Two ways of helping someone, from Heidegger’s Being and Time.
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes a way of caring for someone in which you step into their life, take their care away from them, and hand it back once the thing is done. Call it doing the thing for them.
He describes another way too. A teacher, for example, can leap ahead of you and free you for your own care. The aim is not to do the thing for you but to give you back an authentic relationship to your own possibilities. As we argue about cognitive offloading and whether anything is left for the human in the age of AI, the distinction is worth remembering.
Someone wants to help you with something that is yours to do. Choose how they help.
The small flame is your care: your own concern for the thing, and through it for yourself.
Heidegger’s word for caring about other people is Fürsorge, usually translated as solicitude. He says it has two extreme possibilities.
In the first, einspringende Fürsorge, one leaps in for the other and takes over whatever the other was supposed to be concerned with. The other is pushed out of his own place and steps back, so that afterwards he can receive the matter as finished and ready to use, or be rid of it altogether. Heidegger notes that someone helped this way can become dominated and dependent, even when the domination is quiet and he never notices it.
In the second, vorausspringende Fürsorge, one leaps ahead of the other, toward his own ability to be. The point is not to relieve him of his care but to give it back to him as his own, for the first time. This kind of help concerns the other’s existence rather than some particular thing he is busy with. It helps him see himself clearly in his care and become free for it.
Paraphrased from Sein und Zeit §26, p. 122 of the German pagination.
These are extremes. Heidegger says everyday life with others moves between them, in many mixed forms. Here are a few kinds of help, roughly placed.
When a model helps you, it can do either. After the help, could you do the thing again yourself? Did it show you the matter, or hand you a result? Is anything still asked of you?
Neither kind is always wrong. Leaping in is often exactly what a task calls for. The question is which one is happening, and whether you chose it.
The second kind of help is what a teacher is for. My course on Being and Time tries to do it for one of the hardest books of the last century: four recorded sessions, about four hours, from the question of the meaning of being, through being-in-the-world, to the possibility of being authentic.
It was made for people who have tried the book and put it down, and for people who have never studied philosophy at all.