ABSTRACT
Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. This chapter argues that Heidegger's conception of the temporal articulation of caring elucidates a misunderstanding at the heart of Frankfurt's view of the relations among care, death, and time. The temporal, existential, and normative significance that Frankfurt finds in a hard-wired instinct for self-preservation, what he calls a person's 'love of living', is more compellingly captured by Heidegger's idea that a human identity is lived out in the manner he calls 'being-toward-death'. Both Frankfurt and Heidegger see the phenomenon of care as having a distinctive temporal articulation: while being essentially futural or prospective, it is rooted in a pre-constituted situation in which a person already finds himself. Heidegger gives the name 'care' to the ontological structure of human existence that he spells out in Being and Time.
