Words&Dirt

I am getting married in two weeks, and my officiant––who is also a dear friend and fellow book-lover––recommended Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring as an aid for writing my wedding vows. I can’t imagine a better text for helping someone approach the joyful yet intimidating project of marriage. This isn’t just one of the best books I’ve read about care-giving or interpersonal dynamics; it’s one of the best philosophy books I’ve read––period. It is hard to understand why this lucid, intelligent, and compassionate treatise isn’t required reading in all high school and college humanities courses.

On Caring is a happy hybrid of two of my favorite books from my undergraduate philosophy courses: Martin Buber’s I and Thou and Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty. Mayeroff combines Buber’s style of interpersonal ethics with Royce’s model of a unified concept that anchors ethical life. Although Mayeroff focuses on caring rather than loyalty, the differences between his views and Royce’s are almost entirely semantic.

In the book’s opening sections, Mayeroff echoes Buber with his depiction of human identity as bound up with and determined by our relationships with others. The “basic pattern” of caring is characterized by a fluctuating and active process of mutual growth between two or more entities:

I experience the other as an extension of myself and also as independent and with the need to grow; I experience the other’s development as bound up with my own sense of well-being; and I feel needed by it for that growing…I often speak of caring for the other, but in any actual instance of caring it is always someone or something specific that is cared for: the writer cares for this idea, the parent cares for this child, the citizen cares for this community. (11-2, emphasis his)

As we can see, caring can be extended to any specific person, group, object, idea, or cause that requires human cultivation in order to grow. The boundaries of identity become blurred by the act of caring, but not in a way that strips participants of vitality or individuality. In fact, Mayeroff believes that properly orchestrating and attending to one’s caring relationships is the surest path to self-actualization:

Besides the other’s need for me if it is to grow, I need the other to care for if I am to be myself…To say I need the other if I am to be myself does not mean I basically experience the other as a means, as existing simply to satisfy my own needs. I do not try to help the other grow in order to actualize myself, but by helping the other grow I do actualize myself. (40, emphasis his)

Though he makes no biological claims, Mayeroff is attempting to describe a kind of “caring instinct”––an impulse present in all (or most) humans that leads us to channel our energies and habits in order to help projects and people flourish. When we are fully engaged in that process, the act of contributing to the growth of the other is the same as contributing to our own growth.

How is caring best accomplished? Mayeroff repeatedly asserts that preserving the integrity of the other is paramount; without respect for the other as other, one can never authentically contribute to growth. Many qualities and practices aid us in this process, but patience is perhaps the most critical:

Patience is not waiting passively for something to happen, but is a kind of participation with the other in which we give fully of ourselves. And it is misleading to understand patience simply in terms of time, for we give the other space as well…The patient man gives the other room to live; he enlarges the other’s living room, whereas the impatient man narrows it. (24)

This expansion of “living room” signifies a broadening of the other’s horizon of growth. If we are truly caring for the other, the other will experience possibility and openness of conduct, but not without structure or direction. We help by opening doors and clearing paths for the other, but refrain from walking the path ourselves or insisting on the manner in which it must be traversed.

Caring is a balancing act, with the needs, desires, and perceptions of each participant constantly informing the situation. Nothing vanishes into or becomes consumed by the relationship, but new qualities and potentials are born from it. Betrayals and lapses cannot be avoided, but they can be overcome when when we realize that a failure to care for the other is also a failure of self-care:

Just as an honorable man betrays himself in breaking his word to another, guilt in caring is not simply an expression of my betrayal of the other; it is also an expression of self-betrayal. Conscience calls me back to the other and to myself. Through overcoming the break with the other, I overcome the break within myself. (46, emphasis his)

The latter sections of On Caring parallel Royce’s thinking by focusing on how caring bestows meaning and organization on human activities. Royce’s theory of loyalty posits loyalty as the hub of one’s ethical and practical existence, and Mayeroff’s theory of caring does the same with a different semantic veil:

Caring has a way of ordering activities and values around itself; it becomes primary and other activities and values come to be secondary…Such ordering is not felt as an imposition from outside which denies me and closes me to life; rather, it is unforced and, like a natural unfolding, emerges from within life. It is liberating in that it opens me up more fully to life and brings me more in touch with myself and others. (65-6)

One who diligently and carefully cultivates caring relationships will experience a deep kind of satisfaction that Mayeroff calls being “in-place”:

My feeling of being in-place is not entirely subjective, and it is not merely a feeling, for it expresses my actual involvements with others in the world. Place is not something I have, as if it were a possession. Rather I am in-place because of the way I relate to others. And place must be continually renewed and reaffirmed; it is not assured once and for all, for it is our response to the need of others to grow which gives us place…We may think of ourselves as restless, in some deep-seated sense, until we find our unique place, and of being in-place as coming to rest, but this rest is dynamic rather than static. (69)

This “dynamic rest” is a blend of security and activity, one in which the bonds that make up caring relationships are always being examined, rewoven, strengthened, and sometimes repaired. Since this process requires energy and attention, the number of truly caring relationships we can sustain is “always small, for we cannot really be devoted to many things at the same time” (72).

If caring involves valuing quality over quantity, we must exercise great scrutiny when designing our palette of caring relationships. For Mayeroff, this means finding our “appropriate others,” (a more modern term is perhaps one’s “logical (as opposed to biological) family”):

My appropriate others complement me, they enable me to be complete, somewhat as playing music enables the musician to be himself…This sense of completeness does not mean the end of growth, as if one were now somehow finished; rather, it goes with being in the best position for further growth…To be in-place then is living that is centered and integrated by my caring for my appropriate others, one of whom, to repeat, must always be myself. (72-3)

Those who are in-place experience contentment and clarity rather than agitation and bemusement; from this foundation of security, one becomes better equipped to deal with the unfathomability of existence:

The unfathomable character of existence is not a matter of ignorance to be resolved, it is not something to overcome by knowing more or having some special knowledge. Instead, like wonder, it is something to undergo, to realize, and to appreciate. I am not simply speaking about the mystery of coming into being and passing out of being, or the strange sense that I was not here at the beginning and will not be here at the end. I am speaking, rather, about the mystery of existence itself, the mystery and amazement that anything exists at all.

This awareness of unfathomability is not something to fear and flee from, but to realize deeply. Unlike the experience of the uncanny, it does not separate me from other people; it brings me closer by making me more aware that whatever our powers or limitations, whatever our possessions or lack of possessions, we are all in the same boat. This is not a leveling down that does away with differences. On the contrary, it makes for a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of others and of myself. I realize more deeply my own insignificance, as if I were a brief flame in an endless darkness, and I am also more aware of my incomparable worth, a preciousness that is somehow bound up with being a once-and-for-all, never to be repeated. (93-4)

Only in my very best moments have I experienced the in-placeness of which Mayeroff speaks, but those moments were impactful enough for me to know that they are what life is all about. All our ambitions, our discontents with others and the immutabilities of life, our apish jostling––these pale in comparison to a life shot through with caring.

With a pagecount barely exceeding one hundred, On Caring contains more wisdom than most books of any length. It is a profound and moving text that deserves a 21st-century rebirth. In an era characterized by the systemic devaluation of compassion and the labor of care-giving, this book can help us rediscover how to care for others and for ourselves. The first step is to realize that these two projects are one and the same.

Rating: 10/10