BCDU (2014) – Sorge

(BCDU  )

We must note first that “care” does not derive from Latin cura but rather from Old High German or Gothic Kara, which means “care,” “lament,” “sorrow.” The word initially designated a painful mental state such as concern or anxiety, and it was indeed appropriate to use “care” to render the German Sorge as it is used by Heidegger. For Heidegger the very Being of Dasein is “care” ( Sorge ) ( Sein und Zeit   ), so that the latter is in the world in the form of Besorgen ( concern ). Cares, tribulations, and melancholias are distinct states, but they are part of the ontological structure of Sorge: “Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue” ( Being and Time  , 274 ).

The word “care” also designates the effort to anticipate a danger or to protect oneself from the uncertainties of the future by acting responsibly. That is the most common meaning of the term in English, and here again we see how well the importance of temporality in “care” corresponds to Heideggerian concerns: “The ontological meaning of care is temporality” ( ibid. ). But the deficiencies of the English translation of Sorge by “care” rapidly make themselves felt because the element of nothingness is absent in “care”: “Death, conscience, and guilt are anchored in the phenomenon of care.”

Finally, Heidegger connects Sorge with curiosity, which leads him to retranslate Aristotle  : “All men by nature desire to see” ( pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei ) ( ibid. )—taking eidenai in the original sense of “to see” and connecting oregontai ( lit., “seek” ) with Sorge, “care.” And he translates Aristotle   in these terms: “The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being.” Thus he makes an association between “seeing” and “thinking” in Western metaphysics that the English translation as “care” cannot render. There is no possibility of making the connotations specific to the German Sorge flow into the English “care,” and the current development of the meaning of “care” that is drawing this word in the direction of interpersonal relations and concern about others makes the translation of Heidegger given here in English rather enigmatic.