Care (Sorge)

In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies Sorge (care) as the unified structure underlying the existential analytic of Dasein. To be Dasein is to be the being for whom its own being is an issue — and this 'being at issue' is what care names. Care is not a sentiment, emotion, or moral virtue in the ordinary sense. It is the ontological structure that makes possible all the more familiar modes of concerned engagement: worry, attention, preoccupation, interest, attending-to. Without care, there would be no situation in which things mattered, no foreground against background, no significance against mere presence. The machine processes without care because nothing is at stake for it in its processing. The human being works within care because the work is always also about the being who does the work, whether she recognizes this or not.