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Care

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Care refers to an ethical and existential concern for others and the world. It emphasises responsibility and relationality.

Detailed Definition
In philosophy, particularly Heidegger and ethics of care, care defines human existence as fundamentally relational and engaged. In poetry, it appears in themes of compassion, attention, and responsibility, often through intimate or reflective tones. Poets use care to foreground connection, vulnerability, and the ethics of being with others.
Example
Example in poetry:
Heidegger's concept of Sorge (care) as the fundamental structure of human existence — Dasein as always already caring about its being and the being of others — provides a philosophical framework for reading the lyric as an expression of the care-structure of human life; In Milton's "Lycidas," pastoral elegy is a form of philosophical care — the poem's elaborate ceremonial mourning performs the care we owe the dead and constitutes the community of the living around that obligation; Gillian Clarke and other contemporary nature poets enact a poetics of care — philosophical in its insistence that attentiveness to the natural world is not merely aesthetic but an ethical practice of tending to what matters; A poet writing about nursing or medical practice might deploy the philosophical concept of care (as in Carol Gilligan's ethics of care) to argue that the caregiver's attentiveness is a form of moral knowledge that exceeds procedural ethics; Adrienne Rich's feminist poetics is grounded in an ethics of care — the poem as a site of attention to the overlooked, the vulnerable, and the silenced — drawing on care philosophy to argue for a relational rather than individualist conception of ethical life; Wordsworth's "spots of time" and his Prelude more broadly can be read as a philosophical account of how care (the care of nature for the growing mind, the care of memory for past experience) constitutes the self over time
Additional Notes
In Heidegger's "Being and Time," Sorge (care) is the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein — human existence is constitutively care: care for its own being, care for others (Fürsorge), and care for the things of the world (Besorgen). Care is not an optional ethical attitude but the basic mode in which we are in the world. Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan developed an ethics of care in feminist philosophy, arguing that care — the attentive, responsive tending to particular relationships — is a moral orientation at least as fundamental as the justice-based ethics of liberal theory. For poets, care has both existential and ethical dimensions: the poem as an act of care for language, for the subject, for the reader. The question of who receives care and who is expected to provide it is also a political question that poetry can address. Related terms: Fürsorge, ethics of care, Gilligan, Noddings, responsibility, attentiveness, Sorge.
Also Known As
Cura reck tendance
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