Heidegger, Sorge, and Care

The word care works very hard for us in Modal Path Ethics.

It names what agents must sustain in order to remain available to structural harm, the disposition through which the field becomes perceptible as a field rather than as a backdrop to personal narrative, and the practice that separates agents who can respond to contraction from agents who cannot.

Given how central this concept is, readers with a philosophical background will likely hear it against the most famous use of the exact same term in twentieth century thought: Martin Heidegger's analysis of Sorge in Being and Time. The resonance is real enough to require a note to avoid a misread.

(Yes, I do appear to be betting a lot on people going to this website right after reading the book.)

That note will be kept relatively short, and may not even have been fully needed because the distance between the positions is actually smaller than the vocabulary overlap suggests.

Sorge in Being and Time

Heidegger's use of Sorge, usually translated as care, is a technical term within his fundamental ontology. In Being and Time, Sorge names the basic structure of Dasein, the kind of being that humans have. Dasein is not a thing or a subject in the ordinary sense but a way of being that is characterized by its own concern for its existence, its throwness into a world it did not choose, its projection toward possibilities it can take up, and its fallenness into the everyday absorption that obscures its own nature. Care, as Heidegger uses the term, is the unified structure that holds all these dimensions together. To be Dasein is itself to be concerned about one's own being in a specific existential sense that Heidegger spends many hundreds of pages analyzing in his own vocabulary.

Sorge is not an emotional state or a moral virtue. It is the ontological structure of a particular kind of being. All Dasein thus has care in Heidegger's sense, whether or not any particular person experiences themselves as actually caring about anything. A person who appears entirely indifferent to the world still always has Sorge as the structure of their existence, because Sorge just is what it means to be the kind of being whose existence is an issue for itself.

Many hundreds of pages.

What Care Means in Modal Path Ethics

The care that Modal Path Ethics describes is quite different from the Sorge of Dasein. Modal Path Ethic's care is a disposition that can be present or absent in an agent, that can be cultivated or eroded, and that distinguishes agents who remain in honest contact with structural harm from agents who do not. It is not the ontological structure of a kind of being called a Dasein, but the practical orientation that particular agents either maintain or fail to maintain in their actual engagement with extance.

Where Heidegger's Sorge is descriptive of what Dasein necessarily is, this framework's care is prescriptive of what agents should sustain. Where Heidegger's analysis operates at the level of fundamental ontology, Modal Path Ethic's analysis operates at the level of ethical practice. The frameworks are doing very different kinds of philosophical work using the same word, and this incidental overlap does not itself indicate any overlap in philosophical position or ontology.

Any reader who was formed by Heidegger might assume that Modal Path Ethics' care is some specification of or somehow analogous to Sorge, a particular mode in which the general structure gets concretized. It is not. Modal Path Ethics does not build on Heidegger's ontological foundation and does not require the reader to know anything about Dasein as the basic structure of human existence at all. The framework's definition of care is fully accessible to philosophers who find Heidegger's fundamental ontology compelling, and to philosophers who find his ontology entirely unpersuasive.

That paragraph really could have been the whole note, except for:

What The Frameworks Do Share

The frameworks are still not entirely unrelated, which is another reason to discuss Dasein here (beyond the concept being admittedly enjoyable to both write and read about). Both frameworks agree that ordinary everyday engagement with the world tends to obscure something important about what is actually happening.

For Heidegger, everyday Dasein is fallen into the they; inauthentic absorption in average understandings that cover over Dasein's own most important structures. This framework more or less agrees that this happens to Dasein.

For Modal Path Ethics, everyday social agents are almost always embedded in distortion fields that bend perception away from structural harm and toward socially legible narratives. The phenomena are different but the actual structural observation presented is very similar: honest contact with what is actually the case requires something more than what ordinary engagement provides us.

Both frameworks also treat the recovery of that honest contact as demanding rather than spontaneous. Heidegger's account of authenticity, or the resoluteness that allows Dasein to confront its own being without the cover of everyday absorption, describes a demanding achievement rather than a default condition. This framework's account of care in contact with harm describes a similarly demanding achievement that agents must actively maintain rather than just passively inhabit.

Why This Framework Could Not Possibly Build On Heidegger

In active spite of these resonances, Modal Path Ethics could not take Heideggerian fundamental ontology as its starting point, for reasons I consider worth also stating briefly.

Heidegger's framework is explicitly anthropocentric in a way that this framework is not, very much by design.

The analysis of Sorge is an analysis of the kind of being that Dasein has, and Dasein is characterized by its concern for its own being in a way that non-human beings, on Heidegger's account, do not share. Animals, for Heidegger, are poor in world. Stones tragically lack world entirely. The moral relevance of structural contraction to loci that are certainly not Dasein cannot then be grounded in Sorge without performing considerable additional work that Heidegger himself did not perform in ways a framework like Modal Path Ethics could ever use.

Modal Path Ethics is, again, intentionally not anthropocentric. The framework treats extant loci as objects of moral concern regardless of whether or not they are the kind of being that has its own existence as an issue for itself.

Pre-life harm, ecological harm to non-sentient systems, structural harm to institutions considered as loci: all of these matter on this framework's account in ways that cannot be derived from Heidegger's analysis of human existence. The framework requires a broader ontological base than fundamental ontology as Heidegger developed it can easily provide.

Heidegger's framework is also oriented toward authenticity in a way that this framework is not. The recovery of honest engagement with Dasein's own structure is, for Heidegger, a matter of utter resoluteness, of confronting one's own being-toward-death, of taking up one's ownmost possibilities. This is a profoundly individual trajectory even where Heidegger acknowledges that Dasein is, of course, always being-with others.

Modal Path Ethics' orientation toward sustained care in the field is not reducible to individual authenticity. It is constitutively concerned with how agents stand in relation to other loci and with what the field as a whole requires, not with how the individual Dasein comes to itself.

If Modal Path Ethics owes Heidegger anything in particular, it is definitely not the analysis of Sorge but something more diffuse: his insistence that philosophical analysis of human engagement with reality must operate at a level below the more familiar and comfortable categories of subject, object, belief, desire, and rational agent.

Heidegger's philosophical project made space for other frameworks that treat the basic structures of engagement as prior to the subject-object distinction and the representationalist vocabulary that follows from it. Modal Path Ethics now works in that broader philosophical space even where it does not adopt Heidegger's specific analyses.

That debt is real but it is also shared with many other twentieth century thinkers working in related traditions, if we are looking at the field. Merleau-Ponty, then later Wittgenstein, pragmatists from James onward, and phenomenologists in Husserl's tradition all contributed to the broader movement away from representationalist philosophy of mind and toward accounts of engaged, embedded, practical comportment.

Modal Path Ethics' care is more at home in this general philosophical landscape than it would be grounded in Heidegger's fundamental ontology, and the resonance with his Sorge is best understood as a shared inheritance from this general broader movement rather than as direct philosophical relation.