scholars to reconceptualize the significance and role of emotions and sentiments. Feminist theory has indeed repeatedly sought to counter the view that emotions are antagonistic to reason and morality, and that they are inevitably a source of bias and distortion in moral reasoning. But naturally, feminist theory at large is not the only body of scholarship that has done so. Theorists of care ethics have also (and in a mode distinct from previous scholarship on the emotions) been interested in underscoring the great epistemic value of affects and sentiments. Care ethics has been particularly rich in light of its recasting of the epistemic power of sentiments and of presenting them as the corollary of various human postures/orientations towards others and of practical activities. Moral knowledge and understanding takes place not in addition to or as separate from our active, sensitive attentiveness to another being—but really as something that is part and parcel of that very attentiveness. Much feminist theory and care ethics scholarship thus converge in their shared efforts to rehabilitate and reconceive both emotions and the nature of personal commitments. These efforts have, as we have seen, important political consequences in light of the connections between the denigration of the moral value of emotion and the devaluation of women (and of other marginalized groups who attend to care work). Both types of devaluation work hand in hand. As such, analyzing the significance of emotions and sentiments takes on a critical role in the writings of feminist care ethicists. For what is developed here in their work is a fine-grained historical and sociological account of human affectivity—one that compels readers to confront the gender presuppositions that have informed so much mainstream/majoritarian theory over the years. Needless to say, this dominant moral and political theory will not emerge unscathed from these gendered critical lenses, which have shed new light on the conditions that have produced the disqualification of sentiments for far too long. (Translated by Sophie Bourgault)

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Literature Baier, A. [1987], “The Need for More Than Justice”, in Held, V. (ed.), Justice and Care. Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder, Westview Press, 1995. Damamme, A. [2012], “Éthique du care et Disability Studies: un même projet politique?” Garrau, M. et Le Goff, A. (eds.), Politiser le care ? Perspectives philosophiques et sociologiques, Lormont, Le bord de l’eau. Gilligan, C. [2002], The Birth of Pleasure. A New Map of Love, New York, Knopf. Friedman, M. [2000], “Feminism in Ethics: Conceptions of Autonomy”, Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby eds., The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205-224. Kittay, E. [2009], “The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield”, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 40, Nos. 3–4, July 2009, 611- 623. Kymlicka, W. [1990], Contemporary Political Philosophy. An Introduction, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Okin, S. M. [1981], “Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11/1, 65-88. Okin, S. M. [1989a], “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice”, Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Jan., 1989), 229-249. Okin, S. M. [1989b], Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books. Okin, S. M. [1990], “Thinking Like A Woman”, in Rhode, D. (ed.), Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference, New-Haven, Yale University Press, 145-159. Paperman, P. [2009], “D’une voix discordante. Désentimentaliser le care, démoraliser l’éthique”, in Molinier P., Laugier S., Paperman P. (eds.) Qu’est-ce que le care ? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris, Payot. Paperman, P. [2013], Care et sentiments, Paris, PUF. Pateman, C. [1987], “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy”, in A. Philipps (ed.) Feminism and Equality, Blackwell, Oxford. Pulcini, E. [2015], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, Emotion Review, 1-8. Raïd, L. [2005], “Baier et la critique du libéralisme moral”, in Paperman P. et Laugier S. (eds.) Le souci des autres. Ethique et politique du care. Paris Editions de l’EHESS. Tronto, J. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Routledge, New York, London. Young, I. [1990], Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990.

5. Care between sympathy, imagination and humility Caterina Botti

Care ethics is now widely recognized as a new and promising moral paradigm that brings both moral practice and moral theory closer to ordinary experience. Many thinkers influenced by Carol Gilligan’s seminal 1982 work have contributed to care ethics’ development [e.g. Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993; Held 1993, 2006; Kittay 1999; Slote 2007; Baier 1995; Blum 1994; Moliner, Laugier and Paperman 2009; Laugier 2015]. Here in what follows, I would like to examine some aspects of the connections much of this scholarship has established between care and affectivity, and between care ethics and human feelings, building on some sentimentalist re-readings of care ethics (particularly those of Annette Baier and Michael Slote). My goal is to assess how fertile these latter accounts are, to indicate some of their limitations and, finally, to suggest some possible ways in which they could be further developed. In a series of recent works [Botti 2014; Botti 2015], I have gone back to Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice [1982] and her more recent Joining the Resistance [2011] in order to contribute to the development of a more structured philosophical account of care ethics (understood as an alternative, rather than a complement, to universalist, impartialist and rationalist moral paradigms). I have examined what types of human capacities could be placed at the centre of moral thought and practice in this account, how morality relates to emotional capacity or other faculties, and what kind of philosophical account has been offered in the literature so far to that effect. My aim was to underscore

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the value of naturalistic and sentimentalist accounts, but also to indicate some of their limitations. These limitations, I argued, are tied to the difficulty that what can still be considered as an empiricist/enlightenment framework encounters when faced with a post-twentieth-century awareness of the problem of difference and stigma, and hence with the difficulty of seeing the other and of recognizing their pleasure and pain. This difficulty has led me to consider anew the kind of work done by the imagination—the imagination having typically been considered, in the scholarship mentioned above, as a fundamental requirement for morality (along with sympathy). It has also led me to think about the positive role that could be played in morality by a further resource that I shall try to characterize here in terms of an awareness of the limits of one’s imaginative and affective capacities, an awareness of one’s own limitation or, stated differently, a critical attitude. This potentially useful resource for ethics—the sense of one’s own limitation—need not be regarded as resulting from the intervention of reason or the intellect. It could also be regarded as the upshot of actual experiences, as what these might generate in terms of puzzlement or feelings of humility. In this chapter I wish to review this line of enquiry and take it a step further. I will first give a short account of the main points of my argument, going back once more to Gilligan’s ideas to propose a reinterpretation of her views. I will then offer some remarks on the sentimentalist account of care ethics and its chief characteristics, which will be followed by some critical reflections on this account’s limitations and the latter’s possible overcoming.

1. Gilligan on care: relevant themes and critical assessment. First of all, I would like to outline some points in Gilligan’s thinking on care that I find particularly salient. As I see it, Gilligan’s work provides not only the empirical basis for the paradigm of care ethics, but also some specific cues for theoretical thinking that are particularly interesting and have not always been taken up or developed in later treatments of care ethics.

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As is generally known, Gilligan overturns the traditional judgment of women’s moral incapacity and shows how the “care for and sensitivity to the needs of others” [Gilligan 1982, 18] and the qualities of “relational sensitivity” and “empathic concerns” [Gilligan 2011, 29], usually ascribed to women and considered as limiting their moral maturity, can be placed instead at the centre of a different way of thinking and of practising morals. It is a way that is only superficially associated with women, and can be fruitfully practised by all. As she states: The disparity between women’s experience and the representation of human development noted throughout the psychological literature, has generally been seen to signify a problem in women’s development. Instead, the failure of women to fit existing models of human growth may point to a problem in the representation, a limitation in the conception of human condition, an omission of certain truths about life. [Gilligan 1982, 1-2]

Regarding the sexualisation of this different way of re-describing the human and the moral, Gilligan had already clearly stated in In a Different Voice that the voice she describes “is characterized not by gender but theme” [Gilligan 1982, 2]. In her more recent work, she claims that it is only in the patriarchal system that care is feminine, and that it is precisely by generalizing care that we can resist patriarchal dehumanization and remain human [Gilligan 2011, 28, 221-222]. In her view, therefore, the voices of little girls and young women her research focuses on can lead to illuminate a different and less limited way of representing the human condition tout court and to recognizing some “truths about life” that have been obscured in mainstream moral thinking and that are significant for rethinking the stages of human moral development. In taking stock of these voices Gilligan is, in her words, taking stock of “the rediscovery of connection, the realization that self and other are interdependent and that life, however valuable in itself, can only be sustained by care in relationships” [Gilligan 1982, 127]. She is also taking stock of the possibility/necessity of no longer regarding moral practice and moral thought as typically detached and as based on universal, impartial rules, but rather as something centred on recognizing the value of attitudes and practices of care and attention towards others with whom we relate, in all their particularity and

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actuality or, to be more precise, the value of attitudes and practices of responsible care for the relationships that sustain our own flourishing and that of everyone else. The ideal of care is thus an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone [Gilligan 1982, 62].

All this is well-known and, as already mentioned, is at the centre of a wide-ranging philosophical literature. The point I am interested in developing here is that of how we can give a more philosophically structured account of this new way of thinking about morality, and, above all, to investigate the specific role of that dimension of “empathic concern” and “relational sensitivity” Gilligan speaks of and from which she seems to start. In defining the ideal of care, Gilligan often speaks of the responsibility that proceeds from an intimate representation1 of one’s position in relation to others and their needs (their survival and their wellbeing), and here, often underscores the importance of “sensitivity” and “solicitude”. But Gilligan, like many other authors who have written on these themes in light of her work, remains somewhat general on the nature of this intimate representation, and of this sensitivity, solicitude, or care—as if they were a shared fact of our experience, as if they were a given human capacity (one she encounters particularly in the attitudes and judgments of small girls). She seems to claim that we need only recognize their moral value and simply generalize them. Similarly, other theorists speak of caring as an experience common to all human beings, at least in the form of having been nursed [for example, Held 2006, 3] or in terms of the “ordinariness of care” or of care as a “species activity” [Tronto 1993, 102-3]. However, if we are dealing with an ethical paradigm then we should articulate this specific attitude more clearly. Indeed, Gilligan herself speaks of an ideal, and the task of any philosophical reflection on care is therefore that of probing this kind of statement more deeply and with more precision [Pulcini 2016 makes a similar point]. In Gilligan’s works, in fact, we find few indications (and those few indications are all very different from each other) as to how we can

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gain this sense of connection and responsibility that leads us to the practice of care. On the one hand, she concentrates on verbal communication: narration, listening, dialogue; on the other, she often refers to sentimental communication in terms of empathy or sympathy, or speaks elsewhere of attention and imagination. But, obviously, it is a radically different matter to indicate which of these paths is the one to take and how. Here I believe that it might be fruitful to explore further the path of sentimental communication: this is the path that many have followed, and that Gilligan herself seems to prefer in her later works [e.g. Gilligan 2011]. But before turning to this in the next section, I would like to underline some relevant themes, so as to give an account of the form that care ethics takes in Gilligan, in my view. These themes, as I will indicate, are also significant for clarifying how the sentimentalist path itself can be developed and interpreted. As just noted, they are issues that can help us grasp with great precision Gilligan’s thinking on the relation between the practice and attitude of care and ethics, distinguishing it from different readings. In other words, they are issues where the debate is still open and where relevant questions must be tackled, if we are to give care ethics the shape of a philosophically structured moral paradigm. The first issue concerns the extension of the moral practice of caring. One might well ask if the ideal of care, i.e. the responsible care of relations in their specificity, concreteness and difference, is an ideal that can only be applied to a restricted domain of morally significant situations, and that only concerns particular types of relations (e.g. interpersonal or affective ones with our nearest and dearest) or can be extended to all (i.e. to the broad moral universe of human relations in general). That is, does assuming an attitude of responsible care mean caring for a limited number of people, for certain particular others who are important for each of us (as Noddings and, in part, Slote claim, for example)? Or does it mean caring for others, all others, far and near, in their particularity (as Tronto and Held suggest)? I think that Gilligan’s sense of care, or the one I would like to give it, is the second of the two. But this poses an important question as to the actual functioning

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or the forms of care. How do we achieve such a broad capacity for solicitude, attention and commitment towards others? Secondly, I would like to insist that Gilligan is not proposing an ideal of agape, of altruistic and sacrificial benevolence. She quite explicitly claims that moral maturity is gained by passing from the model of “maternal care” [considered fundamental by Held and Noddings, and also by Ruddick 1989], to what she calls “responsible care”, where one is receptive to the “truth” or dynamics of one’s relations and so also activates self-care. Self-care emerges from the very awareness of the functioning of relations, from the very sense of the “relational truth” that “self and other are interdependent” [Gilligan 1982, 74]. So care does not take the form of receiving the needs of others as external to oneself while forgetting about oneself, but seeks to keep alive the web of interconnections between us all, on which we all feed and thrive, in our difference, starting from our different positions of responsibility and action. Both responsibility for others and for ourselves emerge, then, from “the truth of relationships”, from the dynamics of relations, from the awareness that the life of each one of us is interwoven with and sustained by relations: the human condition is not that of distinct, sovereign individuals who need to find a way of not entering into conflict or be benevolent, but rather of interdependent beings who are therefore dependent, vulnerable and porous, and, as such, are (all) in need and also capable of morality—that is, of caring for each other and themselves, of handling the vulnerability of themselves and others. Not only is this not agapism; it is a clear relational vision of subjectivity, in which any sharp distinction between ourselves and others seems to fade away. Thirdly—and further complicating any naive reading of care ethics—I would also like to mention that Gilligan’s ideal of responsible care does not seem to consist in providing attentive responses to the needs of others in their specificity, as if they were always easily taken up and the responses were simple, if not automatic. At various points Gilligan notes that the practice of care cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game where everything has its appointed place and every need has a corresponding response—a game that has no cost or damage or suffering. It is, rather, a commitment to the responsible handling of relations and

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their setbacks, a commitment that characteristically gives attention to all (“no one is left alone” only in this sense), even in the most complex situations. In other words, responsibility and care might not take the form of a benevolent reaction from responsible individuals to others who are clearly in need. It can rather be that of maintaining the possibility of an exchange, a connection that allows everyone’s needs to emerge and take form, that allows everyone’s needs to be represented and taken on board so far as possible, even where this does not lead to a simple solution, or the one expected. In certain cases, in fact, the responsible handling of a relation may also be defined in recognizing its failure [see, for example, the interviews on abortion in Gilligan 1987, Chap. 3]. One last and, in my view, fundamental observation should be made: if care is care for the human flourishing that is embodied in a series of relations to which we give attention, trying to limit their violence and suffering, one important question becomes that of bearing in mind the various levels at which the thriving or the violence, the happiness or unhappiness, of the relations unfolds. In other words, it is worth asking about the nature of the needs or vulnerability we must take into account and care for. In many interpretations of care ethics, the type of human need referred to, when thinking about attitudes of care and attention, is described in physical or psychological terms. There is reference to the dimension of survival, or physical or psychological wellbeing (to the responsibility in/of responding to bodily needs or of contributing to the stability of one’s own self and that of others). But, actually, there is much more than this at stake. Particularly in her recent works, Gilligan focuses on the importance of the dimensions of gaining visibility and capacity of expression, of making oneself heard and having one’s own (specific) voice recognized. That is to say, Gilligan dwells on the need to consider the fragility of the human voice as an important form of vulnerability we should care for [here the reading in Laugier 2015 is relevant; cf. Molinier, Laugier and Paperman 2009]. So there is not only a reference to a sort of physical or psychological (inter)dependence, but also to a broader social and symbolic dependence. The ideal of care,

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then, is extended from the realm of attitudes and activities of care that may be exemplified by feeding or nurturing (as in the care of children or the sick) and which characterize private relations, to practices and activities that are deployed on a social, cultural and symbolic plane (for example, maintaining the very texture of the language that sustains the expression of each one of us, or producing non-oppressive representations of the human or non-oppressive social systems). In this sense Gilligan’s very gesture of listening to small girls and recognizing their voice as a non-defective voice can be regarded as a gesture of care, an ethical gesture that shows care: it is, in fact, putting into practice what Gilligan made her subject when listening to the children. Thus care takes the form of cultivating a sensibility that will disapprove of various forms or levels of vulnerability and violence or suffering. The question of which needs one ought to care for, like the previous issues, is, in my view, fundamental for positing care ethics both as a complete moral paradigm and as one that is adequate to the contemporary world. But it is precisely on this last point, as we shall see more clearly in what follows, that is raised the problem mentioned at the outset: namely, the difficulty of holding together a perspective of care and the awareness of the difficulty (underscored in much twentiethcentury philosophy) of having an authentic, non-mediated access to the needs of others (if not to our own). In other words, the difficulty of considering others as always able to express themselves, and ourselves as always able to receive those expressions. We have to face here, in short, the difficulty of recognizing others as interlocutors. Last of all, in my interpretation, Gilligan’s care ethics can be understood as an ethic for a humanity regarded as interconnected, fragile and vulnerable—a humanity that constitutes and maintains itself through relations at various levels. In this sense responsible care as a fulcrum of morals takes the form of caring for the relation between oneself and others, caring for oneself and others in relations, and caring for the network of relations that sustain life or our world at various levels, from the physical existence of individuals to their psychic identity, their independence, and their visibility and social subjectivity. The decisive point I turn to now is how to represent this form of sensitivity and care, how

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to make of it the fulcrum of an ethic that can account for this great degree of complexity.

2. Sentimentalist readings of care ethics: relationships, sympathy and imagination As I have already indicated, I am particularly convinced by sentimentalist readings of care ethics, such as the neo-Humean ones—for all their differences—of Annette Baier and Michael Slote [notably in Baier 1995; Slote 2007; 2010]. As already noted, I realize that these readings come up against certain problems, but they also open up an interesting path of development—interesting in itself and strikingly in line with Gilligan’s thesis that the practice of responsible care can emerge from sentimental competence—or, to use her own words, “through a coherent sequence of feelings and thoughts” [Gilligan 1982, 127].2 Sophisticated sentimentalist readings take into account the sentimental matrix of morals by appealing both to the role of sympathy or empathy, but also to the gradual development of a more sophisticated sensibility, for example when they deal with the reflective nature of the moral sense (which is thus distinguished from the appeal to generic or good feelings). I would like to explore, for a moment, these accounts at greater length. As is generally known, these theories, the classical expression of which is in the works of David Hume, regard morality as rooted in human passions and affections, and, more particularly, in a special sentimental capacity or sensibility that leads us to participate in the suffering of other individuals. It is this same capacity that leads us to disapprove the characters of those who create the suffering, and to approve of those who are able to mitigate or avoid causing suffering (and who therefore demonstrate they are able to be good human companions),3 and—on this basis—to judge our conduct or that of others.4 As is generally known, the account that is given of this capacity for moral approbation or disapprobation is based on the principle of sympathy and the faculty of imagination. There are, in fact, various accounts that set up in more or less complex ways the transition from sympathy (or empathy)5 to moral

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approbation/disapprobation, and thence to solicitude and benevolence. As I have already said, I find particularly interesting those accounts that consider it a complex mechanism involving a reflective dimension that turns back on one’s more immediate sentiments. This reading, which is the most faithful to Hume’s elaboration, is suggested by Baier [1991] among others, and in Italy by Eugenio Lecaldano [Lecaldano 1991, 2010, 2013], for example. This reading gives pride of place to the way in which morality is brought back to a special feeling of approbation and disapprobation—a special pleasure (a special emotion) that we feel in seeing or imagining a character and its conduct. This type of account of morals, of course, revolves around the principle of sympathy, a principle of psychological transmission which is inherent to us, and which makes the sufferings and pleasures of others intimately present to us. Through the sympathetic mechanism, we are naturally influenced by the pleasures and pains of others so that the others’ pains create pain and suffering in us, and the pleasures make us feel joy and comfort. It is this pain and this comfort that leads us to approve or disapprove the forms of conduct that create either pleasure and displeasure (agreeableness and disagreeableness) in others, and—in some cases—to a solicitous reaction that puts our mind at rest. Morality therefore originates in continuity with this human psychological structure, but is not limited to it. The crucial point here is that, according to Hume and his readers, this capacity for fellow-feeling and for a sentimental reaction to the suffering of others is limited in humans and therefore gives rise to a limited benevolence. The principle of sympathy is influenced by closeness and distance, and by the relations we have with those we have feelings for, and may be a source both of benevolence or solicitude, and disgust or even malice. And so, feelings of approbation or disapprobation deriving from sympathy for those near and dear to us are not in themselves moral feelings, but require extending and stabilizing. In Hume, then, sympathy is a necessary but insufficient principle for morality. As clarified by contemporary sentimentalists such as Baier and Lecaldano, Hume offers a more complex account of moral sensibility,

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bringing in the faculty of imagination alongside sympathy and feelings (although the latter remain central) and offering a finer account of the dynamic of feeling that underlies moral approbation (i.e. moral judgment and moral behaviour) and that characterizes true moral sense. For Hume, it is imagination that enables us to enlarge our point of view so that our reaction of approbation or disapprobation for conduct is not influenced by the kind of relation we have with the person acting or suffering the effects of the action. Rather, our reaction can arise, thanks to our imagination, from the very nature of those effects in terms of the pleasure or suffering experienced by the person concerned, or how beneficial and agreeable the relation with a person acting in a determinate way may be. That is to say, from the happiness or unhappiness of the specific relational context in which individuals, who may not be in direct contact with us, find themselves. Imagination allows us to construct a broader and firmer context (“firm and general”), which allows us to return more reflectively and critically on the partiality of the most immediate (first-level) feelings, approving or disapproving them, that is to say endorsing them sentimentally or not, feeling or not a precise form of pleasure or well-being, which is characterized by its stability or authoritativeness [for a clear account of this, see Baier 1991, Lecaldano 2010, Chap. 3 and Vaccari 2012, Chap. 1]. Moral sense, then, is characterized by this reflective nature—by being that particular pleasure or displeasure we feel for our most immediate feelings, when we have imaginatively broadened our point of view, and that makes us endorse them or not. And these reflective feelings characterize moral approbation or disapprobation and make moral distinctions (and moral conduct itself) possible. Morality, then, can indeed be brought back to our emotions and feelings about human conduct and the suffering it causes (or not); and it would not exist without them. But at the same time, morality cannot be brought back to all emotions or feelings, not to immediate, unreflected ones. It is to be brought back to those feelings we actually feel once we have extended and stabilized our point of view. I find this account particularly interesting for the following reasons.

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First, because it allows us to give a more analytic account of the mechanism underlying care and solicitude, and because it allows us to explain why, normatively, we value the cultivation of characters that are sensitive and concerned for others to be happy or to flourish. It is also compelling because it does justice to the relational nature of individuals themselves and their flourishing or happiness (as I have already noted, approbation is based on the agreeableness or value of the relational contexts), as well as to a necessary attention to details—to the specificity of individuals and their circumstances, which we register or imagine in detail. Moreover, it is an interesting account because, as Gilligan indicates, it places the origin of need of care, and of the moral capacity of caring, in relationality itself.6 Secondly, I would like to indicate that this kind of account gives a very particular answer to the question that is often raised on what are the relevant emotions for the morals of care [see, for example, Pulcini 2016]. More specifically, this particularity lies in the fact that in this account, the sentimental nature of morals is not tied to a specific type of emotion or passion, love more than compassion and so on, or to a number of virtuous character traits that can be listed, but is tied to a dynamic of pleasure and pain, of being at ease or ill at ease, of approbation or disapprobation, which resides in our mind when we have duly extended our point of view. This account, then, allows us to recognize the moral value of various emotions each time, taking into account the wealth and value of various emotions, but it also indicates precisely why they have or do not have moral significance. By not focusing normatively on the value of specific emotions, but on the reflective process by which we approve them, the morals (of care) become more adaptable. Finally, I would like to point out that the most interesting role in this account is not played by sentimental communication, which seems relatively simple and spontaneous, or by the possibility of turning back on our own feelings, which is also almost automatic, but rather by the imagination. It is this faculty and its work that allow us to correct the natural limitations of sympathy and solicitude, turning them into morality (into a moral sense).

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In my view, this work of the imagination is worth much consideration, both because it allows us to give an account of some of the issues we have previously seen as salient for the debate on the forms of an ethic of care, and because it might prove to be a weak spot in the account itself, needing further investigation. Coming to the themes I have identified above as salient in the account of Gilligan’s care ethics, it seems clear to me that this reflective understanding of the moral sense and of the work of imagination provides answers to some of them. For example: it accounts for the fact that care can be extended from our relations with those near and dear to us to distant others and to humanity in the broadest sense, whose vulnerability we can imagine. Secondly, in this light care ethics is by no means characterized as an altruistic, sacrificial ethic, precisely because of this relational dynamic that always turns back on itself. Thirdly, it recognizes the relational matrix of wellbeing and human flourishing (or its opposite), and the necessary attention to the specificity of each relational context and to the very maintenance of the connective tissue of the connections and relations between individuals. Finally, it might also account for the various levels of human neediness, precisely thanks to the intervention of the imagination and the cultural level it draws on.7 But, on the other hand, it is precisely in relation to the functioning of the imagination and the limits of sympathy that the question of the visibility and invisibility of others and the recognisability of the needs of others (or of one’s own), becomes significant—a question that might mark a limit to this account. In conclusion, I would like to mention some limitations that I see in this account and some possible lines of development.

3. Opacity, self-transformation and humility. As noted earlier, one point I would like to suggest is that the empiricist framework (an enlightened and associationist framework, to use a general formula) in which sentimentalist thinking moves, might prove to be limited in the face of the awareness the twentieth century acquired on the subject of the visibility and invisibility of others, and of the recognizability of one’s own and others’ needs. I refer here, very broadly,

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to the vast number of reflections (e.g. those of Freud, Foucault, Wittgenstein, or those put forward by feminists) that made us mindful of the difficulty of having a so-called ‘authentic access’ to one’s own or someone else’s sensations, including those of pleasure and pain. (‘Authentic’ used here in the sense that such access is conceived as not conditioned or mediated by linguistic, cultural, historical or psychic constraints). Much twentieth-century philosophy has made it difficult to assume that human beings share a single, universal grammar of pleasure and pain, on the basis of which—once prejudices and partialities deriving from emotional or physical closeness have been eliminated reflectively—one can articulate moral distinctions on the basis of sentimental communication. In this light I find particularly interesting reflections that have been developed in recent feminist and post-feminist writing on the difficulty of “giving an account” of oneself and others [e.g. Butler 2005], of seeing one’s own and others’ needs, or having a voice to express them—reflections that, as I suggested, are also echoed in Gilligan’s own recent work [e.g. Gilligan 2011] when the author considers the suffering of not being recognized as subjects.8 I am not referring here to the well-known problem of the risk of paternalism in care [discussed, for example, in Tronto 1993, 134-136], but to the broader problem of not seeing the needs of some individuals at all, of not granting them a voice, or even not acknowledging (or feeling oneself to be involved in) their very existence. I think of Gayatri Spivak when she claims, for instance, that “the subaltern cannot speak” [Spivak 1988], of Judith Butler’s view of the invisibility of some lives [e.g. Butler 2004], or of the many recent deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. So now the crucial point is to understand whether we can account for this necessary opacity from inside the paradigm of care, and how we can do this. One interesting path might be that of extending the sentimentalist interpretation of care we have just discussed. In this light, while maintaining a strong reference to sympathy and imagination, I have myself tried to reflect on the kind of work the imagination does and to indicate the positive role that could be played by a further resource that we

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might characterize in terms of an awareness of the limits of one’s imagination or feeling, a sense of limitation or a critical capacity. I would like to conclude with some quick notes on these two points. With regards to the imagination: if we assume a horizon in which even feeling pleasure or pain (whether our own or others’), or one in which our or the others’ visibility and audibility depends on a series of constraints that make those perceptions not simple perceptions but rather perceptions that are only available within discursive practices or orders, languages, forms of life, psychological states, etc. (though they remain fundamental for our action and for our judgment—of that I am certain), then, evidently, the work of the imagination becomes more complicated and needs reconsideration. We can tentatively suggest, then, that the work of the imagination is not limited to putting us in connection with situations of suffering or pleasure that are far removed from us but readily available (for example, through a TV news service or a work of fiction), to which we can react with our grammar of pleasure, assumed as universal. It is more a matter of gaining access to or taking stock of grammars of pleasure or pain that are different from ours. And it is also, as such, a matter of questioning our own grammar. What is required, then, is not just reviving the intensity of our perceptions so that the sympathetic mechanism can start up, but somehow to acquaint ourselves with entirely new contexts (or unprecedented contexts) of suffering. The work of the imagination, then, is also grammatical. It should change our own mental panorama, our concepts, our representations of what is suffering or pain or what is human or what has value (we might say with Butler that it is a question of “doing and undoing” the human). Returning to care as a moral paradigm, in very general terms, we can claim, then, that caring for others involves not only receptiveness and responsiveness to individual instances of suffering or distress, but to whole ways of living. To put ourselves in relation with the other involves, in fact, a transformation of oneself, of one’s own mental landscape, and a reconsideration of what one regards as a response of human care. This may lead us to consider that caring for the others

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might also mean, for example, giving attention to our tiniest, most ordinary gestures, to the words we use if these reinforce the invisibility or the stigma of some, or becoming involved in large-scale social and symbolic changes. At this point we might wonder what nourishes or moves an imagination conceived in this way. Certainly, it would not only be the mere description of an instance of suffering, but—we might say—large-scale re-descriptions of the human, of whole ways of living. Images, concepts, narratives or theories that extend the representation of the human (without closing it in a fixed ontological reality, as Nussbaum and Tronto tend to do—see Tronto 1993) will be useful for this end. But there will also be a role for critical and transformative practices and experiences (like those implemented by the feminist or LGBT movements) and for the actual experience of encounters with different others and for the dialogue, the listening and even the puzzlement they can give rise to. In short, the many different ways of transforming the self and of cultural progress will be important.9 Coming to the last point: through this appeal to the imagination, I have tried to show how fundamental it is to underscore this need for opening up and transforming the self, if placing care at the centre of moral practice is not to be violent in its ultimate effect. However, this process obviously cannot be exhausted once and for all. It is infinite. It will close only on temporary, limited, partial images each time and for each individual—or for each meeting between individuals. If this is true, then I believe (and once again I am building on recent feminist work) that we can consider another resource as an active part of the reflective process that characterizes moral practice and moral judgment: what we might call a sense of humility, or a critical and selfcritical capacity. Phrased differently, we could name it an awareness of the limitations of our feeling, our listening and our imagining. So, alongside the importance of being able to extend one’s mental landscape (through the imagination), I think we should also consider the role of one’s awareness that this effort can only be partial and limited.10 Note well: this awareness is not necessarily intellectual, nor should it necessarily be thought of as the result of an intervention of reason or

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the intellect. It can also be thought of in the form of a feeling, of a sense of inadequacy or frustration with regard to the limits of one’s own action, thinking, etc. It can also be thought of as the upshot of actual experiences, for example, in terms of puzzlement or the sense of humility that some experiences can generate. Spivak, for example, speaks of the value of meeting someone we do not understand, or those we resist identifying with, but to whom we are still bound. She says that it is the very sense of the impossibility of meeting the other that—paradoxically—can make it possible for us to escape ourselves and finally meet him/her [Spivak 1995, on this, see also Boella 2012, 185 ff]. Consider for instance Spivak’s following claim: This is why ethics is the experience of the impossible. Please note that I am not saying that ethics are impossible, but rather that ethics is the experience of the impossible [Spivak 1995, xxv].

It is, then, a sense of humility that opens to generosity – a generosity that can even take the form of suspending our judgment on others, but not our care and attention for them. One might even suggest giving serious consideration to the ability to suspend judgment without suspending care, or suggest to consider the suspension of judgment—recursively—as a form of care [see Botti 2014, 84]. Taking care of how we take care of others, taking note of the invisible structures that inhabit our minds and that make some lives invisible in their turn, becomes therefore a crucial attitude. I believe this broad range of reflections can contribute to a revised sentimentalist account of care ethics, both in their functioning and in their wide-ranging potential. It is a vision of care that places at the centre of it our capacity to handle (in the widest sense possible) the relations that nourish individualities and collective life, and that sees solicitude and a sense of one’s limits as character traits to appreciate and cultivate. To sum up my arguments, I would say that we could try to read care ethics as a reflection on morals that puts at the centre of morality itself both the ability to reach out to the needs of others in their specificity (which is rooted in a relational and sentimental characterization of subjectivity), and an awareness of the fact that reaching out to others

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also means questioning what one thinks of oneself and of them (to overcome, as far as possible, any gap, opacity or myopia). It means laying oneself open, listening to others and transforming oneself, while being aware that one can never completely escape oneself and one’s own limits.

Notes 1 In some passages she describes this representation as “compelling”, explaining, for example, the reactions of the child Amy in the following terms: “Her [Amy’s] world is a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another, a perception of the need for response. Seen in this light, her understanding of morality as arising from the recognition of relationship, her belief in communication as the mode of conflict resolutions, and her conviction that the solution to the dilemma will follow from its compelling representation seem far from naive or cognitively immature. Instead Amy’s judgments contains the insights central to an ethic of care, just as Jake’s judgments reflects the logic of the justice approach.” [Gilligan 1982, 30, emphasis added]. 2 This sentimentalist reading is interestingly confirmed in a passage from George Eliot quoted by Gilligan (one of many by this author that Gilligan quotes): “Since ‘the mysterious complexity of our life’ cannot be ‘laced up in formulas’, moral judgement cannot be bound by ‘general rules’ but must instead be informed ‘by a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide, fellow-feeling with all that is human’.” (G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, in Gilligan 1982, 130). As is generally known, George Eliot was familiar with David Hume’s works. 3 Hume clarifies this point on the importance of being “a safe companion, an easy friend, a gentle master, an agreeable husband” and so on, i.e. a person with whom we would want to have any sort of relation, in his Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part III sect. 3 [Hume 2000, 386]. On this point, see Baier 1991, Chap. 7. 4 Or motivate our conduct, as claimed, for example, in Vaccari 2012. 5 As is widely known, for Hume the principle of sympathy is a neutral mechanism for transmitting an emotion, not the emotion of compassion or suffering for someone. As such it is closer to what we now call empathy. See Slote 2007 and Lecaldano 2013. 6 What activates morality is precisely this porousness (inevitable within certain limits) to the wellbeing and agreeableness of those around us and of the relations we and they enjoy, and those we can imagine, and the search for mental peace deriving from it. Annette Baier claims that in this sense what activates morals is our not being carapaced like insects [see Baier 1995, 286]. Indeed—but this is another subject—even our sense of ourselves is linked to the pleasure and pride we feel in being recognized as moral subjects.

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7

One might mention here the importance of the processes of civilizing and socializing, the role of education, customs, rules of conduct and human cultural progress, whose role is described by Hume too, and becomes central in his treatment of the artificial virtues—a question that often receives little attention in the context of rereadings of care ethics. In this connection, see, for example, Baier 1997. 8 See also the Letter to Readers in the 1993 edition of In a Different Voice, where she claims: “To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act.” [Gilligan 1993, xvi]. 9 In this sense it is certainly useful to consider the wealth of interpretations of care emerging from theorists influenced by Wittgenstein [Laugier 2013, 2015] and also the reference to authors such as Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch [for the latter, see Blum 1994]. Equally useful might be those re-readings of Hume’s ethics (see again Baier’s and Lecaldano’s, but see also Taylor 2015 for a more recent proposal) which deal with the value of cultural progress and the collective search for what makes humanity flourish, considering even the role of anti-conformist characters, etc. [on this, see also Vaccari 2012, Chap. 5]. 10 I am indebted to Sandra Harding’s thoughts on the necessary instability of feminist categories, and Adrienne Rich’s and Donna Haraway’s on the politics of positioning and partiality [Harding 1986; Rich 1986; Haraway 1991, Chap.2], as well as to Butler 2005.

Literature Baier, A. [1991], A Progress of Sentiments. Reflections on Hume’s Treatise, Cambridge Mass.London, Harvard University Press. Baier, A. [1995], Moral Prejudices, Cambridge Mass.-London, Harvard University Press. Baier, A. [1997], The Commons of the Mind, Chicago, Open Court. Boella, L. [2012], Il coraggio dell’etica, Milan, Raffaello Cortina. Botti, C. [2014], Prospettive femministe. Morale, bioetica e vita quotidiana, Milan, Mimesis. Botti C. [2015], “Feminine Virtues or Feminist Virtues. The Debate on Care Ethics Revisited”, Ethics & Politics, XVII, 2, pp. 107-151. Blum L. [1994], Moral Perception and Particularity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. [2004], Precarious life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London-New York: Verso. Butler, J. [2005], Giving an account of oneself. New York, Fordham University Press. Gilligan, C. [1982], In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C. [1993], “Letters to Readers”, in C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2nd edition. Gilligan, C. [2011], Joining the Resistence, Cambridge-Molden, Polity Press. Harding, S. [1986], “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory”, in Signs, 11, 4, pp.645-64.

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Haraway, D. [1991], Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books. Held, V. [1993], Feminist Morality. Transforming Culture, Society and Politics, ChicagoLondon, The University of Chicago Press. Held, V. [2006], The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political and Global, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press. Hume, D. [2000], A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), edited by D. F. Norton and M. Norton, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kittay, E. Feder [1999], Love’s Labour. Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, New York, Routledge. Laugier, S. [2013], “Attention to Ordinary Others: Care, Vulnerability, and Human Security”, in Iride, 70, XXVI, pp.507526. Laugier, S. [2015], Etica e politica dell’ordinario, Milan LED. Lecaldano, E. [1991], Hume e la nascita dell’etica contemporanea, Rome-Bari, Laterza. Lecaldano, E. [2010], La prima lezione di filosofia morale, Rome-Bari, Laterza. Lecaldano, E. [2013], Simpatia, Milan, Raffaello Cortina. Molinier, P., Laugier S., Paperman P. [2009], Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris, Payot. Noddings, N. [1984], Caring. A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, BerkeleyLos Angeles, University of California Press. Pulcini, E. [2016], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotions Review, 9, 1, pp. 64-71. Rich, A. [1986], “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” Ead. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected prose 1979-1985, London, Virago, pp. 200-231. Ruddick, S. [1989], Maternal Thinking. Toward a Politics of Peace, Beacon Press, Boston. Slote, M. [2007], The Ethics of Care and Empathy, London-New York, Routledge. Slote, M. [2010], Moral Sentimentalism, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press. Slote, M. [2011], The Impossibility of Perfection. Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press. Spivak, G.C. [1988], “Can the subaltern speak?”, in C. Nelson, L. Grossberg, ed., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-313. Spivak, G.C. [1995], Translator’s Preface to M. Davi, Imaginary Maps, London, Routledge, pp. xxiii-xxix. Taylor, J. [2015], Reflecting Subjects. Passions, Sympathy and Society in Hume’s Philosophy, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press. Tronto, J. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care, New York, Routledge. Vaccari, A. [2012], Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume, Florence, Le Lettere.

6. Rethinking the Moral Importance of Empathy Monika Betzler

1. Introduction Philosophers have discussed what role empathy can play in our moral lives for a long time. On first inspection, one might think that those who are able to empathize with others care more about their well-being, are more attentive to their needs, or are more respectful of their autonomous perspective. One might therefore be tempted to conclude that the connection between empathy and morality is very close. On closer scrutiny, however, the connection between empathy and morality is much more intricate and complex. The pervasive partiality that empathy seems to give rise to has spawned a lot of skepticism about the alleged close connection [Prinz 2011; Bloom 2016]. This skepticism has inspired proponents of an empathy-based morality to come up with more sophisticated proposals. They either try to make room for empathy within moral theorizing, or come up with morally filtered conceptions of empathy [Carse 2005; Noddings 2010a; Simmons 2014; Masto 2015]. My aim is not to engage directly with these attempts, but to elucidate the distinct value that empathy has with regard to building and maintaining our relationships. Once we better understand that relational value, I claim, we are in a better position to show what particular moral relevance empathy has. This chapter will be organized as follows. I will first highlight how empathy and morality can conceivably be connected so as to better explain what grounds the skeptical worries about any direct relation between them. After clarifying what empathy is, I will further explicate

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what I take the relational value of empathy to consist in that, so far, has been largely overlooked and was only alluded to by very few philosophers [Halpern 2001, 111ff.; Herrmann 2013; Song 2015]. I will show that empathy is both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable in virtue of various evaluative dimensions, such as the pleasant experiences with others, harmony and meaning that it provides, the recognition, self-esteem and self-trust it enhances, and the security, attachment and affection it fosters. Finally, I will draw out what plausible bearing the relational value of empathy so conceived has on morality in general and on an ethics of care in particular, one that avoids the strictures of both partiality and impartiality. Once we better capture the relational value of empathy we might have a better understanding of both why empathy is sometimes morally required, and why there sometimes are stronger reasons to refrain from empathizing.

2. The Many Connections between Empathy and Morality But why exactly should one think that empathy belongs to the moral domain at all? There are at least four conceivable connections between empathy and morality. First, one might think that there is a close motivational connection between empathy and moral behavior. Those who empathize with others might be thought to be immediately moved by their concerns, and will thus be more likely to engage in other-directed action [Sober and Wilson 1998, 236f.; Noddings 2010b].1 Second, empathy and morality could be conceived as conceptually intertwined. Accordingly, empathy just is other-directed concern [Slote 2007]. Third, some think that there is an interesting metaethical connection between empathy and morality: what is morally right is what an (ideal) empathizer would feel empathy with [Slote 2010; Kauppinen 2014]. And fourth, some locate a normative connection between empathy and morality in that empathy is regarded as a bearer of value that provides reasons to respond in other-regarding ways. For example, it can be thought to be epistemically valuable in that it provides access to information about other people’s emotions that can be morally relevant [Steinberg 2014; Song 2015; Hamington 2017].

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Whatever connection has been detected, each view is beset with problems of its own. As to the first alleged connection between empathy and moral motivation, one can easily point to cases in which empathy does not lead to moral motivation. For example, taking delight in the joy of another person will hardly motivate morally. This is just not a case for moral action, at least not in any immediate sense. Similarly, it is difficult to conceive what other-regarding motivation should ensue from empathizing with someone’s anger. It will hardly motivate to go after the cause of anger, and if it does, it will not necessarily count as moral action. One might point out that it can lead to helping the other person to alleviate her anger, but this would require another motive than vicarious anger. One can also take issue with the second, conceptual connection. After all, empathy implies partiality to some to the disadvantage of others [Snow 2000; Prinz 2011]. By contrast, it is a widespread assumption that the moral point of view is impartial and does not differentiate between particular others. Two of the most prominent moral theories, such as consequentialism and Kantianism, for example, take it for granted that all others concerned play a relevant role in morality. Empathy, which is, by its nature, directed to particular persons, can thus lead to favoritism and neglect the legitimate demands of others. Even care ethicists who explicitly distance themselves from an impartialist morality try to broaden the ambit of empathy to those with whom we have no interactions [Noddings 2010b]. It remains questionable, however, whether empathy is apt for this task. These worries substantiate the view that empathy and morality are two different and potentially conflicting concepts. One might therefore concede that there is no immediate connection between empathy and (first-order) morality, but defend the view that there is an important connection between empathy and moral truth. Given that individual occurrences of empathy might be erroneous, socalled sentimentalists in metaethics resort to what an ideal empathizer would empathize with to get at what is morally right. But (neo-)sentimentalist metaethics faces many criticisms of its own. It remains elusive within (neo-)sentimentalist metaethics how to capture the responses of

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an ideal empathizer. Either these responses look like responses that we, as mundane people typically have. Given the fallibility of these responses, however, they seem unable to ground what is morally right. Or they look too much like responses we do not have. The question then is to explain how such ideal responses could ever be normative for situated people like us. It is thus equally difficult to show how idealized responses can ground reasons for what is morally right for us as real non-idealized agents. I think that the normative connection between empathy and morality is more on the right track. Accordingly, empathy can generate or point us to reasons that have moral relevance. For example, empathy provides us with access to emotional information that can serve as a morally relevant epistemic reason. The fact that another person suffers, for example, can thus be a morally relevant consideration that gives us a reason to assist that person. The problem with the normative connection is not that it is wrong, but that it is incomplete. In what follows, my aim is to elucidate a second normative dimension of empathy that, again, has only an indirect bearing on moral deliberation and action. Empathy not only has epistemic, but also relational value that can be morally relevant. Before I proceed, a further clarification is in order. In the next section I will first specify in more detail what empathy is. Even though I follow the dominant view in recent scholarship on empathy, I also try to amend it in some respects.

3. What is Empathy? The term “empathy” is used to cover quite a variety of different phenomena and it has been debated what the term is precisely meant to refer [Batson 2009, 3-15; Michael 2014]. Many scholars have come to agree, however, that empathy is a “process or activity, where to empathize with a person, A, is to vicariously experience A’s internal experience.” [Song 2015, 438; cf. Coplan 2011, 5] Despite the blurriness that typically clouds the analysis of empathy, it has become quite common to take the following conditions to account for empathy: For a person P to empathize with person Q, (i) P is aware of and apprehends Q’s

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internal experience E (awareness condition), and (ii) P experiences E* because Q undergoes E, and E* is sufficiently similar to E, (re-enactment condition) [Deonna 2007; Steinberg 2014; Smith 2017, 713]. To bring out what these conditions come down to, let me refer to Elena Ferrante’s novel The Days of Abandonment in which the protagonist Olga has quite unexpectedly been informed by her husband Mario that he is romantically involved with twenty-year old Carla and decides to leave her. Ferrante vividly illustrates the thoughts, emotions and feelings that Olga subsequently experiences. “I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn’t conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention.” [Ferrante 2005, 21] “I began to change. In the course of a month I lost the habit of putting on makeup carefully, I went from using a refined language, attentive to the feelings of others, to a sarcastic way of expressing myself, punctuated by coarse laughter.” [Ferrante 2005, 26] “In parallel there began to grow inside me a permanent sense of danger. The weight of the two children - the responsibility but also the physical requirements of their lives - became a constant worry.” [Ferrante 2005, 27] “[…], the nights, nearly sleepless already, became a torment. Where was I coming from, what was I becoming.” [Ferrante 2005, 30]

In light of this scenario, let us now consider Lea, one of Olga’s closer friends and assume that she empathizes with Olga (even though this does not seem to be the case in the novel). What content should her mental states have to qualify as fulfilling the abovementioned conditions of empathy? The awareness condition suggests that Olga’s particular mental state or set of states has to play a role in Lea’s own mental state, and that Lea has to be aware of Olga’s way of responding to her circumstances. The first condition is thus meant to differentiate empathy from both emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is a case in which Lea would simply have a similar set of emotions and thoughts as Olga

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without being aware of a clear self-other distinction. Olga’s experiences would simply transfer to Lea without Lea being consciously aware of the fact that it is Olga who perceives the situation she is in. For Lea to be aware of Olga’s way of responding to her situation, Lea’s mental state must therefore not just be an instance of sharing a similar set of thoughts and emotions. But the awareness condition remains quite vague with respect to (i) what the object of empathy precisely is, and (ii) how conscious the process of empathizing has to be to successfully distinguish it from emotional contagion. As for (i) the first condition generally suggests that the particular experiences that a person empathizes with are emotional. As a matter of fact, however, empathy can be directed to a whole array of mental states, such as another person’s feelings, emotions, beliefs, desires, and perceptions. More often than not it is such a set of mental states towards which empathy is directed so as to vividly account for another person’s experiential perspective. As for (ii), it is up for grabs how conscious a process empathizing is. We might be immediately aware of the other person’s experiences, or we might need some more complicated imaginative thought process to grasp them. Some philosophers therefore propose a concept of empathy as “using our imaginations as a tool so as to adopt a different perspective in order to grasp how things appear (or feel) from there” [Matravers 2017, 1f.], or distinguish between lower-level “mirrored understanding” [Debes 2010, 232] and higher-level “normative empathy” [Debes 2010, 221]. To set empathy apart from emotional contagion, however, it seems necessary to assume that there is a more conscious imaginative thought process necessary for empathic understanding than what mere mirroring recognition provides. But despite the attraction of a broader concept of empathy, it is important to highlight that empathy in its fullest form is directed to experiential states of other persons (even if they are part of a set of different mental states). The second re-enactment condition highlights that what Lea’s experience is directed to is mediated by Olga’s experiences. Lea does not simply feel a similar emotion while thinking how she would feel were she in Olga’s situation. Rather, and in contrast to so-called projective

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empathy, she feels the way she does because she imagines how Olga experiences the situation she is in, and how things look for Olga. Lea thus needs to be attentive to and simulates or replicates Olga’s experiential response in the first person [Mortari 2015, 195]. It can be debated, however, how congruent or similar the experiential states of Lea have to be with Olga’s so that Lea qualifies as empathizing with Olga, and thus with how things are for Olga. While some philosophers insist that the two individuals have to feel “in tune” [Deonna 2007] and thus affectively match, we can ask whether this view overstates the case of empathy. After all, we seem to be able to empathize with persons who undergo experiences we have never experienced ourselves [Ratcliffe 2017]. If we had to have the same experiential response as they do we would hardly be able to empathize with them given our lack of experience with what they experience. But there is an indicator that suggests what a person like Lea needs to experience for the person on the receiving end to feel empathized with. If we look at the case from this perspective it seems quite clear that Olga will not feel empathized with if Lea feels similarly depressed, jealous, or rejected. It will even strike Olga as inappropriate if Lea feels too much as she does. The reason is that the object of Lea’s experiencial states is not Mario’s abandonment, but Mario’s abandonment of Olga that Lea perceives and feels from Olga’s perspective. Hence, she should rather vicariously feel the pain that Olga undergoes than the intentional content of Olga’s emotion. In short, what Lea has to feel in tune with is the feeling character of Olga’s experiences. Lea’s empathy is thus not directed at Mario eliciting similar emotions in her as in Olga, but at Olga feeling rejected and let down. So the matching condition has to be interpreted in such a way that it is the phenomenal quality of Olga’s experiences that Lea vicariously experiences. The content of those experiences matters only insofar as they are mediated through Olga’s experiences. With these clarifications out of my way I think we can at least make a case that both the awareness condition and the re-enactment condition are typical characteristics of empathy [Michael 2014, 157ff]. In what follows, I will make a case for the value of empathy with regard to establishing and maintaining our relationships.

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4. The Value of Empathically Relating to Others To ask what the relational value of empathy consists in is to ask how empathy relates two or more people and explain what is good about it. The aim of this sub-chapter is to explore the relational credentials of empathy in more detail, and show in what way empathy is both a valuable kind of relating for its own sake, and constitutively valuable in building interpersonal relationships. I will first articulate this idea more generally, and then spell out at greater length the various evaluative dimensions I take empathy to have with regard to our relationships.

4.1. A First Attempt to Argue for Empathy’s Unique Relational Value To make a first attempt illustrating why we should regard empathy as relationally valuable, I will consider a case of failed empathy with another person and highlight what precisely is missing here, and pave the way to show how empathy can correct for that failure. I will further substantiate my claim about empathy’s relational value by considering empirical research that underscores its significance for close relationships. I will then clarify why not every kind of empathically relating to others is valuable and propose criteria for when this is the case. To get us started suppose Lea fails to empathize with Olga as she is unwilling or unable to do so. Lea would still know that Olga has been abandoned by her husband, but its threatening significance to Olga will not be accessible to Lea. Even if Lea inferred from psychological studies about how people typically feel in such situations that Olga is in bad shape, she cannot dis-value Olga’s vulnerability by vicariously feeling it herself. She can only access it cognitively by judging that Olga is reacting negatively, and that this is indeed bad. There are two possibilities that making such judgments (about the badness of Olga’s situation) might give rise to. Lea’s judgment might be plausibly connected to her intention to bring about change for Olga. Lea might thus either try to make the object of Olga’s negative reaction go away, or she might focus on Olga’s negative reaction itself and try to make it disappear. In the first case, Lea’s attention is directed to Mario. She might either scold Mario and try to talk him out of his decision, or she might think that she does not have any control over Mario and abstain from doing

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anything at all. Or, Lea might try to make Olga’s feelings go away by trying to prove that the object of Olga’s painful experience does not merit that response. She might do so by simply belittling Olga’s feelings. What effect will Lea’s strategy resulting from her judgment have? It is unlikely that Mario would welcome Lea’s interference. As for Olga, she will feel unsupported and not acknowledged in her pain. In not being helped at all, Olga will not be able to view Lea as a friend ready to assist her. In being questioned in the very justification of her experiences, Olga will feel additionally rejected, and start to question herself even more. In not vicariously feeling what Olga feels Lea thus does not alleviate but enhance Olga’s pain. It can therefore be inferred from this case that the lack of empathy accounts for the distance and separation between the two friends. Conversely, if Lea showed empathy with Olga, she would relate to Olga in acknowledging her pain, and thus establish an affirming response. Olga will thereby feel that she is not left alone by Lea. As a result, empathy establishes a valuable relation as it manifests an intimate bond that is at the core of our close relationships. Provided we consider close relationships to be of value, and provided I could show that empathy is connected to that value, it is sufficiently plausible to infer that empathy has relational value. That there is a close link between empathy and close relationships is independently substantiated by psychological studies. They provide further evidence for a close connection between both a flourishing of a close relationship and a high level of empathy, and between a malfunctioning close relationship and a lack of empathy. Studies in social psychology, for example, confirm that couples with high levels of empathy tend to have more positive relationship outcomes than couples with low levels of empathy. Conversely, divorce and separation are experienced as negative life events with severe effects on self-esteem that are correlated with losses in empathy [Schutte et al. 2001, 52ff.; Malouff et al. 2014, 523ff.]. In a similar vein, patients with psychiatric illness who have difficulties to empathize with others have trouble leading satisfying close relationships. For example, persons with disorders in the autistic spectrum are reported to have difficulties in feeling and expressing emotion.

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Even though there is some debate as to what specific aspect of empathy is dysfunctional in autism spectrum disorder, there is clear evidence for a connection between some lack of empathy and poor relationships [Decety and Moriguchi 2007, 15f., Hobson 2002]. One might object at this point that there are cases in which empathy fails to have any relational value at all. Considering such cases certainly challenges my claim: First, it could be argued that empathy can be used manipulatively. While conveying to the other that one experiences her feelings and saying things that express that, one induces her to open up even more, and this can give rise to misuse the person’s vulnerability to one’s own advantage. Emotional blackmail can be a result of that manipulative use of empathy. Second, one can overempathize with experiences that do not matter greatly for the person empathized with. Empathy therefore does not forge a connection with the person in question. Similarly, one can empathize too much so that person in question doesn’t feel supported but belittled in her experiences. Third, one can empathize inaccurately so that empathy does not really succeed. The person with whom one attempted to empathize is likely to feel misunderstood [Ickes and Hodges 1997; Noddings 2010a]. In response to these counterexamples, however, we should not conclude that empathy fails to have relational value. Instead, these counterexamples help us to come up with the following criteria that further clarify the conditions under which empathy can be said to have such relational value. For empathy to be a bearer of relational value it must be (a) sincere, (b) sufficiently accurate, and (c) sufficiently resonating with an experience that is relevant and meaningful for the person empathized with. Empathy is a capacity that comes in degrees. But it can be carried out more or less competently, and it is competent empathy in that sense that satisfies the three criteria mentioned that bears relational value. With these amendments in place, I hope to have made headway to establish the claim that empathy has a distinct relational value which I will now consider in more detail. I will first examine how empathy qualifies as being of relational value for its own sake, and how it is constitutively valuable for close relationships.

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4.2. Empathy as Relational Value for its own Sake There are both intrinsic and extrinsic qualities that render empathy relationally valuable for its own sake. For empathy to have value for its own sake it must have relational value independent of other values or goods to which it might contribute [Rønnow-Rasmussen and Rabinowicz 2000]. It is my aim here to spell out how these evaluative dimensions can be captured more precisely. Empathy is intrinsically valuable in that it is the mental states involved in empathy that are the source of relational value. The relational value is thus internal to these very mental states. The source of this relational value can be described in (at least) three distinct ways. First, and on the most general level, to the extent that empathy fulfills the conditions of adequacy spelt out above empathy is an achievement. Succeeding in achieving it by appropriately relating to the experiences of another person is valuable. Its value is thus grounded in relating to another person successfully. Second, empathy’s relational value is grounded in more specific ways in how exactly the person empathizing and the person empathized with relate to one another. To the extent that the experiences of the other person one empathizes with are positive, experiencing them oneself manifests pleasantness both for the empathizer and for the person empathized with. The empathizer feels positive emotions, the person empathized with feels that she is empathized with, and this adds to the hedonic quality of her experiences. This, in turn, will make the empathizer feel that she has had a positive effect on the other person, which will further enhance her positive experience. Thus, both feel harmony and convergence in relating to each other in these ways. Third, to the extent that the other person’s experiences are negative, experiencing them oneself is not itself pleasant, but it is source of value to dis-value the dis-value another person is experiencing. If Lea dis-values the dis-value of Olga’s pain in virtue of experientially simulating the painful feeling she makes a normative case for the badness of Olga’s pain: it should not be that way. This manifests a meaningful connection for both Lea and Olga [Wolf 2010].

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Hence, empathy is relationally valuable for its own sake in responding (in valuing or dis-valuing ways) to the experiences of another person that are valuable or of dis-value. The source of its value is intrinsic to the experiential character of empathy, and it can be described as a successful relation that manifests pleasantness, harmony, and meaning. As a fitting attitude empathy also provides a justificatory basis that is relationally valuable. This value is extrinsic in that it is not grounded in empathy’s experiential qualities, but in its relation to what it does to another person. That is, it is valuable for its own sake in virtue of the relation it stands to another person. This can be brought out if we look more closely at what empathy realizes in virtue of its relation to the person empathized with. Olga, for example, will perceive herself as affirmed in her perspective if Lea expresses her empathy with what Olga is going through [Debes 2010, 222]. If Olga’s husband, by contrast, reproaches her for overreacting, Lea’s empathy provides a justificatory basis that she is not overreacting and that the way her situation feels to her is intelligible and rightly perceived. Olga’s experiences thus prove warranted not only by the situation her experiences are about, but also by Lea’s very empathy. Empathy is thus relationally valuable for its own sake in virtue of the recognition of the person empathized with [Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2007]. If recognition is what empathy’s relational value is grounded in, it is important to further distinguish what it is more precisely that Lea recognizes in empathizing. On closer look, we can distinguish four different dimensions of recognition, which I call apprehending, acknowledging, affirming and accepting. In empathizing with Olga, Lea apprehends what Olga is going through. In virtue of experiencing similar feelings she acknowledges that these feelings have a justificatory basis and thereby endorses that basis herself. She thus also affirms Olga’s evaluative perspective as intelligible and called for. In short, they way Olga feels makes good sense to Lea. The latter conveys to Olga by way of her empathy that Olga is not alone in how she views her situation. And by sharing the reasons calling for such reaction, Olga is accepted as the particular person she is. If empathy’s extrinsic value of recognition can be analyzed along these dimensions, we can better understand its

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normative significance [Brandom 2007, 136]. By Lea endorsing Olga’s evaluative perspective Olga is endorsed as a person responding appropriately to her situation. Lea thus relates to Olga as a further justificatory basis of what Olga takes to be her reasons. Her empathy thus affects how Olga can view her evaluative perspective and ultimately herself [Herrmann 2013]. Lea’s empathy thus also enhances Olga’s selfesteem and self-trust. To the extent that her evaluative perspective is regarded as warranted, she can trust herself as someone able to assess things right. Empathy is thus a way to provide recognitional justice to others in affirming their testimony, but it also conveys to them that they matter to the empathizer in that Lea deems Olga’s evaluative perspective as worthy to be experienced. It takes Olga to recognize Lea as a competent empathizer for Lea’s empathy to be relationally valuable. But there is still one concern about my claim that empathy has relational value in that precise sense that needs to be addressed. One might wonder at this point what really makes empathy a source of recognition. The person empathizing might get things just as wrong as the person with whom she empathizes. As a result, the fact that she empathizes can just double the unjustifiability of the particular perspective of the person empathized with. Let’s suppose that Olga overreacted due to her own experiences of early abandonment as a child. Her husband, in fact, had informed her from early on how uncomfortable he felt in his marriage with her. He had repeatedly tried to cultivate their love, and pointed out to her what changes were important to him. Olga, in return, simply overheard his concerns, and closed off. When viewed from this perspective, it seems that her reactions about his request for divorce are less justified. How could Lea’s empathy further warrant those feelings? It much rather seems that Lea should point out to Olga that she was mistaken all along about not listening to her husband’s concerns. In response to this worry two things could be pointed out. The justificatory basis that empathy provides is not an all-things-considered justification of Olga’s perspective. It does not imply that Olga’s perspective is the best she can have objectively. Instead, it much rather conveys that given her affective and evaluative background it makes sense to

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perceive and feel the way she does. To put it simply, the warrant is thus perspectivist, not objectivist. It still serves as a validation in that Olga’s thoughts and feelings make sense given her general perspective, and it is this validation that undergirds empathy’s relational value in virtue of the recognition it provides for the person having that particular perspective. To the extent that recognition is a ground of value by enhancing the self-esteem and self-trust of another person, and in light of the fact that empathy is valuable in virtue of the recognition it provides, empathy is extrinsically valuable for its own sake and in addition to the experiential quality intrinsic to it.

4.3. Empathy as Constitutive Value Provided empathy is a relational value that is valuable for its own sake, it also has a constitutive value in that it contributes to further goods. It constitutes and maintains close relationships. Close relationships, to be sure, consist of more than the empathy both parties in such relationships manifest. But without such empathy close relationships neither come into existence nor persist. Empathy is thus both causally and constitutively necessary for close relationships. To better capture the constitutive value of empathy we first need to characterize what close relationships and their good-making features are. Close relationships involve enduring, substantive and mutually affirmed interactions between two or more persons leading them [Seglow 2013, ch. 2]. We can distinguish between social and intimate relationships. While social relationships are characterized by conventional roles with particular social functions, such as the relationship between physician and patient or between teacher and student, intimate relationships are characterized by particular positive attitudes of mutual affection, such as in friendships, romantic partnerships, or family relationships. The social function of the physician-patient-relationship is the promotion of health, and the social function of the teacher-studentrelationship is the dissemination of knowledge. The particular persons fulfilling those roles are substitutable. Intimate relationships, by

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contrast, are mostly guided by the attitudes that the parties involved have towards each other, and in that they regard each other as insubstitutable. The boundaries between these two kinds of relationships are not sharp. Colleagues, for example, can turn into friends. Parentchild relationships are governed both by role-related norms manifesting what parenthood is about as by mutual affection. But the two kinds of relationships can, in principle, be distinguished. What matters for our purposes is that both kinds of relationships are bearers of noninstrumental value. That is, independent of the value that can be brought about by these relationships—such as their specific social function or their value for society at large—they can be non-instrumentally valuable for the parties leading these relationships. They have that non-instrumental value for the parties involved in virtue of how they lead their relationship, co-creating so-called relationship goods. Among such goods are intimacy, mutual concern and care, trust, assistance, favour, and empathy [Seglow 2013; Brighouse and Swift 2014; Pettit 2015]. It is ultimately up to the parties involved whether they are successful in realizing such goods. But if they don’t, their relationship will deteriorate. The goods, to be sure, vary depending on the particular type of relationship. Intimacy is not a good that teachers and students typically co-create, and we would have reasons for blame if they did. But it is a good that is co-created by partners, friends and family members. Hence, the goods that parties in a particular relationship co-create are grounded, in part at least, in what the particular relationship is about. To create those relationship goods, however, the parties involved need to value both each other as well as their relationship non-instrumentally. This entails that they regard themselves as partners in a particular relationship for whose sake (and for the sake of their relationship) they bring about such goods. If this is correct, it might be helpful to envision empathy as a particular relationship good and tease out how it constitutes the value, in part at least, of a particular relationship (such as the friendship between Lea and Olga). For Lea’s empathy with Olga to constitute and maintain their friendship as a valuable kind of relationship, it would have to be shown how exactly empathy serves

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their friendship. There are three more concrete ways in which empathy can be thought to contribute to realizing their friendship. One way is that empathy and the value it has for its own sake enhances trust and security from the will of the other. To the extent that trust and security from the will of the other entail that we no longer weigh the reasons for or against another person, we open up to her. Another way in which empathy can be thought to contribute to the value of a particular relationship is that empathy creates attachment. If Lea empathizes with Olga and Olga feels empathized with their sense of closeness and belonging will be fostered, and they will come to feel at home with one another. A third possibility is that empathy enhances loving attitudes and affection. If Lea affirms Olga’s perspective in how she experiences her situation, she responds to what Olga values or dis-values, and ultimately to Olga. Conversely, being empathized with, a broader array of experiences creates the feeling of being liked or loved which in turn can enhance one’s own positive attitudes towards that person. To the extent that trust and security, attachment as well as loving affection are what close relationships such as friendships are about and belong to the most important relationship goods, empathy can indeed be an important constitutive value. One might object at this point that relationships are characterized by a shared history of ongoing interactions and behaviors with regard to each other. How could an instance of empathy contribute to the value of a particular relationship? It is important to bear in mind that the connection between empathy and close relationships is both causal and normative. In empathizing we substantively relate to another person. Given that this person will feel related to, one forges a connection that can turn and build up into a relationship. The relationship can be more fleeting and might be less likely to qualify as a relationship in the full sense of the term in a case say, where a complete stranger empathizes with Olga. Sometimes, such instances surely might occasion the desire to further interactions. But given the contingencies of our lives, they sometimes remain quite singular and never turn into a genuine and thus lasting

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close relationship. Empathy is a causal building block of a close relationship. At the same time, and once a particular relationship is established, however, empathy is one of the goods that needs to be co-created so as to maintain the value of that particular relationship. To be sure, a single instance of empathy will not do. Instead, only if empathy is realized regularly will a relationship be both established and maintained.

5. Back to Morality I have tried to spell out in what ways empathy has relational value. I hope to have shown that it contributes to the flourishing of close relationships in virtue of being an important relationship good. Its contributory value is grounded in the value empathy bears both intrinsically and extrinsically. One might still wonder, however, what this tells us about the connection between empathy and morality. There are two interesting moral implications of empathy’s relational value to consider: Due to empathy’s relational value, it is sometimes morally required to empathize, and it is sometimes morally required to abstain from one’s empathy. Let me explain. First, to the extent that a particular relationship is established and flourishing, empathy can be morally required. Hence, if Lea did not show any empathy for Olga, Olga would be justified in blaming Lea for not being a good friend. This is what precisely happens in Ferrante’s novel. Some relationships are valuable in virtue of the relationship-dependent duties that the parties involved take themselves to have. The value of a friendship, in part at least, constitutes such duties. To empathize is one such duty to bring about the related relationship good of actualized empathy. Empathy is thus owed to a friend in virtue of the friendship they have. The friend is likely to be harmed if not even his friends relate to them in empathic ways. Even if he or she is not harmed, the friendship as such is likely to be less close as it should be to qualify as friendship. That duty not only entails that one should empathize with those with whom we entertain close relationships. It also entails that we see

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to it that empathy is possible for those with whom we are related. That is, we are also obliged to make sure that we do our part so that those with whom we are related are able to empathize with us. We have to reveal how certain situations feel like for us, thus enhancing the possibility for others to empathize with us. But it is this duty to empathize that has spawned widespread skepticism about empathy’s connection with morality. As a duty of partiality, so a widespread worry, it notoriously conflicts with our duties of impartiality. This skepticism brings me to a second moral implication of empathy’s relational value. Specifically, we must bear in mind that the duty to empathize with one’s partners, friends, and all those with whom we entertain close personal or social relationships, is by no means absolute. To be sure, it is a duty grounded in the value of a particular relationship. But it would be a mistake to conclude that we should empathize with our intimates, and with those we have social relationships with, all the time and to a maximum degree. Similarly, we are also not required to reveal all our experiences so that others can empathize with us. We do not undermine the value of a particular relationship if we are more selective with our empathy and the experiences we share for others to empathize. What is central for that value to be realized is that we empathize in cases where empathy is called for. This is the case when our intimates or the persons we interact with in a particular social relationship are in particular need, are particularly suffering, or otherwise in situations that highly matter to them. In such cases empathy has a special bearing on the other person involved in a particular relationship. In other cases, it might suffice to empathize less fully or less often. Empathy is a dynamic capacity, and we can calibrate it to the person and situation at hand. Sometimes, it suffices to cognitively imagine how a situation is like for another person to create closeness. Sometimes, empathy is not needed as there are other relationship goods, such as sharing mutual interests, trust or help, which establish and maintain the value of a particular relationship. That we exercise the capacity to empathize does not entail that we empathize all the time in its fullest form. And we might even be required to reduce our empathy to prevent depletion. This

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precisely opens up room for impartial concerns. That empathy, to some extent at least, is required to realize the value of particular relationships, does not crowd out our capacity to deliberate about where it is needed, and where we need to take other impartial interests and demands into account. Taking impartial demands into account by no means undermines the value of our particular relationships. It remains difficult to accommodate partialist and impartialist demands in theory, but it is far from impossible in practice. In fact, we do it all the time. As a result, the connection between empathy and morality is twofold. On the one hand, to empathize is a relationship-dependent duty to the extent that we entertain relationships with others. On the other hand, both our limited cognitive and affective resources as well as other moral demands can similarly justify that we keep our empathy within bounds. These bounds, however, more often than not, and absent tragic conflicts, still allow us to realize the value of relationships and leave room to fulfill other impartial duties. I therefore think that an ethics of care that relies on the relational value of empathy is not doomed to preclude impartial considerations. Instead of rendering empathy more impartial, however, I have tried to argue that it is more plausible to constrain our empathic capacities and let them be accompanied by more impartially driven ways of deliberation. What delineates these constraints, in part at least, is the value of a particular relationship. As a result, the connection between empathy and morality is normative. We sometimes have moral reasons to empathize and we sometimes have moral reasons to refrain from empathizing. It is up to our moral capacities to decide which conditions call for what. As Joan Tronto has pointed out, rightly in my view, care is a necessary, but not a sufficient part of morality [Tronto 1993, 155]. To the extent that empathy is a central component of care, empathy as such is not a genuinely moral but rather an interpersonal and thus relational phenomenon. It relates us to others, and this can, but need not be, what morality demands.2

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Notes 1

Care ethicists tend to think of care as being immediately linked to moral action. Cf. Noddings 2010b, 9. Many care ethicists, however, do not emphasize the importance of empathy with regard to care, but rather the importance of moral emotions, such as compassion and generosity that motivate care. Cf. Pulcini 2015; Paperman 2013, ch. 2. 2 I am indebted to Sophie Bourgault for extensive written comments that helped to improve this paper. I am also grateful for feedback I received from the audience at the conference on “Cura ed emozioni” that was co-organized by Elena Pulcini and Sophie Bourgault at the University of Florence in May 2016, and to audiences at LMU Munich and the University of Lucerne where I had the occasion to present earlier drafts of this paper.

Literature Batson, C. D. [2009], “These things called empathy: eight related but distinct phenomena”, in J. Decety and W. Ickles (eds.) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 3-15. Bloom, P. [2016], Against Empathy. The Case for Rational Compassion, London, Penguin. Brandom, R. [2007], “The Structure of Desire and Recognition. Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution”, in Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, 127-150. Brighouse, H. and A. Swift. [2014], Family Values, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Carse, A. L. [2005], “The Moral Contours of Empathy”, in Ethical Theory and Practice 8, 169-195. Coplan, A. [2011], “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects”, in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds.) Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 3-18. Debes, R. [2010], “Which Empathy? Limitations in the mirrored ‘understanding’ of emotion”, in Synthese 175, 219-239. Decety, J. and Y. Moriguchi. [2007], “The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions”, in BioPsychoSoical Medicine, 1-21. Deonna, J. [2007], “The Structure of Empathy,” in The Journal of Moral Philosophy, 99-116. Ferrante, E. [2005], The Days of Abandonment. Translated by Ann Goldstein, New York, Europa Editions. Halpern, J. [2001], From Detached Concert o Empathy, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hamington. M. [2017]. “Empathy and Care Ethics”, in H. Maibom (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, London, Routledge, 264-272. Herrmann, M. [2013], “Empathie in Beziehungen zwischen Personen”, in I. Römer and M. Wunsch (eds.), Person, Münster, mentis, 363-382. Hobson, R.P. [2002], The Cradle of Thought, London, Macmillan.

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Ickes, W. and S. D. Hodges. [1997], “Empathic Accuracy in Close Relationships”, in W. Ickes (ed.) Empathic Accurac, New York, Guilford Press, 218-250. Ikäheimo H. and A. Laitinen. [2007], “Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgment and Recognitive Attitudes Towards Persons”, in B. van den Brink and D. Owen (eds.), Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33-56. Kauppinen, A. [2014], “Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Moral Judgment”, in H. Maibom (ed.), Empathy and Morality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 97-121. Malouff, J. M, N. Schutte and E. Thorsteinsson. [2014], “Trait Emotional Intelligence and Romantic Relationship Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis”, in The American Journal of Family Therapy 42, 53-66. Masto, M. [2015], “Empathy and its Role in Morality”, in Southern Journal of Philosophy 53, 74-96. Matravers, D. [2017], Empathy, Cambridge, Polity Press. Michael, J. [2014], “Towards a Consensus About the Role of Empathy in Interpersonal Understanding”, in Topoi 33, 157-172. Mortari. L. [2015]. Filosofia della cura, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore. Noddings, N. [2010a]. The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality, Berkeley, University of California Press. Noddings. N. [2010b], “Complexity in Caring and Empathy”, in Abstracta V, 6-12. Paperman, P. [2013], Care et Sentiments, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Pettit, P. [2015], The Robust Demands of the Good, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Prinz, J. [2011], “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?”, in A Coplan and P- Goldie (eds.) Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 211-229. Pulcini, E. [2016], “What Emotions Motivate Care?” in Emotion Review 9, 64-71. Ratcliffe, M. [2017], “Empathy and Psychiatric Illness”, in H. Maibom (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, London, Routledge, 190-200. Rønnow-Rasmussen, T. and W. Rabinowicz. [2000], “A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and for Its Own Sake”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100, 33-51. Schutte, N. et al. [2001], “Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Relations”, in The Journal of Social Psychology 14, 523-536. Seglow, J. [2014], Defending Associative Duties, London, Routledge. Simmons, A. [2014], “In Defense of the Moral Significance of Empathy”, in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17, 97-111. Slote, M. [2007], The Ethics of Care and Empathy, London, Routledge. Slote, M. [2010], Moral Sentimentalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Smith, J. [2017], “What is Empathy for?”, in Synthese 194, 709-722. Snow, N. [2000], “Empathy”, in American Philosophical Quarterly 37, 65-78. Sober, E. and D.S. Wilson. [1998], Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Song, Y. [2015], “How to be a Proponent of Empathy?”, in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18, 437-451.

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Steinberg, J. [2014], “An Epistemic Case for Empathy”, in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95, 47-71. Tronto, J.C. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, London, Routledge. Wolf, S. [2010], Meaning in Life and Why it Matters. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

7. Affective Coexistence. Pity as a Connection between Emotion and Ethical Knowledge1 Inge van Nistelrooij

Introduction The well-known biblical story of the Prodigal Son has been exquisitely retold by Marilynne Robinson in her book Home. The book tells us the story of Jack, who has been from his early youth onwards the continuous shame of the family. When he finally returns after twenty years, his mother has passed away and his father is in the last weeks of his life, being taken care of by the youngest daughter, Glory. It is from Glory’s perspective that the story is told—that is, from a caregiver’s perspective (unlike the biblical story). Glory has also returned to the family home after an unhappy relationship, doing all the care work her father as well as the old house and untended garden require. She is also the grown up ‘little sister’ who cherishes some tender moments that she had in her youth with the family’s black sheep. When Jack returns, the story unfolds as one about care, in all of its complexities: everyday work in the household, but also the complex emotional household situations of almost too painful confrontations and conversations. It is a wonderful, moving story of how three persons, living under a single roof, try to live together through the day and come to terms with their common past, aiming somehow at reconciliation or at least at some kind of repair for the almost unrepairable relationship between father and son. Caring practices (primarily for the fragile father, and Glory spending the evenings with Jack at his request until the bars are closed, but also the everyday work of cooking meals, cleaning clothes, tending the garden, playing music and making coffee),

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are the manifold ways in which these individuals make their way towards mutual understanding, express love and concern as well as hurt, guilt and shame. This story, like so many others, shows how caring is a messy and quotidian practice. It is not a matter of rational and clear-cut decisions, even though in some matters decisions are certainly made. Caring unfolds itself amidst all kinds of tensions, between messiness and rational decision, between what happens, what is given in concrete life and in the contexts in which we live, and how we as moral agents act in order to ‘maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible’ [Tronto 1993, 103]. As Marilynne Robinson shows, caring is indeed this complex practice of maintenance, continuance and repair, dealing with and mending what is given. The story she tells also uncovers how emotions are inextricably part of that practice, as sources of understanding (‘feeling for the other’) and as given experiences that need to be dealt with (resentment, shame, guilt). This central role of emotions in ethical practices is something that mainstream Western ethics, being foremost rationalist, abstract and principle-led, has not taken into account. We could even say that Western ethical theories have almost entirely excluded emotions from ethics as untrustworthy and unreliable [Tronto 1993, Walker 2007, Engster & Hamington 2015, Engster 2015]. This is quite at odds with care-ethical epistemology, which acknowledges that emotions are part of those practices and hence part of the soil in which ethics is rooted. I consider this insight to be most relevant for social movements and for ethical theory. Emotions do show themselves as unstable, as impressionable. Does this discard them as ethical guides? Or are they, on the contrary, rendered even more important and even indispensable for ethics? As stated above, care ethics acknowledges emotions as a source for moral understandings. Various care ethicists have proposed important reflections on this issue [Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984, 2002; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993; Walker 2007]. However, they have also struggled with it, as we can gather from their ambiguous position on emotional involvement: the latter is both valued as highly relevant for caring as a moral practice and ethical source, and yet, at the same time, is devalued

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when it leads to over-involvement or even self-sacrifice of the caregiver. In order to illuminate this claim, I will first present a brief recapitulation of my previous research on care ethics and self-sacrifice [Van Nistelrooij, 2015]. In this presentation I aim to show that Gilligan [1982], Pettersen [2011], Noddings [1984], Tronto [1993, 2013] and Van Heijst [2011] all attribute important but varying roles to emotions in their ethical theories. And depending upon how they conceive that role, they frame the question of self-sacrifice in a particular way. The case of selfsacrifice is a most pertinent case to think about the question of emotions and ethics, as it shows how an ethics that stresses emotional involvement instead of detachment almost inevitably must address the challenges raised by this involvement. It cannot simply reject the more demanding and decentering practices of care by labeling them as ‘overidentification’, ‘self-sacrifice’, or ‘martyrdom’, and dismiss them beforehand. Rather, the ambiguous reality of emotional involvement as being both vital to good care and risky needs to be made more readily imaginable and understandable. The first section below, on self-sacrifice, serves as the groundwork for the rest of the chapter, in which I seek to support the claim that emotions are vital for ethics. Two authors underpin my argument, Nel Noddings and Emmanuel Housset. Even though care-ethical pioneer Nel Noddings’ plea for emotions as an important ethical source leads her to a critical perspective on self-sacrifice that is not without fault [Groenhout 2003, 159-160], her work is most valuable for care ethicists. Indeed, her work helps us to refine our reflections about the role that emotions, feelings and affectivity2 play in motivating and sustaining caring practices and moral ideals. But as we will see, Noddings limits emotional involvement to face-to-face contact, to the reciprocal caring practice of giving and receiving care. As such, her ethics has often been (rightly) criticized for being overly parochial and best suited for the private sphere. I will indicate that this is not sufficient for an ethics that criticizes the separation of the private and the public spheres and considers them as intertwined [Tronto 1993]. In the following section, I will turn to an author who is still on the margins of care ethics while being highly relevant for it: French phenomenologist Emmanuel

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Housset, who has analyzed at lenght the emotion of pity. I will argue that his work bolsters care ethics in its political dimension, for Housset insists that in order to live together well in a socio-political order, we must acknowledge that a community arises from fellow feelings. In short, in this chapter, I hope to make a case for the significant role played by emotions in ethics and collective well-being, and I will do so, more specifically, by arguing that the experience of ‘being affected’ by the other is a valuable source of ethical knowledge. After having presented Noddings’ and Housset’s epistemological positions and compared their views on how emotions, feelings and affectivity play a crucial role in ethics, I will conclude with a brief series of remarks on how their positions speak to care ethics.

Self-sacrifice as a case for emotions and ethics In previous research into care ethics and self-sacrifice [Van Nistelrooij 2014, 2015, 2016; Van Nistelrooij, Tronto & Schaafsma 2014], I have indicated that care ethicists have often struggled with emotional involvement as both a requirement for good care, and as a pitfall for caregivers. They have sometimes solved the problem by boiling it down into conceptual dichotomies [Van Nistelrooij & Leget, 2016], without fully realizing that practices are more messy, complex, and multi-layered than that. One of the few care ethicists who has argued for a more nuanced view has been the Dutch care ethicist Annelies van Heijst [2008, 2011]. In professional caregiving, she argues, a complex and multilayered interaction of giving and receiving takes place, which cannot sufficiently be captured in an economic framework alone, for this makes us blind to the moral significance of caring. Since caring practices are often motivated by the wish to give, self-sacrifice plays a role too, but needs to be scrutinized critically [Van Heijst 2011; Pulcini 2015]. After analyzing the main ways care ethicists have been thinking about self-sacrifice, I have organized these along a continuum between two extremes: namely, from an a priori rejection of any form of selfsacrifice on the one hand, to conditional acceptance of self-sacrifice on the other. The intention here is to suggest that the way care ethicists conceptualize caring inevitably leads them to confront the issue of

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self-sacrifice, although not necessarily into a detailed analysis of it. Let us therefore take a closer look at the analysis. Four main positions (each equipped with a different conception of the role of emotions) can be identified in the literature [Van Nistelrooij 2015]: 1. A view of caring that rejects self-sacrifice. This view is chiefly rooted in Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking work In a Different Voice [1982], in which Gilligan argues that the morality of care develops from selfish to altruistic care, and then to a form of mature care in which one has the capacity to dissipate the tension between selfishness and responsibility [74]. This theoretical framework has been further developed by care philosopher Tove Pettersen [2011], who argues that mature care is the ‘golden mean’ between self-sacrifice or self-denial on the one hand, and self-centered concern on the other [56-57]. For Pettersen, mature care contains the recognition that in principle one should have as much care for oneself as for others [56], and that one should balance the interest of self and others [59]. In this theoretical model, emotions do not play a crucial ethical role. 2. A view of caring that values self-effacing involvement, yet opposes self-sacrifice. This view is expressed most notably by Nel Noddings [1984], who conceptualizes caring as requiring two essential elements. The first is feeling (or engrossment), which she understands as a complete being with the other [26]. The second is displacement of motivation [26], also called a motivational shift [33], one that leads to care. Caring, she argues, requires ‘a displacement of interest from my own reality to the reality of the other’ [14]. The great importance Noddings attaches to engrossment and motivational shift obviously raises the question of self-sacrifice because of the centrality of the other and the self-effacement that seems to follow. Nevertheless, Noddings condemns self-sacrifice and proposes that the one caring stops caring as soon as this point is reached [105]. 3. A view of caring that acknowledges the risk of self-sacrifice and connects it to power. Joan Tronto [1993, 2013] bases her account of care in the view of human nature not as autonomous but as interdependent [1993, 101]. Her relational ontology [2013] is well captured by her use of the term ‘needs’ instead of ‘interest’ or ‘project’ when thinking about human activity, for needs are necessarily intersubjective, culturally

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embedded and matters of social concern [1993, 164]. Emotions and dispositions are part of care, Tronto argues [1993, 119], but the association of care and emotions has also been part of successful strategic and ideological divisions of spheres that have served ‘to placate women and others who are left to the tasks of caring’ [118]. Tronto acknowledges that caring requires sacrifices and self-sacrifice [2013, 146], but she problematizes the connection of self-sacrifice to powerlessness, since ‘those who are most likely to be too self-sacrificing are likely to be the relatively powerless in society’ [1993, 141]. 4. A conceptualization of caring that values self-sacrifice but does not think it through fully. This view is perhaps best expressed by Annelies van Heijst [2011], who develops an ethical view of professional care. She proposes the concept of Professional Loving Care (PLC), which she defines as a practice in which competent and compassionate professionals interact with people in their care [3]. A leading principle for these professionals is to tune in with the needs of each individual patient [3]. To Van Heijst, self-sacrificial acts (such as giving time and energy to others) are not harmful as long as they are performed freely, driven by a sincere commitment to the person concerned and by feelings of professional responsibility [197]. As we can see from these four conceptualizations of caring, the question of self-sacrifice is raised almost self-evidently, albeit in different manners. The risk of sacrificing the self is very real, most have argued. And with regards to the question of affectivity in caring practices, all thinkers emphasize the vital role of feeling for and with the other, of being involved affectively. Indeed, all insist on the importance of feeling as a guide for moral knowledge. In what follows, I propose to elaborate on my previous work on self-sacrifice and to indicate its relevance for ethics by connecting it, more specifically, to the issue of the role of emotions in care ethics.

Affectivity and moral epistemology When care ethics scholars argue that emotions are a source for moral knowledge, they do two things at once. First, they acknowledge the significance of everyday experience: we are moved by feeling, for

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instance, when we meet the ones we love, when facing threatening situations or violence, when we see people suffering in real life or news reports. And second, they confront us with the difficulty that feelings can be (and often are) unstable, misleading, and that they can lead to unjust situations (e.g. favoritism or avoidance). In care ethical literature we can see authors struggling to address two challenges, but below, I propose to deal exclusively with the first, namely, the significance of feeling in ethics. The question of the ways in which morality may be rooted in prereflective emotion and in reflective feeling or affectivity [Noddings, 1984]3 is an epistemological one that has received diverse answers. In what follows, we will consider the answers offered by two authors who have different epistemological positions. The first is Nel Noddings, one of the first to propose an ethics of care. Noddings considers the experience of receiving and giving care to be the fruitful soil for a relational self-understanding, one that is foundational for her care ethics [1984]. The other author I wish to consider is the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Housset, who has developed a politically relevant phenomenology of pity [2003]. Housset connects ethics to the experience of meeting a suffering other, an experience that arouses in me the feeling of suffering for this pain, which is what Housset understands as pity. This meeting opens up the possibility of ethics, as it shatters my selfenclosedness and gives me the opportunity to act morally by saying ‘yes’ to the other. In short, Noddings argues for a relational self-understanding that is developed through experiences of care, and Housset argues for a totally overwhelming experience of pity, one that decenters the self and in this way, opens up the possibility of ethics. Let us begin with Nel Noddings’ work. Noddings has defended feeling as a source for ethics in her well-known statement that the reality of the other can arouse ‘in us the feeling, “I must do something.”’ [1984, 14] She argues that sensitivity is the heart of morality, that is, a very concrete feeling that ‘something is wrong’, which she considers to be the foundation of the ethical response [3]. Moreover, this feeling is said to be rooted in a relational understanding of the self, one that is the product of a reflection upon myself as a caregiver, and one that is

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completed when I add to it a reflection upon myself as having received care, as having been cared-for [49]. Then, ‘a picture of goodness begins to form’ [49], which is the foundation of my morality. When the thus formed moral subject is confronted with the question ‘Why should I behave morally?’, the subject’s answer according to Noddings is: ‘Because I am or want to be a moral person’ [50], which is an answer that arises out of our natural impulse to care in her view [51]. Noddings does acknowledge that this impulse does not necessarily lead to a practice of care, for there is always also the moment of decision [to respond or not]. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the feeling or impulse has not occured or is irrelevant: At every level, in every situation, there are decisions to be made, and we are free to affirm or to reject the impulse to care. But our relatedness, our apprehension of happiness or misery in others, comes through immediately. We may reject what we feel, what we see clearly, but at the risk of separation not only from others but from our ideal selves. [51]

Now, Housset’s epistemology does not start with or presuppose any self-understanding, but rather, presupposes its opposite. In his view, it is an element of dispossession by the other, a feeling of being troubled by an alterity that is the essential opening to ethics. For Housset, the core of ethical life is the unconscious moment in which we find ourselves confronted with the suffering of the other. This, to Housset, is the moment of pity, which is a bodily feeling that seizes the subject even before the subject is aware of this seizure [Housset 2003, 43]. Pity has a dual status: there is a pity anterior to conscience as well as a pity that is developed by reflection [43]. But this preceding moment of the order of pathos is vital. As such, pity is regarded as the primary abandonment of the self without which one cannot really pay attention to the good, because pity is given from the exterior and opens the self-enclosed subject by affecting it. Pity is a bodily feeling, affecting and decentering the subject, thereby opening the way to ethics. But the moment of rational decision as an ethical moment cannot be overlooked, for feeling does not yet mean knowing what is just. The moment of feeling is not the same as the

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moment of responsibility [52]. Pathos precedes ethos but also remains present in ethical reflection, as pathos reminds us, in our moral reflection, of the ethical necessity to remain sensitive and open to the other. Housset argues that in ethics we must avoid two positions: first, that of seeking to appropriate the suffering of the other in a fusion of sensitivity, and, second, that of seeking a state of pure will, in which the self positions itself and closes itself in subjectivity. In both positions the other does not have a real opportunity to appear as he or she is, as inalienable [40]. It is exactly in this decentering, in human weakness or fragility, that the moral subject ‘can abandon himself in order to listen to the other’ [41]. Housset thus argues for the necessity of self-abandonment for ethics—one that is caused by the suffering other (causing a suffering that is pathos), which seizes the subject. This affective moment is the experience of community that shatters the boundaries of the ego and opens up a new existence that is coexistence. Although the self is still required in the ethical moment, the origin of ethics lies outside the self. In short, then, both Housset and Noddings argue for feelings as a source of ethics. But whereas Noddings argues more for the active integration of others in the self’s moral ideal and builds an ethics upon this relational self, Housset rejects an ethics rooted in individual ideals and positions the starting point of ethics outside the self, not enhancing but shattering any pre-existing self-understanding. Now that we have seen the two epistemological positions of Noddings and Housset, let us look a little more closely at how emotions and ethics relate according to these two authors.

A care-ethical view on affectivity in the relational self Nel Noddings has been the first, and probably the most prominent, care ethicist to elaborate upon the connections between emotions and ethics. I will focus upon her first work, Caring [1984], but she certainly reiterated her views several times over the years—including and most recently in 2015, when she once again insisted that emotion and feeling are central for moral life [2015, 75]. Care ethics, according to Noddings, recognizes the centrality of emotion or feeling in moral life. Reason is necessary for analysis and

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evaluation, she says, but may leave us uninvolved [Noddings, 2015, 75]. In order to act, we must be motivated by feeling and this is why Noddings differentiates between caring-about and caring-for: the first may be done by groups of people or organizations and consists of a response to the suffering of others at a distance, who respond by contributing funds for their relief [75] or by expressing their concern [78]. However, a concern is still something else than ‘genuine caring-for’. In caring-for we cannot project ‘how we would feel if we were in the other’s situation’ upon the other, like we can do in caring-about in order to prepare us to invoke justice [78]. Rather, in caring-for we actually ‘recognize that the other is an other, not necessarily exactly like us’, and we must receive the other into ourselves ‘in order to find out what he or she is going through’ [78, emphasis in text]. Noddings has certainly been consistent in her view that direct caring-for cannot be done by institutions, but rather ‘requires a person-to-person relationship in which both carer and cared-for play essential roles’ [83]. Let us briefly return to her first major work, Caring, where she has first elaborated this view. Noddings, from the outset, puts feeling at the center of ethics. In her own words: ‘I shall locate the very wellspring of ethical behavior in human affective response’ [3]. Noddings distinguishes between feeling and affectivity on the one hand, and emotions, on the other. She argues that affects and feeling are reflective modes of consciousness, whereas emotions are nonreflective [132]. For instance, the feeling joy not only accompanies a realization of our relatedness, but it also encourages growth to the ethical ideal of relatedness and our commitment to this ethical ideal [132]. Emotion is usually regarded as nonreflective, as a mode in which we meet objects directly and in which we are unaware of ourselves as conscious beings [133]. However, elsewhere in her work, things are a bit more nuanced. For Noddings, joy can both ‘[arise] out of an awareness of the caring relation’, but it may also ‘burst through like a rainbow over tears’ [139]. In the latter form, it is a basic emotion and in the former it is a basic affect, a feeling. The distinction lies in whether it is founded upon the ethical ideal of the relational self that ‘accompanies our recognition of relatedness and reflects our basic reality’ [147], or whether it is an

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emotion that is received ‘as a real quality of the lived world’ [133]. In this latter sense joy is ‘an emotion – a nonreflective, direct contact with some objects’ [147]. Both experiences of joy, either as reflective ‘joyfeeling’ or non-reflective ‘joy-emotion’ may enhance the ethical ideal of being related, of being ‘one-caring’ to use Noddings’ term. As cited above, in her defense of feeling as a source for ethics, Noddings states that the reality of the other can arouse ‘in us the feeling, “I must do something.”’ [14] Central to her argument here is that a caring ‘morality as an “active virtue” requires two feelings and not just one’ [79]. The first feeling is ‘the sentiment of natural caring’ which is the ‘initial, enabling sentiment’ that makes the second sentiment possible [79]. The second sentiment occurs when there is a conflict between the natural feeling and my own desires—‘I must—I do not want to’ [80]. But what is the status of the first feeling, one may ask? This first feeling, the sentiment of natural caring, is positioned as a ‘pre-moral good’, that is, ‘a goodness that lies in a region with the moral good and shades over into it’ [84]. Vital here is that the premoral feeling affects the one-caring. And if the sentiment of natural caring that reveals an impulse to care is not followed upon in practice, Noddings is clear about the damage that is done to others and the self: As I chop away at the chains that bind me to loved others, asserting my freedom, I move into a wilderness of strangers and loneliness, leaving behind all who care for me and even, perhaps, my own self [51].

This passage captures quite well the relational ideal put forth by Noddings and the significance of feeling for the enhancement of this ideal. For Noddings, what this means is that we should let feelings do their job, even though this is not always a self-evident way to act when we care. For in many cases, Noddings argues, we are used to ‘fix things’, to immediately and instrumentally respond to problems in what she calls an ‘assimilatory mode’. But sometimes, she insists, this approach is inadequate. Somebody is not helped; something is not fixed or resolved. She writes: We can switch from an assimilatory mode to a receptive-intuitive mode which, by a process we do not understand well, allows us to receive the

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object, to put ourselves quietly into its presence. We enter a feeling mode, but it is not necessarily an emotional mode. In such a mode, we receive what-is-there as nearly as possible without evaluation or assessment. We are in the world of relation, having stepped out of the instrumental world […]. We are not attempting to transform the world, but we are allowing ourselves to be transformed [34].

Hence Noddings distinguishes between the ‘affective-receptive mode’ and ‘the analytic-objective mode in which we impose structure on the world’ [34]. She opposes a hierarchy between the two modes, like for instance Jean-Paul Sartre defended. In the hierarchy, the rational objective, problem-solving, thinking mode of consciousness is considered to be ‘the higher consciousness of rationality’ and put above the ‘lower, nonreflective consciousness of emotion’. Noddings argues: The receptive or relational mode seems to be essential to living fully as a person. In caring, a permanent or untimely move from feeling and affective engrossment to abstract problem solving would be a “degradation,” a movement from the appropriate to something qualitatively different and less appropriate. […] What seems to be crucial is that we retain the ability to move back and forth and to invest the appropriate mode with dominance [35; emphasis added].

So Noddings seems to fully acknowledge an affective channel as a source of knowledge, distinct from a rational channel. The former requires the suspension of instrumental, problem-solving thought that dominates, and the priority of an affective engrossment, of being takenin by the other. Thinking and feeling are, in her words, ‘turning points’ [35]: receptivity may turn into abstraction, when necessary for problemsolving, but essential is to turn away from abstraction and back to the cared-for, in order to care for a person, and not for a problem [35]. I consider Noddings’ defense of emotions and feelings in ethics as welcome and insightful. Not only has she made important distinctions for care ethics’ epistemology, but her work also deserves wider ethical acknowledgment. But, with others, I think that there are limitations and problems with her work. Joan Tronto [1993], for instance, has criticized Noddings for limiting her caring ethics to a network of existing relations, thereby privatizing care. According to her, ‘perhaps the

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fundamental moral question for contemporary life’ is that of conceiving ‘a way to think of morality that extends some form of sympathy further than our own group’ [Tronto, 1993, 59]. This is where care ethics still has some work to do. In the section that follows, I will suggest that care ethics would be well served if it turned to the work of Emmanuel Housset for his treatment of the contested emotion of pity.

A phenomenological view of affectivity in meeting a suffering other Pity has a bad reputation. The French phenomenologist Emmanuel Housset has scrutinized pity’s dire fate. I now turn to his view, in order to broaden existing conceptions of caring affectivity to include pity, understood as a politically relevant emotion for human living together, and as offering a touchstone for ethics. I will argue that if we want to understand the role of affectivity in caring practices that are not limited to our closed, loved ones, his analysis of pity is quite helpful. Now, to start with semantics: pity, mercy and compassion (in French: pitié, miséricorde, compassion) are all synonyms in Housset’s work. For our purposes here, I prefer to use ‘pity’, in order to avoid the ‘easier’ acceptation in some circles of compassion and mercy. I consider pity (in Dutch: medelijden, like the German Mitleid, is literally: com-passion, suffering-with) as a term that may adequately describe the suffering that I experience as a result from the suffering of the other that I witness. But I am also aware of the discomfort and even distrust that is often caused by this term. Perhaps the discomfort can be interpreted as a sign that something quite important is at stake here, and as such, perhaps the use of the term ‘pity’ could be regarded as a hermeneutic tool for scrutinizing what that is. The title of Housset’s book: L’intelligence de la pitié. Phénoménologie de la communauté4 captures quite well the double aim of his work. Indeed, Housset assigns (or more to the point: re-assigns) knowledge to pity and he does so by describing pity (as feeling and knowledge) as the foundation of the community. In order to support these claims, Housset offers an analysis of pity and of its dubious reputation in mainstream ethics throughout the centuries. Through this, he aims to uncover the essence of pity as well

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as to illuminate the relation of pity to morality. Central to many critiques of pity according to Housset is the view that pity is the refusal to experience the other, as the self remains self-absorbed: it is considered as a weakness, hypocrisy, and a maliciousness, which is pure violence disguised as care [190]. Thus disguised, pity prevents true contact with the other and thereby prevents ethics. Phrased differently, pity is the pretence of feeling for the other, while actually being a feeling sorry for the self. Housset analyzes three main critics of pity: Augustine, Nietzsche and Kant [19-42]. I will follow Housset’s analysis of these positions, as it leads him to two conclusions that are crucial for his phenomenology of pity. While Augustine, Kant and Nietzsche have slightly different views, their critiques of pity converge on one point—namely, that pity is typically self-centered. Augustine, for instance, has coined the term ‘malevolent benevolence’ [24], indicating an interested kind of pity that cherishes the other’s suffering and desires that it lasts, for it gives the self the pleasure of showing mercy. Nietzsche also denounces the hypocrisy of pity and insists that pity manifests a self-enclosed interiority that flees everything that may affect it. For Nietzsche, then, pity is a refusal of suffering, the avoidance of the suffering of others, and the mere protecting of one’s own well-being [32]. Kant has called pity weak and blind, and considers it to be a sentiment that, as such, is incapable of universalization and therefore cannot be understood as a duty [37]. For Housset however, it is clear that none of these critics has entirely rejected the morally significant role pity may play. Augustine has distinguished the rejectionable ‘malevolent benevolence’ from the praiseworthy true compassion [one that involves the desire that the other’s suffering disappears [24]]. And Nietzsche has also described a form of pity that can have some moral value, i.e. the pity of the master [33-34]. This is pity in a paradoxical form: it is both the highest affirmation of the self’s interiority and the greatest opening to the other [36], as it aims to restore the other: ‘All grand love is beyond pity, because those whom one loves, one also wants to – create’ [quote from Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathoustra, in: Housset, 2003, 36, transl. IvN]. And finally, Housset recalls that Kant too considered pity beautiful and loveable, and

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assigned a position to pity in morality, even though it is a humble one, i.e. the auxiliary role of possibly causing good actions [38]. Housset’s analysis leads him to conclude two things: 1) the main critics of pity have not entirely eliminated pity from moral life but yet, 2) they have not fully recognized it for what it is [37]. This conclusion is the starting point for Housset’s phenomenology of pity and his conceptualization of pity as an affect that is vital to ethics. Key to Housset’s view is the idea that pity is affective coexistence. Pity’s critics have failed to see that pity’s essential characteristic is the abandoning of the self by the self when facing the suffering other. (It is exactly this self-abandonment that can be considered as a form of self-sacrifice in the sense of offering up the self for something more essential, that is, this suffering other.) Either in the form of pity of the weak as based on self-love or of pity of the strong as self-mastery, the failure is at base the same: both forms abandon the element of dispossession by the other, of being troubled by an alterity. This is however its essence. Pity is not a conscious act but rather an unconscious event happening to the self; hence it does not represent the self, but is immediately experienced, and lacks the representative conscience of duty [39]. Sensitivity is indispensable to see that self-mastery is not the core of ethical life: Cruelty of the soul and insensitivity of the body are inseparable [...] The refusal of every emotion and the project of perfect self-mastery always [...] lead to a certain apathy, as the concern for the other cannot be recognized as a mode of being that is essential for ethical existence [40, transl. IvN].

Pity is this disturbance, this decentering of the self, for it shatters the closed circle of the self as it invades the self and as such is a modality of my exposedness to the other [73]. It is both feeling and knowing, joined together, as the subject immediately knows that he or she is being seized by the other [43]. Hence pity for Housset is both of the order of pathos and that of ethics: it is a feeling that is also pre-reflective judgment, i.e. a judgment that is formed within us without us [43]. Pity thus has a double status (double status de la pitié): there is a pity anterior to conscience (pathos) as well as a pity that is developed by reflection (ethos) [43]. For even though pity seizes us, there is still the

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moment of decision, of responsibility [52]. In pathos, the subject is opened up by the other from the exterior, by the suffering that precedes and affects the subject as a bodily feeling that is relevant to ethics. Pity as pathos tears the subject away from the dream of autonomy [177]. Housset draws upon Emmanuel Levinas here, by stressing that ‘without pity the human community would be reduced to a simple community of essence in which both the other and the self would be lost as unique and irreplaceable individuals’ [Van Nistelrooij, 2015, 158-159]. Pity can achieve that because it can personalize the human community in the experiencing of the other person’s suffering: it is here and now, in this concrete confrontation of meeting this suffering other, that I can [or cannot] say ‘yes’ to the other instead of the self [Housset, 2003, 178]. And as we indicated earlier, affectivity plays a key role here. To Housset affectivity is the place where the subject can abandon the self in order to listen to the other [41]. It is this human weakness of being permeated by the other, of feeling inside the self the interior sentiment, a sentiment and a feeling that show that the self is already taken, moved, shaken by the other. It is a finding the other in the self, an interior ipseity, that is experienced as a shock of the body [17]. The ego experiences the other as a life-changing event: it is opened to the possibility of ‘becoming different’ (devenir-autre) in which the ego is no longer the principle [101]. This experience is for Housset the understanding of the community, for the self discovers an ‘ourness’ (nostrité) here, a commonality, a community, anterior to ‘egoity’, one that is the revelation of the common world [106]. And it is exactly in this feeling and simultaneous understanding of the community of the other and myself, that the ethical domain is opened. For every abstract universalism is annihilated in this pity, for pity is a feeling, a shock of the body that individualizes (‘it is me, who is shocked, my body suffering for this suffering other, here and now’). It individualizes the involved embodied persons in the experience of commonality (‘since I appear to be feeling for this other, suffering for his suffering, I discover our commonality, our shared humanness’) [17]. Hence, in this very concrete, very personto-person experience lies the root of ethics according to Housset. Ethics starts with pathos in which the suffering other has taken me by

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surprise, and offers the possibility to the subject to be saved from isolation, revealing the self in solidarity and dedication [99].

Support to and extension of affective ethics In various ways, then, Housset and Noddings concur in their conceptions of feelings and ethics. Noddings, as shown above, has argued for the ability to move back and forth between feeling and affective engrossment on the one hand, and abstract problem solving on the other [Noddings 1984, 35]. And Housset concurs with this point of view, when he argues that a danger lies in the wish to pass immediately from feeling to observing, thereby abandoning the feeling [Housset 2003, 53]. Noddings speaks of feeling with the other, and Housset argues that ‘within pity, as an interior sentiment, the subject communicates with the other before the latter is objectified […], and this feeling is the condition for the perception of the other as my neighbor’ [53-54]. Both acknowledge the experience of being affected as a gift from the exterior. The differences between their perspectives are subtle, but they are relevant for thinking a morality that extends sympathy further than our own group [Tronto, 1993, 59]. For instance Noddings emphasizes the centrality of the caregiver’s ethical ideal, either by nonreflective emotion or by reflective feeling, whereas Housset underscores the risk that this self-consciousness may be an obstacle to relationality. An ethical ideal of being related, of being one-caring, may be the disguise of a form of sentiment that is a feeling for the self, which he terms false pity. The distinction lies in whether pity comes from the outside, shatters the horizon of the subject and makes it open, or not. Instead of the self’s ideal of relationality, the relation that decenters the self is key. The latter is the feeling that is true contact with the other, and this feeling presents itself as interior ipseity. And exactly as feeling it lacks self-consciousness and opens the space for relating and ethical acting. Hence Housset’s is an extended ethics in comparison to Noddings’, as he offers both a broader idea of the temporal dimension and a broader range of affectivity. Pity as pathos is more radically pre-reflective than Noddings’ joy-emotion, for where Noddings considers this emotion as one that enhances the ethical ideal, pity turns my previous

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self-enclosed ethical ideal upside down. Pity shatters pre-existing ideals by opening a new and truly ethical possibility of suffering with the other and taking responsibility for this suffering. And since this moment is truly an invasion from the exterior, there is no pre-existing idea of those who are connected to me, either in an ‘inner circle’ or through chains of relations. There is no idea of others who are part of my ideal related self. Hence, according to Housset, there is no limit to the range of persons who can evoke pity like this. Where Noddings considered affectivity and consequent caring responsibilities as decreasing with growing distance (geographically and relationally), Housset redraws the limits of affectivity, as pity can befall upon us also in meeting the unknown other, the complete stranger, discovering an unexpected commonality. This is the consequence of his analysis of pity as coming from the outside, decentering the self. And thus, Housset provides an ethical touchstone for the connection between feeling and ethics. With this touchstone, Housset’s work provides an answer to the aforementioned challenge posed by Joan Tronto, namely, that we need to conceive ‘a way to think of morality that extends some form of sympathy further than our own group’ [Tronto 1993, 59]. Thinking about this challenge with Housset, we can answer that feeling is ethically relevant if, and only if, it is an opening to the other, not a (further) enclosure of the self into the self. If the self remains self-enclosed, selfcentered, ethics is impossible. And affectivity plays a key role in this opening of the ethical field. Pity that comes from the outside and uncovers community is both affectivity and ethical knowledge.

Conclusion All the time Jack has spent since his return to Gilead, he has entertained the hope that the woman he loves would answer his letters and they would be reunited. This much he has confided to Glory. When his hope is shattered, the story comes to a sad climax. He is found dead drunk by her, in the old barn next to the house. She said, “I have to sit down.” She could hear herself sobbing, and she couldn’t get her breath. She leaned against the car with her arms folded and resting on the roof and wept, so hard that she could only give herself

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over to it, though it kept her even from thinking what to do next. Jack hovered unsteadily at a distance from her, full of drunken regret [Robinson 2009, 243-244].

Glory recovers and starts to care. Utterly gently she cares for Jack and in the mean time informs her father of the sad news in such a way that he is not too worried, so that she can turn to tend ‘whatever the situation required’. She guards over father and brother. A highly emotionally charged scene in which she washes Jack, while crying, unfolds. Robinson’s story underpins the intimate connections between emotions and ethics, something which, as we saw, is also underscored in Housset’s work. Housset writes: To have mercy is to suffer for the other, is to sow in tears, and the seeds of mercy are the foundation of any true community. Those who do not suffer with the hungry and to whom they give food, those who do not mourn the dead they bury, act with contempt and not with mercy: there is no neutral place where they could be neither in contempt nor in mercy [Housset 2003, 108, transl. IvN].

In both Robinson’s story and Housset’s work, we can find support for a care-ethical epistemology. If care ethicists want to argue for an ethics that is rooted in bodies, practices, relations, contexts, etc., we need to take feelings into account as well, as they are part and parcel of this fruitful soil. Even if emotions lead caregivers to an involvement that leads them to sacrifice the self, we should not disqualify these as necessarily perilous or immoral. If we do so, we could end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We should, rather, scrutinize how a morality that includes emotions (and feelings and affects) may lead to moral goods that are incompatible with an individualistic and rationalistic interpretation of self-interest, self-preservation and self-realization. This scrutiny requires some courage with regard to disturbing concepts like self-sacrifice, but the result may be a care ethics that is more loyal to the concepts that distinguish it from other ethical approaches: namely, relationality, contextuality, sensitivity to power imbalances, and affectivity. Both Noddings and Housset have helped us to see that nonreflective as well as reflective feelings are involved in ethics. Both, in their own way, have distinguished between the order of ‘pathos’ and the order of

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‘ethos’, without separating the two. Both have distinguished between the pre-reflexive emotions—Noddings on joy, Housset on pity—and the reflexive incorporation of emotions and feeling in ethics. Both have attributed ethical knowledge to feeling, but Housset attributes more radical ethical weight to affectivity. After all, the affectively de-centered self is Housset’s ethical touchstone, in which affective coexistence precedes moral agency. Concrete, real-life confrontations with others are essential to avoid the self-enclosed development of moral ideals that subsequently serve us as convenient (but inadequate) guidelines in practices. Care is radically relational; we need the other to disturb and decenter us from our comfortzone and confident routines and beliefs. And this cannot only be our neighbor or people ‘like us’. In global times, in which strangers almost literally come knocking on our door, we should not build walls, but rather, embrace an ethics that celebrates rather than shuns the search for commonness in strangers, of community amidst difference or great vulnerability. We need to sob with the suffering, to suffer with the hungry, to wash them gently, give them food and shelter, and if unavoidable, mourn those who have died and give them a decent grave, while we weep.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Carlo Leget and the editors of this volume for reading and providing valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 After having used ‘emotions’ up to this point, I here sum up the terms that are used by the main sources that I draw upon in this chapter. Feelings, emotions and affects are not the same and their distinction has been the topic of extensive research in many disciplines and fields that are too broad to cover in this chapter. One scholar who has stressed the importance of making distinctions is Elena Pulcini [2015]. Below, I will partially follow Noddings’ own approach to these distinctions. My own view differs from hers however, in that unlike Noddings, I believe that, from a phenomenological perspective, feelings and affects—like stomach ache, restlessness, a shock of the body—are pre-cognitive. They differ from emotions—such as joy, sadness, anger—which could be regarded as a combination of feeling and (social) cognition. 3 This is the distinction as it is made by Noddings [1984] and here I juxtapose it to the view of phenomenologist Housset, who considers affectivity and feeling as the nonreflective, passively undergone, experience of ‘being moved from the outside’. 4 ‘The intelligence of pity. A phenomenology of community’

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Literature Engster, D., and M. Hamington [2015], “Introduction” to Care Ethics & Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engster, D. [2015], “Care in the state of nature. The biologial and evolutionary roots of the disposition to care in human beings.” In Care Ethics & Political Theory, edited by D. Engster and M. Hamington, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.227-251. Groenhout, R. [2003], “I can’t say no: self-sacrifice and an ethics of care”. In Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith, edited by R Groenhout and M. Bower, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp.152-174. Housset, E. [2003], L’intelligence de la pitié. Phénoménologie de la communauté. Paris: La nuit surveillée. Noddings, N. [1984], Caring. A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Noddings, N. [2002], Starting at Home. Caring and Social Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Noddings, N. [2015], “Care ethics and “caring” organizations.” In Care Ethics & Political Theory, edited by D. Engster and M. Hamington, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 72-84. Pettersen, T. [2011], “The Ethics of Care: Normative Structures and Empirical Implications”, in Health Care Analysis 19, pp.51-64. Pulcini, E. [2015], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotion Review, pp.1-8. Robinson, M. [2009], Home. New York: Picador. Tronto, Joan C. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A political argument for an ethic of care. New York: Routledge. Tronto, Joan C. [2011], “Democracy becomes care; care becomes democracy.” In Care, Compassion and Recognition: An Ethical Discussion, edited by C. Leget, C. Gastmans, and M. Verkerk, Leuven: Peeters, pp.33-49. Tronto, Joan C. [2013], Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality, and Justice, New York: New York University Press. Van Heijst, A. [2008], Models of Charitable Care. Catholic Nuns and Children in their Care in Amsterdam, 1852-2002. Leiden: Brill. Van Heijst, A. [2011], Professional Loving Care. An ethical view of the healthcare sector. Leuven: Peeters. Van Nistelrooij, I. [2014], “Self-sacrifice and self-affirmation within care-giving.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17, pp.519-528 Van Nistelrooij, I., J. C. Tronto, and P. Schaafsma [2014], “Ricoeur and the ethics of care.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17, pp.485-491. Van Nistelrooij, I. [2015], Sacrifice. A care-ethical reappraisal of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Leuven: Peeters. Van Nistelrooij, I., and C. Leget [2016], “Against dichotomies: On mature care and self-sacrifice in care ethics”, Nursing Ethics. 24 (6), pp. 694-703.

8. Care and Birth. Emotional Sharing as the Foundation of Care Relationships. Guido Cusinato

Care and the “hunger to be born completely” What is the purpose of care? Is it possible to switch from the perspective of death to that of birth and rethink care not as a way to postpone death but as a means to promote birth and let it germinate? I have always wondered why Dostoyevsky opened The Brothers Karamazov with a passage from the Gospel according to John in which it is said that when a grain of wheat falls on the ground, it should not postpone death: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain: but if it dies, it bears much fruit” [John 12:24]. The grain of wheat will “bear much fruit” if it “dies” in the sense of germinating out of its integument, but such a “death” actually does not mean dying: it means being reborn. From this viewpoint, care does not at all follow the abstract scheme of the Hegelian double negation, but rather follows that of cultivation: cultivation does not aim to postpone the death of the grain of wheat, but to make it germinate, so that it can grow out of its self-referential integument and shape something that does not yet exist. In this way, we can rethink human development from the standpoint of the unpredictability of life, taking into account the fact that there needs to be a break, so to speak, from what the seed already is. On the contrary, that type of care that seeks to keep the grain intact (even once it has fallen on the ground) is a sterile cura sui, because it cannot give rise to anything beyond the confines of the selfreferential ‘small self’: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain”.

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Twentieth-century philosophical anthropology has underscored the fact that humans are, in a sense, born twice: the first time when they leave the womb, and secondly when they come out of the integument of their own environmental closedness (Umweltgeschlossenheit) in order to blend their own ontogenetic formation process with that of their culture. Having come into the world without (yet) being fully born, they are characterized by an exceptional plasticity that translates into a strong “hunger to be born completely”. Here, it is pertinent to turn to the enlightening phrase coined by Spanish philosopher María Zambrano: “hambre de nacer del todo”. Drawing on Scheler’s The Human Place in the Cosmos, Zambrano identifies this “hunger to be born completely” as the cardinal question of philosophy: An animal is born once and for all, whereas humans are never born completely; they have to face the fatigue of generating themselves again, or hope they will be generated. Hope is the hunger to be born completely, to complete what we carry within ourselves in the form of an outline [...]; [humans’] birth is incomplete and so is the world that is awaiting them. Humans therefore have to complete their birth, creating their own world, their own place, their own site; they have to ceaselessly give birth to themselves and to the reality around them [Zambrano 1989, my translation].

What fuels this “hunger”? Human beings are animals that are moved by the possibility of germinating, i.e. of taking shape beyond their own integument in the encounter with the Other. They are affected by all the experiences that pertain to birth beyond their own self-referential self: sharing birth, promoting the birth of the Other, being born beyond oneself. The English language offers a handy distinction between the two terms “care” and “cure”.1 “Cure”, which mostly concerns sick or disabled people, is often understood as a medicalization or an activity that aims to compensate for a lack or a disability, whereas “care” typically evokes the act of ‘cultivating’ (such as in farming) and includes all the activities that promote the flourishing of life. Both components are important and necessary. Until recently, though, the scales have been clearly tipped in favor of a medicalizing cure in the social sciences and

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humanities. It is only in the last few decades—especially thanks to feminist care ethics and to the ethics of care more generally2—that the attention has shifted towards the specificity and significance of care. Nevertheless, some crucial topics have been neglected in this literature so far. In this chapter, I would like to reconsider such topics from the perspective of a philosophy of birth and while doing so, to underscore some of the following issues: 1) What is the purpose of care? Saying that care deals with the flourishing of human beings may still be too generic. In what follows, I wish to suggest that care focuses on flourishing understood as re-birth, which takes place when one human being meets another. Personal singularity can be born further in the encounter with the Other, in that the encounter with the Other becomes the “extra-uterine womb” offering the space necessary to be born again beyond oneself. Care thus aims at the re-birth process that occurs in the encounter with the Other. 2) I will insist that care necessarily implies a reference to the Other. On the contrary, the phrases epimeleia heautou or cura sui recall a solipsistic taking care of oneself in our modern culture: taking care of what Hegel described as an inward-looking “beautiful soul” that neglects the rest of the world. This type of care is sometimes relegated to a prepolitical dimension, to a private, domestic and subjective one. In order to avoid this misinterpretation, in this chapter I will use the wording “care relationship” instead of simply the term “care”. 3) Rethinking care from the point of view of a philosophy of birth also entails rethinking the phenomenology of otherness. The birth that takes place in the encounter with the Other does not occur on an intersubjective level, but rather on a trans-subjective one. The term “inter-subjectivity” suggests that, in the encounter, two monadic adult subjects come into contact by lowering the drawbridges of their own fortresses, but without blending together their own existences: contact thus remains external, in a space “in between” two or more already constituted “subjects”. It is for this reason that I prefer the term “trans-subjectivity”, as it conveys more immediately the idea of contact occurring “beyond” the self-referential horizon of the respective “subjectivities”. Switching from a theory of inter-subjectivity to a theory of trans-subjectivity, the

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starting point is no longer the description of an isolated adult person, but rather the process that has led a person to shape their singularity through care relationships and through the encounter with the Other. Care relationships and encounters with the Other are a constitutive part of personal singularity and not something external or subsequent to it. In brief, care relationships do not focus on self-preservation, but on the sprout that takes shape outside of the integument. They underlie any “formation” (Bildung) process through an act of “selftranscendence”, in the sense of a critical distancing from one’s own self [Cusinato 2013]. 4) It is quite surprising that just as the international cultural landscape is undergoing an epochal “emotional turn”, the research on the connection between care relationship and emotions, which triggered this very turn [Pulcini 2015], often fails to go beyond the generic mention of the concept of “empathy”. If we do not want the term “empathy” to become generic and inflated, we need to distinguish it from the phenomena of sympathy and love. Strictly speaking, empathy is the capacity to feel and comprehend the experience (Erlebnis) of the Other as experienced by the Other, which can therefore be distinguished from my own experience. According to this view, empathy is devoid of any ethical value and does not suffice to prompt care relationships: sadists have particularly pronounced empathetic skills by definition [Scheler 1913/1923, GW VII], but this does not motivate them to develop care relationships towards their victim. The specific case of sadism aside, referring to empathy does not solve the problem of the emotional motivations behind care relationships. Empathy cannot motivate care relationships in situations that cause frustration, disgust or nausea. So far, the problem of emotional motivations underlying care relationships has remained in the background. A more sustained conversation with a phenomenology of emotions might make it possible to examine more closely whether the motivation for care relationships can be traced back to attention, respect (in the sense of the German word Ehrfurcht) and love. 5) A further aspect that is relatively absent in current debates surrounding the philosophy or ethics of care is an explicit anthropological

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frame of reference: what anthropological research or categories are referred to in the various philosophies or ethics of care? I am thinking not only about the categories developed in twentieth-century philosophical anthropology—openness to the world (Weltoffenheit), ex-centricity, vulnerability, neoteny, “deactivation of the body” (Körperausschaltung)—but also those that are emerging from the latest researches in cultural and social anthropology [Tattersall 1998; 2003; Barnard 2011; 2012; 2016] and in developmental psychology [Tomasello 2008; 2009; 2014]. I suggest that we should go beyond the category of “empathy” by shifting our focus to the concept of “emotional sharing”: my thesis is that empathy is a very particular case of the latter. The concept of emotional sharing is a key category in the phenomenology of emotions developed by Max Scheler in the early twentieth century [Scheler 1913/1923, GW VII], as well as in Michael Tomasello’s more recent works on the origin of human communication [2008; 2009; 2014]. Both Scheler and Tomasello believe that humans are the result of emotional sharing practices that appear to have evolved following the logic of cooperation (Tomasello) or that of solidarity (Scheler) rather than a competitive and individualistic one. 6) Emotions are extremely “plastic” in human beings; they are like small plants asking to be cultivated. If the forces promoting relationships are rooted in emotions, the problem underlying care relationships— and human existence as such—becomes the problem of “cultivating” emotions. Indeed, I wish to suggest that it is the same forces that drive care relationships and guide the cultivation of the affective sphere. Who or what leads this process of growth and affective maturation? Is it will? Spinoza noted that will does not influence the affects, in that “an emotion cannot be destroyed nor controlled except by a contrary and stronger emotion” [Spinoza 1667, IV, prop. 7]. It is reasonable to suggest that, more than the power of the will, what influences the affective development of a person is the strength of the “maieutic testimony of the Other”, derived from the existential success or failure of a person close to us, or from the impact of an artwork [Cusinato 2017, 145-149].

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7) Twentieth-century philosophical anthropology has shown that human formation does not follow the logic of organic reinforcement. On the contrary, it is associated with an increasingly pronounced organic weakening, to the point that homo sapiens takes on the features of an infant ape (neoteny). Care relationships are often regarded to be the result of such anthropological vulnerability: human beings are vulnerable and need care relationships in order to survive. If this is the only way care relationships are understood, however, we run the risk of reducing such relationships to a reparative and medicalizing conception of care. A similar reasoning applies to institutions and society: Adolf Portmann [1956; 1973] compares the latter to a big cultural incubator imbued with the task of ensuring the survival of an animal species that would otherwise be destined to die. From the standpoint of the “hunger to be born completely”, the relationship between an individual and society is no longer a one-way relationship, but a reciprocal and retroactive interaction. Society can also be re-born and transform itself. The social space revealed by symbolic thought [Barnard 2012] is not only conceived as an ‘incubator’ whose task is to keep prematurely born beings alive, but rather as an “extrauterine womb” which allows them to continue to be born. Human beings are “ex-centric” animals born without a definite shape, whose brain still has large areas to develop and is open to the influence of cultural factors. At a certain point in the homination process, it became difficult for the increasingly sizeable skull of the fetus to go through the birth canal, which made childbirth more and more dangerous both for the mother and for the child. Somewhere along the line of evolution, it proved less risky to be born prematurely, thus with a smaller cranial structure and still with large areas of “soft spots” (a phenomenon referred to today as “fontanelles”). While this characteristic had the good outcome of facilitating delivery (allowing the skull to adapt to the size of the birth canal), it meant, however, that the development of most of the brain had to be postponed until after the birth.3 Care relationships allow the brain to leap towards symbolic thought. As such, care relationships are not only “compensatory”, but they contribute to the making of a being who comes into the world without having been born completely.

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8) The term vulnerability covers two distinct concepts: biological vulnerability, referring to a lack or an illness, and anthropological vulnerability, linked to human plasticity and openness to the world (Weltoffenheit). It would be hazardous to extend a medicalizing approach to anthropological vulnerability in my view. Care relationships aim at compensating biological vulnerability as well as promoting the germination of the anthropological vulnerability that characterizes the human being as ex-centric and open to the world. In this sense, they are at the root both of care and of cure. What I wish to insist on is that the care oriented to flourishing is not opposed to the cure attending to pain, illness or to the meeting of special needs. Care is not the superior ‘philosophical’ care of the soul as opposed to medicalizing or assistive cure. Care and cure enrich one another by converging and embracing the applications of the other; without such convergence, care might become a self-referential, inwardlooking cura sui, and cure might reduce the patient to the impersonal subject of a pathology. Moreover, cure and care cannot be relegated to a domestic or pre-political dimension: without providing assistance to newborns, the elderly, the sick and the marginalized, there would be no human societies and there would be no human beings either. The point of convergence between cure and care, I argue, lies in the emotional motivations behind them. Indeed, the openness to the other that flows from a respect for life,4 the ability to give time, to pay attention, and to listen to the fragility and suffering of the other, from the point of view of the other, are constituent and central aspects of any care relationship and of cure.

Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron Let us first examine the correlation between care relationships and anthropological vulnerability by drawing on a well-known case. What would happen if a small child suddenly found himself living in nature without any care relationships? Would he be able to become the homme naturel, the result of the state of nature so highly praised by Rousseau, spared from any contact with corrupt civilization? Or would he simply die? What happened to the enfant sauvage of Aveyron would suggest that

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care relationships are not indispensable for the organic survival of the child (regarding a compensating or reparative function in terms of biological vulnerability), but they certainly are for the cultural formation process that leads humans to use the word. In this case, the decisive presupposition for the leap towards symbolic thought that is typical of the human being seems to be a formation (Bildung) based on care relationships. The concept of formation (Bildung) was already at the center of Goethe’s morphology. In the second volume of his morphological writings, Goethe [1959] studies living beings, starting from the problem of the “formation [Bildung] and transformation [Umbildung] of organic natures”. According to him, organisms are not characterized by a fixed configuration (Bild, Gestalt), but rather by a formation process (Bildung) that implies a trans-formation (Um-bildung). The nature of an organism is not permanently bound to a fixed form or essence, but can be found in its formation and transformation process. The care relationships at the root of human development should be understood as a cultivation praxis. In farming, cultivation originated as taking care of a plant and its growth. Nevertheless, in many living beings, this formation process is widely predetermined: the characteristics of the plant that will germinate from a grain of wheat are mostly already inscribed in the genome of the grain. In this case, the formation process is very similar to an algorithm where the variables are the environmental conditions. The agricultural activity operates on two levels: it seeks, on the one hand, to select the best seeds and, on the other, to ensure the best possible environmental conditions for the development of such seeds. A grain of wheat can germinate and develop even without being farmed, whereas the survival of the young of many animals in the first months depends on the parents’ care. In humans, something else occurs: the formation process that leads to symbolic thought implies long-lasting care relationships. That is what is revealed by Victor’s case. On January 25th 1800, the French press broadcast the sensational news that a boy of around twelve had been found in the woods in Aveyron, in the south of France, who appeared to have grown up living like a

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wild animal. He had probably been abandoned in the woods at the age of four, when he was old enough to somehow become biologically autonomous and survive. Nevertheless, his process of cultural education had stalled: he could neither recognize his own image in the mirror nor speak. Jean Itard, the physician who took care of Victor, wrote two reports about this case [Mason 1964; Moravia 1972]. The Preface to the 1801 report begins with this exquisitely philosophical consideration: Cast on this earth, without physical strength and innate ideas; unable to obey spontaneously the laws of the organic order by which he has the first rank in the system of living beings, Man can only find in society the eminent position that was destined to him in nature; without civilization, he would be one of the most feeble and least intelligent animals; a truth that, despite having often been insisted upon, has not yet been rigorously demonstrated. [Itard 1801; 3, my translation].

Itard had the courage to disagree with the diagnosis of congenital idiocy made by the internationally renowned doctor and psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745-1826): this mental deficiency was not due to congenital organic causes, but to the fact that the child—whom Itard named Victor in view of the boy’s preference for the vowel “o”—had lived in total isolation at a crucial age for his development: It is therefore probable, and almost certain, that he was abandoned when he was four or five years old; and if, at that period, he had already gathered some ideas and the knowledge of some words by the virtue of some rudimental education, these would have been obliterated from his memory in consequence of his isolation [Itard 1801, 31, my translation].

Regarding the ability to speak, Victor managed with much effort to pronounce the word “lait”. However, Itard was forced to notice that it was in fact a sound Victor made in response to the milk, not before seeing it: thus “the word pronounced, instead of being the sign of a need, appeared […] to be simply an exclamation of joy” [Itard 1801; 94, my translation]. Itard’s conclusions are rather clear: Consider the following metaphysical problem: “to determine what would be the degree of understanding and the nature of the ideas of a youth who, deprived from his infancy of all education, should have lived entirely separated from individuals of his species.” I am either strangely deceived, or the solution would lie

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in attributing to this individual an understanding only connected with his few needs [...]; well, the moral frame of this youth would be that of the Savage of Aveyron [Itard 1801; 24-25, my translation].

Itard’s observations about Victor’s case suggest that the leap towards symbolic thought, which separates humans from other animals, is enabled by social connections with one’s peers. If Victor’s brain—perfectly functioning but isolated—lacked the ability to speak, it was because only “social brains” can speak, i.e. brains that experienced an extrauterine growth nurtured by social relationships during childhood. What is so crucial about what Itard calls civilization or education? What stage of social interaction and culture proves to be so decisive for the leap towards symbolic thought that seems to characterize humans?

Homo sapiens and care relationships In recent decades, two main explanations have been proposed regarding the origin of symbolic thought in paleoanthropology and cognitive archaeology: an “explosion” model on the one hand, and a “gradual development” model on the other. One of the most significant supporters of the first hypothesis is the paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall. His theory maintains that the transition to symbolic thought was not motivated by biological factors, but by cultural ones. According to Tattersall “in the case of Homo sapiens the potential for symbolic thought evidently just lurked there, undetected, until it was ‘released’ by a stimulus that must necessarily have been a cultural one—the biology, after all, was already in place.” [Tattersall 2012, 211]. But when it comes to analyzing the cultural stimuli at the basis of symbolic thought, Tattersall reverts to a typical circular argument: “There are many reasons why the invention of language is the obvious candidate for the stimulus that tipped our ancestors over the symbolic edge.” [Tattersall 2012, 216]. In other words, according to Tattersall, the spark that was to lead to the advent of symbolic thought was the emergence of language, i.e. the ultimate expression of symbolic thought itself. Thus, Tattersall needs to establish a daring equivalence between symbolic thought and articulate language [Tattersall 1998].

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According to Tattersall, the origin of symbolic thought apparently coincides with the Upper Paleolithic revolution, a relatively recent period ranging from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago [Tattersall 1998]. However, this hypothesis was challenged in 2002 by the recovery of two red ochre pieces dating back to around 77,000 years ago in Blombos Cave in South Africa. They show the first sign of symbolic thought: both pieces were painstakingly scraped and engraved with a cross-hatched design that forms a geometrical pattern [Barnard 2012, 32-34].5 This discovery forced Tattersall to backdate the origin of symbolic thought, and, consistently with his hypothesis, he then suggested that the inhabitants of Blombos Cave already had the ability to communicate through articulate verbal language [Tattersall 2012, 199-206]. The cultural anthropologist Alan Barnard has a different view and argues for the existence of a pre-linguistic symbolism or a protolinguistic art: the artifacts found at Blombos do not necessarily imply the existence of articulate verbal language, as some maintain, “but certainly symbolism, maybe pre-linguistic symbolic action, and maybe art” [Barnard 2011, 96].6 Barnard’s thesis is that the symbolic revolution at the origin of human beings is characterized by three stages that can respectively be traced to the emergence of sharing, exchange and symbolic behavior [Bernard 2011, 104]. Sharing, talking and giving are the elements that make up hunter-gatherer sociality in advanced human cultural entities [Marshall 1961].7 The inhabitants of Blombos Cave probably belonged to the first stage, characterized by certain “sharing practices” which are not displayed by anthropomorphous apes. “While chimpanzees share, they nevertheless do not possess rules or definitions of sharing practices” [Barnard 2011, 134-135]. Such practices came with a proto-language that was comprised only of single words or phrases indicating something specific, such as food or fire. So the origin of symbolic thought, and therefore of the human condition, is not articulate verbal language— the appearance of which Barnard places only at the end, in the third stage—but rather certain “sharing practices”. Indeed, what differentiates humans from animals “is an evolutionary trend towards cooperation, reciprocal altruism and sharing. Thus, humans possess a

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special kind of sociality, one dependent on these things” [Barnard 2016, 48]. In 2012, Tattersall investigated a hypothesis, and immediately abandoned it. This hypothesis was that the emergence of symbolic thought eventually became indispensable to cope with the dynamics of interaction within societies that were steadily becoming more complex. In other words, modern human cognition developed under the self-reinforcing pressures of increasingly intense sociality – maybe around those campfires. [...]. But a mechanism of this kind [does not explain] […] why the highly social apes haven’t developed a more complex theory of mind over the time during which they have been evolving in parallel with us […] [Tattersall 2012, 214].

Tattersall’s objection would only hit the mark if the anthropomorphous great apes were in the habit of gathering around campfires as well. Tattersall does not seem to acknowledge the fact that there is no evidence of anthropomorphous apes organizing their lives around a campfire. However, we cannot ignore the fact that it was perhaps thanks to those first campfires, in a situation of “insulation” (Insulierungen)—to quote a category from Sloterdijk’s homination—that new experiences of communicative socialization could develop, producing the leap towards symbolic thought. What made homo sapiens suddenly smooth and engrave the two pieces of red ochre in Blombos, craft ornamental objects and leave those campfires to start painting on the walls of the cave? The importance of food sharing practices in the homination process has already been emphasized by Isaac [1978a; 1978b]. Is it reasonable to assume that around that campfire, in an insular—and therefore protected— environment, practices of sharing food and habits became increasingly complex, to the point that they gradually developed into social relationships that were intricate enough to threaten the existing system of communication?8 Can we rule out the fact that those sharing practices have developed over millennia until they initiated, again around the campfire, new care relationships between the mother and her newborn child? These new care relationships between mother and newborn may well have become the anthropogenetic and ontogenetic

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pivot for the leap towards symbolic thought and towards a new type of culture. It indeed appears sensible to formulate the hypothesis that, due to the increasingly complex social relationships and sharing practices, the pressure towards more efficient expressive forms and new communication techniques, such as verbal language, eventually became so strong that it produced a compelling need, just like the one that led to the invention of new utensil-building techniques and hunting strategies.

Emotional sharing and shared intentionality Barnard [2011; 2016] believes that the genesis of symbolic thought, and therefore the key to solve the human enigma, lies in certain “practices of sharing” that evolved in the first hunter-gatherer societies. Tomasello [2008; 2009] attributes such practices to the ability to share intentionality in view of cooperation. An enlightening example is how the gesture of finger-pointing is understood by chimpanzees and by humans. Chimpanzees are perfectly able to make a pointing gesture to indicate an object they want in the sense of imperative pointing [Tomasello 2008, 34-35] and to follow another individual’s pointing gesture by staring in the finger’s direction [Tomasello 2008, 38-41]. The problem arises when we shift our attention from “imperative pointing” to “pointing to offer help”. For example, when a human points to an upturned bucket to show that there is food hidden underneath, the chimpanzee can understand that the human is indicating the bucket, but does not understand why. According to Tomasello, the most reasonable hypothesis is that the great apes “themselves communicate intentionally only to request things imperatively, and so they only understand others’ gestures when they are imperative requests as well—otherwise they are simply mystified as to what the gesticulating is all about” [Tomasello 2008, 41]. What caused this switch from “imperative pointing” to “pointing to offer help” and to the “joint attention” typical of humans? Tomasello rules out verbal language. Tomasello’s research into the pre-linguistic cognitive development of deaf children (who are therefore not exposed to any vocal language) have shown that their deictic gestures are not

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compromised. Thus, this switch depends neither on the production nor on the comprehension of language: And so we claim that in ontogeny the first manifestations of uniquely human forms of cooperative communication emerge in prelinguistic gestural communication—especially in the pointing gesture—and that they do not depend on language production or comprehension. [Tomasello 2008, 165-166].

The difference between human and non-human animals is more likely to lie in the practices of shared intentionality based on a new “cooperative communication” [Tomasello 2014, 3-6]. According to Tomasello, the uniqueness of human cognition appears to derive from the fact that in humans, thanks to such shared intentionality practices, the culturalontogenetic development, based mainly on a cooperative-social logic, prevails over the biologic-phylogenetic one (which we share with great apes) based mostly on a competitive-individualistic logic. Tomasello analyzes the cognitive and cultural processes that separate human children from great apes, and he comes to the conclusion that a form of shared intentionality emerges in human children towards 12 months of age, but does not occur in the rest of the animal kingdom. This new kind of shared intentionality is the premise not only for the ability of imperative pointing and of pointing to share attitudes—something that we have in common with chimpanzees—but also for the typically human ability to point to offer help. According to Tomasello, this shared intentionality is based on specific emotional sharing practices that begin at about 3 months of age [Tomasello 2008, 144, Figure 4.1]. At the origin of symbolic thought there seem to be emotional sharing practices related to deictic gestures that are not only imperative and expressive (like those of chimpanzees), but are also aimed at offering help, thus leading to stronger emotional bonds. In addition to Tomasello’s conclusions, one could also mention the studies on the connection between autism and joint attention in infant cognitive development. If joint attention and shared intentionality are not substantially inhibited in deaf children (who are denied the experience of verbal language), the same cannot be said in the case of autism [Jones, Carr 2014]. This would appear to suggest that the switch from

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imperative pointing to joint attention is not due to the experience of verbal language (compromised in the event of deafness), but rather to a certain form of emotional sharing, which is hindered in the event of autism.

Emotional sharing and the development of emotional bonds If I were asked to pinpoint the difference between a human newborn and that of another mammal, I would answer: the former cries. A newly-born foal does not cry, and neither do other non-human animals.9 A human baby, on the other hand, almost always cries as soon as it comes into the world. A foal does not need to cry when born because it has a body schema (Leibschema) right from the beginning, so much so that it can immediately coordinate its movements and attempt to stand. Maybe that is the reason why a foal is not interested in its reflection in the mirror: it already has a body schema. Instead, a human newborn comes into the world without a complete body schema, as demonstrated by the fact that it lacks full motor coordination: it only has a fragmented image of itself as a lived body (Leib). When a child sees its own reflection in the mirror, it is delighted [Lacan 1949]. It is delighted because it can see what biological birth has not yet given and cannot give: in this reflection the child sees the anticipation of what the child itself, as a being who is not yet fully born, has been deprived of up to that moment. Hence the child joyfully rushes towards his reflected image to make a leap towards symbolic thought, that is, to continue to be born beyond biological birth. In short, a human newborn comes into the world crying, because it lacks a completed body schema. While a foal concentrates all its resources onto learning to stand and to walk before it even starts suckling, a newly-born human comes into existence wailing, as if it knew it was in a situation of utter impotence and that its survival depended solely on its mother’s initiative. Actually, the newborn does do something by crying: it seeks its mother’s attention and closeness, not only in a physical, but also in an emotional sense. When a newborn comes into the world without being

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born completely and carries on being born purely thanks to care relationships and emotional sharing practices, the development of this emotional intimacy with the mother becomes as essential as learning to stand is for a foal. Now, what makes human beings share an emotion so strongly from the age of three months? It is a common experience that, when we have an emotion, we instinctively feel the need to share it: when we receive good news, for example, the first thing we do is rejoice in it, but the second thing is usually to think of someone to call to share our joy. The same thing happens if we receive bad news: once we have recovered from the shock, it is natural to feel the need to share the pain with someone who is close to us. The concept of sharing does not necessarily imply a process of collective uniformity: shared and collective are not synonyms. Indeed, certain emotional sharing experiences are precisely what enables the individuation processes underlying the singularization that goes beyond the collective common sense. Sharing a significant emotion means verifying and strengthening our emotional bonds as well as pursuing our birth in the trans-subjective spaces of living-together (Miteinanderleben) and feeling-together (Miteinanderfühlen). Faced with the impact of a relevant emotion, an individual’s life transforms itself thanks to their emotional bonds: if they do not share that emotion, they do not share the transformation that derives from it either, until they lose contact with the people close to them.

The debate around emotional sharing The origin of the concept of “emotional sharing” can be traced back to the first edition of Sympathiebuch [GW VII, 1913], in which Max Scheler paved the way to a phenomenology of emotions and to social ontology. The importance of his findings is evident: consider the central role of emotional sharing in Tomasello’s analysis [2000, 2008] and the lively debate on social ontology and collective intentionality. The latter term that can be ascribed to John Searle’s Collective Intentions and Actions [Searle 1990]. Searle claims that social ontology is based on collective intentionality, that is, on ways of sharing intentions and beliefs. Now,

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ever since the beginning of the debate, there has been much discussion on the degrees of individuality held by the various members of such collective intentionality, understood as the cognitive or normative criterion that connects them [Bratman 1999, Alonso 2009, Gilbert 1990]. However, the phenomenon of emotional sharing has hardly been considered, if at all. Today’s phenomenological debate has partially filled this gap, after starting a line of research focusing on emotional sharing in the last couple of years. The various theories in this field have one subject matter in common: the presence of a specific we-mode, a first person plural ‘we’ modality of experience, which is distinct both from the experience in the first person singular ‘I’ or ‘self’, and from the one in the second person [Zahavi 2015]. The relationship between these experience modes is still the subject of much discussion. Zahavi [Brinck, Reddy, Zahavi 2017; León, Szanto, Zahavi 2017] has examined the formation of emotional experiences that are constitutively interdependent. In his view, such sharing is inseparable from basic consciousness and from a minimal self. In other words, the experience of shared emotions remains the experience of single individuals, who would otherwise blend into an ‘englobing’ collective subject. Schmid [2009] sets himself apart from Zahavi’s theories and supports the so-called “token-identity account”, which views emotions as an affective flow that is unique and equal for all members involved. Following a certain interpretation of Scheler, Cusinato [2015a] argues in favor of different levels of emotional sharing that trigger individuation processes within each single person and maintains that even the minimal self is already constitutively relational. More recently, Ciaunica [2017] and Ciaunica and Fotopoulou [2017] have identified an original emotional sharing experience based on the sense of touch, already within the mother’s womb. In this debate, a static perspective often prevails: the lived experiences (Erlebnisse) that are shared are either individualistic and private (otherwise we would witness the fusion into an englobing subject), or they are unique and equal for all the members involved. But a third interpretation could be proposed if we consider the issue from a

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dynamic point of view: when sharing takes place, there is an initial moment in which a trans-subjective flow of lived experiences is neither individual nor collective. Whereas emotional sharing on the level of collective ‘we’ is a homogenizing process, on the trans-subjective level of the encounter with the Other it marks the beginning of a singularizing process. On this trans-subjective level, the Erlebnis constitutes itself neither in relation to an independent individual consciousness nor in relation to a collective ‘we’. It is not what I, you or a ‘we’ experience. It rather becomes the Erlebnis of a trans-subject, that is, a set of subjects that go beyond the self-referential perspective in order to be re-born in the very encounter with the Other. At the beginning of this encounter, the Erlebnis is ‘identical’ for all the members involved in this transformation, as these members do not experience it separately in each single consciousness. They rather experience it on a trans-subjective register, one that founds the transformation of individual consciousness in each one of them. However, this trans-subjective flow of experiences can later be metabolized by the single members—referring to one’s own order of feeling in the first person singular (“I-mode”)—into an individual and private experience. The latter process coincides with further individualization. Singularity is not at the beginning, but at the end of the process [Cusinato 2015a; 2017]. Furthermore, I should now clarify what I mean by “we-mode” and “I-mode”. In this respect, one can use Scheler’s distinction between the ‘social self’ and the ‘personal self’, and between the ‘we of society’ and the ‘we of the personal community’ [GW II, 1913-16]. Now, does the ‘social self’ truly correspond to the first person singular experience mode, and the ‘we of society’ to the first person plural one? Besides the social self, should the experience mode of a personal singularity (intended as an individual who is ‘hungry for being born completely’) not also be taken into consideration? Besides our ‘social we’ (which equates with the gregarious identity of the group), shouldn’t we consider the experience mode of ‘we as a personal community’—the trans-subjective modality of the encounter with the other, also including the stranger and the different? In this way, it would be possible to raise the issue of

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emotional sharing not only with reference to social recognition, but also with reference to the importance of care relationships for the transformation of society and for an individual’s formation process in terms of singularity [Cusinato 2015a, 2017].

Emotional sharing and social ontology Scheler’s theory that emotional sharing underlies social ontology, which was already presented in the first edition of Sympathiebuch in 1913, made a comeback in Formalismus. Sharing one’s feelings and emotions is the reason behind various “forms of being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein) and co-living-with-one-another (Miteinaderleben), in which the corresponding forms of social unit constitute themselves” [GW II, 515, my translation]. Scheler thus lays the foundation for a general theory of social ontology: There is a theory of all the possible social essential units [Wesenseinheiten]. To develop it and to apply it for the comprehension of real, existing social units (marriage, family, people, nation etc.) constitutes the fundamental problem of a philosophical sociology and the premise of any social ethics [GW II, 515, my translation].10

According to this hypothesis, we can outline four major correlations between forms of emotional sharing and forms of social unit: 1) “The social unit that constitutes itself (simultaneously) through so-called contagion without comprehension and involuntary imitation. It is called ‘herd’ for animals and ‘mass’ if it occurs with the human being.” [GW II, 515, my translation]; 2) “The social unit that constitutes itself in [...] co-experiencing [Miterleben] or re-experiencing (Nacherleben) (co-feeling (Mitfühlen), costriving (Mitstreben), co-thinking (Mitdenken), co-judging (Miturteilen) etc.)” [GW II, 515, my translation]. This type of social unit is called “vital community” (Lebensgemeinschaft) [GW II, 516, my translation]; 3) Society, unlike the vital community, is “a unit made up of adult and self-conscious single persons” [GW II, 518, my translation]. In society, individuals are not considered in relation to the difference of their irreplaceable singularity; in fact, “differences in society and differences in value between its elements come about only through different values

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of accomplishment of the individuals in the value-direction of the agreeable and the useful, the value-correlates of society.” [GW II, 519, my translation]. This efficientistic and individualistic logic entails an ability to share the Other’s emotions qua emotions of the Other, based on the clear and conscious distinction between I and You. However, it also entails the absence of any form of “original co-responsibility (Mitverantwortlichkeit) since every form of responsibility that is assumed towards the Other is founded on a unilateral self-responsibility (Selbstverantwortlichkeit) instead” [GW II, 518, my translation]. 4) The “personal community”11 is established according to a solidaristic form of sharing responsibility, or “co-responsibility” (Mitverantwortlichkeit), based on the principle of “irreplaceable solidarity” [GW II, 523]. Already in the second edition of Sympathiebuch (1923), Scheler felt the need to offer a modified version of the four ways of sharing feelings and emotions: 1) Unconscious sharing through unipathy (Einsfühlung, “feeling as one”, a term that appeared neither in the 1913 edition nor in Formalismus) or affective contamination (Gefühlsanstekung); 2) Sharing through empathy, which Scheler calls Nachfühlung, to distance himself from Lipps’ theory of empathy (Einfühlung); 3) Conscious sharing through sympathy or “affective co-feeling” (Mitgefühl) according to the logic of social recognition; 4) Solidaristic sharing that leads to love or hate. Scheler also institutes a foundational law according to which unipathy is the foundation of empathy, empathy is that of sympathy, and sympathy is the basis of the forms of love and hate [GW VII, 105].

Collective intentionality and solidaristic intentionality Scheler’s considerations suggest that human beings are the result of certain solidaristic practices of emotional sharing. To a certain degree, we can find a similar hypothesis in Tomasello: “It is thus possible that sharing emotions and attitudes serves a kind of group identity function for humans and that this is a uniquely human function” [Tomasello, 2008, 212]. According to Tomasello, Great apes are all about cognition for competition. Human beings, in contrast, are all about (or mostly about) cooperation. Human social life is

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much more cooperatively organized than that of other primates, and so, in the current hypothesis, it was these more complex forms of cooperative sociality that acted as the selective pressures that transformed great ape individual intentionality and thinking into human shared intentionality and thinking [Tomasello 2014, 31].

Therefore, it would not be far-fetched to trace our most selfish and aggressive instincts back to the competitive and individualistic behavior of gorillas or chimpanzees, but it is precisely this competitive and individualistic behavior that encapsulates and hinders human cultural development. Developing in a cooperative way, emotional sharing practices appear to have further strengthened human emotional bonds, thus leading to the creation of more complex social norms: “Pressure from the group for the individual to conform is the essence of social norms; the ultimate threat is being ostracized or even physically excluded from the group” [Tomasello 2009, 212].

Divisible goods and shareable goods Tomasello’s reconstruction seems to underestimate the role and importance both of cooperation in bonobos [de Waal 2013] and of individualistic and competitive logic in human society. Still, Tomasello does acknowledge that the human practices of emotional sharing might go hand in hand with ostracism and social exclusion. If bonobos already manifest a cooperative logic, then there has to be something much more complex than mere cooperation at the origin of the human emotional sharing that allows for the leap to symbolic thought. Could it be a solidarity-based logic striving towards the ‘hunger to be born completely’? If solidaristic logic does not exist thanks to a kind of “goodwill”, where does it come from? To tackle that question, I propose to use the distinction between “divisible goods” and “shareable goods”. My hypothesis is that solidaristic logic arises spontaneously in relation to the second type of goods, but can also be extended to the former under certain conditions [Cusinato 2017, 445-451]. The more a material resource, like petroleum (a divisible good), is consumed, the more it diminishes. It is evident that, following this logic, this (divisible) good

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will rapidly and easily become a cause for—often militarized—dispute in relation to its distribution. But no one would ever cut up one of Van Gogh’s paintings (a shareable good) in order to divide it. This is so not only because the painting would be destroyed in the process, but also because the pleasure of art can be non-oppositional: it can be enjoyed with a friend, in the sense that the more this friend is able to ‘consume’ the artwork, making me co-participate in his or her own interpretation, the more the artwork becomes accessible to me, too. If I go to an exhibit of Paul Cézanne with a friend of mine and, upon seeing the representation of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he or she feels something special and tells me about it, this metabolization will not take something away from me: on the contrary, it will make me richer. An individual’s ‘consumption’ of an art piece does not take something away from other potential viewers, but it contributes to the multiplication of its value. As a result, thanks to the act of sharing, the more this type of good is ‘consumed’, the more it miraculously ‘multiplies’ [Cusinato 2017, 446447]. A particular case of shareable good is, I wish to argue, the ‘hunger to be born completely’. And this gives every care relationship its ultimate sense direction. The more I share a good, the more my singularity takes shape, the more I aspire to further share that good. On the other hand, the more I divide a good—in order to split the booty or solve a dispute—, the more the oppositional logic of gregarious identity and self-reference asserts itself in my formation process. Hence, what shapes humans is more than the “collective intentionality” around which Tomasello’s research revolves: it is a solidaristic logic that human beings first experience in their mother’s care relationship.

Emotional sharing and the individuation process Another issue to be considered in this context concerns the connection between emotional sharing practices and individuation processes. We might assume that the various emotional sharing practices not only lead to the constitution of different social units, but also to the various individuation processes of the social self and of personal singularity [Cusinato 2015a; 2017].

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To this effect, I would suggest making the following two kinds of association: on the one hand, the emotional sharing practices that follow the logic of struggle for one’s recognition are to be associated with the individuation processes that lead to the constitution of the social self; and, on the other hand, the sharing practices that follow the solidaristic principle are to be associated with the individualization process of one’s personal singularity. While the individuation process connected to the first kind of emotional sharing practices aims to strengthen the self-referential subject, the second type of emotional sharing practices are not attributable to the subject’s self-referential cura sui: when an individual experiences love, they experience their own utter non-selfsufficiency, they desire something that is outside the self-referential realm of their own ‘small self’, which they can only find in the encounter with the Other.

Organism, social self, person Starting from an analysis of shame, Michael Lewis [1992] has outlined a set of primary emotions that do not require processes of self-consciousness (“non-self-conscious-emotions”) nor a set of secondary emotions, such as shame or guilt, that involve the sense of self (“self-conscious-emotions”). In my opinion, the criterion suggested by Lewis is still too abstract: if it is not self-consciousness, but the ‘hunger to be born completely’ that characterizes a person as an ontologically new entity, then the affective structure of the person, their ordo amoris, needs to be rethought in relation to this ‘hunger to be born completely’. The logic that the organism’s instinctual structure (Triebstruktur) follows must be distinguished from that of the social self, which in turn must be distinguished from the logic that a person’s ‘order of feeling’ (ordo amoris) follows. In the first case, fear, disgust, pleasure and pain guide the organism in its interaction with the environment. Without these forms of emotional orientation and value-ception (Wert-nehmung), the lived-body would perceive all the possibilities of movement as meaningless, because they would be utterly indifferent. In the case of the social self, emotions like shame, pride, indignation, resentment and

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envy follow a logic that aims to orientate the dynamics of social recognition. In both cases, the emotions follow the logic of response reaction (Antwortsreaktion). This logic varies greatly according to how the personal center functions: love and hate, bliss and despair, repentance, modesty and respect no longer regulate the interaction with the environment (organism) or the struggle for social recognition (social self), but they mostly drive the care relationships through which the personal singularity takes shape in the further birth. Naturally, care relationships require the development and maturation of all the different affective classes. However, one can identify at least two specific prerequisites underlying all care relationships, which are the object of the next section.

Care, respect (Ehrfurcht) and lack of envy (aphthonos) When emotional sharing involves the personal center, the direction of recognition is completely overturned: the intention is no longer to achieve self-recognition (Anerkennung), but the recognition of the Other. This reversal is made possible by the emotional disposition of respect or reverence (Ehrfurcht) for the value of the Other qua Other.12 What characterizes the human is not the technical ability to dominate nature, but the ability to feel profound respect (Ehrfurcht) for the other-thanself, and for the whole of nature.13 The feeling of respect clearly implies “self-transcendence”, a term that I use here in the sense of transcendence in immanence, as it is not aimed at an otherworldly dimension, but rather intends to overcome the self-referential horizon of one’s ‘small Self’. With this reversal of perspectives, from Anerkennung to Ehrfurcht, the individual leaves the contingent self (epoché of the I or “ego”) and becomes a “receptive center” (Rezeptionszentrum) [Scheler 1915, GW X, 236] that opens up to the encounter with the Other and ensures the conditions to further share birth. Once the recognition of one’s social Self is obtained, the personal singularity realizes it wants to recognize the Other, because it is only in the encounter with the Other that it can find the space to satisfy its ‘hunger to be born completely’.

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When someone encounters someone else by sharing an act (Mitvollzug), an Erlebnis, etc., they place themselves in a trans-subjective dimension. What is nullified in this dimension is not each one’s singularity, but one’s resistance against trans-formation due to his or her egotism. In the trans-subjective dimension of the encounter with the Other, the person finds the space to be born further—a space that she did not find within the horizon of her self-referential integument. Every solidaristic experience of sharing an act, a lived experience or an emotion therefore corresponds to a further birth and implies a big or small step forward in the individuation process of all the people involved. In this way, the fourth form of emotional sharing, which involves the order of feeling of the personal center, is not exactly a simple sharing of emotions, but rather, it is a “sharing of the cultivation of emotions”. What is actually shared in this case is the very practice of caring for emotions. The emotional disposition of profound respect (Ehrfurcht) is connected to the ability to act without envy. It is not insignificant that one of the few characteristics that Plato attributes to the divine is the “lack of envy” (aphthonos) [Tim. 29e.]. Naturally, a “non-envious” (aphthonos) behavior is still not enough for emotional motivations to arise and for us to crave for care relationships. However, on closer inspection, it could be said to represent, at the very least, a necessary condition. Thanks to the lack of envy, something absolutely unexpected can occur in me: I can perceive a positive value outside of myself, namely not as a theft or robbery from my existence but as something worth recognizing, so that I no longer have to fear that this value outside of me might take something away from me and diminish my own value. If I water a rose plant on my windowsill, it is not because I expect something in exchange by taking something from the plant (unlike what might be the case with an aromatic plant): I will feel rewarded if my care helps it flourish. Realizing that my attention and care contribute to the rose’s life and flourishing, I will feel more alive myself. This is why it is possible to go beyond the logic guided by Girard’s mimetic desire and make the transition from self-recognition (Anerkennung) to other-recognition and respect for the Other as such (Ehrfurcht).

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NOTES 1

For one account of the distinction between care and cure, see Mortari [2006, 46]. On the concepts of caring and care, see Mayeroff [1971]. 2 I am referring for instance to Tronto [1993], Groenhout [2004] and in Italy to Pulcini [2013] and Mortari [2006]. 3 In the 1960s, anthropologist Desmond Morris [1967] observed that at birth the brain of an ape has reached 70% of its future dimension, whereas that of a human only 23%. 4 For more on the concept of respect (Ehrfurcht) see the last paragraph. 5 On Blombos cave see Barnard [2011]. 6 According to other studies, including Coolidge [2009], to the Blombos people should not be attributed fully developed language skills. 7 Cf. Barnard 2016, 67. 8 According to anthropologist Martin Edwardes, “if we want a plausible evolutionary explanation for grammar in language, we should concentrate our search on the social process of information sharing. The question of why we need grammar is tied to the question of how a social structure evolved requiring the exchange of complex information, and what that social structure was”. [Edwardes 2010, 13, quoted here by Barnard 2016, 102.] 9 A non-human young usually only cries or whines when it is hurt, separated from its mother, or cannot suckle. A particular case is described in the 2003 docufilm The Story of the Weeping Camel (Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel), directed by Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa. 10 See also Scheler GW VII, 437. 11 In Formalismus, the fourth form of social unit is also referred to as “collective person” (Gesamtperson), a problematic term that does not appear in the second edition of Sympathiebuch, where it is replaced by the phrase “community of irreplaceable spiritual persons” (Gemeinschaft unersetzbarer geistiger Personen) [Scheler, GW VII, 214)]. 12 On the importance of Ehrfurcht as an emotional disposition that opens up to the ethical dimension see Scheler [1913, GW III, 26-32]. 13 Albert Schweitzer places the concept of “reverence for life” [Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben] at the centre of ethics. He describes how this intuition came to him: “The evening of the third day, at sunset, we were near the village of Igendja, and had to coast a small island, along a stretch of the river that was more than a kilometer wide. To our left, on a sandbank, there were four hippopotami with their young, moving in the same direction as us. At that very moment, despite my exhaustion and sense of dejection, I suddenly remembered the expression ‘reverence for life’ […]. I realized straight away that this expression embodied the solution to the problem that was haunting me. I remembered that an ethics that only takes into consideration our relationship with other human beings is incomplete and partial, and therefore cannot have full power. […] an ethics of the respect of life […] not only puts us in contact with other human beings but with all the beings that appear on our horizon, entrusting us with the task of looking after their destiny in order not to cause them any harm; on the contrary, in order to help them as far as possible.” [1991, 18, my translation].

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Literature Barnard A. [2011], Social anthropology and human origins, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Barnard A. [2012], Genesis of Symbolic Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Barnard A. [2016], Language in Prehistory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Brinck I., Reddy V., Zahavi D. [2015], “The Primacy of the We?”, in C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, Embodiment, Enaction and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, Cambridge/London, MIT Press, 131-147. Ciaunica, A. [2017], “The ‘Meeting of Bodies’: Empathy and Basic Forms of Shared Experiences”, in Topoi (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9500-x). Ciaunica, A., Fotopoulou, A. [2017], “The Touched Self: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on Proximal Intersubjectivity and the Self”, in C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, Embodiment, Enaction and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, Cambridge/London, MIT Press, 173-192. Cusinato G. [2013], “Il problema dell’orientamento nella società liquida: autotrascendimento e aver cura come esercizio di trasformazione”, in Thaumàzein, 1, 35-84. Cusinato G. [2014], “Etica e cura del desiderio”, in Thaumàzein, 2, 23-66. Cusinato G. [2015a], “Anthropogenese. Hunger nach Geburt und Sharing der Gefühle aus Max Schelers Perspektive”, in Thaumàzein, 3, 29-82. Cusinato G. [2015b], “La formatività antropologica della “care”. Salute e cura del desiderio”, in Lessico di etica pubblica, 6, 1, 51-63. Cusinato G. [2017], Periagoge. Teoria della singolarità e filosofia come esercizio di trasformazione [1st ed. 2014], Verona, QuiEdit. Cusinato G. [2018, in press] “Hunger for being born completely. Plasticity and Desire”, in Philosophical News, 14. Coolidge F.L., Wynn T. [2009], The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. de Waal F. [1996], Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. de Waal F. [2005], Our Inner Ape, New York, Riverhead Books. de Waal F. [2013], The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, New York, W. W. Norton & Company. Edwardes M. [2010]. The origins of grammar: an anthropological perspective, London, Continuum. Goethe W. [1959], Schriften zur Morphologie II, in: Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, Bd. XIX, Stuttgardt, Cotta’sche Buchhandlung. Groenhout R. [2004], Connected Lives. Human Nature and an Ethics of Care, Lanham, Rowman. Heidegger M. [1927], Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag. Jones E.A., Carr E.G. [2004], “Joint attention in children with autism. Theory and intervention”, in Focus on autism and other developmental disabilities, 19, 13-26. Isaac G.L. [1978a], “The food sharing behavior of proto-human hominids”, in Scientific American, 238, 90-108.

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Isaac G.L. [1978b], “Food sharing and human evolution: Archaeological evidence from the Plio-Plestocene of East Africa”, in Journal of Anthropological Research, 34, 311-325. Itard J. [1801], De l’éducation d’un homme sauvage, ou des premiers développelments physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l’Aveyron, Paris, Goujon fils. Itard J. [1807], Rapport fait à son Excellence le ministre de l’Intérieur, sur les nouveaux développements et l’état actuel du sauvage de l’Aveyron [1806], Paris, L’imprimerie impériale. Lacan J. [1949] “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique”, in Revue française de psychanalyse, 13, 4, 449-455. León F., Szanto T., Zahavi D. [2017], “Emotional Sharing and the Extended Mind”, in Synthese, 1-21. Leroi-Gourthan A. [1964], Le geste et la parole. Technique et langage, Paris, Albin Michel. Lewis M. [1992], Shame. The Exposed Self, New York, Free Press, 1995. Marshall L. [1961], “Sharing, talking, and giving: relief of social tensions among Kung Bushmen”, in Africa, 31, 231-49. Mason L. [1964], Les enfants sauvages, Paris, Ed. 10/18. Mayerhoff M. [1971], On Caring, New York, Harper&Row. Moravia S. [1972], Il ragazzo selvaggio dell’Aveyron. Pedagogia e psichiatria nei testi di J. Itard, P. Pinel e dell’Anonimo della “Décade”, Bari, Laterza. Morris D. [1967], The Naked Ape. A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, London, Corgi paperback editions. Mortari L. [2006], La pratica dell’aver cura, Milano, Bruno Mondadori. Portmann A. [1956], Zoologie und das neue Bild des Menschen. Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen, Hamburg, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Portmann A. [1965], Aufbruch der Lebensforschung, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp; trad. it. Le forme viventi. Nuove prospettive della biologia, Milano, Adelphi, 1989. Portmann A. [1973], Biologie und Geist, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp. Pulcini E. [2013], Care of the World: Fear, Responsibility and Justice in the Global Age, Dordrecht, Springer. Pulcini E. [2015], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotion Review, 1-8. Salice, A. [2015], “Shared Emotions – A Schelerian Approach”, in Thaumàzein, 3, 83-102. Scheler M. [1913], Ehrfurcht, in Gesammelte Werke [= GW] III, 26-32. Scheler M. [1915], Absolutsphäre und Realsetzung der Gottesidee, in GW X 179-254. Scheler M. [1913/1917], Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, in GW II. Scheler M. [1913/1923], Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, in GW VII. Scheler M. [1926], Politik und Moral, in GW XV. Schmid, H.B. [2009], Plural Action. Essays in Philosophy and Social Science, Dordrecht/ Heidelberg/London/New York, Springer. Schweitzer A. [1991], Die Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben – Grundtexte aus fünf Jahrzehnten, Beck, 6th edition, München.

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Searle J. R. [2010], Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization, New York, Oxford University Press; Spinoza B. [1667], Ethica, in Spinoza Opera, vol. 2, ed. by C. Gebhardt, Heidelberg, Carl-Winter Verlag, 1972. Szanto T. [2015], “Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account”, in Human Studies, 38/4, 503-527. Tattersall I. [1998], Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness, New York, Harcourt Brace. Tattersall I. [2003], The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human, Fort Washington, Harvest Books. Tattersall I. [2012], Masters of the Planet – The Search for Our Human Origins, London, St. Martins Press. Tomasello M. [1999], The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press. Tomasello M. [2008], Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge Mass, MIT Press. Tomasello M. [2009], Why We Cooperate, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press. Tomasello M. [2014], A Natural History of Human Thinking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. Tronto J. C. [1993], Moral Boundaries: a Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York/ London, Routledge. Zahavi, D. [2015], “You, Me and We: The Sharing of Emotional Experiences”, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22/1-2, 84-101. Zambrano M. [1989], Hacia un saber sobre el alma, Madrid, Alianza.

9. Affective Self-Understanding: a Way to Care for the Self Luigina Mortari

1. Care, finitude and the pull of transcendence The life that we live is one of continuous becoming, where we find ourselves ceaselessly involved in doing things. Since we continually have to take care of our being with others in the world, we may often feel the need to stop: to stop and think. If we do so in light of an urge to understand what we are, we might be in a position to discover the quality of our being: we then realise our ontological weakness, because we discover that we have a “substance received” from elsewhere, from outside of our selves. Indeed, we find ourselves delivered over to the world without any explicit decision on our part. And once we are in the world, we are “pulled towards reality”—to use the terms of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano [1986, 23] and exposed to it without having been given the chance to interrupt or interrogate this position of extreme fragility and vulnerability. This lack of sovereignty over our lives is clear from the fact that our Dasein—to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology—is a becoming in time in which we feel ourselves to be deferred from one moment to the next. But just as we discover that we lack sovereignty over Dasein, we also feel ourselves called upon to take responsibility for giving a shape to our potential being (to what we might become). Indeed, we are not complete, finite beings; we rather come into the world with the task of giving meaning to time, of giving a shape to life. As Zambrano puts it: “Everything that is born and that which is not yet born is promised a shape. It is the primordially nuptial meaning of life” [1990, 14]. But

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things are particularly complex for the human being, because as a being that is only half complete [ibid, 14], finding a form is not straightforward but rather constitutes the very problem of existence. When individuals are born, they find themselves immediately weighed down by a great but invisible responsibility: finding their own form. We are, in short, born forced into transcendence. The call to transcendence places human beings, as such, before the challenge of their very own selves. This is the difficult part of existence: to feel our inconsistent, vulnerable, fleeting being (the absence of complete sovereignty over our becoming), and at the same time to feel the pull of transcendence, to feel irrevocably tied to the responsibility of responding to the call to fulfil our potentiality-for-being. The job of living is, therefore, doubly hard: to dedicate our thinking and our acting to finding a good form for our existence, all the while being aware of the fragility and vulnerability of our plans because of our lack of sovereignty over our lives. As such, accepting the call to transcendence means accepting the challenge to learn the art of existing, that is, developing ways of Dasein with which to imbue time with meaning. Now, searching for the art of existing entails caring for life. The practise of care is in our view a fundamental ontological action because without care, life would simply not flourish. Care ought to be regarded as an essential ontological characteristic of Dasein; for Heidegger, “it is the structure of Dasein itself” [1985, 293]. Dasein takes on its existence by caring for it, that is, by taking to heart the complex network of relations that structures the abode of life [Pulcini 2003, xxvii]. Moreover, precisely because of the fact that we are fragile and vulnerable, from the moment we come into the world we need care, and this care is given to us by other people we are related to. As many care theorists have insisted since Carol Gilligan [1982], we are fundamentally relational beings. We need to receive care from others: that care that consists in protecting us when we most need it and procuring the things that are necessary for life; that care which nurtures the mind and the heart to allow us to best fulfil our existential possibilities; and that care as a kind of therapy that gives us support in moments of suffering and sooths the wounds in our souls. As relational beings, we not only

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receive acts of care, but we are called on to care for others: not only for those who enter the network of relationships we experience, that is, those who we know and are familiar with, but also those who are distant and unknown, who need our solidarity and our involvement [Pulcini 2003, xxvii]. It is through the movement of giving and receiving care that a community is built. But care is not only what we give and receive in the shared space of relationality. Precisely because we are called to take responsibility for giving form to our own lives, we find ourselves assigned the ontogenetic task of caring for ourselves. As stated above, care of oneself flows from the very quality of our Dasein, which, as soon as it enters the time of life, finds itself immediately weighed down by the task of becoming its own possible being.1 Caring for oneself means taking to heart one’s own life, searching for that essential living wisdom that is necessary to authenticate the meaning of our own time. If the event of being becomes concrete in the concern for being and if “to be as such is, from the first, to be preoccupied with being” [Levinas 1998, xii], then taking care of oneself becomes an obligatory option because taking on this responsibility is the result of a decision by which consciousness responds to an unavoidable ontological and ethical need. Care of oneself transforms simple living (i.e. the time that we are allotted that could be lived simply as it unfolds) into existence, in which time takes a certain shape thanks to sense thought and put into practice by free acts. For Edith Stein, there is a way of living that is thoughtless, natural, and spontaneous, where what prevails are simply reactions to the stimuli that come from the world [Stein 1962, 137]; and there is a meditated way of living, which is not influenced by the outside, but which lets itself be guided by the desire for what is beyond. We who lack sovereignty over Dasein find ourselves conditioned throughout the time of our lives by the things of the world, and we come to feel the value of free acts, which generate modes of being that are consciously adopted. Stein argues that the more we feel our fragility the more we wish to be able to direct (inszenieren) our own movements [Stein 1962, 137].2 When subjects manage to draw an inner centre, which becomes the source of freely intentioned acts, this does not

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mean that they cease to act in a reactive way to external stimuli. But when they cultivate self-consciousness with the aim of acting intentionally, reactive acts are not merely passive responses, but arise from the intentional life of the mind. 3 The direction of sense of the practice of caring for oneself consists in searching for those forms of Dasein that render one’s existentiell attestation possible, and that implies cultivating those postures of the mind that lead us to keep searching for the essential. My aim in this chapter is largely to show that the care of the self ought not be considered a marginal part of what an ethics of care has to propose, but rather, something that is central to it and something that is rather complex. Anchoring my discussion in a phenomenological/Heideggerian perspective, the following chapter will draw on the work of Plato, Michel Foucault, María Zambrano and Edith Stein in order to better come to grips, more specifically, with the role that affects and self-knowledge ought to play in this care of the self.

2. Care of the self and knowledge of the self The fundamental point of reference for understanding the essence of care of the self is Socratic thought, since it is to Socrates that we are indebted for creating the concept of “caring for oneself” (epiméleia eautoû)—as Michel Foucault in his last lectures at the Collège de France has shown. In the Apology, when explaining the original meaning of educational practice, Socrates states that the task of the educator is to encourage the other to care for himself [Plato, Apology, 36c]. Moreover, he explains that the essence of caring for oneself consists in caring for one’s soul (epimeleîsthai tes psukês) in such a way that it takes on the best form possible [Plato, Apology, 30b]. This account of caring for the self is discussed in Alcibiades 1, where, after stressing that it is necessary to care for oneself (127e), Socrates explains that it is important to understand what being capable of the right care (orthos epimeisthai) consists of [Plato, Alcibiades 1, 128b]: that is, a care that takes place in the right direction (compared to the horizon of existentiell possibilities) and in the right measure [Alcibiades 1, 128b]. As such, a properly understood care of the self, according to Socrates, means working on bettering

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yourself [Alcibiades 1, 128b] and what this requires is to know yourself [Alcibiades 1, 129a]. Only if we know ourselves can we learn the art of caring for ourselves. In order to understand how knowing oneself comes about, it is necessary to know the essence of the human being; and since for Socrates what is essential in the human being is the soul, then knowing oneself means knowing the soul because “the soul is the human being” [Alcibiades 1, 130eb]. Caring for oneself therefore means caring for the soul [Alcibiades 1, 132cb]. In order to constitute oneself as a subject capable of giving shape to one’s life by oneself it is necessary to learn to know oneself. If I stop and think about my life I can discover that there are different actions by means of which I move in the world: some come from an opaque source, others manifest themselves as free consciously chosen acts.4 But gaining a deeper knowledge of the self is difficult, and for this reason we may give up in the attempt. When we do not try to know ourselves and do not dare approach the most intimate core of the life of the mind, we end up living a peripheral life, in which we use up our time in activities that risk being far from the directions that guide us towards the search for the essential. Seeking a clear understanding of the visions, emotions, and desires that constitute the source of our mode of Dasein, is a need that the person feels within themselves. Indeed, when one stops and listens to oneself, one cannot but feel that the life in which being flows requires a certain transparency [Zambrano, 2007, 53]. Now, if we think of the soul as the centre of our being, the place where we gather our vital energy, where the directions of the realization of our Dasein take shape, where the search for the composition of sense of our life is generated and cultivated, then conceiving of caring for oneself as caring for the soul seems to be fundamental. If we accept that we can think of the soul as the dynamic centre of our Dasein and that the substance of our Dasein is given by the thoughts we think and the emotions we feel, then care of oneself understood as care of the soul becomes care of thinking and feeling. And since, according to Socrates, care of oneself is knowledge of oneself, then care for oneself means knowing how we think and how we feel.

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To care for oneself, therefore, is an essentially noetic activity, one, that is, that uses thought. Foucault [2005, 11] writes that “the care of self implies a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought”. The reflective essence of the practice of care also emerges from an etymological analysis of the term, which in Ancient Greek meant having care, that is, “epimeleomai”, where “melete” also indicates thinking. In the Apology, to explain the directions of sense of educational care, Socrates uses the term “frontizein” which means both thinking and reflecting, having care and concern. In the Clouds, when he describes Socrates meditating, Aristophanes uses the terms “frontizein” and “ekfrontizein”; in the Symposium, in order to say that the quality proper to the Socratic method consists of meditating, Xenophon uses the term “frontistes”. If we remember that “frontis” not only means the act of meditating, but also means care, then we can say that the “frontistes”, he who meditates, is he who knows how to find the right and necessary time to devote himself to thinking and that, by meditating, cares for himself.

3. Thinking and feeling In the Symposium there is a short but important note in which Alcibiades says “my heart, or my soul, or whatever one is to call it” [Plato Symposium, 218a]. When we start to reason on what the essence proper to human life might be, the advice that we find in these words is to avoid falling into an intellectualistic vision of the essence of our Dasein, which cannot see the essential value of the life of the affections and the heart. The mind that carries out sound reasoning is capable of a living thought and living thought is thinking with the heart. For a long time the essence of our immaterial life was made to consist of cognitive activity, while no value was given to the life of the affections. This life was often considered to be an obstacle by a culture gripped by an excessive zeal for the rational [Zambrano 1950, 31].5 Feeling, however, is an essential part of Dasein. Affective experiences are things that we always happen to experience, things that “are happening to us in all senses. […] they extend throughout the time of consciousness and touch everything that happens in it; nothing escapes feelings, whole

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groups of thoughts, series of perceptions, even the memory is affected” by the quality of experiences [Zambrano 2007, 79]. Feelings “constitute the entire life of the soul, they are the soul itself”; if we were denied the possibility of feeling we would cease even to be ourselves [Zambrano 1949, 103]. Feelings are such an intimate part of life that Zambrano places the origin of feeling in our entrails (las entrañas): “the entrails are the seat of the feelings” [1949, 103]. In Heidegger’s terms, Dasein is always delivered over to its mood and the mood installs Dasein in its there [Heidegger 1996, 127]. Dasein is always in the condition of finding itself, that finding itself that “is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being on hand like a thing” [Heidegger 1985, 255]; and finding itself always happens in a precise mood [ibid]. Affective experience is neither something that comes from without and hits us nor something that manifests itself in the space within the individual, but it is the mode proper to our openness to the world [Heidegger 1996, 129]. As such, it carries out the function of revealing the quality of the phenomena that we experience. In other words the mood contributes to a “penetrating understanding of the worldliness of the world” [Heidegger 1996, 129]. Even the most apparently neutral cognitive activity is emotionally connoted. Feelings accompany every moment of existence and permeate the entire flow of the life of the mind. For Heidegger [1996, 129130] pure intuition—even if we admit that it is a really practicable cognitive act—would not be able to understand the sense of experience, which instead is possible for an affectively connoted thinking. The activity of the mind is not purely intellectual, but densely affective. Indeed, as Lévinas notes: “There is a logic of feelings and an emotive charge in ideas” [1998, 42]. An intellectual knowledge devoid of feeling would limit itself to grasping the surface of things, unable to reach a deep understanding of human experience. Feeling is what makes us aware of the quality of experience, the mode and the rhythm of our becoming. It carries out a function of ontological revelation. Nothing escapes feeling, because mood is what Dasein is delivered over to. In other words, emotion is a certain way of grasping the world.

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When we think about the life of the mind it is easy to identify it with the intellectual dimension, as if the affective dimension were irrelevant. Yet the heart is the true centre of life, taking the term heart to indicate not the organ, but the affective side of life. Edith Stein states that our being is always filled with feelings in such a way that one supplants the other and keeps our heart in continual movement, often in turmoil and apprehension [Stein 1980]. In the flow of the affective life there is not a moment of pause, or silence. For too long we have thought and searched for a pure and ascetic way of thinking, when every cognitive act is in reality tinged with emotion. Plotinus spoke of an “intellect loving” [nous eron], which becomes “one only thing” with the essence of the object [Plotinus, Enneads, VI, 7, 35, 21-22]. When he states that this densely affective intelligence “has unbroken thinking”, but also “an Act unattended by knowing” [to me noein: Enneads, VI, 7, 35, 29-30], Plotinus asks us to reflect on the ways that are followed by the knowledge of the heart, which cannot be calculated and ordered according to the rationalistic criteria with which we tend to give impoverished interpretations of the life of the mind. The mind, which is nothing but the flow of thinking and feeling together, follows movements which cannot all be reduced to the idea that we have created of reason over time. We might feel afraid when we realise the unknown and unforeseen paths followed by the mind and we find ourselves subject to what is happening in it, making us feel helpless and fragile; but these are precisely the paths that often keep us in contact with the bottommost part of life, that mystery that no form of reason is able to unravel. Feeling has such a presence in human life that Zambrano speaks of an “excessive density” of feeling to the point where it envelops the entire field of experience [1986, 25]: We are constituted by feeling more than by any other psychic function; we could say that we possess the other functions, while we are feeling. For this reason feeling has always been a supreme sign of truthfulness, of living truth: the ultimate source of legitimacy of what man says, does, and thinks [Zambrano 1949, 104].

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If we look for the essence of the affective life we find that it is something fluid, almost elusive. But at the same time it has its own weight and gravity, it takes up space and fills in time. When as human beings we find ourselves oppressed by the excessive density of experience and feeling that continually flows, without us having the chance to interrupt it, we run the risk of feeling beleaguered, oppressed. Because of this density enveloping us, it is essential to learn a method of breathing. But what does a method of breathing consist of—one that could pull us out of this density? There are different ways of interpreting it: one of these is self-understanding, which helps beings who think and feel to think and feel, their own happening.

4. The quality of the affective life It is difficult, however, to have knowledge of the affective life, because it takes the form of something fluid, and as such is difficult to conceptualise. Zambrano notes: The feelings are many and they are elusive; precisely because they are the most lively part of our life, they are also the most elusive, the first to fade away and leave us a sort of throbbing emptiness when we want to catch them. They are what is most difficult to define [Zambrano 1949, 104].

According to Zambrano, we live in a culture in which a rationalistic interpretation of the inner life prevails; our knowledge of the feelings has been gradually impoverished and has ended up taking refuge in increasingly hermetic places [1949, 104]. When we undertake a journey of knowledge of the affective life we immediately sense the difficulty of the task. This subjective difficulty corresponds on a theoretical level to the lack of a knowledge of feeling able to describe the sphere of the emotions with adequate precision [De Monticelli 2003, 21]. The complexity of the affective life is also clear from the fact that the various labels given to identify different phenomena—emotions, feelings, passions, moods—do not have the same meanings in literature. It is therefore necessary to analyse the sphere of the affections in order to outline a general theory that can help us to shed some light on them.

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4.1 The flowing of experiences The first discriminating quality that is clear is the presence of positive affective experiences and negative affective experiences. The former are those that make us feel the pleasure of Dasein and give strength to the soul. They are radiating energy. Negative feelings, on the other hand, use up our vital strength.6 Positive experiences are light and help life to breathe, while negative experiences can become encrusted on the skin of the soul making the daily task of existing difficult. The positive and negative each have different degrees both of intensity and axiological curvature. The sudden joy when we are met by a smile in a strange environment is different from the joy we feel every time we think of someone we love: the former restores us momentarily, while the latter accompanies the life of the soul fuelling it with that vital energy that is necessary to respond in a positive way to the call to transcendence towards what is beyond. In the field of negative feelings, Simone Weil has identified those that she defines as “base sentiments”, such as envy and resentment [2004, 175], that have the effect of degrading the quality of life, because these use up vital energy and endanger the tissue of relations. However not all negative feelings are to be avoided of course. The sadness we feel when we perceive a loss of sense, or the anguish that grips us when we are keenly aware of our fragility and of the vulnerability of the human condition, even if they produce suffering, have the effect of making us aware of the quality of existence. For this reason, working on the sphere of the emotions does not mean contrasting every negative emotion and trying to eliminate it, but managing to outline an understanding that is as deep and complex as possible. It is difficult to elaborate a suitable and perspicuous knowledge of the affective life because experiences do not present themselves as welldefined units, and the quality of one experience flows into the subsequent experience. Being caught up by sudden joy when the soul has long suffered greatly is different from experiencing joy in a period of our lives when the soul is immersed in a form of relaxed tranquillity. In the first case the discontinuity between qualitatively different experiences—one positive and one negative—creates a sort of earthquake; in

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the second case the qualitative continuity has the effect of strengthening the perception of good that the soul is experiencing. The life of the heart is complex because experiences present themselves not only as one after another, but also as one happening at the same time as the other. In the context of an intensely melancholy mood we may experience bright moments of joy. When the experience which gave rise to the sense of joy has finished, the affective experience can transform itself, generally becoming gradually less intense, but some part of the joy continues to persist for a certain period of time and its colour is mixed with that of melancholy.

4.2 Different affective acts To elaborate an albeit provisional theory of affective acts, it is necessary to find a criterion that will allow us to differentiate between experiences. From a phenomenological perspective, experiences can be differentiated according to whether they are reactive or active expressions with regard to the object of feeling. Indeed, there are affective experiences that express a reaction either to an external happening or an external phenomenon; others are cultivated intentionally with respect to precise objects. On the basis of this criterion of differentiation, we can use various terms to describe an affective content, such as emotion, feeling, passion, or affective tone. We can define as emotions those experiences that are provoked by events that happen suddenly and with respect to which the affective act takes place as “sensory receptiveness” [Stein 1989, 100]: in the tranquil silence of a summer night a low noise suddenly invades the room and we are terrorized by a sense of fear; a firefly appears suddenly in the grass and our mind is caught up by a sense of wonder. An emotion therefore is conceivable as a momentary experience that comes about following a sudden event that strikes us. Unlike feelings, passions, and affective tones, which last over time, emotions have the characteristic of an extemporary events that appear and disappear in the present instant. Moods are lasting affective modes, which colour the mode of a person without them being the effect of any precise act of the will. Someone

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can have the tendency to feel melancholic or happy, sad, or anxious, or something else, and in this way feeling is not sought out but found. Affective tones have something of the omnipresence of light, which is never localised in a precise spot, but spreads through an environment permeating its every corner; as the colouring of a person’s being, they permeate every mode and every moment of their existence. An affective tone is not an experience linked to a precise object, but it is a mode of feeling which is intimately connected to a way of interpreting life. We use the word feelings to describe the experiences that the soul cultivates in the process of creating relationships with the objects of experience: other people above all, but also things. Admiration, indignation, hope, faith, and diffidence are all feelings. We are relational beings and our way of being in a relationship is guided by a tendency to interpret these relationships and to experience them in a certain way; a feeling is an affective act by which we direct ourselves towards the other in a certain way; hence it is not something reactive, like an emotion, but a tendency. Passions also guide beings towards something according to a certain direction, but the dimension of undergoing rather than tending prevails, since in these cases the intensity of the feeling is such as to subjugate the mind to the point of feeling oneself drawn in. Jealousy, hatred, terror, and euphoria are all affective experiences that make us feel as if we are in the grip of something and in some cases feel overwhelmed by it. Elena Pulcini distinguishes between “acquisitive passions” and “community passions”: the former manifest the desire to affirm oneself by means of the acquisition of resources and power, while the latter are aware of the dimension of relationships with others. Without creating unecessary oppositions between different forms of feeling, it must still be noted that a policy of care needs to cultivate those community passions that our individualistic and competitive culture seems to have forgotten. Without embracing forms of radical communitarianism [Pulcini 2009, 220], which would deny the individual’s distinctiveness, we can still underscore the value of those modes of being in the world that are in line with a commitment to create relational environments that make life a good experience for everyone.

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5. Understanding feeling If caring for oneself also means knowing one’s own affective dimension, and if the affective life presents itself in complex forms, how are we to understand the practice of self-investigation of the affective life? Phenomenology can give us a method which is suitable for investigating affective experiences. For phenomenology, the object of investigation is the life of the consciousness. For Husserl the term consciousness “envelops all the experiences” [Erlebnisse] and it is the sphere of experience that constitutes the field of investigation [Husserl 2012, 168]. Since the method of phenomenological investigation is descriptive, self-understanding takes the form of a description of affective experiences. In our natural attitude we are not aware of experiences, which simply happen and we are immersed in them. We constantly feel, but we are not necessarily aware of the particular way the affective life happens. Nevertheless, affective experiences can at any time become intentional objects when we activate the methodological principle of “stopping and describing with attention” what we feel is happening. Surely, examining the life of the consciousness is not easy. The flow of experience is not only an indivisible continuum: between the various units identified by reflection as units of experience there is no clear separation, as every new unit carries with it all the previous experiences. An inner event, once it has been experienced, does not even become an inert, fixed, and immutable unit with respect to which new experiences are added in a linear logic. Indeed while the mind finds itself living a new experience, “there is a ‘live’ persisting of what’s ‘concluded’ while what’s new is producing itself, so that one phase of the current contains alike what’s just becoming, and what’s already been but is still alive” [Stein 2000, 9]. The field of consciousness is complex, and we grasp clear experiences and dark experiences, some that seem distinct, and others confused. Just as everything in the external world is on a horizon from which it stands out, so in the field of the consciousness what the inner gaze grasps is on a background, on a horizon of indeterminate reality offered to the consciousness in an obscure way. For Husserl [2012, 52], It is the job of thought to bring experiences “rays from the illuminating

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focus of attention”. When the inner gaze practices continually, experiences that were once obscure should become increasingly clearer. Even though the phenomenological method can be exercised with persistent discipline, we should not expect complete clarity, because the inner gaze has to deal with what Husserl calls “an empty mist of dim indeterminacy” [2012, 52]. If on an autumn day we can barely see the horizon because of the mist, the flow of consciousness is like a horizon in continual flux, in which the gaze of attention searches with difficulty for the essence of experiences. Knowledge of the affective self takes the form of descriptions of affective experiences. Describing means making clear, bringing to the light. The first principle of the phenomenological method is known as the principle of fidelity: it asks us to describe the thing as it appears. To faithfully describe the affective life means putting into words how feeling manifests itself: what happens when we feel joy and when we feel sadness, what happens to our body and what happens in our mind, and since feeling has clear implications for our way of being in the world, describing how an affective experience manifests itself on the outside, that is, how it is externalised. But in phenomenology if it is true that being manifests itself in the phenomenon, it is also true that not all of being appears. In every phenomenon there is a mixture of light and dark. For this reason, besides the principle of evidence, phenomenology asks us to apply the principle of transcendence, which means looking beyond appearances, tending however to follow the tracks left by that which appears. If we apply this principle we will see that at the origin of all feeling is an act of thought, that is to say, every affective act implies a cognitive act. Cognitive psychology that examines the affective life finds that there are acts of evaluation at the origin of affective experiences. In order for the description to be able to grasp the concrete essence of affective experiences, the process of describing must not be an intellectualistic act, because the affective life cannot be captured in its intimate meaning by a rationalistic viewpoint. We must activate a method of investigation where thinking and feeling proceed together, “without

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this being at the cost of one losing itself in another or of being cancelled out” [Zambrano 1986, 14]. A thinking that is open to the senses is one which lets the quality of the affective life we are analysing resound within the self: to feel the joy of a joyous experience and the suffering of a painful experience.7 If we consider the fact that ever since the epistemology of modern science was established the process of inquiry capable of acquiring reliable knowledge has been conceived of as one that is devoid of all form of feeling (because only emotionally neutral investigation is still considered by many sciences to be a guarantee of objective knowledge), then a thinking open to the senses might seem to be out of place. But if the theory of affective self-understanding is to be coherent with the theory of the emotions it encounters, then only an emotionally characterised view can be held capable of grasping the essence of affective experiences. The method of affective self-understanding responds to the need to take life to heart. For this reason it does not take refuge in logic and it does not aim to be systematic, because life in its complexity cannot be reduced to a systematic interpretation. What the method of affective self-understanding can seek to do is to shed some light on certain experiences and when it is applied with continuity it allows the mind to become increasingly enlightened, making it aware of itself.

6. At the heart of feeling If we stop to reflect on our inner life we can see how many different feelings we happen to experience with different intensity, depending on the moments and the objects they concern: we can feel hope and faith, concern and desperation, joy or sadness, happiness or pain, etc. But what moves the movement of being is, as Zambrano explains, hope. “Man is a being whose first manifestation is hope” [Zambrano 1992, 22]. As we feel that we are subjected to life, delivered over into the world, the feeling we need to support us in the job of going beyond the given in order to realise ourselves can only be hope. There is a localized hope, that is to say, hope for something precise, which the mind recognises is of value for the quality of life, or something than

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can be a point on the horizon that can guide our progress over time, and there is hope in the open, the hope fostered in the soul by the desire for the unheard of. It is difficult to resist in these working conditions, which continually de-humanise us. It is difficult when we live in a time of crisis like this to find the energy to overcome the obstacle. Only hope in a new day with a different rhythm of being with others allows us to find the rhythm to continue to walk in time (anonymous writings (a.w.)) 8

Hope, however, would move in a vacuum if it were not supported by faith. There is no possibility of ex-isting, that is, of leaving the bottommost part of being to find our own form if there were no faith in an opening to something other than what we are. In order to care for ourselves we have to have faith in the possibility that our Dasein can find forms of authentication, faith in the ability to find enough energy to give a good form to as many moments in the time of life as possible. We are intimately relational beings. Knowing one’s own being-with means being aware that our existence, even within its own personal trajectory, is interconnected with that of others.9 But for our relationship with the other to lead to the attestation of Dasein, we must be able to have faith in the other, feel that we can share with others our search for what is essential to life. I felt all the difficulty of the moment. It was incredibly hard to decide. I could feel my mind tremble. But I knew I could count on her. On her punctual and willing presence. I had faith in her judgments. Feeling you can have faith makes you less alone. And time becomes less massive, less cumbersome. (a. w.)

Precisely because we are intimately relational beings we are also profoundly vulnerable beings. For this reason we may feel afraid of what could come from that which is other than us, even when we have a positive feeling towards it. There is not only the fear of the negative that can come from our inevitable subjection to reality, since we are beings that are irrevocably conditioned by the reality that we inhabit [Arendt, 1958]; but there is also existential fear, fear faced with life. Existential fear is fear of not

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being able to become our potentiality-for-being, of missing that composition of sense in which each person perceives there lies the reason for the movement of Dasein. I devoted all my energy to caring for the time of life. But now, if I think about the results I have obtained, I feel a sense of dismay, and a disarming fear grips me by the stomach: the fear of not being able to achieve anything and of coming to discover that the time of my life was merely the passing of moments devoid of sense. (a.w.)

Fear serves to alert us to a problem, something that is not right; in this case it is a form of intelligence about the real. But fear can become excessive and this happens when it becomes the fear of being afraid of life: there are moments when the consciousness is aware not only of the difficult task of living, and for this reason it feels all the fear of not being able to carry out our existential task, but also that fear can reach levels in which it immobilises the soul. Then the consciousness can become flooded by the fear of succumbing to fear itself. This is the moment when the soul feels the greatest amount of existential crisis. Before fear becomes illness and blocks the movement of Dasein, the mind must practice searching for a safe place to moor. What can help here is the principle that is the opposite of the principle of attention. Too much attention, too much work by the consciousness on negative feeling risks nurturing that feeling. You cannot free yourself from a way of feeling by concentrating on it, but only by bringing attention and cultivating the opposite mood [Heidegger 1996, 128]. Therefore we should apply to the life of the soul what phenomenology indicates is an essential epistemic move: bracketing, epoché, suspending. It is possible to place a very uncomfortable negative feeling between brackets if we stop concentrating on it and look elsewhere, orienting our thought towards other horizons, looking for points of light and breath in other spaces of thought. Looking at the positive, at what has been done. Accepting what happens and looking for what is good in it. Thinking about moments of joy that are privileged moments of being:

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The sense of solitude was too strong. It gripped me inside, stopped me from breathing. A strong desire to contract rose up from my stomach, To reduce myself to little or nothing. Then from the silence of the empty room a slow measured step And a caress that messes up my hair. And the tension immediately goes. My mind goes back to that gesture in moments of darkness (a. w.)

When much has been done but we have the impression that we have achieved little or nothing that is of any value, we can feel as though we have lost all our energy, like a haemorrhaging of being. When the sense of the emptiness of our actions is too intense for our consciousness we sometimes feel a sense of desperation, which can at times take the form of a sense of shame: seeing yourself devoid of the capacity to carry out the plans that you see as the only possibility of gaining sense can make you feel ashamed. The pain that comes from thinking that we have not done what is required is a voiceless pain that can’t be heard. It is immobile and locks us in immobility. It holds the soul to ransom (a.w.).

This pain is a negative feeling that can only erode vital energy. In these cases, what comes to the fore is our need of others, because the gaze of the other can allow the mind to breathe differently. Indeed, with their words and gestures, others can reflect a different image from the one we have created of ourselves. The positive view of the other, when it is supported by the empathetic capacity to feel our feeling, can generate other movements of Dasein. The other can also be the absolute Other. For those who have a religious sensibility in their soul, keeping their attention open to the transcendental can lead the soul to an elective state of serenity. Serenity is a light, blue feeling. It makes us feel in tune with the bottommost part of being. Feeling calm is to feel that we can stay where we are without desiring anything else. Feeling good in a state of quiet is an almost divine experience because the human being, delivered unremittingly over to the continual job of the search for what is beyond, can never stop to pause on the journey of life.

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7. The difficulty of affective self-understanding The discipline of affective self-understanding is important in carrying out what Elena Pulcini defines as the process of dis-identification with our feeling: to understand our feeling in order to be able to distance ourselves enough from it [Pulcini 2003, xix]. But the job of selfunderstanding is difficult because the life of the affections is a difficult object to grasp. Indeed it possesses “an elusive mobile, and fluid character” [Zambrano 2007, 79]. In order to understand the essence of the affective life we need a form of thinking that goes together with feeling “without this being at the cost of one losing itself in another or of being cancelled out” [Zambrano 1986, 14], a thinking that reflects on the affective life in a sensible way; only in this way is it possible to realise that sort of inner empathy that makes it possible to gain a suitable understanding of affective experiences. The affective life is like a dense forest full of shadows where it takes perseverance and patience to find a clearing. One needs to activate the inner gaze and use it not in the form of the penetration that is proper to scientific activity (which acts on phenomena), but in a mode of observation, with attention. Paying calm and patient attention, as Rilke suggests to his interlocutor: To be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live with them [Rilke 1962, 35].

Precisely because the matter of the emotions is delicate and complex, the mind has to exercise the intellectual virtue of patience. This is necessary to keep thinking free from the desire to grasp the sense of the affective life and to assume instead a receptive posture which is suitably passive—a posture, indeed that knows how to free itself from the need for pre-formulated conceptualizations and that leaves time to find the right word to give back the true sense of our experiences. “The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one.” [Rilke 1962, 45-46]

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For a philosopher like Zambrano [1986], what this means is to learn to confide in the hermeneutic potential of the passivity of understanding. The hermeneutics of the affective life requires paying attention with a receptive and passive posture, as if the mind were a canvas on which experiences can leave their mark, giving affective experiences the time to show themselves. If we think of the affective life as a dense forest where there are many shadows and few clearings where light can shine, then the words of Zambrano can help us to find the right declination of a passive, patient way of thinking: The clearing in the wood is a centre which it is not always possible to enter; it can be observed from the edge (…). You mustn’t look for it. You must not search. This is the immediate lesson of the clearings in a wood: you must not go off and look for them, and neither must you seek anything from them. Nothing definite, prefigured or known [Zambrano 1986, 11].

Precisely because the affective life is a forest, a map of which it is difficult to create, we could let ourselves be carried away by a form of hermeneutic fury. But when we insist to such an extent on such a delicate subject as the flow of affections, instead of creating a ray of light, we end up by obscuring it. Then “nothing remains”; it is precisely when this object comes closer without any tension, without looking for anything precise, that “the offering will be unpredictable and unlimited” [ibid, 11]. Not looking, holding back, remaining in suspense, giving up the tendency to insist on questioning, giving the mind sufficient slow time to let ideas emerge: this is what Zambrano suggests to create the greatest possible understanding. Too many questions create a sense of asphyxia in the soul, while the exercise of relaxation to create the greatest form of passivity possible is the cognitive practice that allows the mind to achieve the greatest possible contact with things, in this case the inner things of the soul itself. The interpretation of the process of affective self-understanding according to the phenomenological method of describing with open and receptive attention may seem like a weak action which has little effect, but describing is the essential condition for bringing something to light; and when something is brought out of the obscurity in which

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it tends to remain and is brought under the gaze of the mind we gain a self-presence that has strong implications for the way of interpreting existence. Emotional experiences tend to be evanescent, happening and then ebbing away without leaving the time to understand what is happening; but “there is no greater danger than that which emanates from that which does not manifest itself, that which does not show its face” [Zambrano 2007, 81]. Describing in order to bring to the light means making clear and allowing a conscious self-presence. When the object of attention are those feelings and passions that have become encrusted in the soul, taking the form of fixations that block the free movement of Dasein like stones, “the light of understanding” can, slowly and patiently, dissolve and undo the knots, the stones of slavery that we carry inside when light has not been shed on us for a while. When we persevere in the silent work of the soul on itself we gain that glimmer of light that is indispensable for making life a living time. When we give ourselves over to the job of understanding (an essential part of the care of the self, as I have argued)—a job that searches for some point of light in the flow of the inner life—this cannot but produce a change that transforms life.

Notes 1 The human being is not given to live with lightness, because as soon as we are born and touched by the light, our beginning is weighed down by the task of caring for being to preserve life and to compose time with sense. 2 The practice of caring for oneself is as such a response to our tendency to avoid activating ourselves in reactive impulses to external prompts, to act on the basis of pondered decisions which take shape through meditated research initiated by a need felt deep in the soul to give a good form to existing. 3 In tracing the movement of care of oneself as the tendency to act freely, an essential point of reference is the thought of Edith Stein. Stein however interprets the difference between natural acting and free acting in a religious horizon and believes that a soul is capable of freedom when it is totally implanted into itself (in sich hineingesetzt) [Stein 1962, 138] and that this condition only comes about when the soul has the world of faith as a point of reference, because it is only by entrusting oneself to divine grace that the soul can find its foundation. It would seem paradoxical to think that only by entrusting oneself and hence giving up one’s freedom, is it possible to find true

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freedom; but this is the vision of someone who has the experience of faith and theorises philosophically on the basis of an experience that may not be accessible to everyone. If we look for the meaning of care of oneself regardless of a religious basis, that inner centre which alone can be the source of the vital force that makes conscious and free acting possible can be thought of not so much as a place or a thing that objectively presents itself to the consciousness, but as a general orientation of the soul, a method, if by method we intend a way of being among things. When we lose the centre, when we lose the method for moving suitably in time, then the soul trembles and, as Zambrano tells us [1986, 57], anguish can arise, because the soul feels as if its being and life were separating and the possibility of all movement disappearing. It is in these moments, when we can feel as if we are hanging by a thread, that the discipline of care of oneself can keep the soul safe. 4 Knowing oneself means understanding the forces that act on the life of the mind, what implications they have on our way of being, and evaluating to what extent they help us to become our potentiality-for-being in the direction of our existentiell attestation. 5 The life of the affections has long been considered to be the irrational part of the human experience and as such not worthy of being the object of consideration. One of the metaphors long used to describe the relationship between reason and the emotions was that of the master and the slave, where the wisdom of reason checked the dangerous impulses of the emotions [Solomon 2008, 3]. To speak of a person as a sentimental or emotional subject still means labelling them in negative terms. We had to wait for phenomenology (in particular Scheler, Heidegger and Sartre) to find a careful consideration of the affective dimension of experience. For the development of a philosophy of the emotions we must not forget the essay written in 1884 by William James entitled “What is an emotion?”. It has always been difficult to answer this question: should we think of emotions as intrusive or essential to rationality, capable of creating meaning or dangerous, to be avoided or considered part of our being responsible? [Solomon 2008, 10]. Faced with the many questions that arise when we reflect on the affective dimension of experience, I have chosen here to examine the affections from the point of view of the investigative paradigm of phenomenology, also taking into consideration the cognitive theory of the emotions. 6 When they become too intense, they risk causing the subject to fall back on themselves and give up staying in the order of transcendence, because it is difficult to find the strength to move in time in search for what is beyond when Dasein is weighed down by suffering. 7 Some theories place doubt on the possibility of reaching the emotions in a phenomenological way. See e.g. Ronald De Sousa (The Mind’s Bermuda Triangle: Philosophy of Emotions and Empirical Science. University of Toronto, manuscript), who states that the emotions cannot always be known on the basis of that which is available to the consciousness; in De Sousa’s opinion this can be explained by the fact that the emotions are inscribed phylogenetically in the evolution of the human species and so they are completely transparent to the consciousness (8).

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8

Because of its fluid, evasive character, the sphere of feeling is difficult to put into words. When we claim to capture it by systematising it within the sphere of concepts, it mostly remains ungraspable. Precisely because of the fact that it defies definition the best way of expressing the affective life is to express experiences as they happen to be felt when we stop and observe them. On this basis we quote above some fragments from anonymous writings (indicated as a.w.) which express the quality of different affective experiences. 9 Trying to give sense to time without taking into consideration the fact that we share our life with others makes us lose our sense of reality and can lead to madness [Zambrano 1996].

Literature Arendt, H. [1958], The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. De Monticelli [2003], L’ordine del cuore. Etica e teoria del sentire, Milano: Garzanti. Foucault, M. [2005], The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 19811982, Translated by G. Burchell, New York; Palgrave Macmillan (L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France 1981-1982, Gallimard, Seuil 2001). Heidegger, M. [1996]. Being and time. Translated by J. Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press. (Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927). Heidegger, M. [1985], History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by T. Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (Prolegomeni zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1975). Husserl, E. [2012], Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Routledge (Ideen zu einer reiner Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserliana III 1/2, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976). Lévinas, E. [1998]. Entre Nous. Essays on Thinking-of- the-Other, Translated by M.B. Smith – B. Harshav, New York: Columbia University Press (Entre nous. Essai sur le penserà-l’autre, Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991). Plato [1925] Plato in Twelve Volumes. Translated by H. N. Fowler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plotinus [1991], The Enneads. Translated by S. Mackenna, London: Faber. Pulcini, E. [2003], Il potere di unire, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Pulcini, E. [2009], La cura del mondo, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Rilke, R.M. [1962], Letters to a Young Poet, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Solomon, R. C. [2008], “The philosophy of emotions”, in M. Lewis, J.M. HavilandJones and L.F. Barrett. Handbook of Emotions, New York: The Guilford Press. Stein, E. [1962], Welt und Person. Edith Steins Werke, vol. VI, Louvain-Freiburg: Editions Nauwemaerts-Verlag Herder. Stein, E. [1980], In der Kraft des Kreuzes: Hundert Worte von Edith Stein, Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder. Stein, E. [1989], “On The Problem of Empathy”, trans. by W. Stein, in The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. III, Washington: ICS Publications (Zum Problem der Einfühlung, Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917).

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Stein, E. [2000], Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Translated by M.C. Baseheart - M. Sawick, Washington: ICS Publications (Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenshaften, in Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenshaften – Eine Untersuchung über den Staat (pp. 1-283), Tubingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1970). Weil, S. [2004], The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Translated by A. Wills, London-New York: Routledge. (Cahiers, II, Paris: Plon, 1972). Zambrano, M. [1949], Para una historia de la pietad. “Lyceum”, La Habana 1949. Zambrano, M. [1950], Hacia un saber sobre el alma, Buenos Aires: Losada. Zambrano, M. [1996], Persona y democrazia. La historia sacrificial. Fundatión Maria Zambrano– Madrid: Ediciones Siruela. Zambrano, M. [1986], Claros del bosque, Barcelona: Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Zambrano, M. [1990], Los bienaventurados, Madrid: Ediciones Siruela. Zambrano, M. [1992], Los sueños y el tempo, Madrid: Ediciones Siruela. Zambrano, M. [2007], Filosofía y Educación. Manuscritos. Málaga: Fundación María Zambrano.

10. Care as attentiveness: Weilian reflections on the affective and cognitive dimensions of care. Sophie Bourgault

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” - Simone Weil

In 1890, in his now widely-cited Principles of Psychology, William James observed, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of [...] several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and [it] is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused [...] state which in French is called distraction.” [403-404] Now, despite the seemingly trouble-free ‘everyone knows what attention is’ (which James meant only half seriously), research on attention since the late 19th century has generated far more disagreement than consensus—most notably around attention’s ties to consciousness, morality, decision-making and empathy [Meyer & Kornblum 1993; Depraz & Perreau 2010; Mole 2011; Nobre & Kastner 2014]. As such, it is unsurprising to see that care ethics scholarship is equally full of puzzles and ambiguity on the subject of attention—despite the fact that attentiveness has been described as absolutely central to care ethics since the early 1980s [Noddings 1984; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993; Sevenhuijsen 2003]. Sandra Laugier [2009a], for instance, understands the moral subject chiefly as an “attentive subject” (“un sujet attentif, attentionné”); Elisabeth Conradi [2001] has underscored the great importance for care ethics of theorizing a political

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theory of attentiveness; Marie Garrau proposes that the ethics of care is best understood as an “ethics of attention” [Garrau 2014, 54]. Yves Citton, in his Pour une écologie de l’attention, similarly insists that care ethics be summed up chiefly as a matter of attention [2014, 165].1 Beyond these general statements, much needs spelling out: for instance, attention to what exactly? The most common answer offered by care scholars has been that proposed by Joan Tronto: namely, attention to the needs of others. [Tronto 1993; Noddings 1984] 2 A significant (if obvious) implication flows from this assertion: without some attention paid to neediness, there can be no such thing as care. On this view, attention could be regarded as the impetus to all caring activities, if not, perhaps, as the basis of all ethics. This is a position embraced by Sandra Laugier [2009] and by Fabienne Brugère, who speaks of attention as “the engine of all authentically human interaction”. [2014; 80] If care, at its simplest, is a matter of addressing or responding to needs, attention, for the likes of Tronto and Brugère, is what permits us to identify these needs in the first place. Note here that the quality of our attention (the quality of our observing and listening) is of great significance, for it will largely determine whether needs identification will track closely what a care-recipient actually requires and wants to receive. And it is precisely this that makes attention so significant to many care theorists: attentiveness is regarded as vital for curtailing the risk of paternalism in care processes. Indeed, it is attentiveness, says Nel Noddings, that allows us to “move away from assumed needs to expressed needs.” [Noddings 2015, 77; see also Mortari, 2006] Now, if Tronto, Noddings and Ruddick all draw strong ties between attention and the needs of others, some have accorded an almost equal importance to the needs of the self, the needs of the caregiver. Laugier, for instance, repeatedly underscores that attentiveness is not about selflessness but rather, that it entails “un souci de soi”, a concern for one’s own needs (a claim I will return to shortly). [2009a, 83; 86] Quite significantly, what one finds in Laugier’s work is the transposition of the concept of attention on a slightly different ‘register’ than that found in Tronto—attention entails not just noticing needs, but, more generally, noticing or perceiving the ordinary, the quotidian, and attending to the

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world in a particular way. [Laugier 2009b, 172] In both Laugier and Garrau [2014] attention becomes at once ethics, epistemology and methodology. If there are diverse answers to the question ‘attention to what?’, a brief perusal through the care literature quickly indicates an even greater variety of answers to the question ‘what is attention’. If Tronto [1993] defines attentiveness as a “moral quality” that is critical for good caring practices,3 Fiona Robinson [2011] understands it as a “value”, Marion Barnes as a moral “principle” [2012], and Agata Zielinski defines it as a competence [2010, 640]. (Note here the notable absence of the term “virtue” in this list—an unsurprising absence given the nearconsensus in the literature that care ethics is not a virtue ethics.4) More significantly for our purposes, Noddings describes attention as a hyperreceptive moral phenomenon that entails sympathy and that, she insists, “is not primarily intellectual” [Noddings 2002, 15-16]5 Sara Ruddick [1989] and Maurice Hamington [2001; 2015] have also underscored the emotional dimension of attention; in fact, the words attention and love are typically mentioned in the very same breath in their work.6 For Zielinski as well, it is evident that “attention opens onto the sphere of affects, of moral sentiments.” [2010, 637] But the view that attending properly to others necessarily calls for the presence of strong feelings or of particular positive emotions such as love, has not won unanimous assent. Selma Sevenhuijsen [2003; 2014], most notably, insists that attention ought to be distinguished from both compassion and empathy. One of the main goals of this paper is to consider a bit more closely this question: namely, to what extent do emotions and affectivity play a role in the attention that is said to be of utmost importance for care. To explore this question, I will turn to French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), whose writings constitute the main source behind the majority of treatments of attention in care ethics.7 I will also draw on the writings of English philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) albeit less systematically, since her account of attention is largely derivative of Weil’s. Two keen platonists, Weil and Murdoch are particularly relevant for us given that it is in their work that one finds the seemingly

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straightforward (and seemingly sentimental) thesis that “attention is love” [Weil 1950, 96; Murdoch, 1997, 354]. But the simplicity of the statement is misleading. As we will see, attention may indeed be understood as ‘love’ by both philosophers, but it is above all a love that is conceived in highly rationalist terms. The second claim I will make, with Weil and Murdoch, is that despite scholars’ well-founded concerns about the risks of celebrating a radically intense other-oriented attention, the ethico-political appeal of attentiveness rests precisely in this selflessness, in this getting “out of ourselves”.

Attention, will and desire Although most care scholars like to draw on Simone Weil’s later work (written during the last three years of her short life), Weil in fact started theorizing attention in her early twenties, shortly after she took up her first philosophy teaching job in a Lycée. In her lectures to her students (published as her Leçons de philosophie), we can already see the contours of her more mature theory of attention: attention is identified as what distinguishes human beings from animals, and as what is most decisive for our ethical, intellectual and political lives. Weil’s view is somewhat perplexing because she suggests that the same faculty is at play in study, in ethical interactions, and in political activity. According to her (and it is a view that she never fully defended),8 attending to a book, to a mathematical problem or to a marginalized, suffering individual all required the same skills and entailed the same difficulty: namely, seeing the non-obvious, the quasi invisible, and hearing the barely audible [Weil 1950; 1957].9 Indeed, Weil was convinced that the attentive skills that one learned in school could, later, be transposed to one’s work and relationships with others. It is for this reason that she affirmed, in a scathing manner fairly characteristic of her, that “the only interest of school studies” was the cultivation of attention.10 In her lectures as much as in her notebooks and later essays, Weil largely approached the notion of attention negatively—by reflecting on what it is not. Hence we will, in the next two sections, follow Weil’s own way of proceeding and consider two of her core negative claims: first, the view that attention has nothing to do with will; and second,

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the view that attention is neither pity nor sentimental fusion. As we will see, it is largely via these negations that Weil came to articulate the most original (and unsettling) parts of her account of attention. Let us begin with the question of the will’s relationship to attention or, more specifically, with the ‘higher’ type of attention. Like other philosophers of attention, Weil was of the view that there are diverse types and degrees of attention: if will might have a role to play in the lower, more quotidian type, it has little to do with that sustained and challenging attention that she labels ‘pure’ or ‘directed’ (attention dirigée). In La Pesanteur et la Grâce, Weil is particularly categorical: pure attention has nothing to do with will—nothing to do with a tensing up of muscles, a frowning of the brow, an active search to grasp, possess or understand.11 As some Weil scholars have rightly noted, it is difficult to know precisely what Weil meant by will; certainly, it is far from obvious what directing one’s attention without willing might signify. [Janiaud 2009] Although she never fully worked out her conception of will, Weil seems to have associated the term with possessiveness or, to phrase it differently, with an active and aggressive striving (something akin, perhaps, to Nietzschean will-to-power). And as we will see below, ‘pure’ attention must be detached; it must not seek to possess. Weil also associated the will with impatience, with a tendency for speed and precipitation—which she thought spoiled the quality of our attention. [Weil 1950, 93]12 This was absolutely critical for Weil, and her simple insight would certainly be worth underscoring more often when we think about good care practices: attending to needy others (just like attending to a philosophical argument) requires a moderate and controlled pace. It requires sufficient time.13 Now, if attention is not a matter of will, Weil was insistent that it was a matter of longing and love. She puts it most tersely in La Pesanteur et la Grâce: “attention is linked to desire. Not to will, but desire.” [Weil 1991b, 194] While one might be tempted to deduce from passages like these that her account might be anchored in strong affectivity, things are not that straightforward. The desire that nourishes attention, the desire that allows, say, a child to learn how to read or that makes a care-giver attend to someone in pain or need, is a desire for truth and

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for justice—which Weil, as a good Platonist, understood as a kind of erotic pursuit of the Good and of the Beautiful. “Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good. Attention is bound up with desire.” [Weil 1991b, 194]14 Plato’s imprint is obviously deep here, as it is in Murdoch’s work, where the Good, Platonic eros and attention, are all mentioned in the same breath. Consider, for instance, this passage from Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: “The Timaeus Demiurge is inspired to create by love of the Good. Concentrated attention (‘loving care’) is easily distinguished from the muddled states of mind. [...] The good artist, the dedicated thinker, the unselfish moral agent […]: they create out of love.” [Murdoch 1998, 505-506] That Platonism so deeply informs Murdoch and Weil’s accounts of attention does raise some difficulties for care scholarship. After all, Plato is a name that few dare to utter. Indeed, few feminist care theorists appreciate Plato’s metaphysics, his views on the bodily, on attachment, and his intellectualist account of virtue. It is thus surprising that Sandra Laugier should so often appeal to Murdoch, an author who readily and explicitly embraces Plato’s thesis that “virtue is knowledge”, albeit with a slightly Weilian twist. Consider, for instance, this remarkable passage from one of Murdoch’s work: “Virtue is knowledge / is attention.”15 Such a statement clearly jars with the thesis, mentioned earlier, almost universally accepted by care scholars: namely, that attention is not to be defined as a virtue, and that care ethics is not a virtue ethics. As such, there is something quite puzzling about the fact that so many care theorists have appealed to Weil and Murdoch to understand attention, without having addressed the fact that Weil and Murdoch’s theories of attention were thoroughly Platonic. Now, something else needs to be considered about the peculiar nature of the desire that is said to sustain attention according to Weil. Somewhat paradoxically, the philosopher insists that pure attention is nourished by desire, but that this desire must be empty—empty partially in the sense that it must not be tied to any motive or longing to obtain or possess goods (e.g. praise, power, money, grades). [Weil 1991b, 57]16 Weil emphasizes this point repeatedly in her discussion of what

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constitutes an ideal education: students ought to attend to their studies without the goal of obtaining good results or compliments. Similarly, the best type of attention one can have at work is one that is free of concern for subsistence, money-making or job security. But desire must also be ‘empty’ in a second, slightly different sense: it must be empty of egoistic passions and anxieties. One finds here the most distinctive and disquieting part of Weil’s (and Murdoch’s) account of attention: namely, the idea that attending meaningfully to a mathematical problem, to one’s work or to a fellow human being requires, momentarily, a radical suppression of the self and of its concerns—a “decreation” to use Weil’s term of art. “All that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me.” [Weil 1991b, 194] To attend thus entails at once an eradication of the egoistic self and a state of hyper-receptivity. In Attente de Dieu, Weil gives us her clearest definition of attention (the one most repeatedly defined in care scholarship): “Attention consists in suspending one’s thought, to leave it available... and penetrable by an object... Thought must be empty, waiting, not looking, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object.” [1950, 92-93] For Weil as much as for Murdoch, then, the very simple reason why decreation is necessary is that true receptivity to others depends upon it. Unsurprisingly, both Weil and Murdoch regarded this process of unselfing as an exceedingly rare and most radical act of generosity and love—a most precious gift17. But in their view, attention is love only in the very precise sense that it is “the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” [Murdoch 1997, 215] We know that this ‘difficult realization’ that a marginalized or vulnerable individual matters—that she exists, that she is there—was something Weil considered of utmost consequence for social justice. In her view, privileged individuals too easily get accustomed to being attended to, and thus forget how significant that fact is. Indeed, those with cultural, linguistic and economic capital feel they already have a social identity: they exist, they count. But for marginalized individuals who barely seem to ‘count’ (the ‘sans-part’, to use Jacques Rancière’s term), things are obviously different. And it is

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because she was so concerned with the socially invisible, with those whose voices are considered mere ‘noise’ rather than cogent political speech, that Weil regarded attention as a creative faculty: attention offers recognition, it gives social identity. “Through denying oneself, one becomes capable […] of affirming another through a creative affirmation”, Weil insists. [OE 725] In a passage repeatedly mentioned by care scholars (most notably by Nel Noddings), Weil explains that to attend to the excluded at base entails stopping and listening to them. It also entails posing this very basic yet vital question: ‘What are you going through?’. All this, Weil writes, has the power to offer “the recognition that the sufferer exists.”18 It is this other-orientedness, this putting on hold of personal goals and concerns that has made Weilian attention so appealing to care scholars (in Moral Boundaries, for instance, it is chiefly this ‘suspension’ of the self that is underscored by Tronto in her discussion). But it is also this very same other-orientedness that has made Weilian attention seem so problematic (if not outright revolting) to others. In short, Weilian decreation is at once a great source of admiration and trepidation. Sara Ruddick, for instance, insistently invites us to discard that part of Weil’s account, because she sees in it a risk of exhaustion or resentment for the attentive care-giver.19 But as I have indicated, it is not convincing to speak of Weilian attention without decreation or selflessness: these are its core. To put it most simply, for both Murdoch and Weil, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as attention to the self. That said, Weil could probably have addressed part of Sara Ruddick’s concern by pointing to two important elements of her account of decreation and generous hyper-receptivity. First, Weil always made it clear that we ought to distinguish between an unselfing that is imposed from without and one that comes from within. [Weil 1991b, 75] The decreation (or sacrificing of the self) that is conducive to attentiveness must be consented to and desired—which Weil thought had nothing to do with the type of destruction of the self that came, say, from unequal power relations or dire poverty. Weil would also have tried to address Ruddick’s concern by saying that, even though attention is fundamentally other-oriented and cannot be looked at instrumentally, we the

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attentive people also have much to gain from it. Indeed, since attention is a matter of perceiving or seeing the world more clearly and accurately, Weil and Murdoch both regarded it as capable of imbuing our own lives with more honesty, clarity and more meaning.20 Attention is what allows us to separate illusions, prejudices or unfounded anxieties from what is real—and as such, it is a means to greater reflectivity and freedom. To put it in Weil’s own words, “only attention is free”.21 Paradoxically, then, we could say that attention takes us away from ourselves but it also allows us to better know ourselves. So ultimately, to the question of why we should aim at this selfless and hyper-receptive attentive posture, Murdoch answers with the following statement, which underscores quite well the great importance of Weilian attention for our moral life: Should we not [try] to ... attend to what surrounds and concerns us, because it is there and is interesting, beautiful, strange, worth experiencing, and because it demands (and needs) our attention, rather than living in a vague haze of private anxiety and fantasy. This requirement could be stated in quasi-aesthetic terms ... or in terms of healthy human function or ‘mental hygiene’ ... [or] in moral terms: one must see what is happening, what is there, in order to be able to see what ought to be done. [Murdoch 1998, 218]

Attentiveness, pity and fusion: whither autonomy, whither dignity? “the name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love.” - Simone Weil [1957]

In the previous section, we have seen that Weilian attention is not a matter of will, but rather, of desire—desire understood in a Platonic sense. I would now like to turn to two other negative claims that pepper Weil’s treatment of attention: namely, that attention is not pity and that it is not fusional in nature. Our discussion is pertinent in light of oft-heard charge that care ethics celebrates a kind of love (and a kind of attentiveness) that is too intimate to be fit for the political realm and too dangerous for the autonomy of both caregivers and care-receivers. In his Pour une écologie de l’attention (which is, to the best of my

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knowledge, the first book dedicated to attention to consider seriously the contribution made by care scholars), Yves Citton suggests that while quite rich, care ethics is problematic in that is accords too great an importance to solicitude and to an emotionally-charged type of listening. For Citton [2014], there is a real risk for caregivers and care-receivers to feel smothered; ethical attention requires a certain distance and dispassion. As we will see in the section below, Simone Weil was equally convinced that attention required a certain detachment and that ‘fusion’ (or any kind of intense ‘suffering-with’) was not desirable. And as such, I belive that Weil could be regarded as an ally of feminist critics who have denounced excessively sentimental/fusionnal or dyadic accounts of care ethics22. Moreover, I think that it is possible to see in Weil the contours of a relational perspective on autonomy and an account of political philia that is quite compatible with the vision of socio-political life embraced by many care scholars. But before we consider the issue of autonomy or the type of emotional attachment that undergirds friendship according to Weil, I first wish to consider briefly the question of attention’s relationship to pity— which, in contrast to philosophers like Martha Nussbaum [1996], Weil distinguishes from compassion. While nowhere in her work does Weil offer us a systematic or detailed justification for this distinction, it is still possible to gather, from a few key passages, that the chief reason she condemns pity is that she regards it as entailing a kind of scornful commiseration and a problematic fusion.23 While Weil was no fan of Nietzsche, she would have agreed with the observation he made in Daybreak that “to offer pity is as good as to offer contempt” [Nietzsche 1986, 135].24 Indeed, within the context of her discussion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of decreation, Weil explains that for individuals whose souls have been almost completely crushed by difficult circumstances (say, by grave poverty or by a humiliating encounter with the penal system), the receiving of attention may help give them back some sense of dignity and decency. [Weil 1991b, 77-78] But she insists that in all cases where there is even a remote trace of pity, the attention of another will produce discomfort or, more likely, bitterness and hatred. In a moment of hyperbolic flippancy quite characteristic of her, Weil goes so far as to

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suggest that for those who have been trampled by misfortune, an attentive gaze that has a “mere trace of contempt precipitates towards death.” [Weil 1991b, 77] Weil often liked to repeat that one of the reasons why true attention was so rare in this world is that most individuals assume that what it requires is simply a certain “warmth of heart” and a bit of gentle commiseration. But Weil is clear: attention is no mere “human warmth, impulse of the heart, pity” [Weil 1950, 96]. As we noted above, she regarded it as much more demanding and much ‘cooler’. But if attention cannot be nourished by the sentiment of pitié, is there any legitimate role to be played by compassion? Weil certainly regards compassion in a much better light than pity, but as we will now see, hers is a fairly idiosyncratic account, as one can gather from her late essay the “Forms of the implicit love of God”. There, Weil argues that there are four indirect ways for human beings to love God: the love of neighbour, the love of the order of the world, the love of religious ceremonies and friendship.25 We will return below to Weil’s account of friendship. For now, I would like us to consider her conception of the love of neighbour (l’amour du prochain) which she conceives in a highly relational way as entailing not just one but two types of affections: first, the compassion of those who attend to the needs of someone without any pity (or desire for praise from the world at large) and, second, the gratitude of those who receive.26 Now, Weil readily admits that such a perfect moment of exchange is exceedingly rare: as she makes very clear in her essay on the Illiad, human beings are much more naturally inclined to dominate others rather than to be generous towards them. [Weil, 1999, 529-552] Another difficulty is that when there is a bit of generosity in our behaviour, this generosity is typically spoiled by the fact that we end up taking pride in our charitable deeds, a pride that Weil largely understood as the result of the regrettable distinction moderns have made between justice and love.27 For Weil, if attending to the needs of all human beings was a basic matter of justice (and obligation) rather than an ‘option’ that is available to those desiring praise or selfsatisfaction, the dignity of the needy would be less compromised by the help or care received. Indeed, for those who receive to experience anything close to gratitude, the giving has to be done out of justice. In La

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Pesanteur et la grâce, she explains: “To experience pure gratitude... I need to think that the other treats me well, not because of pity […] or out of caprice, or as a favour or as a privilege, and neither because of a natural consequence of temperament, but because of a desire to do what justice requires.” [Weil 1999, 129] If justice and compassion are very intimately related in a Weil’s work (sometimes the terms are, in fact, used interchangeably), pity and justice are definitely not. Now, in that same essay on the “Forms of the implicit love of God”, Weil suggests that true friendship is quite similar to what is found in the pure types of compassion and gratitude: in all cases, what undergirds these types of love is a deep and ‘sober’ (or cool) respect for the autonomy of the other. Weil writes: “In a perfect friendship.... the two friends accept to be two and not one, and they respect the distance that puts between them the fact of being two distinct creatures.” [Weil 1950, 202] This clearly resonates with what Weil considered to be the mark of attention (and what distinguished it from will): a non-possessiveness, a respect for the distance between “what we are and what we love”. [Weil 1991b, 193] Indeed, Weilian friendship, just like pure compassion and pure attention, is characterized by detachment and cool sobriety. (Note here that Simone Weil does not posit a clear distinction between compassion and love.)28 This detachment is desirable not only for the autonomy of the other, but also for ourselves, for our own intellectual integrity. “There is friendship only where distance is kept and respected. The mere fact of having pleasure in thinking the same way as a friend on a certain issue, or in any case the desire to have such a concordance of opinions, this compromises the purity of friendship and, at the same time, intellectual probity.”29 But beyond the significant parallels that Weil draws between ‘cool’ compassion and ‘cool’ attention, does Weil ultimately think that compassion or sympathy is a requirement for attending well—or not? In L’Enracinement (the last important work she penned before her death), Weil notes that some “respect, sympathy and other sentiment of goodwill” can incline us to a “degree of attention.” [Weil 1999, 1156]30 But while conceding that certain sentiments can facilitate attention, ultimately the affective state she associates with attention is, once again,

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chiefly a kind of Platonic eros for the good—a reorientation of our energy towards something other than self, which entailed the suppression of many passions, desires and earthly attachments. As such, it is possible to suggest that for Weil, true attention to others might be possible even in the absence of any kind of ‘benevolent feeling’ or compassion. This is, besides, something that is consistent with the heavily rationalist dimensions of her account of attention, which we considered in the first part of the paper. But it does jar with some of the interpretations of her work proposed by care theorists over the years, which have emphasized the emotive aspects of Weilian attention. [e.g. Ruddick 1980 & 1989] Now, some readers unfamiliar with Weil might be surprised to see that the chief source for care ethics is a philosopher who gave such great importance to a certain detachment and distance (a ‘sober’ or cold disposition of the mind/the heart that attends to the needs of other). And indeed, for some care scholars, it might very well be that the high Platonic inflections Weil gives to her account of attention is not one that they might wish to uphold. (Recall that part of the intention of many care scholars (especially in the 1980s) was to rehabilitate the emotions as valuable sources of moral knowledge and as part and parcel of lives well lived.) Nonetheless, by modulating the role that strong emotional investment plays (or ought to play?) in attentiveness and in caring for others at large, we might nevertheless open up new avenues for thinking the extent to which vast state institutions (or the employees that work within them) can attend to needs and attend to particulars in any meaningful sense, without risking emotional exhaustion.

The radicality of Weil: or how to create ordinary saints? This chapter has sought to make a few modest claims: first, that Weilian attention—what has been key for care scholarship—is chiefly to be understood in rationalist and platonic terms and that while she celebrated compassion, hers is a conception that is radically unsentimental. (This is in fact one of the many reasons why attending to Weil’s work is a fruitful exercise, for it clearly reminds us of the importance of distinguishing between mere sentimentalism and the celebration of

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particular desires or emotions in caring encounters). I have also underscored the fact that for both Weil and Murdoch, attention is in its essence other-oriented. Put most simply: it is selfless through and through. As such, it seems unconvincing to appeal to the writings of Weil or Murdoch in order to speak of the importance of attending to the self and its needs, as Sandra Laugier and a few others have done. One of the wider, if more implicit, aims of this paper was to interrogate care scholars’ desire to assign an equal amount of importance to attending to the needs of the self and those of others. Undoubtedly, feminist scholars should always cautiously approach authors or work that offer gospels of ‘unselfing’ or of sentimentalising practices and acts of care. But by objecting excessively to the language of selflessness or to the idea of having a profoundly other-oriented ethics altogether, I wonder if there is not the risk of diluting some of the most radical ethical and political power that rests in care ethics and, in particular, in its notion of attentiveness. To put it in slightly polemical terms (but terms that would resonate with both Weil and Murdoch in my view), I will conclude by asking whether what our socio-political existence is most in need of right now is not less, but more selflessness31—not fewer but more numerous saints, more numerous ordinary saints. Some might quibble with this seemingly absurd formulation: is this not making a farce of the notion of sainthood? Perhaps, but with William James, I would nevertheless like to suggest that we try imitating those he termed, in Varieties of Religious Experience, the “smaller saints”32. This would, I believe, be consistent with care ethics’ efforts to deflate traditional (masculinist) views of the political hero and to rehabilitate the more invisible, discreet heroes who labour around us every day. (Indeed, in care ethics scholarship, Pericles is most definitely dethroned by the ordinary heroes that change our children’s diapers or care for our frail grandparents for fairly little pay). In short, rather than shun the radically other-oriented aspect of attentiveness in light of the risks of emotional exhaustion (which are undoubtedly real), we should double up our efforts at creating the proper material and political conditions that might permit that caring attentiveness many of us regard as constitutive of a life well-lived (whether in our private homes, work places or large

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institutions). And this entails thinking about wages, control over one’s time and schedule, about technology and sufficient resources. It is here, in fact, that Weil’s oeuvre is most insightful,33 for she made it very clear that one simply cannot pay meaningful attention to others without radical changes in our economic, institutional, and technological conditions.

Notes 1

In Qu’est-ce que le care?, Pascale Molinier, Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman also propose that care be defined as a matter of attention, as: “faire attention à, être attentionné” [2009, 22]. 2 Not all care scholars agree that we can meaningfully attend to distant others. For two scholars who espouse such a view, see Robinson [1999] and Barnes [2012]. 3 The other moral qualities underscored by Tronto [1993] include responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. 4 For exceptions to this quasi consensus, see Plot [2011], Halwani [2003], McLaren [2001], Slote [2007]. Compare with Sander-Staudt [2006]. 5 Although she admits that it does have an intellectual dimension. See Noddings [2002], especially chapter 8. More recently, Noddings has started using the term ‘empathy’ instead of sympathy, partially as a result of her critical dialogue with Michael Slote. 6 In Care et attention (2014, 50-52) Garrau also highlights the affective dimension of attention, partially through a comparison of care ethics with Martha Nussbaum’s work on the emotions. 7 As such, this paper only considers the question of attention and emotion from the perspective of political philosophy. For a solid exploration of this issue from a neuroscience perspective, see Luiz Pessoa’s “Attention, Motivation and Emotion”, in Nobre, K & S. Kastner [2014]. For insightful and much more detailed discussions of the connections between care and emotions, see Pulcini [2015] and Paperman [2013]. 8 As such, it is unsurprising that authors like Nel Noddings have expressed great skepticism vis-à-vis Weil’s unsubstantiated claim. See e.g. Noddings [2002, 15]. 9 In one of her later essays (‘La personne et le sacré’), Weil observed: “Because affliction and truth need the same kind of attention before they can be heard, the spirit of justice and the spirit of truth is nothing else but a certain type of attention that is pure love.” [Weil 1957, 36] 10 Weil 1950, 85; emphasis mine. 11 But note that Weil is not perfectly consistent here: if in most places she posits a stark distinction between will and attention (e.g. Weil [1991b, 136; 91], consider this passage of Attente de dieu: “Au moment où on s’applique à un exercice, il faut vouloir l’accomplir correctement; parce que cette volonté est indispensable pour qu’il y ait vraiment

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effort.” [Weil 1950, 89] See also Weil [1988, 390] where she observes: “Au centre de l’acte volontaire: l’attention”. 12 “The most precious goods must not be sought, but waited for”, she insisted [1950, 93]. Weil also associated will with excessive pride; see e.g. Weil [1991b, 192]. 13 Weil [1999, 125-126; 146]. Also Weil [1957, 21]. I have explored the intimate connections between care and time elsewhere. See Bourgault [2016]. 14 Note that for Weil this is a good that we can neither define nor fully represent to ourselves, but that we all tend to gravitate towards—unless economic, political and social conditions have thwarted that longing. [1991b, 57] 15 Cited in Conradi [2002, 260]. As such, Peta Bowden is entirely correct to describe attention (in Weil and Murdoch) as a “virtue that reveals.” [Bowden 1998, 62]. 16 “Désirer à vide, désirer sans souhait. Détacher notre désir de tous les biens et attendre.” [1991b, 57] See also Weil [1950, 87-88]. 17 Neither Murdoch nor Weil, however, really offers a sustained discussion of what thinking care as a kind of gift (in a Maussian sense) would mean. But for one insightful discussion that proposes to do so, see Pulcini 2012. 18 Weil, 1950, 97; emphasis mine. 19 See also Bowden [1998] for another critique of Weil and Murdoch. Compare with Cattaneo [2014]. 20 In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch for instance writes: “Attend ‘without thinking about’. This is ‘good for us’ because it involves respect, because it is an exercise in cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation, because it is an experience of what truth is like.” [1998, 245] “L’effort rare et méritoire que nous faisons pour porter notre attention sur des choses que nous oublions facilement s’explique par notre volonté d’être sincères avec nous-mêmes, et non par la sympathie.” [Weil 1989, 178] 21 Weil [1988, 390]. 22 Elsewhere, I have discussed Weil’s relationship to care feminism at greater length (here focusing on her account of needs). See Bourgault [2014]. 23 Compassion is typically depicted by Weil as free of demeaning condescension, and as a ‘cooler’, more sober kind of emotional bond. More on this below. 24 This is also a view espoused by Murdoch who writes, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: “It matters how we see other people. ... Others are given to us as a spectacle which we should treat with wise respect. A loving just gaze cherishes and adds substance, a contemptuous gaze withers. A look of hatred designs to kill.” [Murdoch 1998, 463]. 25 Note that in her essay, Weil somewhat sets friendship apart—partially because unlike the other three types of love (which are impersonal), philia is a personal type of attachment. 26 Unlike true compassion (or love of neighbour), pity cannot according to Weil lead to reciprocity and thus to a certain equality. Pity is a unidirectional affective phenomenon that reinforces an already unequal power relationship. 27 Weil tried to counter this distinction with an account of politics that was to be anchored in an anthropology of needs and a strong theory of obligation. 28 Rarely does she insist on clear distinctions between charity and compassion either, or on distinguishing between love of kin and love of distant others. This could

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raise some analytical difficulties for care theorists who might be interested in deploying Weil further to think about the particular dispositions that inform various care practices, on different scales. As Pulcini [2016] has correctly indicated, one cannot always travel quickly between the types of emotions that attend to caring practices in private, and those that take place in public institutions or in the world as a global entity. 29 Readers familiar with Hannah Arendt will no doubt see some remarkable similarities between the two philosophers’ accounts of friendship. Think, for instance of Arendt’s description, in Men in Dark Times, of true philia as a type of attachment that is “sober and cool rather than sentimental” (1970, 25) or of her description of an ideal political bond as made out of friendship “without intimacy and without closeness.” (1998, 243) 30 Scholars have suggested that the young Weil had a much more ‘intellectualist’ understanding of attention than what we find in her London writings (including in L’Enracinement). While it is the case that the terms ‘compassion’ and sympathy occupy more prominent places in her later essays, Weil had already suggested, in her early Lycée lectures, that it might be love that allows the human being to go from the ‘lower’ type of attention to a higher, purer type. In one particular passage, for instance, one can read: “Sans changer la volonté, on peut changer l’attention passive en attention active. Exemple : l’amour. » [Weil, 1991a, 389] 31 Naturally, whether Weil’s own life and her experience of compassion ought to be taken as exemplary of this selflessness (or rather, as its very opposite) remains an open question. 32 See James [2004], lecture XV. 33 See most notably Weil 2002; 1957.

Literature Arendt, H. [1970], Men in Dark Times, London, Lowe & Brydone. Arendt, H. [1998], The Human Condition, 2nd ed, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Barnes, M. [2012], Care in Everyday Life: An Ethic of Care in Practice, Policy Press. Bourgault, S. [2014], “Beyond the saint and the red virgin: Simone Weil as feminist theorist of care”, Frontiers: Journal of Women’s Studies. Bourgault, S. [2016], “Attentive Listening and Care in a Neoliberal Era: Weilian Insights for Hurried Times”, Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 311-337. Bowden, P. [1998], “Ethical attention: Accumulating Understandings”, European Journal of Philosophy, 6:1, 59-77. Brugère, F. [2014], L’éthique du ‘care’, coll. Que sais-je? no.3903, Paris, PUF. Cattaneo, F. [2014], “La nostra verità: immaginazione ed esperienza della realtà nella filosofia di Iris Murdoch”, Etica & Politica, XVI. Citton, Y. [2014], Pour une écologie de l’attention, Paris, Seuil. Conradi, E. [2001], Take Care. Grundlagen einer Ethik der Achtsamkeit, Frankfurt am Main. Conradi, P. [2002], Iris Murdoch: A Life, New York: HarperCollins. Depraz, N., & L. Perreau eds. [2010], “L’attention”, in Alter. Revue de Phénoménologie, no.18.

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Garrau, M. [2014], Care et attention, Paris, PUF. Haegert, S. [2004], “The ethics of self”, Nursing Ethics, vol. 11, no 5. Halwani, R. [2003], “Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics”. Hypatia, 18: 161–192 Hamington, M. [2001], “Jane Adams and a Politics of Embodied Care”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15:2. Hamington, M. [2015], “Politics is not a game: the Radical Potential of Care”, in Care Ethics and Political Theory, M. Hamington and D. Engster eds., Oxford, Oxford University Press. James, W. [1890], Principles of Psychology, vol.1, Cosimo [reprint 2007]. James, W. [2004], Varieties of Religious Experience, London, Routledge. Janiaud, J. [2009], “Simone Weil et l’attention”, dans Chantal Delsol (dir.), Simone Weil., Cerf, coll. Les cahiers d’histoire de la philosophie, 2009. Laugier, S [2009a], “L’éthique comme politique de l’ordinaire”, Multitudes n.37-38, 80-88. Laugier, S [2009b], “Vulnérabilité et expression ordinaire”, dans Qu’est-ce que le care?, Molinier et al, Paris, Payot. Laugier, S et P Paperman dir. [2011], Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. McLaren, M [2001], “Feminist Ethics: Care as a Virtue”, in Feminists Doing Ethics, ed. by J. Waugh and P. Desautels, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Nobre, K & S. Kastner [2014], The Oxford Handbook of Attention, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, D. E. & S. Kornblum eds. [1993], Attention and Performance XIV, MIT Press. Mole, C. [2011], Attention is Cognitive Unison. An Essay in Philosophical Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Molinier, P et al [2009], Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité. Paris: Payot. Molinier, P & S Laugier [2010], “Le care : un modèle alternatif au discours de droite”, published online, Raison publique.fr, May 15th. Mortari, L [2006], La pratica dell’aver cura, Pearson Italia. Murdoch, I [1998], Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York, NY: Penguin Books. Murdoch, I [1997], Existentialists and Mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature, New York, Penguin. Noddings, N [1984], Caring. A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley, University of California Press. Noddings, N [2002], Starting at Home. Caring and Social Policy, Berkeley, University of California Press. Noddings, N [2010], The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality, Berkeley, University of California Press. Nussbaum, M [1996], “Compassion as the Basic Social Emotion”, Social Philosophy & Policy 13 (1), 27-58. Paperman, P. [2013], Care et sentiments, Paris, PUF. Plot, F [2011], “Éthique de la vertu et éthique du care”, in Laugier, S. & P. Paperman eds, Le souci des autres : Éthiques et politique du care, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 227-246.

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Pulcini E. [2012], “Donner le care”, Revue du MAUSS, 1/2012 (n° 39), 49-66. Pulcini, E. [2016], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotion Review. Robinson, F [1999], Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Robinson, F. [2011], “Stop talking and listen: Discourse ethics and feminist care ethics in international political theory millennium”, Journal of International Studies, vol. 39, no 3, 845-860. Ruddick, S. [1980], “Maternal Thinking”, Feminist Studies, 6: 2 (1980), 357-58. Ruddick, S. [1989], Maternal Thinking, Boston, Beacon Press. Sander-Staudt, M. [2006], “The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics” Hypatia 21 (4), 21-39. Sevenhuijsen, S. [2003], Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics. London, Routledge. Sevenhuijsen, S. [2014], “Care and attention’; unpublished paper presented at the Universiteit voor Humanistiek, Utrecht. Slote, M. [2007], The Ethics of Care and Empathy. London, UK, Routledge. Tronto, J. [1993], Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993. Tronto, J. [2010], “Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose”, Ethics and Social Welfare, vol.4, no.2. Tronto, J. [2013], Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York: New York University Press. Weil, S. [1950], Attente de Dieu, Paris, La Colombe. Weil, S. [1957], Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, Paris, Gallimard, 1957. Weil, S. [1988], Œuvres complètes, Premiers écrits philosophiques, t.I, Paris, Gallimard. Weil, S. [1989], Leçons de philosophie, éd. A. Reynaud-Guérithault, Paris, Plon. Weil, S. [1991a], Œuvres complètes, t. II, éd. par G. Leroy et A. Roche, Paris, Gallimard. Weil, S. [1991b], La pesanteur et la grâce, Paris, Plon. Weil, S. [1999], Œuvres, éd. par F. de Lussy, Paris, Gallimard. Weil, S. [2002], La condition ouvrière, présentation et notes de R. Chenavier, Paris, Gallimard. Zielinski, A. [2010], “L’éthique du care. Une nouvelle façon de prendre soin”, Études, 4136.

11. Existence, care and emotions Vincenzo Sorrentino

I think that every reflection on the relationship between existence, care and emotions has to start from the fact that care is generally correlated with the events marking the beginning and end of our existence on earth, namely birth and death. Care for a newborn baby (and in a certain way also for the foetus)1 and for a dying person are the two poles within which every other form of care arises. Care accompanies and contributes to shaping the experience of our entrance into and farewell from the world. This already brings forth the constitutive nexus between existence and care, and correlates the latter with the deepest emotional registers of our personality. If an emotion, in its most proper sense, is what prompts movement,2 then posing the problem of the relationship between existence, care and emotions comes down to asking ourselves what, within the existential openness that characterizes human life, can prompt care. Nevertheless, surely the latter does not only have a single side. Care is, first of all, an existential disposition belonging to the human being as a beingin-the-world. As such, it is not simply a particular activity, but the essential human way of relating to the world: “Dasein, ontologically understood, is care [Sorge]” [Heidegger 1927, 53], namely it is a “being-ahead-of-oneself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered)” [Heidegger 1927, 180]. Dasein is involved in the world that we take care of [Heidegger 1927, 57]. This involvement always also takes on an emotional attunement. I will return to this aspect later. Care can be actualized as Besorgen (taking

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care of the things we encounter in the world) and as Fürsorge (caring for others) [Heidegger 1927, 63, 180]. For Heidegger, both “practical” and “theoretical” behaviour can be traced back to care [1927, 180]. Care as Sorge is therefore the condition for every form of care, which means that the specific care practices with which we relate to things and to others refer to an existential disposition. The way in which we give care—and the emotional attunements that accompany it—are correlated with how we are disposed in the openness of existence.

1. Existence, mere life, care In Moral Boundaries, Joan Tronto defined the various “phases” of care in what subsequently became a widely referred to account of care. The first phase corresponds to “caring about”, that is, “noting the existence of a need and making an assessment that this need should be met”. This is followed by “taking care of”, which involves “assuming some responsibility for the identified need and determining how to respond to it”. The third moment is that of “care-giving”, which implies meeting the caring needs; it implies direct contact with the care-receiver. Finally, there is the phase of “care-receiving”, which considers the response of the care-receiver, in order to know whether the caring needs have been met [1993, 106-108]. Care, as an ethical practice, is a movement in which the self opens up towards the other. As such, I believe that it needs to be thought of within the frame of ek-sistence, which stands beyond mere life. There are certainly care practices aimed at enhancing and preserving life, but what characterizes human life is existence, and therefore care is also to be understood “as the search for the experiential conditions that enable the action of transcendence, of going beyond what is already given to create new forms of being-there” [Mortari 2015, 21, our translation]. Existence includes and transcends mere life, that is, that biological process [Arendt 1958, 97-98], that “fever of matter” which is neither matter nor spirit, but “something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame” [Mann 1924, I, 269]. In the following pages I will discuss human life while presupposing this same existential connotation.

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A care ethic is rooted in a philosophical anthropology (human beings as ek-sistent) that is different from the line of thought centred on humankind as mere living beings. I have the impression that today the enormous proliferation and—in some ways pervasive—development of care practices generally takes place at the level of mere life, its conservation and empowerment. Suffice it to think of the many forms of care for the body. Here, care is deemed marginal—or at least not given suitable social consideration; it is not acknowledged as an existential dimension, as a practice intimately tied to openness to meaning and sense. As it is understood here, existence refers to a being outside, an opening-up-to which has an ecstatic nature. Eksistence, writes Heidegger, is “standing in the clearing [Lichtung] of being” [1947, 247, 266], “ecstatic inherence in the truth of being” [1947, 248]: the essence of existence is being-in-the-world [1947, 266]. Inasmuch as humankind exists, it has an ecstatic essence [1947, 247-249]. Moreover, an ethics of care requires taking care of the other which, as we suggested above, involves a responsibility. With a wonderful expression, Lévinas defines the latter as a “response answering to a non-thematizable provocation” [1978, 12]. As such, there can only be responsibility in the openness of space where provocation and response can resound and call upon each other. Just as truth as correspondence presupposes truth as unconcealment (and therefore openness of the horizon of being) [Heidegger 1943], taking care of (correlated with responsibility towards the other) can only occur in the very openness of ek-sistence. The connection between care and existence is also manifest in our need for care. To exist is always also to be exposed-to. After all, one of the dimensions of being open-to is being exposed. Of course, this puts our vulnerability at stake, but also our desire to attune ourselves to the world, a bit like when we are exposed to the sun to enjoy its rays. Since we are exposed, we are vulnerable, at the mercy of events, and therefore also in need of the support given to us owing to the fact of receiving care. Nevertheless, to be exposed is also to come out of ourselves, to exit the boundaries of our selves, our prejudices and our certainties.

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Hence, at the same time, existential openness entails feeling exposed to life (with all the anxiety this raises) and exposing oneself through the active posture we adopt when we try to attune ourselves to the other. In the next sections of the chapter, I would like to consider what appear to me to be three fundamental modes of ecstatic openness connotating existence (e.g. an endeavour towards purpose; a search for meaning; a demand for sense),3 and then consider the emotional attunements correlated with each care paradigm connected to these different existential registers.

2. Purpose, meaning and sense In teleological action, writes Jürgen Habermas, The actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner. […] The teleological model of action is expanded to a strategic model when there can enter into the agent’s calculation of success the anticipation of decisions on the part of at least one additional goal-directed actor [1981, 85].

The endeavour towards purpose gives a direction to the action, projecting it towards the future. As a result, it opens action to an exteriority that guides it. Arendt distinguishes the sense (Sinn) of something, which is inherent to the thing itself, from its end or purpose, which is external: The meaning4 of a thing, as opposed to its end, is always contained within the thing itself, and the meaning of an activity can exist only as long as the activity continues. This is true of all activities, and of actions as well, whether they pursue an end or not. It is just the opposite with ends; an end does not begin to become a reality until the activity that produced it has been concluded—just as the existence of any given produced object begins at that moment when its producer has put the final touch to it. [1993, 193-194].

Here, the purpose set out by the will is connected to the activity of fabrication. Achieving a purpose implies ceasing the activity. The latter consists of preparing and using means in view of achieving the end; the activity itself is a means in view of this realization. From this point of

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view, the activity presupposes the existence of a subject to master it. Fabrication, unlike action, can reduce things and people to mere means functional to a procedure that the subject seeks to make totally manageable [Arendt 1958, 139-144, 160-162]. In this first mode of ecstatic openness, to identify the sense and purpose of life is to seek to become the masters of our lives. For those whose lives seem to acquire a sense only insofar as they live for something, in view of something, life itself becomes a mere means, which only has a value in relation to the set purpose. In other words, life ends up not having any intrinsic dignity, beauty or value. The purpose, we have seen, is external to the activity, hence those seeking the sense of life in the purposes that they set out are constantly projected outside the life they are living. Therefore, the future takes precedence over the present and past. Here the ecstatic opening of existence assumes the form of striving towards the future where the realization of the purpose is projected. This openness takes on a different appearance if we pass to the second existential register that I hinted at before, namely the search for the meaning of our lives. It seems to me possible to assert that people’s lives take on meaning through their belonging to a world, that is, a set of relationships and references whose structure is meaningfulness [Heidegger 1927, 80-82]. Here the world needs to be conceived of as a symbolic and not merely functional network, within which identities are formed on the basis of mutual recognition [Taylor 1991, 47-49]. The metaphor of language can be useful in this context. The meaning of an existence, like that of a word, depends on its collocation within a system of relationships. Alienation (i.e. being uprooted from the world) is always accompanied by one’s identity being shattered and falling into insignificance.5 As such, meaning can never be seen simply as something that is chosen or created directly and intentionally by individuals. It is always given behind their backs, in a perspective of preunderstanding [Heidegger 1927, 126-156], which provides the criteria for the meaningfulness of individuals’ experiences and, in short, their whole existence. In other words, meaning is always given within a context of belonging that

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precedes every possible decision by the subject, and is therefore relatively stable. The permanent and stable traits of identity are the correlate of this relative stability of the world. Meaning always, at least in part, transcends from the individual’s will, insofar as it is given within a precedent framework of relationships. Therefore, in this existential register the past takes precedence over the present and the future. Here the ecstatic openness of existence takes on the form of being open to the world as the horizon of meaningfulness. This openness takes on yet another appearance when it is guided by the demand for sense (the third register I would like to consider). My initial hypothesis is that sense must be distinguished from purpose and meaning and that it corresponds to the beauty of life. To look at things from the perspective of meaning is to ask oneself “why, what reason do we live for?”, while the question of sense is: “is life worth living? Is it beautiful?”. Like a work of art, life can seem beautiful even if it does not have a meaning or we are not able to grasp it—in the same way that it can have a meaning without appearing beautiful, or having a sense. In my opinion, this explains why sometimes people who may have achieved recognition thanks to their activity, who have a stable place in the world (i.e. people whose existence is certainly not lacking in meaning), can be burdened by a sense of emptiness, depression or even end up committing suicide. In the same way, sense has to be distinguished from purpose: people can feel that their existence has a purpose but not a sense, and can stumble into the void of senselessness despite having achieved the purpose that they were aiming at, in which they deceived themselves they could find a sense in life. Purpose gives a direction to life; sense gives it substance and pleasure.6 To grasp the immanent nature of sense, to which Arendt refers in the passage quoted above, I think it is useful to refer to the experience of love. Love has a sense in itself and not in view of something external, for example, because we build a family or make plans with the person we love, no matter how important these aspects can be in making a loving relationship rich and meaningful. The relationship between death, life and sense also needs to be thought of as starting from the paradigm of love. Consciousness of death strips love (and life) of sense

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only if the sense is made to correspond to the purpose or the meaning: in reality, it does not strip love of sense, but turns on desire; it does not strip sense from life, but causes suffering and entrenches our consciousness of the limit. I believe that the experience of sense does not depend on the vision we have of life, but rather on the way in which we feel life: sense has an essentially aesthetic nature, that is, it has to do with the perception (aísthesis) of beauty. Konrad Lorenz quite rightly wrote that “every human who can become sentient to and experience joy in creation and its beauty is made immune to any and every doubt about its meaning”7 [1983, 209-210]. Here the beauty of existence corresponds to the perception that it is worth living,8 that it is good,9 that it is agreeable. If a person’s existence has a purpose when it is aimed at realizing something and a meaning when it belongs to a world, it has a sense when it is perceived as beautiful. Commenting on some passages from Plato’s Phaedrus dedicated to beauty [Plato 2017, 483, 487], Heidegger writes: “The beautiful is what advances most directly upon us and captivates us. While encountering us as a being, however, it at the same time liberates us to the view upon Being. […] it is both captivating and liberating […] The beautiful is called that which is most radiant…” [Heidegger 1961, vol. I, 196]. Beauty is first of all connected to revelation, to unconcealment; but not just that. The beautiful seduces, captivates. What is beautiful captures our attention, attracts us and at the same time enchants us, arouses our wonder, takes us outside ourselves. The experience of beauty is complex, and it certainly cannot be accounted for in a few lines. What is important in this context is beauty as the ecstatic experience of forgetting oneself as an individual [Schopenhauer 1859, 221-223, 417]. Beauty, as demonstrated by the experience of love, is not incompatible with suffering, struggles and imbalances. Therefore, life does not have to be perfect to be beautiful. Life can appear beautiful, and therefore can appear as having sense, even if it is painful and tormented. Obviously, as Aristotle observes, the “natural sweetness and happiness” of living, its “noble element” and beauty, can only be grasped if existence is not overly burdened by evil and suffering [Aristotle 2016, 68].

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Therefore, the beauty that is correlated with the perception of the sense of life has nothing to do with the proportionate ratios of a complete form, or with balance,10 but with vitality,11 revelation and captivation. The perception of sense, inasmuch as it is the perception of the beauty of life, is ek-stasis, namely, it is a state in which we are outside ourselves, beyond the boundaries of our identity. It appears that the dimension of sense can only be obtained by overcoming the principium individuationis, namely, through loss of the self. Those who do not manage to forget themselves or to take their attention off themselves, and remain constantly enclosed within selfconcern, are at the same time incapable of loving others and of loving life. Isolation and senselessness are profoundly correlated here. It is significant that depression tends to fixate individuals upon themselves, and enclose them in the prison of autism: In hypochondriac (delirious) depression, the autistic isolation is even more profound and impenetrable than in any other Gestalt. The closedness, and withdrawal, into the boundaries of the self (of an ego that becomes a body, body-thing, and loses every dialogical dimension and lust for life) are absolute [Borgna 2001, 95, our translation; see also 86-97].

Depression tends to close the ego’s doors, causing life to somehow become frozen, immobilized [Borgna 2001, 122] ultimately also preventing death. In a patient’s words: You can’t even die. I’m just flesh and bones, there’s no life in me. I’m no longer a human being. I’ve become a senseless thing, a nothing. I no longer feel alive or dead. This sense of emptiness is a terrible thing. Everything is empty. There’s a terrible force that doesn’t let me die. It’d be wonderful to die but I’m not even allowed to do that. I’m tired of life and death [Borgna 2001, 60, our translation].

However, losing oneself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for there to be sense. Experience shows us that you can lose yourself in the presence of states of emptiness and depression, as can happen, for example, by turning to drugs or alcohol. Losing oneself may not have anything to do with love for life, with the perception of its beauty, and become a mere state of dizziness, oblivion, anaesthetization towards the suffering or burden of living. Now we need to take another step forward.

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As Etty Hillesum wrote from the Westerbork “transit camp”, a few months before she was killed: …the misery here is quite terrible and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire and then time and again it soars straight from my heart—I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent… [1985, 247]

And the year before her death at Auschwitz: I went to bed early last night and from my bed I stared out through the large open window. And it was once more as if life with all its mysteries was close to me, as if I could touch it. I had the feeling that I was resting against the naked breast of life, and could feel her gentle and regular heartbeat. I felt safe and protected. And I thought: how strange. It is wartime. There are concentration camps. I can say of so many of the houses I pass: here the son has been thrown into prison, there the father has been taken hostage, and an 18-year-old boy in that house over there has been sentenced to death. And these streets and houses are all so close to my own. I know how very nervous people are, I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution and oppression and despotism and the impotent fury and the terrible sadism. I know it all. And yet—at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breast of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe: so slow and so regular and so soft, almost muffled, but so constant, as if it would never stop. [1985, 141-142]

What does this unguardedness, this abandonment consist of? Of being at one with life: …following days of intense inner striving after clarity, birth pangs with sentences and thoughts that refuse to be born and make tremendous demands on you. Then suddenly it drops away, all of it, and a benevolent tiredness enters the brain, then everything feels calm again, then I am filled with a sort of bountifulness, even towards myself, and a veil envelops me through which life seems more serene and often much friendlier as well. And a feeling of being at one with all existence. No longer: I want this or that, but: life is great and good and fascinating and eternal and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty, eternal current that is life. (…) True, I realise that this mood will not last, that it will probably be gone within half-an-hour, but I have nevertheless been able to draw new strength from it. [1985, 74-75]

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The source that fosters the perception that life has sense is not the mere loss of self, but symbiosis. Syn-bíos: shared life, whose paradigm is the prenatal union with the mother.12 Love for life seems to be fostered by abandonment to the “symbiotic” union with otherness (the you, God, nature, the collective, etc.), by consonance with what is other from the self. So, the perception of sense appears as an ecstatic (being outside oneself) and mystical experience (“symbiotic” union). Therefore, this experience presupposes the capacity to lose oneself, to die (from the viewpoint of the principium individuationis). A heightened individualism, an overtly strong instinct of self-preservation, hinders our perception of sense, since it prevents us from abandoning or releasing ourselves, and overcoming the principium individuationis and the primacy of the will correlated with it.13 To sum up, I wish to suggest that the dimension of meaning has a symbolic-relational nature, that purpose has a teleological nature, and sense an aesthetic nature. Life assumes a meaning when the earth comes across as a home where you can live, that is, a world: this is the reason why meaninglessness takes on the appearance of uprooting and loss. Purpose projects us into the future, towards achieving the target we have set for ourselves; on the contrary, sense is given in the present (which therefore prevails over the past and future) and corresponds to the ecstatic perception of a fullness of life that breaks out of the confines of our identity: this is why senselessness takes on the depressing appearance of emptiness. In other words, if it is in interaction (which prompts the game of identities/differences) that our life acquires a meaning, it is in sharing (perception of consonance with the other, from oneself) that it acquires a sense. These registers, together with the purpose, naturally must be allowed to co-exist. Hence, the critique of the subject ought not be restricted to highlighting the relational nature of human beings (against the paradigm of the founding subiectum and/or the atomistic individual),14 but also ought to be used to thematize the instinct to overcome the principium individuationis, towards “symbiotic” union with the other. This is an instinct whose traces we find in many human experiences: just think, for example, of the collective phenomena of “affective contagion”

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[Pinotti 2011, 49], states of trance and more in general ecstatic rites [EiblEibesfeldt 1984, 408], some aspects of falling in love [Freud 1929, 3] or pleasure [Freud 1920, 49-57; Fachinelli 2009, 40, 120], and naturally mysticism [Sorrentino 2015, 32-40].

3. The emotional attunements of care Our being-in-the-world is always emotionally attuned: emotional attunement is in fact a fundamental existential [Heidegger 1927, 126, 130]. To place the stress on the emotional attunements (or the varying emotional tonalities) that accompany and guide our being-in-the-world is to remember that what is at stake here is not necessarily strong emotions, but the modulations that tune our existence. “Our life, it could be said, is modulated and attuned thanks to various and unpredictable emotional movements which constitute the continual base, which at times is imperceptible even to those living it, but fundamental in order to put in agreement and create resonances between mind and body, inner and external world” [Boella 2012, 151, our translation]. In relation to the three existential dimensions evoked previously, care takes on appearances and is correlated with different emotional tonalities. Where care—directed both towards things and people—is rooted within the perspective of purpose (i.e. it is a practice aimed at achieving purposes set down by the will), it takes on an instrumental value. Here, we take care of in the sense that we are (pre)occupied with, in view of an external end to the care practice. Care only assumes a value in relation to the purpose. It presupposes that the will setting the purpose and therefore the paradigm of the subiectum aimed at domination takes precedence [Heidegger 1950, 66 and 1961a, 26-32]. Then, insofar as the endeavour towards the purpose is conceived of in terms of fabrication, it also presupposes a certain solipsism, given that the fabricator is alone with his image beheld by the eye of the mind, while the others and things are conceived of as mere means: therefore the subject acts as the “lord and master” [Arendt 1958, 139-144, 160-162]. Here the emotional attunement is determined by the will’s endeavour to reach its goals. Therefore, it is correlated with the degree of trust that accompanies the subject. The fact that subjects take up care

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practices means that they are not pervaded by a sense of impotence that would drive them to mere immobilism. A certain degree of trust in the possibility of achieving a purpose must therefore be presupposed for there to be care practices. However, emotional tonalities can change, going from anxiety (here meant as uncertainty over achieving one’s goals) to hope, and to the sense of omnipotence. In my view, what differs from this significantly are situations in which care practices are rooted within the sphere of meaning. Here, care entails taking care of relationships that give meaning to existence, and care practices can be ultimately traced back to care of the common world that we feel we belong to.15 There is nothing abstract about this care of the world; rather, it takes shape in the specific practices through which we take care of the people and things that form our world. Once again, I believe that we cannot talk of a single emotional tonality with regards to this dimension of meaning. Better would be a continuum of emotions, with angst and serenity at the two opposite poles. Angst could be understood as tied to a lack of meaning [Heidegger 1927, 174178] and therefore with a profound sense of uprooting. And at the other extreme, serenity would not be seen as a lack of emotions, but as an emotional state connected to a strong sense of belonging to the network of worldly relations, from which we feel our existence draws its meaning. Here care is not a practice whose values arise outside itself, such as in the case when it is merely a means to achieve a goal, but it has an intrinsic value, since the world that gives meaning to existence is not a mere given, but a correlate of practices [Arendt 1958, 53], amongst which care practices hold a privileged position. Furthermore, unlike what happens in the dimension of purpose (the first dimension discussed above), here the care-giving subject is not the subiectum whose will is to master reality or the isolated individual correlated with the activity of fabrication. Instead, we are dealing with relational subjects, aware of the profound interdependence that links them to others [Gilligan 1982, 74, 173] and more in general to the significant contexts that are always, at least in part, transcendent from their will.

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Now, the discourse is different still, and in certain respects more problematic, in the third of the dimensions mentioned above, namely sense. Care practices always occur in difference (identity/otherness), while the perception of the beauty—and therefore the sense—of existence occurs when all differences between identity and otherness are overcome, when one abandons oneself to a union with the other (the you, God, nature, the collective). Nevertheless, I believe that in relation to the experience of sense there is still an important connection between care and abandonment. Love for life cannot not be reduced to mere survival, to passively remaining alive. Instead, it generates a care, a taking to heart what fosters the perception of the sense, the beauty of life, against everything that denies it. To quote Italo Calvino: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space [1972, 165].

Love for life is abandonment to life, an abandonment which gives rise to care for that which upholds our existence, giving it a sense, despite pain and death. Furthermore, abandonment can promote care practices since it allows individuals to place this care within a perspective of sense (one that cannot be seen simply as the perspective of meaning given by one’s relationships with the world). Here, it seems possible to affirm that the underlying emotional tonality is set by the happiness16 tied to the experience of beauty and by the gratitude towards that which is capable of arousing the perception of beauty and that the care practices indeed aim to safeguard. This happiness and this underlying gratitude by no means exclude suffering, disagreements, misunderstandings, struggles—in short, the dramatic and tragic dimensions of existence [Schopenhauer 1859, 350-351]. But they do help support

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individuals in the harsh experience of these things, preventing them from falling into the void of depression. The emotional tonality of care that is correlated with the perception of sense runs deep; its roots dig down into the most intimate recesses of our existence. As Laura Boella writes: “…the emotional experience is set apart by its quality of expanding the self, which involves a dual movement: on one hand, coming out of the self towards what lies outside, to take it in, host it, and on the other, intensification of the self-experience, contact with profundity, with every person’s aspiration towards the infinite, the absolute” [2012, 156, our translation]. I think that this is without doubt true for the emotional attunement accompanying the love for life and the care practices which it prompts.

4. Care and emotional participation In itself, “taking care of” can be a means for mere self-affirmation and for achieving the purposes of the will, as we noted earlier. Indeed, the other’s vulnerability can foster a thirst for domination. As Heidegger underlines, care can make “the Other […] become one who is dependent and dominated even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him” [1927, 114]; this happens when the care does not help “the other to become transparent to himself in his care and free for it”, but releases him from the care, doing the “job for him” and dominating him [1927, 115]. The shepherd cares for the flock and the single sheep too [Foucault 1981, 227-240; 2004, 128-129]. There are paternalistic forms of care, in which caregivers consider themselves the only ones able to assess the carereceivers’ needs: the latter are treated like children within a relationship marked by a profound inequality [Tronto 1993, 170]. Care can even become the means for a plan for total domination over others: does the totalitarian dictator not perhaps take care of his subjects? Care can kill freedom. Nevertheless, even where care is not moved by instrumental or dominating intentions, the complete absence of emotional participation in the other’s life experience can be oppressing and humiliating, and can transform others’ vulnerability into dependence. This subjection may

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be unintentionally increased; care-givers can indeed not have the will to cause these consequences. Therefore, care must be marked by a willingness and a capability to attune oneself to others, first of all by listening and taking part in their life experience. And as such, it must presuppose empathy, a certain emotional consonance with alterity [Mortari 2015, 195; Boella 2006, 11-12]. Here we encounter an important trait of every care practice that does not seek to transform others’ vulnerability into an annihilating dependence but rather sets out to safeguard their autonomy. The latter is an essential aspect—together with the will to act for the other’s good— of the care ethic which here I take to be the normative paradigm.17 In a way, one could claim that in this register, care is not tied to some specific emotional attunements, given that it attunes itself to the other’s emotional attunement. But looked at from another angle, we might note that care presupposes an underlying attunement shaped by the very fact of being open to said participation, an openness which is fully realized in love. It is significant that, while speaking of charity in the Letter to the Romans (12, 15), Paul turns to his brothers, and says: “Be happy with those who are not happy, weep with those who weep.” [1988, 200]. Before drawing things to a close, let me offer a couple of precisions regarding empathy, which forms the basis of the very possibility of all participation in the other’s life experience: the first precision concerns its ethical dimension, the second its experiential dimension. Empathy is ethically neutral, since it does not yet imply a judgement about others’ good or about whether their condition is just or unjust18 (which does happen in the case of compassion or pity—i.e. the “pain excited by the sight of evil, deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it; an evil which one might expect to come upon himself or one of his friends, and when it seems near” [Aristotle 1926, 225]). Therefore, care as an ethical practice cannot be exclusively based on empathy; it must also be aimed at others’ good by promoting and safeguarding their (always-relational) autonomy. Furthermore, as several authors have highlighted, the empathetic experience does not imply annulling the consciousness of our differences, our distance from others [Stein 1917,

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12-13, 16-18; Pinotti 2011, 25-29; Boella 2006, 24-25]. Indeed, as Luigina Mortari quite rightly observes, “if in order to act in the right way, workers in the world of healthcare were called upon to genuinely feel all the other’s pain, they would be crushed by the burden of the lives that they would find themselves supporting and would no longer have a crumb of the life force needed to act” [2015, 200, our translation].19 What I have tried to reflect on in this chapter are the connections between care practices and particular existential dispositions. I have suggested that ‘taking care’ while participating emotionally in the other’s life experiences requires the ability to come out of ourselves, to break the boundaries and the borders of our selves by opening up to the other. And here we see emerge all the limits of a care ethics based solely on duty. A care ethics cannot be limited to thinking of it as a praxis. Taking care of the other in a strong ethical sense is not just an action or activity, but is also an inner disposition. Phrased differently, it is not just a doing, but it is also a feeling and the capability to transmit to the other what we are feeling. (Translation by Karen Whittle)

NOTES 1 With regard to the hypothesis that individuals preserve a trace of their prenatal existence, see Laing [1976, 34-65, 78-81]; Winnicott [1988, 131-134] and Fachinelli [2009, 103-124]. 2 “It is clear that the word emotion refers to another semantic field, the one relating to movement (motus). E-motion literally means ‘putting into motion’ (ex-movere), putting outside oneself. From this root, ‘being shaken [scosso], moved [commosso]’ refers to a movement prompted by something that is outside the self, and takes outside the self” [Boella 2012, 150, our translation]. 3 For a more elaborate description of the topic, allow me to refer to Sorrentino 2015. 4 Translator’s note: In the original German version, Arendt uses the word “Sinn”, corresponding to the author’s use of “sense” throughout this text. Hence, here “meaning” should be interpreted as “sense”. 5 “[Identity] only plays the role of orienting us, of providing the frame within which things have meaning for us, by virtue of the qualitative distinctions it incorporates” [Taylor 1989, 30].

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6 In describing the senselessness of human life, Schopenhauer highlights the “emptiness and shallowness” of existence [1859, 349]. 7 Translator’s note: again “meaning” is to be interpreted as “sense” as it is understood in this text. 8 On sense meant as what makes existence worth living, see Eagleton [2007, 95]. 9 The term bellus is a diminutive of bonus. On the link between the notion of the beautiful and the good, see for example, Bodei [1995, 13]. 10 On the lack of correspondence of beauty with this paradigm in Greek thought, see Curi [2013, 71, 91]. 11 In Phaedrus the vision of the beloved’s beauty is a vital experience: “And as he looks upon him, a reaction from his shuddering comes over him, with sweat and unwonted heat; for as the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked, and prevented the feathers from sprouting, become soft, and as the nourishment streams upon him, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots over all the form of the soul; for it was once all feathered. (…) [the soul] it is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy” [Plato 2017, 487-489]. 12 I am led to think, following Freud, that the instinct to lose oneself in abandonment implies a nostalgia for prenatal existence (the symbiotic union with the mother). Freud observes that the mother’s womb is “the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease” [1929, 28]. He also connects sleep to the blessed isolation of life in the womb [1924, 108]. 13 “To be sure I don’t know yet what the word releasement means; but I seem to presage that releasement awakens when our nature [Wesen] is let-in so as to have dealings with that which is not a willing” [Heidegger 1959, 61; see also 60, 79]. 14 On the importance of this topic for the ethics of care, see for instance Gilligan [1982, 74, 98]; Tronto [1993, 21, 135, 152, 162]; White and Tronto [2004, 448] and Pulcini [2009, 190-192]. 15 On the different connotations that the topic of “care of the world” can assume in the global age, see Pulcini [2009]. 16 For Aristotle, in life “there is possibly some noble element so long as the evils of existence do not greatly overbalance the good”. Indeed, “we all see that men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune, seeming to find in life a natural sweetness and happiness” [Aristotle 2016, 68]. 17 On the necessity for a care ethic that does not hypostatize the relationships of dependence and makes spaces of autonomy accessible to all, see for instance Tronto [1993, 163]. 18 See Nussbaum [2001, 301-302, 333] and Pulcini [2016, 3]. Nevertheless, Nussbaum seems to waver on this point, since she observes how in a way empathy, namely insofar as it implies an elementary recognition of reality and the other’s humanity, is not totally neutral from an ethical point of view. The deepest form of evil, in her opinion, is the total inability to recognize humanity [2001, 333-334].

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Nevertheless, I think that we should not too hastily throw out the hypothesis that, in its most intense forms at least, this openness to the other can contain a moment of “symbiotic” union, a union that would obviously remain temporary and in itself would not absorb the lengthy timespans of interpersonal practices. This momentary overcoming of the principium individuationis could happen both in the experience of compassion [Schopenhauer 1859, 402, 405], and in the more general experience of empathy [Pinotti 2010, 75], whose “etymology is a compound of én (in) and a derived form of pathos (affection). The German term Einfühlung repeats the Greek compound: Ein is a prefix meaning ‘in’ and a movement of penetration, immersion, or introduction from the ou tside to the inside (hinein)—although it can also allude to ‘one,’ unity, unification, or fusion of two in one—and Fühlung, from fühlen, to feel, means feeling. […] Thus in both cases—empatheia and Einfühlung—we have (1) the movement from the subject towards the other […] according to a dual, bipolar structure, and (2) the process of the cancellation of such alterity, dualism, or bipolarity” [Pinotti 2010, 93].

Literature Arendt, H. [1958], The Human Condition, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Arendt, H. [1993], “Introduction into Politics” in The Promise of Politics, edited and with an introduction by J. Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, 2005. Aristotle [1926], The Art of Rhetoric, edited by Jeffrey Henderson, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle [2016], Aristotle’s Politics. Writings from the Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Banks, Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bodei, R. [1995], Le forme del bello, Bologna: Il Mulino. Boella, L. [2006], Sentire l’altro. Conoscere e praticare l’empatia, Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Boella, L. [2012], Il coraggio dell’etica. Per una nuova immaginazione morale, Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Borgna, E. [2001, 1a ed. 1992], Malinconia, Milan: Feltrinelli. Calvino, I. [1972], Invisible Cities, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974. Curi, U. [2013], L’apparire del bello. Nascita di un’idea, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri. Eagleton, T. [2007], The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. [1984], Human Ethology, New Brunswick; London: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Fachinelli, E. [2009, 1st ed. 1989], La mente estatica, Milan: Adelphi. Foucault, M. [1981], “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, 10 and 16 October 1979, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/foucault81.pdf Foucault, M. [2004], Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France: 1977-78, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Freud, S. [1920], Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961. Freud, S. [1924], Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, edited by J. Strachey, New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966. Freud, S. [1929], Civilization and Its Discontents, edited by J. Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 1975. Gilligan, C. [1982], In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Habermas, J. [1981], The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87. Heidegger, M. [1927], Being and Time, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Heidegger, M. [1943], “On the Essence of Truth”, in Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, M. [1947], “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, in Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, M. [1950], “The Age of the World Picture”, in Off the Beaten Track, edited by J. Young and K. Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, M. [1959], Discourse on Thinking. A Translation of Gelassenheit, introduction by J.M. Anderson, New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Heidegger, M. [1961], Nietzsche, vols. I and II, vols. III and IV, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991. Heidegger, M. [1961a], The End of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hillesum, E. [1985], An Interrupted Life. The Diaries of Etty Hillesbum 1941-43, New York: Washington Square Press. Laing, R. D. [1976], The Facts of Life, New York: Pantheon Books. Lévinas, E. [1978, 1st ed. 1974], Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Lorenz, K. [1983], The Waning of Humaneness, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987 Mann, T. [1924] The Magic Mountain, New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Mortari, L. [2015], Filosofia della cura, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore. Nussbaum, M. C. [2001], Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paul [1988, 1st ed. 1976], Letter to the Romans, in Good News Bible, Swindon, Bible Society Collins. Pinotti, A. [2010], “Empathy” in Sepp H., Embree L. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, vol 59. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 93-98. “Empatia: un termine equivoco e molto equivocato”, in Discipline filosofiche, anno XII, 2, pp. 63-84. Pinotti, A. [2011], Empatia. Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano, Rome-Bari, Laterza. Plato [2017], Phaedrus, in Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus, edited by Jeffrey Henderson, Cambridge (MA); London: Harvard University Press.

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Pulcini, E. [2009], Care of the World. Fear, Responsibility and Justice in the Global Age, Dordrecht: Springer 2013. Pulcini, E. [2016], “What Emotions Motivate Care?”, in Emotion Review, January, pp. 1-8. Schopenhauer, A. [1859], The World as Will and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Sorrentino, V. [2015], Cupio dissolvi. Senso della vita e abbandono (impressioni), Rome, Armando [French translation: Eloge de l’abandon ou le sens de la vie, Le Pommier, Paris 2016]. Stein, E. [1917], On the Problem of Empathy, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989. Taylor, C. [1989], Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Taylor, C. [1991], The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1992. Tronto, J. C. [1993], Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York, London: Routledge, 1994. White, J. A. and Tronto, J. C. [2004], “Political Practices of Care: Needs and Rights”, in Ratio Juris, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 425-453. Winnicott, D. W. [1988], Human Nature, New York: Schocken Books.

12. Emerging emotions and empathy maps amongst migrant care workers in three cities in central Italy Rossana Trifiletti

Foreword In a book that has brought the attention of social researchers back to the topic of paid domestic work and subsequently became a minor classic, Bridget Anderson described the domestic work of migrants from poor countries as potentially limitless work—a type of work that could extend well beyond the tasks defined by the ILO and that would include much care work [2000, p. 15; cf. Colombo 2007]. As much research has underscored since then, it is evident that one would be hard pressed to keep housework and care work neatly separate [Graham 1991; Nakano Glenn 1992; Andall 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Folbre 2008; Lutz 2008]. This is not only due to the fact that paid care work always (if to varying degrees) entails a certain component of housework, but also because the two types of activity are increasingly mixed in the life narratives of female migrants to the first world (just as they are in the unpaid domestic work of women in general). With the numerical increase in the migration of those who wish to take advantage of this market niche of “subaltern integration” [Ambrosini 2001; 2005], the presence of migrant care workers became part of our everyday life. And yet, paradoxically, this work sphere has not been ‘regulated’ by particular emotional scripts, or socially predefined emotional repertoires [Hochschild 1983]. We have here a rapidly-changing social scene (whose depth of change is only compounded by our recent economic crisis). And it is one that has significant emotional implications for care practices—caught as they are between the imperatives of

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intimacy and marketization [Hochschild 2012], between the logics of personal bonds and of economic transactions [Zelizer 2005; 2010]. Moreover, as Pascale Molinier has correctly observed, when “put to the test” of work, care entails a process of subjectivization that comes about in a context of marked interdependence with other subjects on the scene [2005]; it construes itself within “care practices and thus within a concrete moral context, framed, as it were, within social relations” [Martin 2008,1 30]. What lies before our eyes is thus evidently characterized by a great complexity.

The survey In this chapter I will describe the situation of migrant care workers by discussing the findings I obtained through a sociological research project on the care work performed by foreign-born family assistants in three medium-sized cities in Tuscany. This research was anchored in a gender approach; this methodological choice seemed warranted for the following reasons: first, because of the evident feminisation of migratory flows in recent years; and second, in light of the social construction of care work as a profession for women in the domain of “doing gender’’ [West and Zimmermann 1987]. The approach adopted here focuses on the experience of everyday life, and takes its distance from any feminine essentialism such as that found in Noddings [1984]. My research does not tackle the question of care and emotions by looking at what affective phenomena might inform the motivations for caring [Pulcini 2015]. It rather approaches the question from its opposite end: namely, by looking at the effect that the actual experience of caring work for fragile elderly people seems to have on migrant workers selected among some of the typical provenances,2 particularly under certain difficult economic circumstances—today, in Tuscany, in economic crisis. From this latter approach, the feelings and emotions follow the relationship and then give it substance, as Elena Pulcini has also observed. One could argue that one finds here—in both approaches to the issue of emotions in care—a good testimony of the twofold heuristic force of the term ‘care’ itself, which is at once a moral attitude and a social practice [Garrau and Le Goff 2012].

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In its closely circumscribed specificity, the case considered below seems significant for its constructionist gender approach, but also for the complex interdisciplinary issues it touches on (issues central to various debates within care scholarship). Below, I will attempt to explain more clearly in what sense it relates to these interdisciplinary debates; nevertheless, I do not wish to overstate the scope of my research findings. My material, drawn from fieldwork, basically consists in the identitarian narratives of my interviewees—“narratives of recognition”, as Eva Illouz [2007, 4] put it. They are narratives based on the display of recurrent emotions to use Goffman’s terminology. These recurrent emotions are almost always at the heart of the construction process of relations of interdependence, which in turn come about within the broader framework of the social construction of gender and its representation. In the biographical interviews we collected, one finds narratives of the self that accord great importance to the moral and emotional dimensions involved in the process of asserting identity, but show characteristic recurrences in the use of sentimental symbologies, indicative of certain precise regularities in underlying social practices. These regularities take on the shape of “anchoring practices” [Swidler 2001; 1986]— of cultural rationales closely bound up with action, bound up with discursive systems which, while describing them, contribute both to structuring them and making them socially acceptable (similarly to Bourdieu’s thesis on habitus as at once structured/structuring). This is why it is possible to use a reconstruction of the emotional labour performed by a professional group to better grasp the organisational structure of the service work concerned. As such, our research follows in the footsteps of Arlie Hochschild’s research with flight attendants, by looking closely at the rules and guidelines that inform the type and the extent of the emotions that are deemed appropriate in a particular work context [Wharton 2009].

The features of the specific context studied Largely the result of the economic crisis, of changes in migratory flows and of the reduced demands placed on the market by Italian

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households, we are now observing a transformation in the narratives of the women (and the men) who take on caring work. This transformation is closely bound up with the change in their actual practices: these care workers make use of emotional scripts and repertoires behind which there seems to be greater subjective agency and personal autonomy, suggesting a transformation of the feeling rules [Hochschild 1979] consolidated in this field of social relations. There has been a convergence between the research done on gender in care attitudes (solid scholarly contributions now exist on the topic— an area where philosophy and sociology meet) and gender and migratory studies. Many studies are now being conducted on a transnational and circular basis level from a gender perspective, research that contradicts the so-called feminisation of migration thesis [Tienda and Booth 1981; Morokvasic 1984; Sassen 1984; 2014; Morokvasic et al 2003; Anthias and Lazaridis, 2000; Caterino and Morokvasic 2005; Kofman 1999; Kofman and Ranghuram 2015; Trifiletti 2007; Vianello 2014; Abbatecola and Bimbi 2015]. Many authors, indeed, have pointed to the fictitious nature of the “discovery” that women now often constitute the majority in economic migratory flows (women probably were major players in migration before, but had remained invisible to the eyes of researchers). In many ways, therefore, recent research is largely about giving a voice to subjects that were muted and had long been, sociologically speaking, almost invisible. And this is partially my aim in what follows. I am, like other scholars, trying to find a way out of the “major narratives” on migration, which have often confined research within pre-structured areas of scholarly attention. In our subfield, the recurrent “plot” was one of the “global chains of care”, which tended to describe the migrants as victims of globalisation, with small children left behind. These victims were painted as suffering deeply from their lengthy absence from their homes in remote places, with apparently disastrous consequences for the family and even an inevitable pattern of deviance for children concerned [Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2005]. This was the predominant narrative in the Italian literature, especially the grey literature, and in research at the local level. People failed to consider that this narrative had been

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created for migratory flows [Isaksen et al. 2008] that differed from those now chiefly feeding migration to Italy—namely, circular and shortrange migrations [Triandafillydou 2013]. Building on the sociological tradition (from Simmel to Elias and Goffman), when I address the emotions involved in care work, or rather, when I come upon them emerging spontaneously in the narratives collected, I do so seeking situational indicators. Namely, the indicators of the positions various subjectivities take through emotional labour [Hochschild 1983; 2012], within the contexts of the interaction between clients and care workers. From my point of view, this brings together fruitfully micro and macro registers [Collins 1981] and it gives us the possibility to illuminate significant aspects of the gender order [Pfau Effinger 2004; 2008], in a sense very close to what Goffman originally referred to as the Arrangement between the sexes [1977]. A point I will be making is that, in the interactional context of care work, the actual practices of careworkers may well benefit from the suggestions emerging from this reframing (see below, section 5), for we are dealing with a particularly clear case of waste of emotional energy [Collins 2004] as well as of cultural and social capital—as is more generally observed in studies on the new waves of migration.

Care-workers: the transformations of the career As noted above, various changes in caregiving practices (which are connected to a transformation in the narratives of recognition) also derive, paradoxically, from the economic crisis and its persistence in Italy. In a 2007 IREF report, the proportion of caregivers working for more than one client was already recorded, estimated at about 9% of the total [2007, 28],3 but today that proportion is probably much higher,4 due to the reduced demands of households due to the successive economic crises. The years of economic downturn have seen a marked deterioration in the economic treatment of care workers. Simultaneously, middle-class families have been facing increasing difficulties and the costs to regularise employment have also risen together (with the introduction of social security measures such as the Social Insurance Provision for Employment (the ASPI, which subsequently became the

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NASPI). All this has increased pressure on workers, who may remain unemployed for longer periods and ultimately be forced to accept the evermore inevitable conditions of illegal employment, or semi-legal work agreements. Workers may also have to settle for far fewer hours than before, with evident strain on the workers’ caring self [Brown and Korczynski 2015]. Partially as a result, there has been a change in families’ evaluation of the needs of their elderly, and employment relations between families and caregivers have become increasingly complex, triangulated and professional [Triandafillydou and Marchetti 2015]. There is an increasing tendency (especially in families that have trustful relations with care assistants), to entrust fragile care receivers to—as it were—the entrepreneurial conscience of the caregivers who, no longer regularly employed nor living in with the families, manage to get their care work done in fewer hours and take on more care work (or add domestic work to it more often) [cf. Castagnone et al. 2007, p. 23; Cingolani 2009, p. 126; Pasquinelli and Rusmini 2008, p. 11]. Thus we no longer have the straightforward work progression we had in the past when, proportionately with the length of migrant care workers’ residence in Italy, there was a corresponding decreasing share of family assistants living in with the care-receivers [CNEL 2003, p. 29]. This linear ‘career’ story was interpreted at the time as describing a story of relative emancipation/ integration of the immigrant caregivers, since the latter eventually came to obtain a contract, a residence permit and were able to have their own homes, which opened up the possibility of family reunification and of self-managed domestic work for clients on an hourly basis [Campani 1989; Fullin and Vercelloni 2009; Caponio 2009; Tronto 2011]. Today a careworker’s “career” lies essentially in the capacity to build up a wide range of possible jobs and thus earn more—necessitating a far greater capacity to exploit to the maximum the opportunities arising here and there, regardless of the stability of the job and of the aspiration to have a home of one’s own. Rather, it is looked at in terms of maximising the utility of their time (perceived as limited between two journeys to one’s country of origin). This entails a new and indeed asserted professional capacity, taking the practical form of work well

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done with tangible results in the feeling tone guaranteed for all the individual cared for. And indeed, the interviewees often show an extraordinary flair for organisation, initiative and for a sensitive handling of personalised relations with a number of clients—what Collins might describe as indicative of a remarkable emotional energy deriving from the repetition of ritual micro-interactions [1981]: I slept at home in the night. I got up at 6, 6.30 and went to … I saw if he’d got up and got the breakfast ready and everything else, because the woman who did nights would be going away. If he’d had breakfast and all that, then off I would go telling him [the care recipient]: “Daddy, drink a bit more and I’ll be back in two hours”. I left breakfast on the table for him and all that. Like that. And he got up and ate it all and at 9 o’clock I went to the other. From 9 o’clock to 1 o’clock. Yes, I fed him, and then came back to daddy. Because in the morning by 9 o’clock I’d already prepared something. So I left the sauce ready and other little titbits. And that’s it, at half past midday, after I came home and fed him. Afterwards I tidied up and cleaned the house, and then took him out and all that. At half past five or 6 o’clock I left him at home. […] I’ve never been without [work]. I don’t mean to be mean, speaking for people who haven’t got it. But I’ve always been like that, I’ve always worked. […] And when I had school, two years […] I would go to this mother [care recipient] where I go now, I went from 9 o’clock to midday. Then I went to school from midday till half past two. At 3 o’clock and went back to the mother until 4 o’clock. And then, in the summer with the good weather I also did [cleaning] an apartment from 4 to 6, the ones where I have the keys. (8_Roman_fi) In the morning I’d go to this old lady in the city centre. On the bridge there was an old lady I got her up in the morning, dressed her, fed her and they took her away because she was very big … The social worker took her away on a stretcher and her son stayed at home. […] Yes, this old lady went to the day centre because her son was living at home but couldn’t manage. At 9.10 I went up to the bridge and got the number 10, the tram, and arrived at Sar. From Sar. at 2 o’clock I got off and took the 2.15 here on the bridge and I went to Ser. I got off at Ser., stayed here until half past four when the old lady got back from the day centre, I changed her, prepared a little meal and put her to bed. So there really is a lot of work! (18_Roman_si)

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The migrants’ changed social practices now appear to structure a broader scope for agency and initiative, a different habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms): a set of generative aptitudes that ensure “the active presence of past experiences … in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action” [Bourdieu 1980, 91]—an “incorporation of objective necessity” [1987, 21]. This attitude of agency is associated with a particular professional pride. It is a pride that manifests itself in a promotional conception that one is taking care of the dependent person not solely in the limited sense of protecting their residual capacities, but in the sense of “compensating” or supplementing them—with an attitude that goes well beyond empathy and sympathy for their dependence. Many, indeed, make a point of pride the fact that they see themselves as going beyond the range of activities and tasks expected by the family members. These care recipients are “restored” as human beings, as in the case of this young disabled person mentioned here (and of many elderly people in other interviews): Interviewer: What, then, does it mean for you to take care of the person who was in a difficult situation? 2_peru_fi: to begin with, her dignity as a person, because it’s important to consider it, the person deserves a certain dignity, if you think of this poor girl, shut in with her elderly parents who never took her anywhere, shut in, taking medicine, she had little self-respect, we who live with these people must make a change, buck these people up, and it’s better for us, too […] my sister would sometimes criticise me, and she said to me “why do you take her out and about?” Interviewer: And you weren’t afraid? 2_peru_fi: I took her by the hand, I always kept an eye on her [….] sometimes she’d get up to all sorts of things, (2_peru_fi).

In the terms recently introduced by Arlie Hochschild, we thus observe a shift in the borders of the empathy map [2013] which the caregiver encounters between the dependent person, their relatives (often accused of being cold) and the previous family assistants, with evident positive benefits on the caregivers’ identity affirmation and their confidence in their professional qualities.

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The dualization in social and working conditions This change in typical career paths seems to be widening the dualization already existing, resulting from the differences in the care workers’ cultural capital. Migrants with lesser cultural capital, which are often those most recently arrived (and as such, have also less well-established relations with Italian families), risk specialising working chiefly as temporary replacements with frequent turn-over. Many of these little shortterm jobs do not lead to stable positions or relations, continually interrupted as they are by the return of the original caregiver they had replaced or the death of the person assisted. For these workers, a job living in is no longer taken for granted as a starting point (as it often used to be in the past). Rather, a living-in position is conceived of as an improvement to aspire to—something often pursued for a long time and something that might distinguish their work from that of a servant [Carchedi et al. 2003]. But with the increased fragmentation of the care job market, there is not much room for empowering the person assisted. It often entails taking on persons in the most vulnerable states (their families possibly beginning to lose interest in them) and with great pressures put upon them for extreme and rapid adaptability: ... then I go to a house, there’s everything to do. I’ve realised that someone who takes on a steady job for an elderly person, you need to know everything. Why not… and then you get used to it, in that house. I don’t make any rules. You get accustomed, with the rules. Yes. And… it depends because I’ve worked in a lot of homes and I’ve seen how the work is done, one way here, another way in another home. Different ways of cooking, too. And different ways of treating ailing people. (19_roman_fi) I’d already had that experience… they called me for a week, a boy, to substitute. A steady job and I went to do it…and the result was that I finished and the day after he died. He must’ve died because he was one of those they’d already given a short time to live […] And from one day to the next he got quite worse and hadn’t … hadn’t much longer. (21_M_peru_pt)

In these cases of short-term care work, often with great emotional involvement, the interviewees have often talked to us about the “mal d’Italia” (the Italy sickness’)—namely, a serious depression, vividly described by one worker:

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the doctor advised me not to work with detergents and… I went to do care work, six months I did, then I went back home because… it’s difficult, this, doing care work [….] Because I did care work in 2005, I’d already had two years being here.. [….] from.. from anothers I knew this work more or less what… no it isn’t hard work physically, it’s terrible hard work mentally and.. lady where I worked she had Parkinson, it was a lovely family, really, totally good people and… no, I don’t know… unique people I think are like that, how fond of me they were! No problem if I wanted to go out, if I didn’t want… everything, what they didn’t ask… it was all for them, her[…] this lady she was so fond of me but being shut in, in the house, I’m afraid it’s also a matter of character of… of people. After four months and there I got real depression, because the…These sick people, no? old people, they ask.. I don’t know, for me it felt like they are sucking up your energy. (24_moldo_si) Even if nobody behaves badly with you. Nobody tells you stay shut in the house. No, they tell you go ten minutes, go half an hour, have a walk. But you don’t feel free. You know that your work […] It’s the responsibility! and most come from the psychiatrist when they come back home. Quite soon, after a couple of months. […]. When they leave little children, for this I say I don’t agree. The children, there are so many cases of suicides of children in Romania. The children commit suicide yes. Because they can’t put up with it anymore, being without mummy, without daddy. Yes. And in Ukraine they actually recognised as sickness that’s called the Italy syndrome! (5_roman_pt)

Given the far heavier emotional labour for these less privileged caregivers and, moreover, without hopeful prospects, it is perfectly understandable that they are far more exposed to emotional disturbances, to following paths with heavier tolls at the personal level and with greater risk of lapsing into malaise and depression. This might in fact be pivotal to understanding the dark side of care—for instance, these socalled “inexplicable” episodes of violence that occur from time to time in this difficult environment and to which the media dedicate ample space. Here it is a matter of care work almost always devoid of the fourth phase of ‘responsiveness’ theorised by Joan Tronto [1993].5 And it is this fourth, last phase of care that alone can close the circle of invisible gifts rendered within society. It could be regarded also, in a certain sense, as the “power of the poor” [Chanial 2012]. It is certainly

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worth examining further whether a widening of the difference between more or less privileged care workers’ groups has occurred. And here we must bear in mind the central lesson of care ethicists who, in a great many contributions, have underscored the vulnerability of all as an inevitable aspect of the common human condition [Paperman 2005]. Doubtless, in the care work of the type we are discussing here, where vulnerability becomes a sheer burden (given the insufficient time or resources on migrant care workers’ part to metabolise it), a detailed consideration of the emotional aspects of care work is crucial and particularly necessary for assessing the dualization between care workers—between the more or less disadvantaged. This seems to me an improvement over former scholarship that was devoted to social groups, which often confined itself to identifying divergences between optimistic and pessimistic attitudes directly associated with social status [Ridgeway and Johnson 1990].

Gender differences between care workers The gender differences only partially overlap with the polarization just described, since our male interviewees—a small but more homogeneous sample of subjects that tend to be dedicated exclusively to care work (as opposed to multi-tasking, or juggling several types of occupation). These male workers more often work in short-term jobs and substitutions, and appear to uphold a different career ideal, in contrast with the women in the disadvantaged group. They seem to be more drawn towards training and professionalization; and more likely to define care work as a real profession, despite having to some extent formulated a non-hegemonic code of masculinity [Connell 2006]. If we have here the case of a care-worker particularly eager to seize every possible opportunity that might widen his horizon, the following quotation does effectively sum up the pragmatic attitude of many of the males interviewed: Interviewer: Why do you think you will find a better job after school? 20_M_roman_fi Better. Or even the same. But this school gives me security. In relation to a family, even an elderly woman. Even a self-sufficient

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elderly woman. When you know you have the school for this to assist, he, too, with you behaves in another … he, too, has security! Interviewer: So you’re not thinking of working in an Home for old people ? 20_M_roman_fi I’m old to work in a Home. I’m old. It’s harder. What I want, after finish this school of ADB I’ve heard there’s also OSS to do for health and for hospital. I’ll see it can be done. I had Italian classmates and Romanian, too.

It is also interesting to observe that the male care-workers, who evidently need not defend themselves against the implications of traditional female gender roles, are generally more explicit about the physical aspects associated with disgust, with the dirty work done [Twigg 2000]. They accept with seemingly no particular problems to handle the bodies of the care-receivers, and have no qualms about describing this in the interview. Here, however, emerges a significant difference. The male caregivers never discuss and tend to avoid going in for physical closeness, such as cuddling and comforting the person assisted, as is widely practised amongst their female colleagues: I always get attached and do it gladly, heart and soul! I get attached to people, even when I see they’re in difficulty and I see …they’re good deep down. You see someone who’s good deep down. I recognise this at once. […] Yes. And even if a bit naughty, I know how to make them be good. Because I talk to them well, treat them well. Cosset them, too. (6_roman_pt) [the dominant feeling of care workers?] Tenderness, because I see they are very tender with the elderly, they show them fondness, pamper them, fond as if it were their grandpa (2_peru_fi) so… I said “God give me the strength to do for other people, because I know that my relations were in need, and if they haven’t been able to do it for others who are in need. I feel I do it with my heart, so open. […] The most important thing is to have a heart, particularly in this work. First thing. Because if you do it just for money… What does it take… To get through those eight hours, you’ll never do it, never, never. Time never passes for you. If you put your heart into it… as if it were your, your mum, you… you’re glad to do it and time flies, right? (8_roman_pt)

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This gender difference is pronounced. It is striking because while in terms of displays of family feeling there is no great difference, and male family assistants are also accustomed to calling the people they assist ‘daddy’ or ‘grandpa’, stressing closeness and family feeling [cf. Trifiletti 2008], the tone male workers take is far more explicitly standardised. Here we seem to have an example of the generally recognised difference between surface acting, in this case common to men and women (a labour on the emotions that produces public displays in response to expectations in a particular situation) and deep acting [Hochschild 1983], an endeavour attested more frequently amongst the women in our sample (a type of acting that shows a readiness to work on one’s inner feelings, shifting the borders of one’s empathy maps [Hochschild 2013]). Similarly, these female workers are more likely to ask for and expect the support of others in managing these emotions [Thoits 1989]. In other words, this suggests gender differences in the management of emotions that go beyond Kemper’s observations on power disparity [1978] or Hochschild’s on the cultural codes of masculinity and femininity [Simon and Nath 2004]. What, however, is most striking is the fact that in their conscious practices, female family assistants use precisely the distinction long formulated in feminist theory between non-exploitative care (which responds to the needs of people who could not manage alone) and ‘servicing work’ (for people who would be perfectly capable of getting along by themselves [Waerness 1984; Bubeck 1995]). Indeed, these workers see their practices as conforming to the former type of work and they refuse to recognise themselves in the latter type: I went to work, they asked me to go to an office, a lawyers’ office to do the cleaning, four hours. Every Saturday afternoon, no? When I saw how untidy it was after four or five young women, I said no. I don’t mind an 80-year-old woman who pees in her pants, but I’m not going to clean for these! (8_roman_pt )

Nothing like this emerged in the case of the male care workers, who in fact have no difficulty in accepting a certain ‘contamination’ between care work and typically female domestic/service chores [cf.

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Ambrosini and Beccalli 2005; Scrinzi 2005; Bartolomei 2010; Kilkey 2010] if there are good economic reasons. Or, alternatively, if these male workers regard it as something they have to go through to avoid discrimination when applying for work, for which their female colleagues are often preferred. Surely such service tasks are almost always taken for granted in care agreements. But the male care workers have shown far less inclination to look for second jobs in domestic work, unless it is a matter of doing repairs or at any rate involves some technical aspects.

Managing decline and death Over and above these gender differences between female and male care workers, which may at least to some extent be interpreted in terms of the concept of “tokenism” for the latter [Moss Kanter 1977; Yoder 1991], it seems to me that many aspects of the “strange” emotional closeness that emerged between the professional pride experienced by female and male care workers, enjoying some continuity and the lapse into depression of the underprivileged, are also to be attributed to a brutal aspect insufficiently discussed in the “migrant-in-the-family” model adopted in Italy [Bettio et al. 2006; Da Roit et al. 2013]. We tend to assign and delegate to care workers the two areas of our lives that are, at the emotional level, the saddest and most painful practices: managing the death of our dear ones and the care work that precedes it, during their visibly distressing decline. In both areas what comes through in their accounts is a great ability to normalize through “the reflexive act of giving names to emotions in order to manage them, gives them an ontology” [Illouz, 2007, 33]. All this points to the structuring capacity of recursive social practices and to the specificity of this context which drives subjects to seek ontological security—to use the terms of Giddens [1990]. All the subjects involved in our research (regardless of the distinctions discussed above) take a realistic approach to the eventuality of the death of the care-receiver—a death that is always there in their experience, repeated, inevitable. It is, moreover, a death that means the sudden loss of a job and of a home. However, in their acceptance to go

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through this suffering together with the elderly’s relatives, there is not a trace of cynicism. These workers seem to be able to take it on not in a coldly professional way, but with a certain authenticity, which must surely have to do with having previously had to reconstruct meaningful relationships with the assisted person, who is often the only human or re-humanisable person on the scene. And in fact, in our small sample, the case has quite often arisen of families of the deceased allowing the caregivers to stay on longer, after having witnessed their genuine involvement. I’ve changed so many jobs. First because [..] I worked with a really fine old man. Then seeing they paid, in others, they offered me much more,[…] I changed job. Then the old man died, because that person was very ill. Over 90 years old. Most are over 90… the contract doesn’t finish… they die. I know a lot of people who had a week, a fortnight, a month, six months. They die. (33_peru_si)

Living intensely through the decline and death of an assisted person can be very devastating, especially if a meaningful rapport had previously been established, as attested by the way these two interviewees have formulated things: Interviewer: And so he went through it all? Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I’ve seen it all, I’ve died ….I’ve already seen it… Because [pause] the night before, she had… she had something again […] , because she had this decompensation …. So water had already got in her lung, and all these things. Her heart couldn’t keep going. She died from heart failure. […] The night before her daughter had come, too, grandchildren, they all came, she laughed, she didn’t speak, but at least you could see that … she was happy and I fed because she ate very little, I gave her milky coffee with biscuits, I don’t remember, she ate something and she said to me… after eating, because I called her little mouse, after eating the things she said! And then round about 10 o’clock I heard something go wrong, she began to have trouble breathing. Panting terribly, she was! I waited and I said it might all go away. I see it doesn’t go away, called the daughter, I only call the daughter when I see that something … She came and stayed until midnight, but always the same conditions. She died the morning after, about 11 o’clock or 10 I don’t remember. I had a terrible time all night long, with this panting and everything. (1_ucra_pt)

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I can tell you I’ve found very good people who treated me well. Most of all the children of the old people. Signora E. to begin with I can tell you she did all this for me […]. Then she didn’t want me to leave her alone. So when she died, because I had a ticket to go to my country. I remember supposed to go on 21 March 2011. And she said to me don’t leave me, don’t leave me. And she died on 11 March. And when she died I said to her: “look what you said to me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me! Who’s leaving who? It’s not that I said it … really I felt bad, because I’d already changed the ticket two times. I wanted to go Christmas and I didn’t go, ’cause the lady said don’t leave me. And she always asked me not to. (13_peru_fi)

Conclusion. Of care agreements and reciprocity, or the possibility that the circulation of care is akin to a common good. It is precisely what is not said about death that brings out strong tensions between caregivers and care-receivers’ relatives (e.g. care-workers thrown out of the house after the death and kept away from the funeral, or, by contrast, those who flee thanks to this). This underscores the fact that in reality the entire care agreement is based on something unspoken, something that is distinctly different for the two parties. Both sides involved in the agreement find something inappropriate in the mix of market criteria and of personal closeness considerations the other side has, but the mix differs on both two sides. The care-worker is aware of providing a service of (possible) considerable quality or, far more often, of providing a service that goes well beyond the terms of the contract. But the worker wishes to have this quality acknowledged and the rules of the market respected, while accepting provisionally and reluctantly the “semi-legality” [Ambrosini 2013] and temporary non-respect of rights pending the acquisition of a stay permit. The family, for its part, expects a labour of love, personalised and family-like, but when something goes wrong and relations breakdown (or prove less advantageous), it is the rules of the market that abruptly return with explicit flatly utilitarian motivation—“I pay you for this”. Nonetheless, upon a close consideration of the cases of lasting relations of reciprocity, it appears that when the care agreement is more

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transparent, we find relations taking on a more expansive scope. Quite significantly, the caregiver’s extra personal commitment is often recognised and rewarded not by case at the level of family gratuity and giving (e.g. a home is made available to the caregiver until a new job is found, an empty family lodging is offered free of charge or with payment only of the costs, support in medical or legal procedures is granted, the use of a the assisted person’s home for the purpose of family reunification or for hospitality purposes during holidays is offered, etc.). This characteristic of productivity of care (Pratesi 2011) seems to confirm the need—pointed out in a recent contribution by Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla—to rethink transnational care. To rethink it no longer as something depriving or robbing the developing countries of care, but as a “circulation of care which includes multidirectional exchanges between genders and generations” [2014, 4]. Of course these exchanges can give rise to conflicts and a great many disadvantages intersecting on either side, but they can also lead to positive new bonds of reciprocity and obligation. Moreover, the dichotomisation described above clearly has to do also with the possibility (granted or denied to care-workers) to “dis-embed, translocate and re-embed emotions” [Baldassar and Boccagni 2015, 75] between their country and Italy, between Italian care practices and their own, if this takes place with the necessary time, understanding and recognition. If care can indeed circulate, it can also open out beyond the private limits of the contract, and all the more so, I believe, when there is a more transparent, a clearer care agreement between parties. In these cases, the agreement could emerge and constitute, basically, a public good—as indeed many feminist economists have long been calling for [England 2005; Folbre 1994; 2001]. It could perhaps, even, constitute a common good, as some initial community experiences guaranteed by the presence of public bodies seem to foreshadow (condominium caregiver, public home of care-workers). This public presence may in fact contribute to a greater clarity in the care agreement and possibly also to the process of inclusion in the public sphere—or phrased differently, of “emerging in visibility and growing in generality”, as most social policies have come about in the course of history [De Leonardis

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2006, 29]. Getting over the problems of the unspoken could help both families and family assistants to formulate their expectations more clearly. It could also help us formulate clearer objectives for public/state intervention which could be re-envisioned as providing a kind of ‘soft tutelage’ of relationships, and as constructing forms of reciprocal recognition which, once shared, enter into the public sphere, helped by emotional experiences’ tendency to propagate [Rimé 2008]. In turn, this would contribute to endowing everyday practices with a certain structure and routine, making the shared understanding and its limits clearer. I would like to end by stressing that public involvement is indispensable, in any case, to safeguard the “reasonable folly” [Cassano 2004] of long-term care, (re)conceived as an emerging common good rather than simply as an erosion of the common goods of the developing world.

Notes 1

Our translation from French. These workers were selected because they were seen as representative of typical countries of origin patterns. This study discusses 49 narrative interviews with Romanian, Ukrainian, Moldavian and Peruvian care workers, data gathered in 2012/2014 in three Tuscan cities – Florence, Pistoia and Siena, on the occasion of the PRIN 2009 project “Le condizioni del riconoscimento: genere migrazioni e spazi sociali” (The conditions of recognition: gender migration and social spaces). 3 A very close figure of 7.7% of non live-in care migrants who worked up to 11-13 hours had been ascertained in a study in Lombardy; for these workers, it was a matter of working for one and the same family [Mesini et al. 2006]. 4 Although not exactly comparable, an IRES research on domestic work in Lombardy ascertained 21% of domestic workers on hourly bases taking care (even though to a limited extent) of elderly or disabled persons: Colombo 2007, p. 223 table 6. 5 Regardless, I take it, whether on the part of the care recipient or of the caregivers. 2

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Contributors Monika Betzler works at the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and the Study of Religion, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and holds the Chair for Practical Philosophy and Ethics. Monika is speaker of the Munich Center of Ethics and a member of the Swiss National Ethics Committee. She does research in Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics and Applied Philosophy. She is currently interested in themes such as the ethics of relationships, autonomy, empathy, weakness of will and other forms of practical irrationality, theories of normativity and practical reasoning, and the normative significance of personal projects. She has published papers in a variety of journals, such as Dialectica, Inquiry, Social Theory and Practice, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, etc. She is currently completing a book manuscript on “Why Personal Projects Matter”. Caterina Botti is associate professor of moral philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), where she runs courses on bioethics, and on feminist philosophy and gender studies. Her main fields of research are moral philosophy, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy. Active in the Italian feminist movement, she also writes in magazines and blogs. Recent scientific publications include an overall reconsideration of care ethics in light of third wave feminism (Feminine Virtues or Feminist Virtues, Ethics & Politics, 2015 and the volume Cura e differenza. Ripensare l’etica, Milan, 2018), several papers and a volume offering a reconsideration of bioethical issues in light of care ethics approaches (the volume Prospettive femministe. Morale, bioetica e vita quotidiana, Milan, 2014), and a number of papers on sentimentalism and David Hume’s moral philosophy. She has also been interested in the problem of cultural differences (Etiche della diversità culturale, editor, Florence, 2013). She is currently working on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. Sophie Bourgault is associate professor of political theory at the University of Ottawa (Canada). Current research interests gravitate around

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the ethics/politics of care and of hospitality, the political thought of Simone Weil, disability studies, and feminist theory. Recent publications include an article on care and listening as embodied practices (in Ethics & Politics 2016), one on bureaucratic organizations and care ethics (European Journal of Women’s Studies 2016) and a piece on care ethics, needs and the capabilities approach (in Praxis der Achtsamkeit, 2016). She is also the co-editor of Le care: Éthique féministe actuelle (2015) and co-editor of a special issue on gender, work and justice (Politique et Sociétés 2016). She is a Research Director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM) at the University of Ottawa, and the Vice-President of the American Simone Weil Society. Fabienne Brugère is Professor of Philosophy of Art at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She is a director of the philosophy research team LLCP (Laboratoire des logiques contemporaines de la philosophie). She is the editor of the « Diagnostics » series published by Bord de l’eau (with Guillaume le Blanc) and the « Perspectives du care » series by ENS Publishing (with Claude Gautier). Brugère is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Esprit. She was an invited professor at the Universities of Hamburg, München and Laval. Her main research interests are the philosophy of art, as well as ethical and political philosophy. She has published many books : Le sexe de la sollicitude (Seuil, 2008); Philosophie de l’art (PUF, 2010); L’éthique du care (PUF, 2011; translated in Japanese and English); Faut-il se révolter ? (Bayard, 2012); Dictionnaire politique à l’usage des gouvernés (Bayard, 2012; with Guillaume le Blanc); La politique de l’individu (Seuil/La République des idées; translated in Japanese). She has directed or co-directed books on Spinoza, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, liberalism and the work of art. With Guillaume le Blanc, she has just published La fin de l’hospitalité, Flammarion, 2017. Guido Cusinato is associate professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Verona. His current research interests are focused on emotional sharing and intercorporeal expressivity. To develop a theory of

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personal singularity he draws on phenomenologies of emotions, phenomenologies of the body, philosophical anthropology and phenomenological psychopathology. He conceives of philosophy as an exercise in transformation. Recent publications include Person und Selbsttranszendenz. Ekstase und Epoché als Individuationsprozesse bei Schelling und Scheler, Königshausen&Neumann, Würzburg 2012; Periagoge. Teoria della singolarità e filosofia come esercizio di trasformazione, QuiEdit, Verona 2014, 2nd edition 2017; Filosofia della nascita, a monographic number of the journal «Thaumàzein», 2017. He is also the Director of the on-line journal of philosophy Thaumàzein, and from 2013 to 2018 he was the President of the Max-Scheler-Gesellschaft (Cologne, Germany). Luigina Mortari is Dean of the Department of Human Sciences at the University of Verona, and is full professor in Epistemology of Qualitative Research. Her main research fields are: the philosophy of care; epistemology and qualitative methods in educational research; epistemology and qualitative methods in nursing research; evaluative research in educational contexts, and the practice of caring in educational settings. She is the author of several books and volumes on the philosophy of care and on care practices, for instance: Filosofia della cura/Philosophy of Care (Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 2105); Aver cura di sé/Caring for the Self (Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2009); La pratica dell’aver cura/The practice of Caring (Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2006). Her publications also include several articles and book chapters on ethics (ethics of fragility; ethics of delicacy); education (particularly environmental education) and phenomenology. Inge van Nistelrooij is assistant professor of care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies (Utrecht, The Netherlands). Her research and teaching focus upon the basic philosophical concepts of care ethics, like relational and embodied identity, affectivity, and (informal and professional) caring practices within institutions. She draws upon care-ethical pioneers (Ruddick, Gilligan, Noddings, Tronto, Walker, Kittay and Annelies van Heijst) and French phenomenology (Levinas, Marion, Housset, Ricoeur). Recent publications include her book Sacrifice. A

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Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice (Peeters Leuven, 2015), an article on mature care and self-sacrifice in care ethics (Nursing Ethics, 2016) and one on the role of family and partners in Shared Decision Making processes (Journal of Medical Ethics, 2017). She is co-author of publications on care ethics in relation to medical education (Nursing Ethics, 2017), on care ethics and emotions in turbulent caregiving practices (Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2017), on the development of care ethics as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry (Nursing Ethics, 2017) and on the concept of empathy in relation to care ethics (Nursing Ethics, 2018). She is co-founder of the research network ‘concerning maternity’; and coordinator of the Care Ethics Research Consortium. Patricia Paperman is a sociologist. She taught Sociology and Gender Studies at Paris VIII University and is a member of Laboratoire d’études de genre et sexualité (LEGS/CNRS). Together with Sandra Laugier and Pascale Molinier, she has published several books since 2005 to make care ethics known in France and to promote research in this field: Qu’est-ce que le care?, Payot, 2009; also, with Sandra Laugier (ed.) Le souci des autres. Ethique et Politique du care, Collection Raisons Pratiques, Editions de l’EHESS, 2005, 2011. Other publications deal with epistemological issue and feminist ethics of care—e.g. Care et sentiments, PUF, 2013. Her current research work focuses on emotions, disability and feminist disability studies. She recently conducted fieldwork in a women’s prison and is writing a book about gender and punishment. Elena Pulcini is Full Professor of Social Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Science, University of Florence. Her central research interests are the passions within the context of theories of modernity and individualism; the ethics of care; the theory of the gift; and theories of the female subject. Her current research revolves around the transformation of individuals and of social bonds in the global age, and on the possible emotional foundation of a new ethics, proposing a philosophy of care for the global age. Among her main recent works: Il potere di unire. Femminile, desiderio, cura (Bollati Borignhieri 2003); Modern

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Individualism and the Loss of the Social Bond, Lexington (Rowan & Littlefield, 2012); Care of the World. Fear, Responsibility and Justice in the Global Age (Springer, 2012) (First Prize of Philosophy “Viaggio a Siracusa” 2009 for Italian edition); Envie. Essai sur une passion triste (c/o Le Bord de l’eau), Paris, 2013. Vincenzo Sorrentino is associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Perugia (Italy). Current research interests gravitate around secrecy and lying in politics, the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, existence and politics, public ethics, and particularly the ethical issues concerning the migrant crisis. Recent publications include an article on Foucault (in Cités, 2017), one on Arendt (in Politica & Società, 2017), a text on transparency and secrecy (in La trasparenza e il segreto, ed. B. Bonato, 2017), and two books, one on secrecy and lying (Il potere invisibile. Il segreto e la menzogna nella politica contemporanea (2011, National Philosophy Award – Certaldo 2012), and one on existence and politics (Cupio dissolvi. Senso della vita e abbandono, 2015; French translation: Eloge de l’abandon ou le sens de la vie, 2016). He is also co-editor of the journal of political philosophy Cosmopolis (www.cosmopolisonline.it). Rossana Trifiletti is Associate professor of Social Policies and Family policies at the School of Political Science “Cesare Alfieri” and a member of the DSPS since its foundation in 1986. Her main research interests are in family sociology, gender studies, social policies, sociology of migrations, qualitative methodology. She also works from time to time on the history of sociological thought. She took part in several European crossnational research networks, Working and Mothering, Soccare: Workcare and Workcare Synergies. Recent publications include an article on worklife balance as part of the investment strategy (in Autonomie locali e servizi sociali, 2017), and one about the effect of the economic crisis on migrants (in Politiche sociali /Social policies, 2018). She was keynote speaker in 2012 at the European Parliament (about Lone Parent Families) and at the conference “Gendering the Flagships” aimed at gendering the Europe 2020 strategy.

INDEX Arendt, A. 9, 12, 214, 216 Aristotle 217 Augustine 128 Baier, A. 6-7, 41-42, 48, 63-64, 73, 81 Baldassar, L. 247 Barnard, A. 147, 149 Barnes, M. 26, 193 Boella, L. 12, 224 Boltanski, L. 29-30 Bourdieu, P. 233, 238 Butler, J. 7, 45, 86-87 Brugère, F. 192 Calvino, I. 223 Ciaunica, A. 153 Citton, Y. 192, 200 Collins, R. 237 Conradi, E. 3, 192 Dostoyevsky, F.

138

Edwardes, M. 162 Elias, N. 235 Elster, J. 16 Ferrante, E. 8, 97, 109 Frankfurt, H. G. 23 Foucault, M. 10, 86, 170, 172 Freud, S. 86 Garrau, M. 192-193 Giddens, A. 22, 244 Gilligan, C. 2, 7, 15, 23, 38, 40-41, 51, 62, 73-80, 85-86, 117, 119, 168 Goethe, W. 144 Goffman, E. 233, 235 Habermas, J. 214 Hamington, M. 8, 193 Hardt, M. 24 Heidegger, M. 10, 12, 167-168, 173, 212213, 217, 224

Held, V. 15, 78 Hénaff, M. 33 Hillesum, E. 219 Hobbes, T. 42-43 Hochschild, A. R. 26, 233, 238 Hoffman, M.L. 20 Honneth, A. 45 Housset, E. 9, 117-118, 127-134 Hume, D. 6-7, 16, 41, 48-49, 81-83 Husserl, E. 10, 179 Illouz, E. 233 Itard, J. 145 James, W. 191, 204 Jonas, H. 30 Kant, E. 37, 48, 128 Kittay, E. F. 7, 15, 26, 47, 65-69 Kohlberg, L. 62 Kymlicka, W. 61 Laugier, S. 191-192, 196, 204 Lecaldano, E. 82 Lévinas, E. 130, 173 Lewis, M. 159 Locke, J. 42, 213 Lorenz, K. 217 MacMahan J. 66 Merla, L. 247 Molinier, P. 232 Mortari, L. 226 Murdoch, I. 11, 193-194, 204 Negri, A. 24 Nietzsche, F. 9, 128, 200 Noddings, N. 8-9, 15, 50, 78, 117, 119, 121, 123-126, 131, 192-193, 198, 232 Nussbaum, M. 16, 25, 88, 200 Ogawa, Y. 44 Okin, S. M. 60-62

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Pettersen, T. 117-118 Pinel, P. 145 Pinotti, A. 12 Plato 170, 196, 217 Plotinus 174 Portmann, A. 142 Pulcini, E. 59, 178, 185, 232 Rancière, J. 198 Rawls, J. 49, 63-64 Rifkin, J. 30 Robinson, F. 28, 193 Robinson, M. 115, 133 Rousseau, J. J. 6, 21, 46, 143 Ruddick, S. 78, 192-193, 198 Scheler, M. 3, 9, 16, 138, 141, 152-153, 155-156 Schmid, H.B. 153 Searle, J. 152 Sevenhuijsen, S. 193 Simmel, G. 21, 235 Singer, P. 30, 66 Slote, M. 7, 8, 19, 73, 81 Sloterdijk, P. 148

Smith, A. 6, 16, 41, 47 Socrates 10, 170-172 Spinoza, B. 23, 141 Spivak, G. 7, 86, 89 Stein, E. 19, 169, 174 Tattersall, I. 3, 146-148 Taylor, C. 12 Tomasello, M. 3, 9, 141, 149-156 Tronto, J. 6, 15, 43, 45, 49, 51, 57, 59-60, 88, 111, 117, 119-120, 132, 192193, 198, 212 Van Heijst, A. 117-118, 120 Vosman, F. 3 Weil, S. 11, 176, 193-204 Winnicott, D. 39 Wittgenstein, L. 86 Zahavi, D. 153 Zambrano, M. 10-11, 138, 167, 175, 181, 186 Zielinski, A. 193