Philosophy of Care

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Retracing the philosophical discussions around careOur current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about the thing s as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the “creative class” over the rest of the population that is predominantly occupied by forms of care – medical care, child care, agriculture, industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, but here again our culture tends to thematize the bodies of desire and to ignore the bodies of care – ill bodies in need of self-care and social care.But the discussion of care has a long philosophical tradition. The book retraces some episodes of this tradition - beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander Bogdanov through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The central question discussed is: who should be the subject of care? Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the dominating mechanisms of control. Show more