Fiat cura, et pereat mundus: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Care and Commitment

In this chapter, I propose to explore “the importance of what we care about” from a phenomenological angle in the spirit but not necessarily in the footsteps of Harry Frankfurt’s seminal essay. My overarching claim is that Frankfurt’s threefold distinction—knowing, ethical conduct, caring—is equally central to Husserl’s phenomenology of reason and, more directly, underlies Husserl’s phenomenological ethics of values and vocation in his Freiburg manuscripts of the 1920s and 1930s. As I argue, Husserl seeks to ground acting with respect to right and wrong and hence, norms and obligations, on the lived experience of valuing, of what it is to find something important worth caring about, as well as the uptake of such values for a person along a distinctive course or in a particular manner, which presupposes agency, responsibility, and self-consciousness. As I examine, care is indexed phenomenologically to the affectivity of values; we would not care for something, let alone uphold the importance of what (or who) we care about, were it not valuable to care, were not the things and persons I care for experienced as valuable. It is arguably this dimension of value that remains largely ignored in much of the literature in “care ethics” but which proves essential for, indeed, distinctly defines a phenomenology of care and commitment.