The Soft Call of Memory: On the Need to Care for Our Elders

In section 41 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger specifies what he takes to be the fundamental mode of being that Dasein, or Being-There, has as its own-most essence: care (Sorge). Heidegger defines ‘care’ in relation to anxiety and its capacity to disclose one’s ultimate worldly trajectory as a meaningful, always already anticipated whole (cf. Heidegger, Being and time (trans: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Blackwell, London, 1962, §41). By this he does not mean that care involves reaching out to others or fulfilling a social, humanist or cross-generational duty. In spite of his professed wish to keep the Analytic of Dasein separate from a philosophy of the subject, Heidegger’s core notion of ‘care’ is self-referring and deeply egotistical. In this chapter, I defend an altogether different framework for thinking about care, grounded in a deep appeal to our earliest memories and the intimate world in which they are anchored—a world which, under the care of our elders (our grandparents and other members of their generation), helped to form us as the types of beings we now are. The formative bond we share with those who once cared for us, who have in the meantime become fragile and dependent, imposes a duty of care that is not rooted in a concern for my future or anticipated lifespan. This chapter thus seeks to refute Heidegger’s treatment of care, which is one of the core notions of his thought.