Care and Resoluteness
A few posts back, I made a passing remark towards the notion of resoluteness when it comes to engaging the fundamental paradoxes of our existence. The resoluteness I referred to is that element of our Being suggested by Heidegger in his opus Being and Time. I hope here to say a little more about the taking up of a position of resoluteness, while incorporating some ideas related to one of Heidegger’s other concepts, the structural totality of Being which Heidegger calls “Care”.
Heidegger’s Being and Time is broken up into two Divisions. Care first shows up late in Division I, after Heidegger has laid some of the other groundwork for an understanding of what he (somewhat famously) calls Dasein, which roughly translates into English as “Being-there”. The notion of being resolute then comes to us towards the middle of Division II, where Heidegger’s focus shifts more intently towards the temporal structure of Dasein. I will take them in that order as Heidegger was diligent in building his structural model quite carefully and one seems to need to understand Care before understanding resoluteness, though it could also be said once one understands resoluteness they will also better understand the structural totality of Dasein as Care, for reasons which will hopefully be seen soon.
Care is a somewhat difficult term to pin down within the context Heidegger uses it for someone who has not spent some time within the pages of Being and Time. That said, I would suggest it is meant to indicate something like “that towards which one’s Being is oriented”, in a sense similar to the idea of caring about. Even Heidegger seems to have trouble totalizing the term in and of itself, trying, as the chapter progresses, to define it through the negation of identifying some of the things which Care is not (wishing, willing, biological principles, etc.).
To better understand the concept, I think it is quite useful to understand how Heidegger reworks a temporal understanding of Being and structures that into the aspect of Being that becomes Care. Throughout the work, Heidegger seems most interested in the past and future aspects of Being, not because the present is irrelevant, but I think because the present exists precisely as a stance we take with respect to our past and future. Our options in the present are merely to either remain “fallen” or to enter into the anxiously organized “moment of vision” which, for Heidegger, involves confronting the very nothingness of our Being. And within that moment is a future that is already laid bare in its possibilities by a past that is already ahead of where we “find” ourselves. A past, which as it were, is already taken over by a future that orients its possibilities through an understanding forward of that which we already are. If it sounds circular, it is meant to be. Part of Heidegger’s project was to illuminate the hermeneutic structure of Being itself. This circularity can be hard to grasp given how much we are conditioned to understand our structural existence as more linear, logical, perhaps even paradoxical (though through paradoxes structured in the clean(er) methodology of Hegelian Dialectics). The Hermeneutic dialectic espoused by Heidegger can be dizzying to grab a hold of, but once taken in, I think goes a long way in finding language for an aspect of existence that is otherwise hard to deny.
This all bears some relevance for Care, in as much as Care is temporally structured via facticity (thrownness/the past), existentiality (projecting/possibility/the future), and fallnness (our everyday being alongside the world/the present). Facticity is that which we are and carry forward. It is our biology, our culture, the family we were raised in, the language we use, the specific set of experiences to which we’ve been exposed. Existentiality is the very groundlessness of our being. Our relationship to our future maintains the possibility that within the specific set of parameters that constitute our thrownness, there would seem to be a whole set of outcomes towards which we may be able to deliver ourselves. Fallenness is the everyday averageness of our Being-in-the-world. It is the ways in which we are taken up by the thrownness in which we exist, and in remaining fallen deny the very ontological fact of our Beingness. For Heidegger we spend most our time in this mode, only to be called out of it by an anxiety which becomes a disclosive space for the taking up of our own authentic relationship to Being.
Care then becomes the structural whole of this entire process at any given point in time. We are our fallenness in our thrown possibilities. Or, in the over-stylized and wildly-hyphenate-philic way Heidegger has of describing things, Care becomes being-ahead-of-oneself-already-in-(the-world)-as-being-together-with. The hyphens can be a bit comical/irritating depending on your disposition, but they do serve a necessary function for Heidegger in that stylistically they suggest the interconnectedness of all of this; it symbolizes the “structural whole”-ness of it all.
Resoluteness gets introduced later, as Heidegger continues to develop the temporal nature of Being, having already determined some notions about what Being is. Through this shift in focus, Heidegger is able to establish definitions for Anxiety and Guilt, for which Anticipatory Resoluteness comes to be the response. Heidegger sees these two features as being central to the nature of Being. Anxiety, because of the gnawing awareness that our Being what it is we think we are is a condition of our fallenness; that fundamentally our Being is actually grounded in a nothingness, or as it’s sometimes more commonly rendered a no-thingness. We are anxious because we know, despite our best efforts to thingify ourselves—that is define ourselves by various characteristics, identities, achievements, material goods, and on an on—none of those are actually what we are ontologically. That ontologically speaking, within the intersection of our thrownness and our existential possibility for being, we have the freedom, and the responsibility, to choose to take over our Being authentically. What is guilty about this, is that regardless of what we choose, we are always betraying something that is important to us, whether that is the comfort of being at home in the fallenness of the they-self which is our everyday average way of being-in-the-world, or the prospect of taking over our own thrown possibility in a way that is individualized, fundamentally alienating, and profoundly lonely. The guilt is also representative of a kind of existential lack, our inability to be wholy what it is we desire to be. That we will always be in the process of being and never have become.
Resoluteness comes into play when Dasein takes as it’s issue “its own most potentiality for Being”. It is a taking over of the facticity of our thrownness as the actuality of our possibilities and seizing upon it in whichever ways are disclosed to it via that which is rendered permissible within the thrown context of the “they” in which exist. As Heidegger later puts it “[w]e have characterized resoluteness as a way of reticently projecting oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilt, and exacting anxiety of oneself.” Anticipatory resoluteness therefore comes about in our maintaining this position alongside an authentic taking over our potentiality-for-Being-a-whole (otherwise known as the inevitable eventuality of our death). That is, anticipatory resoluteness is a factical orientation towards the actuality of our finitude in a manner which honors our capacity to take over Dasein as our own in the present, through our holding open an authentic relationship to our ownmost thrown possibilities. To do this authentically, that is in one’s ownmost capacity to take this on in anxious reflection outside of the everyday discourse of the They, is the authentic mode of Care.
You can (hopefully) see why this is important conceptually to an approach to therapy that honors paradox. The fallen “they-self” always has an answer. A way of narrowing and codifying so as to absolve us of the terror of that aspect of our Being that is fundamentally alone. The They encourages the dissolution of the paradox. Authentic Care encourages the resolution of it in the form of holding the paradox open.
This is an important stance for client and therapist alike. We cannot abandon our clients to their authentic mode of Care, nor can we take it over for them. To do this appropriately we are already in paradox. It’s there when we sit with the client who becomes that little boy or girl still longing for the absent father; confused by the charming yet dismissive mother; wounded by their own neediness; or terrified of the possible recurrence of their own personal trauma. We tend to the fact that they are both desperate to repeat the experience in hoping to get it right, while knowing at the same time it will never be gotten exactly right. In order to do this, you have to be able to feel it down to the marrow in your bones. You become the moment with them, through the cultivation of an awareness of your own longing, your own woundedness, your own suffering.
This is where the object-relations lens becomes useful. There’s a lot of room for Winnicott in here. Whether we want to call it the holding environment or object usage, we need to become some sort of conduit for the client to be able to work this out of their own accord. But that also doesn’t mean standing back and offering nothing. It’s about a perceptual involvement in the process as it is unfolding so that we can offer them things across multiple levels of the interaction. It’s not that we cannot give advice, but that we must at times refrain from giving advice to do the more important work of unveiling the sense we are getting that we are being asked for advice, and acknowledging why it may be important that we withhold that at the moment. There’s also something to be said about a moving towards authenticity and the idea of moving from a false to a true self via play and potential space.
It's strange how a philosophical position born out of something so arelational can be used to signal a deeper move towards relationality. If all goes right in the therapy, the client develops the capacity, through the therapeutic relationship, not to rid themselves of these things, but to tend to them, to be tender to them. They will find ways to long for connection and be connected; to be fragmented and whole; to honor their safety and their vulnerability; to brace themselves against the horror of their nothingness while forging their own place in the world rooted in action, agency, and a responsibility towards the cultivation of their own existence. This is no small task and to me why I think a philosophical and existential orientation to therapy is essential. It attunes us most directly to the difficult problems of being and becoming. It points us toward the shared nature of the ontological bases of the human condition, illuminating the far reaches between each of us, and the ways in which embracing our own authenticity can deliver us over to the deeply relational positions we need in order to bridge that divide.
