The Seba library treats Solicitude in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Ricoeur, Paul, Heidegger, Martin, Yalom, Irvin D.).
it is so important to us to give solicitude a more fundamental status than obedience to duty
Ricoeur argues that solicitude belongs to a pre-moral ethical stratum deeper than obligation, grounding normativity rather than being derived from it.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care—that is, to the existence of the Other, not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned; it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.
Heidegger distinguishes authentic solicitude—which frees the Other for his own existential possibilities—from the deficient modes that dominate everyday Being-with.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
it is this search for equality in the midst of inequality… as this defines the place of solicitude along the trajectory of ethics. To self-esteem… solicitude adds essentially the dimension of lack, the fact that we need friends.
Ricoeur identifies solicitude as the relational supplement to self-esteem, introducing the dimension of mutual need and constituting the self’s apperception of itself as one among others.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
This critical solicitude is the form that practical wisdom takes in the region of interpersonal relations.
Ricoeur designates ‘critical solicitude’—solicitude tested by moral conditions of respect and conflict—as the concrete expression of phronesis in interpersonal ethical life.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Heidegger, in analogous fashion, speaks of two different modes of caring or ‘solicitude.’ One can ‘leap in’ for another… and thus relieve another of the anxiety of facing existence… Or one can ‘leap ahead’ and ‘liberate’ the other by confronting the other with his or her existential situation.
Yalom translates Heidegger’s two modes of solicitude into psychotherapeutic terms, aligning authentic solicitude with the liberating confrontation of the patient’s existential situation.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
The passage from solicitude to the norm is of a piece with this basic dissymmetry, to the extent that it is upon this dissymmetry that all the maleficent offshoots of interaction, beginning with influence and culminating in murder
Ricoeur traces how solicitude’s constitutive dissymmetry between agent and patient provides the structural condition for the passage from ethical responsiveness to moral norms of reciprocity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
solicitude, as the mutual exchange of self-esteems, is affirmative through and through. This affirmation, which can well be termed original, is the hidden soul of the prohibition.
Ricoeur argues that solicitude’s primordial affirmative character underlies and motivates moral prohibitions, grounding the indignation felt at violations of others’ dignity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
on the one hand we have motherly solicitude and the growth of all living things, on the other more indecency and deadliness
Jung and Kerényi invoke solicitude as one pole of the ambivalent lunar-maternal archetype associated with Hecate, contrasting nurturing care with destructive forces.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949aside