On Caring by Milton Mayeroff explores the philosophy and practice of caring. I picked up this book to gain insights into the nature of caring and learn how it applies to modern leadership.

The author begins with a commonly accepted sentiment, but it is often not fully understood in depth. He then spends the rest of the book analyzing and explaining this definition:

• “To care for another person, in the most significant sense, is to help him grow and actualize himself. Consider, for example, a father caring for his child. He respects the child as existing in his own right and as striving to grow. He feels needed by the child and helps him grow by responding to his need to grow.”
• OBSERVATION: Keywords like “help,” “grow,” and “actualize” in this definition require deeper clarification. Mayeroff illustrated his point by using the analogy of a father caring for his child. With this, he may suggest that people struggle to fully comprehend these concepts if they lack personal experience with parenting.
• Mayeroff explains that caring involves perceiving the object of care both as a part of oneself and as a separate, respected entity. This aligns with the original definition of care. It’s natural for many to see someone as part of themselves when they care for someone to grow. But true care also requires us to fully embrace the notion of self-actualization. When guiding the other, we must respect and prioritize their perspective and understanding of their needs over our assumptions/interpretations.
  • “In caring as helping the other grow, I experience what I care for (a person, an ideal, an idea) as an extension of myself and at the same time as something separate from me that I respect in its own right.”
  • I feel the other’s growth as bound up with my own sense of being.
  • This does not simply mean that I know, in some strictly intellectual sense, that the other has needs that must be satisfied and that I can satisfy those needs. And I do not experience being needed by the other as a relationship that gives me power over it and provides me with something to dominate, but rather as a kind of trust. It is as if I had been entrusted with the care of the other in a way that is the antithesis of possessing and manipulating it as I please.
  • ANALOGY: To say the artist experiences his “spiritual child” as having a life of its own, and as striving to grow and needing him in order to grow, does not mean he believes it is conscious and has feelings. This simply describes how he experiences the work of art. This is why we speak of respecting the integrity of the artwork.
  • In helping the other grow I do not impose my own direction; rather, I allow the direction of the other’s growth to guide what I do, to help determine how I am to respond and what is relevant to such response.
  • Direction that comes from the growth of the other should not be confused with being “other-directed,” where this refers to the kind of conformity in which I lose touch with both myself and the other.
  • Any direction that I may give the other is governed by my respect for its integrity and is intended to further its growth.
• Mayeroff suggests that to truly care for somebody, we must be “devoted” to them—in the sense of being committed and responsive to their well-being. “Devotion is essential to caring, just as it is an integral part of friendship. I commit myself to the other and to a largely unforeseeable future. Devotion is not an element that may or may not be present, as if I might be said to care and also to be devoted. When devotion breaks down, caring breaks down. Again, devotion does not simply measure the extent of my caring, but it is through devotion that caring for this other acquires substance and its own particular character.”
  • Devotion expresses my entire person rather than simply the intellectual or emotional part of me. Viewed at a particular time, devotion is shown by my being “there” for the other in a way that is converse of holding back and ambivalence. Viewed over an extended period, it is shown by consistency, which expresses itself in persistence under unfavorable conditions and in my willingness to overcome difficulties.
  • Obligations that derive from devotion are a constituent element in caring, and I do not experience them as forced on me or as necessary evils; there is a convergence between what I feel I am supposed to do and what I want to do.
• To help another person grow is to help him care for something or someone apart from himself. It involves encouraging and assisting him to find and create areas of his own in which he is able to care. Also, it is to help that other person come to care for himself, and by becoming responsive to his own need to care, to become responsible for his own life.
  • IMPORTANT: Teaching someone to be “devoted” and caring toward his own chosen interest can help them refine their values and passions.

More ingredients of caring:

• Caring is not simply a matter of good intentions.
  • “We sometimes speak as if caring did not require knowledge, as if caring for someone, for example, were simply a matter of good intentions or warm regard. But in order to care I must understand the other’s needs and I must be able to respond properly to them, and clearly good intentions do not guarantee this. To care for someone, I must know many things. I must know, for example, who the other is, what his powers and limitations are, what his needs are, and what is conducive to his growth; I must know how to respond to his needs, and what my own powers and limitations are.”
  • “The composer, for example, does not simply know about music in general, nor does he simply know about a specific musical idea; in order to care he must have both sorts of knowledge.”
  • IMPORTANT: Genuine caring requires more than mere goodwill. It requires both wit and wisdom—qualities often overlooked in a caregiver.
• Caring is not simply an act of habit. “I cannot care by sheer habit; I must be able to learn from my past. I see what my actions amount to, whether I have helped or not, and, in the light of the results, maintain or modify my behavior so that I can better help the other.”
  • IMPORTANT: One can’t make it a habit to perform acts of care to show that they care for another. They are required to actively reflect, continuously learn, and consistently adapt their support for the other.
• PATIENCE. Patience is not waiting passively for something to happen, but is kind of participation with the other in which we give fully to ourselves. And it is misleadering to understand patience simply in terms of time, for we give the other space as well. By patiently listening to the distraught man, by being present for him, we give him space to think and feel.
  • IMPORTANT: Mayeroff redefines patience as an active, participatory quality rather than a passive state of waiting. Being patient means being fully present.

• HONESTY. Honesty is present in caring as something positive, and not as a matter of not doing something, not telling lies or not deliberately deceiving others.
  • To care for the other, I must see the other as it is and not as I would like it to be or feel it must be. Similar to the meaning suggest by the phrase, “to be honest with oneself.”
  • Idolatry militates against caring, for it makes it impossible really to respond to this other.
  • The writer must have the courage to look and see whether he is more interested in proving himself correct than he is in examining and developing the idea, or whether he is interested in having something published than he is in developing the idea.
  • I cannot be fully present for the other if I am more concerned about how I appear to other people than I am with seeing and responding to its needs.
  • IMPORTANT: Honesty is the ability to see oneself as one is, unclouded by false expectations imposed by oneself or others. Clarity, in this sense, allows you to be frank with people—that is to be truly honest.
• TRUST. Trusting the other is to let go; it includes an element of risk and a leap into the unknown, both of which take courage.
  • The father who “cares” too much and “overprotects” his child does not trust the child, and whatever he may think he is doing, he is responding more to his needs than to the needs of the child to grow.
  • I must have confidence in my judgments and in my ability to learn from mistakes; I must, as we say, trust my instincts. The philosophical writer must trust his feelings for importance and relevance, for determining when ideas ring true and when to leave them out. The teacher must trust his ability to provide a climate friendly to learning, and to learn from student reactions what works and what does not. And the parent must trust his judgement to know when firmness is required, and to know when seemingly isolated instances really point to more lasting habit patterns.
  • OBSERVATION: By honing your instincts, you enhance your ability to discern, which in turn improves your capacity to take risks and trust others.
• HUMILITY. Humility is present in caring in several ways. First, since caring is responsive to the growth of this other, caring involves continuous learning about the other: there is always something more to learn.
  • No source is felt to be beneath me in principle; I am not humiliated to learn from any source, including my own mistakes.
  • The problem is always one of appropriateness to this novel situation, and this situation is, generally speaking, not simply a repetition of the past requiring only a mechanical application of principles.
  • It includes overcoming the arrogance that exaggerates my own powers at the expense of the powers of others and blinds me to the extent of my dependence, in anything I accomplish, on the cooperation of various conditions over which I have little or no control.
  • Through caring, I come to a truer appreciation of my limitations and powers; my limitations are neither resented nor glorified, and I can take pride in the successful use of my powers. Consider, for example, the mother’s pride in realizing how she has helped her child grow in independence and responsibility or the philosopher’s pride in the thoroughness with which he has worked out a significant idea.
  • Pride in a job well done is not pretentious, it does not distort; rather it goes with an honest awareness of what I have done and the extent of my dependence on the cooperation of others and on various conditions. There is nothing incompatible between pride, in this sense, and humilty.
  • OBSERVATION: Pride should not be confused with the honest recognition of one’s work and the contributions of others.
• HOPE. There is hope that the other will grow through caring, which is more general than hope as a specific expectation; it is akin, in some ways, to the hope that accompanies the coming of spring. It is not to be confused with wishful thinking and unfounded expectations. Such hope is not an expression of the insufficiency of the present in comparison with the sufficiency of a hoped-for future; it is rather an expression of the plenitude of the present, a present alive with a sense of the possible.
  • The father who is unable to trust his child as someone in his own right may have great “hopes” for the child, but they have little to do with the awareness of this child now. Such hopes actually impoverish the present by making it largely a postponement for a “more real” future when the child will really “amount” to something.
  • IMPORTANT: Hope involves appreciating all the possibilities/potential the other has in the present, not an escape to a future ideal.
• COURAGE. Trust in the other to grow and in my own ability to care gives me courage to go into the unknown, but it is also true that without the courage to go into the unknown such trust would be impossible.
  • OBSERVATION: Tied with his point on “trust.”

Some illuminating aspects of caring:

• I do not try to help the other grow in order to actualize myself, but by helping the other grow I do actualize myself.
• Caring for a mentally ill person requires uncommon sensitivity in interpersonal relations as well as specialized training; caring in performing the late Beethoven piano sonatas requires deep musical understanding as well as an accomplished technique.
• Caring assumes continuity and is impossible if the other is continually being replaced. The other must remain constant, for caring is a developmental process.
• In a meaningful friendship, caring is mutual, each cares for the other; caring becomes contagious. My caring for the other helps activate his caring for me; and similarly his caring for me helps activate my caring for him, it “strengthens” me to care for him.
• In caring, my being with the other person is bound up with being for him as well: I am for him in his striving to grow and be himself. I experience him as existing on the “same level” as I do. I neither condescend to him (look down on him, place him beneath me) nor idolize him (look up to him, place him above me). Rather, we exist on a level of equality. Put more accurately, I am no longer aware of levels; seeing things in terms of different levels has been, so to speak, transcended. We are jointly affirmed; neither one is affirmed at the expense of the other.
• Admiration as spontaneous delight should not be confused with adulation. Admiration brings me closer to the one cared for; I see him as he is. In hero worship, however, I relate largely to a figment of my own imagination and am basically out of touch with the other. Also, admiration is not at the expense of yet another whom I necessarily disparage by comparison with the one I praise excessively. Adulation has nothing to do with caring.
• When I care for an adult, on the other hand, I try to avoid making decisions for him. I help him make his own decisions by providing information, suggesting alternatives, and pointing out possible consequences, but all along I realize that they are his decisions to make and not my own. If I made his decisions for him, I would be condescending to him and treating him as a child; and by denying his need to take responsibility for his own life, I would be denying him as a person.

Final paragraph tying some thoughts together:

• To exhibit true care, one must understand its principles and discern what is appropriate in each situation. Mechanical application reveals disingenuousness.
• A profound understanding of fundamental virtues in caring is crucial. Beware of manipulators who exploit others by questioning their grasp of common virtues and gaslighting them by professing care while acting otherwise.
• Caring well helps you build a meaningful and fulfilling life.

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