Verlorene Unmittelbarkeit

Like life, care moves between the two poles of the human condition: Living and dying. The term thus evokes associations of familiarity and security on the one hand, fear and uncertainty on the other. In current international debates, however, care is no longer understood solely as an intentional, human activity. Digital assistants as well as earthworms, falling autumn leaves and honeybees can all be regarded as agents who care. Against this de-differentiating trend, Lisa Alexandra Henke's study aims to reformulate the specific nature of human care based on the fundamental idea of lost immediacy. Following Helmuth Plessner's philosophical-anthropological basic law of mediated immediacy, the book focuses on care relationships in which an immediately familiar, spatio-temporal world or self-reference seems to have been lost in a specific way. The author conceptualizes care as a self-world relationship that moves on a fine line: between a feeling of being directly related to the world and the simultaneous notion of the loss of this immediacy.