Knowing, loving, caring

‘There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world.’ – U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance

‘The person is the kind of good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love’ – Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II)

‘You don’t need to love someone to care for them’ - Nel Noddings

‘To know, know, know him
Is to love, love, love him’

- The Teddy Bears

How are knowing, loving, and caring connected? Do you need to know a person in order to care about them, and is it the case that the better you know someone, the more you love them, and therefore the more you care about their welfare? And does caring about someone necessarily lead to caring for them? This post is a series of loosely connected (and disconnected) thoughts around these questions.

In my recent review of the edited collection, Care Ethics and Beyond: Moral, Epistemological, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, I noted that I was particularly intrigued by the second section of the book, in which different theorists explore what an ‘epistemology of care’ might look like: in other words, the ways in which caring can be a form of knowing. The section begins with a chapter by Vrinda Dalmiya, the author of the 2016 text Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahābhārata, which argued that, while caring and knowing are usually thought of as independent of each other, in fact ‘our lived experiences of caring and being cared for can be useful resources for truth-seeking.’

As I noted in my review, the discussion in this section of Care Ethics and Beyond can strike the non-philosophical reader as quite abstruse, though as I also mentioned, the chapter by Maurice Hamington (my guest in Episode 6 of the Careful Thinking podcast) is somewhat more accessible, being rooted in examples of everyday care. Building on his previous work in 2004’s ground-breaking Embodied Care, Maurice maintains that ‘the embodied practices of care generate knowledge and truth’ and that ‘care and knowledge are inextricably linked’.

I find these arguments about care as a form of knowledge fascinating and deeply sympathetic. However, reading these authors, I also find myself asking a rather different question, one which reverses the terms and poses the question: in what sense does knowing lead to caring?

I’ve often been struck by the phenomenon that simply knowing a person, even on a casual basis, for example as a neighbour, colleague, or fellow student, can lead to a kind of ‘love’, in the broadest sense of the word. The more familiar we are with someone, the more they became part of our emotional worlds and the more we experience a certain warmth towards them and an interest in their welfare, so that knowing results in caring - or at least, in caring about. I’ve written before about the squeamishness one might feel in using the word ‘love’ in this context, though the anthropologist Nigel Rapport, whom I interviewed for Episode 3 of the podcast, has no such hesitation. In our conversation, Nigel referred to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s description of love as ‘a kind of epiphanous moment in which we surprise ourselves by realising the reality of the individual other, the particularity of being that something other than ourselves is real’, and he advocates the development of what he calls ‘cosmopolitan love’ at a community level.

So does knowing a person inevitably lead to loving them in this sense, and to caring about them? Is it always the case, in the words of that Teddy Bears song from 1959, that to ‘know, know, know’ someone is to ‘love, love, love’ them? Maybe I’ve been unusually fortunate in having come across very few people in my life whom I actively dislike, or who have taken a dislike to me, but in my experience, and with few exceptions, the better I’ve got to know a person, the more I’ve found myself caring about them.

And it does seem to be the case that the extent of our knowledge of a person largely determines the degree to which we care about them. We’ve all had the experience of watching or reading a news report of (say) a serious road accident, in which a number of unnamed people might have been injured. If we have any human feeling, we’ll experience a spontaneous sympathy for those affected. However, because the people involved are unknown to us, those feelings will probably only last a short time, and disappear as we move on with our lives. On the other hand, if we happen to recognise a name, or a face in a photo, among the victims, even if it’s only that of a casual acquaintance, perhaps someone we recognise from our daily commute or from standing alongside them at the school gates, then our feelings of sympathy will be both more intense and longer lasting.

So, to a degree, caring about a person does seem to depend on the extent to which we know them. Now, caring about is the first phase in the eminent care theorist Joan Tronto’s often-quoted five phases of care. As Tronto writes in 1993’s Moral Boundaries :

The first phase is caring about: noticing unmet care needs. The second phase is caring for: taking up the responsibility to meet care needs. The third phase is care-giving: delivering care. The fourth phase is care-receiving: evaluating the effectiveness of care after care has been received, either by the receiver or the provider(s) of care. The fifth phase is caring with: evaluating whether care needs are met in a way that is consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom.

I have to confess that I’ve always been a little sceptical as to whether caring about is the best way of describing the initial phase of care. In fact, when Tronto glosses the term, she uses words such as recognition, or acknowledgement of needs, which are less misleading. Part of the problem is that the phrase caring about has a variety of different meanings, which often have little connection with caregiving. For example, lovers will often tell each other ‘I really care about you’, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are prepared to care for them - to become their caregiver - should the need arise.

In fact, I wonder if the tendency to link the very different meanings of the word ‘care’, in the phrases ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’, may be a linguistic accident that only occurs in English. I’ve written before about the difficulties of translating the English word ‘care’ into other languages, which is mainly due to the fact that it can mean so many different things. Think, for example, of the different meanings of ‘care’ in the phrases ‘he cares for his elderly parents’, ‘she doesn’t have a care in the world’, or ‘take care when crossing the road’.

      From L to R: Vrinda Dalmiya, Maurice Hamington, Nigel Rapport, Joan Tronto

I was interested to read, in the piece by Myna Trustram in Care Aesthetics and the Arts, the other new book that I reviewed recently, about the surprising etymological derivation of the English word ‘care’. One might expect it to have some connection with the word cura in Latin and in a number of Romance languages, but in fact, as Trustram explains: ‘ “care” comes from the Old English caru – sorrow, anxiety, grief, and from the Old German char – lament, or a burden of the mind.’ And according to etymological dictionaries, the word only gradually came to mean being concerned about, or burdened with care for, another person. You can see how this eventually led to our modern English sense of ‘caring about’. The connection with ‘care’ as denoting ‘caregiving’ seems almost accidental.

In fact, other European languages tend to make a clearer distinction between caring about, or having a concern for another person, and caring for, or caregiving. In French, if you care about a person, you might say je me soucie de vous, or je tiens beaucoup de toi, whereas to express the sense of care as caregiving, you would use soigner or prendre soin. Similarly, in Italian, the closest equivalent to caring about someone would be preoccupare di qualcunco, or tenere di qualcuno, whereas to actually provide care is prendersi cura di qualcuno, and Spanish makes a similar distinction between preocuparse and cuidar. The difference also extends to non-Romance languages, including Dutch, where one might use om iemand geven to say you care about someone, but om iemand zorgen to represent the activity of caring for them. Unsurprisingly, given the roots of Old English, German is closer to English, in that the verb kümmern, which also has the sense of sorrow or anxiety, can be used for both caring about and caring for, though the latter is also expressed by the verbs sorgen, versorgen or pflegen.

Here I should add the caveat that I’m not a linguist, and I’d be happy to be corrected by readers who are native speakers, if I’ve got any of the above wrong. However, the point I’m trying to make is that the connection in English between caring about someone and caring for them may be the result of a linguistic coincidence, rather than a reflection of any necessary relationship between the two activities.

What’s more, we might question whether one actually has to care about a person in order to effectively care for them. In the words of the pioneering care theorist Nel Noddings, quoted above, we don’t always have to love someone in order to care well for them. If we think of the care provided every day by professional caregivers, then clearly it’s not always possible to know, and therefore care about, at an individual level, those they are charged with caring for. A nurse in a hospital may attend to the needs of dozens of different people, often for quite brief interactions, in a single day, and his or her knowledge of them, and therefore care about them as individuals, will necessarily be quite limited. Instead, he or she will (we hope) be motivated by a less individualised ‘caring about’ people in general.

On the other hand, if a caring interaction continues for a longer period, or if there are repeated interactions and the nurse gets to know the patient better, then he or she may come to care about them on a more personal level. Interestingly, this brings us back to where we started, with ‘caring to know’. It’s surely the case that caring for a person for any length of time, or with any level of intensity, will lead to knowing that person, as an individual, and therefore to a deeper level of caring relationship. This is especially true, as Hamington suggests, where care is embodied, so that a caregiver comes to know a person through communication at an intercorporeal level.

However, if we’re talking about the informal or intimate care that takes place between loved ones, such as the care of a parent for a child, or an adult child for their elderly parents (see this post), then in these cases there is surely a close connection between caring about and, if not directly caring for, then certainly ‘taking care of’ (the second phase in Tronto’s sequence), in the sense of ‘taking up responsibility to meet care needs’.

In her 2015 book Sacrifice: A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice, the Dutch care theorist Inge van Nistelrooij, who was my guest in Episode 17 of the Careful Thinking podcast, draws on the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion to argue that there are some ‘calls’ to care about which we have very little choice or control. As Inge said in the episode, the decision to care for another person is ‘sometimes developed by finding yourself in situations, by receiving appeals of others, by being affected by the suffering of others’. She continued:

So then it’s not about your choice, so much as by…finding yourself in a situation in which you still might have to make a choice. But sometimes it’s impossible to make that choice, because you’re the only one who needs to do something, to rescue somebody or to help or comfort somebody.

From birth onwards, and throughout our lives, we find ourselves implicated in relationships of mutual or reciprocal care. Indeed, our very existence is the result (ideally) of a relationship of care between two people, and we are unable to survive and thrive in the early years of life without their care, or that of other caregivers, which involves us inescapably in reciprocal responsibilities to care for those who have cared for us, when the need arises. But even going beyond our immediate families, at every stage of life we find ourselves always-already in communities or networks of mutual responsibility to care for those whom we know and therefore care about.

This puts me in mind of the words of J.D.Vance which I included at the top of this post, and which he articulated in a media interview in early 2025, immediately drawing a good deal of critical commentary, including some from his fellow Christians. One Catholic commentator acknowledged that ‘of course, we do not neglect our families’ but argued that ‘framing love as something calculated and conditional misses the heart of it entirely’ and suggested that ‘love has no limits’. However, to be fair to Vance (not a phrase that comes easily to me), I wonder if what he said was really so unreasonable. After all, he didn’t actually say ‘love your families and the rest of the world can go hang’, but rather love those closest to you first, then your neighbours and members of your local community, ‘and after that, prioritise the rest of the world’. Isn’t that order of caring priorities something that most people would agree with and act on in their own lives? And haven’t we all encountered people who, rather like Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House, love ‘the world’ but neglect the needs of those closer to home?

Finally, though, I wonder if this opposition between caring for those who are known to us and those who are unknown or less known is actually a false one. A theme that has come up again and again, as I’ve spoken with care theorists and practitioners on the Careful Thinking podcast, is the way in which interpersonal care for a loved one can nurture a care for the wider community, for humanity, and indeed for the more-than-human. In Episode 11, James Thompson, author of the ground-breaking Care Aesthetics: for Artful Care and Careful Art, clarified that when this takes place, ‘it’s not about role-taking, so it’s not by caring for my child I develop the role of carer and then I go to another setting and that role of carer is replayed in that other setting.’ He continued:

Actually, it’s about our capacity...to be aware of the sensory worlds we live in, and to be aware of the way we use our bodies...we use the different sensory capacities we have in relation to other people. And by practising those, and being attentive to those in different environments, it is more likely we are sensitive to other environments and other worlds.

This sense of caring as an embodied education, a process in which engaging in intercorporeal care deepens and extends one’s capacity to care beyond the interpersonal, once again echoes Hamington’s argument in Care Ethics and Beyond. In Episode 22 of the podcast, disability researcher Melody Escobar described how the mothers in her research study developed a sense of care and responsibility for the wider community precisely as the result of caring for their own disabled children. As Melody said:

Caregiving, particularly for a child with a disability, often does widen one’s sense of responsibility to others and to equity. The mothers weren’t just focused on the needs of their own children. Over time, their caregiving led them to speak before legislatures and school boards and faith communities to advocate for access and meaningful change for all persons who experience discrimination. So their love grew into something expansive...This study and my own experience has helped me recognise that caregiving can indeed transform us into more caring citizens and invites us all to bring about a more just and compassionate world.

Nel Noddings makes a similar point, arguing that in the course of our lives we learn ‘first what it means to be cared for, then to care for intimate others, and finally to care about those we cannot care for directly’. In a sense, Noddings reverses Tronto’s sequence, describing the experience of ‘caring for’ as leading to ‘caring about’, though she uses the latter term rather differently, to denote a sense of wider social responsibility.

       From L to R: Nel Noddings, Inge van Nistelrooij, James Thompson, Melody Escobar

If caring for those who are known to us can lead to caring about those who are unknown, then perhaps the late Pope John Paul II was right to suggest, in my other initial quote, that it is not so much the ‘knownness’ of the other that should inspire our ‘love’ for them, but rather their very personhood, and that the human person - any person, not just those close to us - is ‘the kind of good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love’. Or, we might say, care.

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Love Knows No Limit’ by Trudie Tara Moulton. I’m grateful to Trudie for kindly giving me permission to use the image.