Caring for Life and Death

From a Phenomenological Anthropology of Care

Abstract

I was born being cared by others, so heard I. Some day I would die being cared by others, maybe. Between these two phases of passivity "being cared" at the beginning and the end of my life, it becomes possible for me to get an activity "caring" for myself and for others, even being cared as ever. Although I've just used the word "others" roughly, it would be on the phase of care almost impossible to talk about it in the relationship between the self and others without a specific personal relationship. We need not to say who, when and where cares for whom, but at least it seems necessary to distinguish between the two cases: on the one hand caring for the intimate and near "you" with facing and being cared for by this "you", and on the other hand caring for the estranged and distant "somebody" without facing and being cared for by this "somebody". The first case should be named the relationship between me as the first person and others as the second person, whereas the second case the relationship between me and others as the third person. In this paper I would like to study caring for life and death from such differences in personal perspectives.