Buber and the Ethics of Care

In our recent discussions in class, the question has been raised: is there an ethic that stems forth from an Existential Philosophy? And as I have considered this, I have thought more and more about the ideas presented between Nel Noddings' Ethics of Care and Martin Buber's I and Thou. I would like to present their philosophies in a manner of co-dialogue per se, and hear your response; does a form of the ethics of care arise out of Buber's philosophy? I would like to say that it does, though it seems odd that an ethic of care would surface with regards to Existentialism.

The Ethics of Care is an ethic based on myriad factors, but I am only going to explicate the ones I find most relevant to our discussion. The first aspect I would like to discuss is the notion of the relationship. A caring relationship centers on dialogue between the one-caring and the cared-for. Within both the one-caring and the cared-for, (and within everyone you may randomly pass on the street) there are what Noddings' calls, "An Ethical Ideal." The Ethical Ideal, is essentially, exactly what it sounds like: it is the best picture of oneself, and with each interaction a person has, either as one-caring or as a cared-for, their ethical ideal can either grow or diminish. Now, there are two different types of caring for someone: natural care and ethical care. Natural care arises innately from within you--this is the sort of care perhaps a mother has for her child; it is seemingly easy to care for this person because natural affection flows towards this person. The second kind of care is one called ethical caring; this is the kind of caring we are called to do even when it is hard--we ethically care when we are not already in a relationship with someone, and do something for them anyway. Perhaps an example of this would be, imagine you are at the grocery store and a woman drops her gallon of milk next to you--you have a choice: either you keep going, and perhaps neither yours nor her ethical ideal moved in any direction, but perhaps you stopped, picked up the milk, handed it to her, and then kept going: perhaps then, both of your ethical ideals were increased. You had no obligation per se to her because you were not engaging in any sort of previous caring relation with her, but you decided to ethically care for her nonetheless. This feeling of the "I must" that appears within you, is called "obligation"; however, obligation is a choice, and you are free to reject obligation. There are two last things that I would like to discuss before I move on to a discussion on Buber, and those things are Engrossment/Motivational Displacement and the notion of dialogue. Engrossment and Motivational Displacement go hand in hand, in the sense that they occur subsequent of one another. When one-caring engages in dialogue with a cared-for, the one-caring "engrosses" in the cared-for. To engross means to fully engage; to step outside of who you are for the time being, outside of your time constraints, your hunger, your annoyances of the day, and fully and actively engage in what the other person is saying and feeling: by doing this, you "motivationally displace" yourself in order to care for the other. The last thing I want to emphasize is dialogue. Noddings says that dialogue is absolutely essential to the nurturing and the maintenance of the ethical ideal; one must practice both speaking and listening; acting as both one-caring and a cared-for in order for natural care to occur more frequently. With practice, although we are not obligated to do this, we eventually care more naturally, more frequently. It requires less effort to simply desire to nurture others' ethical ideals, and when we are nurturing, very often, and this is also important, people begin to reciprocate that care, and it becomes a cyclical process of relationships.
Finally, I get to Buber. Again, I am only going to address a few specific things here, as this is already quite long, (basically to the bottom of p. 321 in the book.) I specifically want to begin with the ways in which his focus on the I-It relationship and the I-Thou relationship seem to be analogous to those of a caring relationship. He says that the word of humans is two-fold, that in our nature we have the potential to treat or name something an "it" or a "thou", but only by naming something does the "I" come into the picture--thus, creating a sense of dialogue between two things--either the it or the thou. However, Buber says that

"The world of experience belongs to the founding word I-It, whereas the founding word I-Thou grounds the world of relating".

By this, I take Buber to mean that when humans engage with something they enter into this two-fold (I-it or I-thou) relationship; however, the I-it is called forth when a human engages with something that either does not reciprocate that engagement or something that you simply experience. In opposition, the I-thou, is said to truly call forth the I in the relationship. Buber says that in the process of becoming the I, I utter Thou. I take this to mean that in a relationship, where both the I and the thou are being treated as a "thou", thus engaging one another, they encounter one another, and they stand in the process of relating.
The last thing I want to do briefly is show how some of these philosophies are analogous. Both Noddings' and Buber have a distinct philosophy that is based on relation with the "other", and the ways in which we respond to that other. For Noddings' it is treating them as a cared-for, and working to displace yourself and nurture their ethical ideal. For Buber, it is the recognition of the "person" as separate from the recognition of the person as a thing or an experience. Consider the aforementioned possibility of the woman in the grocery store. How might Buber respond to her? Would he say that she was an I-it or an I-thou? The I-It versus the I-Thou seems similar to the caring relationship with regards to the one-caring and the cared-for and the ways in which we choose to treat and engage the people with which we come into contact; in the sense that just as we are both ones-caring and ones-cared for, we have also both been the "its" and the "thous", perhaps we have been treated as an it by a random passer-by, while our mother or best friend treats us as a thou. And although Noddings is not religious in nature while Buber is, it could also be construed that just as Buber says that in experiencing each "I-thou" relationship, where we stand in the process of relation, we come closer to the ultimate "I-thou" it could possibly be said that, every relationship that is reciprocal, we come closer to the ultimate one-caring, whether that be a God, the ultimate friendship, or a soul mate or sorts, just so long as it recognizes the essence of the relationship as dialogical and relational.

Secondly in the analogy, Buber says: "Founding words do not assert anything that would exist beyond them, but spoken, they ground an inventory of states of affairs. Founding words are uttered by the essence." I wonder how this line might appeal to Nodding's idea of the ethical ideal being the best picture of yourself--she calls it a "reservoir of care" that is completed through all of your past experiences of caring or non-caring relationships. So, these founding words--thus, a person entering into relationship with someone else, naming them an I-thou--call upon an inventory of the state of affairs. What does that mean per se? Well, perhaps it means, it calls upon this reservoir of all of your past engagements of relationship, and considers all of those relationships in preparation for your about-to-be relation with this new I-thou.

Here are just some thoughts about Buber and Noddings, clearly there is a lot more that could be said, but this is already quite long. Please add your own thoughts. But, to answer the original question, I do think that some sort of ethic can arise from an Existentialist philosophy, because humans interact with one another--period. And somewhere, there is a driving force behind that relatedness and dialogue. I didn't talk about this much, but I also wonder how the idea of "vulnerability" which is quite relevant in Noddings' would play into an Existentialist ethic.