While graduating as a student in Humanistic Studies and Political Philosophy, Sylwin Cornielje was charmed by the critical studies, that care ethics engaged in. By any means, these studies involve the question of what ‘a good society’ means from a variety of different disciplines and outlooks. As Sylwin Cornielje describes it, care ethics – more specifically the way in which he came to learn of it – at that time practiced political theory, including a small ethical theory.

“My professor, the late care ethicist Frans Vosman, inquired into descriptive modes of care ethics originally and partly sprouting from critical feminist studies from the US in the 1980’s. Perspectives were adopted which showed how individuals and groups were excluded from ordinary society, in particular against the backdrop of normative and rationalist ethics.

Scholars identified ways in which individual suffering was not merely a private affair. Taking into account pain and suffering, enforces one to overcome the individual-society dichotomy through observations and concepts of embodied, interdependent human beings. And, as a consequence, to understand human suffering as inherent to the social and political as well.

Dominant strand of care ethics nowadays

Yet years later, care ethics seems to be reborn within the influential moral discourse on the art of living. Contemporary care ethics may as well count as an art of dying, or as an art of baring loss. Moreover, the development of care ethics appears to be decidedly engaged with concepts of care, suffering, disease, loss, dying etcetera from normative, subject-centered standpoints.

I doubt whether care ethics realizes that in doing so, it advocates a late modern form of neoliberalism that appreciates individuals, who more or less direct their suffering in a positive and meaningful oriented way. Yet at the expense of critically viewing care from a bottom-up, phenomenological standpoint, dominant care ethical discourse became infused with the exemplary and the esthetically beautiful and ethically meaningful.

Raw suffering

In my work as a house visitor for persons with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), I engage with raw suffering and dirty, besmudged pain on a daily basis. Some of my clients have lousy lives, because of the ways that they suffer from a stroke, psychosis, financial problems, social isolation etc. As a social worker, I have come to see the insides of psychiatric hospitals. There, I observed practices of listening, deescalating, medicating, intervening and activities of daily living, which were often messy, not beautiful.

I have the honor of being invited to their rooms and houses by people who need care. It’s an honor, because they show very intimate, often painful aspects of their forms of life, with which they live on the fringes of society. I try to be sensitive to how their lives actually look like and to what they experience.

Sensitive presence

Yet, if I would opt for ideals of ‘the good life’, of the art of living, I then would find the inside- and outside worlds of these people to be rendered invisible, at least partly. Acts of listening, perceiving and ‘simply’ being there with them would lose significance. Again, I speak for the persons who can no longer perform the most basic activities in life, i.e. talking, taking a walk outside, doing groceries, taking care of themselves and their household. What do their lives have to do with an art of living? Orientating my work upon such ideals would particularly frustrate and desensitize my presence with them.

Disguised suffering

Since I have been working with people that have become ‘broken’ as a result of grave neurological and/or psychiatric conditions, I have become acutely aware of how vulnerable I or my loved ones are to pain and suffering. Vulnerability is fundamental to human existence. Why, then, must suffering be made into a moral good and esthetically alluring?

In her recently published dissertation titled Disguised suffering. A care ethical inquiry into the late modern ideal of a ‘successful life’, dr. Jeannet van de Kamp shows how dominant, contemporary care ethics precisely removes, or disguises suffering, by adhering to the neoliberal hegemony of ‘ordinary citizenship’ of the autonomous individual.

According to Van de Kamp, the dominant strand of care ethics has unintentionally become productive in a discourse which neglects the gloom and despair of suffering individuals which social reality nevertheless reveals. This hegemony fails to address the infuriating kind of loss and pain, one that nauseates, appalls, and propels the sufferer(s) into further powerlessness.

Living in a profoundly traumatized body, or being affected by nightmarish mental disorder, may negate any promise of success and good for that person. Yet, as Van de Kamp argues, it is the forms of life of such predicament, that become negated by the capitalist fueled practices of estheticizing and moralizing. It is those forms of life, those of surviving and suffering from injury, misery and oppression, that I seek to accompany as a house visitor.

Care, a political practice

Jeannet van de Kamp thus contends that caregivers, but certainly care ethicists, should reclaim care ethics as a primarily political account of the ordering or disordering of relations. And as an empirically rooted ethics that as such requires the utmost wariness for her own ideals of a humane society of flourishing individuals.

I help those in need of care to endure, knowing that their lives for the most part may have become unappealing, bleak and even cruel. That is why the research of Jeannet van de Kamp appeals to me: for a social worker like me, Disguised suffering offers a lucid reminder to stay close to the lives of the people I work with on a daily base. Still, also on a much broader scale, the book offers an original and necessary view on care as a political practice in a world obsessed with the arts in a market-driven context.”