ABSTRACT
Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. Both contend that caring is bound up with the fact that we are mortal beings related to our own impending death, and both have claimed that caring has a non-instantaneous, future-oriented, and ultimately circular temporal structure. In this chapter, I argue 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.”
