The Nature of Care

“The term ‘concern’ has, in the first instance, its colloquial signification and can mean to carry out something, to get it done, to ‘straighten it out’… We use the expression with still another characteristic turn of phrase when we say “I am concerned for the success of the undertaking”. Here ‘concern’ means something like apprehensiveness. In contrast to these colloquial ontical significations, the expression ‘concern’ will be used in this investigation as an ontological term for an existentiale, and will designate the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world. This term has been chosen not because Dasein [human existence] happens to be proximally and to a large extent ‘practical’ and economic, but because the Being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care. This expression too is to be taken as an ontological structural concept. It has nothing to do with ‘tribulation’, ‘melancholy’  or ‘the cares of life’, though ontically one can come across these in every Dasein. These – like their opposites ‘gaiety’ and ‘freedom from care’ – are ontically possible only because Dasein, when understood ontologically, is care. Because Being-in-the-world belongs essentially to Dasein, its Being towards the world is essentially concern.”

- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Two decades ago, it mattered to me to understand the essence of what it meant to be human. It turns out that what makes us human is – in a special sense – care.

It follows that if care is the essence of how we are, that it should form the basis of how we think and learn.

So over these two decades I have begun the task of describing how we learn, picking up where Heidegger left off and – much like Heidegger in the passage above – struggling to explain how the term ‘Affective Context’ has very little to do with ‘emotion’ in the everyday sense, but rather describes the way we are towards everything.

Learning, in essence, is the encoding of our reactions to things – not the things themselves – and our reactions to things are governed by the idiosyncratic patterns of concerns we have; some of which we are born with, some of which develop through experience.

This is a good theory because it has unrivalled explanatory and predictive power- for example, it explains why the teacher you remember from school was the one who cared about you, or was enthusiastic about the subject. It explains why terribly hurtful comments stick in your mind to this day. But it is not a widely accepted theory, because being widely accepted has very little to do with whether something is good or not.

Instead, we widely accept the legacy of the Cartesian era and computational theory – which suggests that first and foremost we are rational creatures who store and compare information a bit like computers. We believe that learning is something like ‘knowledge transfer’. This mistake – described by people such as Damasio – has set us back hundreds of years, and it will be many decades yet before people begin to understand learning.

And when the science catches up with the theory it will surely not be the philosophers who take the credit.

It has been difficult for me to accept this process. When the word ‘evolution’ was first used it meant nothing to people to believed we were descended from Adam & Eve: it has to be accompanied by a complex and alien-sounding explanation and resulted largely in ridicule and dismissal. Through a process that I don’t really understand it became popular – and now the word ‘evolution’ says everything we need to know about how species develop.

When I reflect on my own concerns, I am struck by how – in time – our concerns invert themselves: like an iceberg slowly up-ending.

I seem to have lived my life backwards – through the looking glass. While most people I knew spent their teens and twenties worrying about other people – about how to relate to other people or build relationships, I worried about ideas and about the meaning of things.

Now, much later, those same people have begun to worry about the meaning of things – about what really matters in life - whilst I, who figured those things out decades ago, have started to worry about care as it applies to other people.

There is a concern for ideas, and a concern for people.

The concern for people comes about because, without the ability to connect to other people, those ideas will never go anywhere. I am not sure Heidegger’s ideas travelled very far, and when I look back at a decade of explaining the Affective Context I think I have done a pretty poor job: a decade has gone by without any real progress in education, without any noticeable improvement in our understanding of learning. Learning itself has surfaced in new ways, through new technologies (even as it begins to migrate*).

But these days I think the progress I make comes as a result of caring deeply about the people that I work with and the journey that they are on.