Imagining a Caring Self. A Modest Proposal

This article discusses the possibility of successfully reintroducing a notion of subjectivity of transcendental sort in the context of contemporary philosophical reflection about caring. The notion of caring revolves around a new kind of subjectivity, far from the sovereign and ultimately totalitarian subject typical of modern philosophy. Yet, as this article tries to argument, also present-day fragmented and liquid subjectivity, non-violent as it might seem, is unfit to bear the burden of the effort of imagining a new subjectivity built around caring as its core. Transcendentality – far from being necessarily implicated with violence and philosophical, as well as political, totalitarianism – may instead be non-violent and respectful of human finiteness, and therefore free from the suspect of restoring old metaphysical views about a fully sovereign subject. All of the more, it makes the notion of caring achieve an iconic status as the very coronation of ethics, in the terms of what can actually substantiate an otherwise intellectualistic (or “too metaphysical”) notion of good.