phenomenology

In everyday language, care is often treated as an emotion. We speak of caring as a feeling we have toward people, causes, or outcomes. Sometimes it is framed morally—as kindness or concern—and other times therapeutically, as empathy or emotional availability.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that something essential is lost when care is reduced to sentiment. I also distinguished between two different ways of understanding care: psychology and ontology. Psychology interprets experience—explaining feelings, motivations, and patterns of behavior. Ontology, by contrast, discloses the structures that shape how experience is possible in the first place.

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