Cuidado e Pobreza em Heidegger

In the history which, being that of the Western World, brings the whole planet in its train, different modes of daily life gain the shape of an epoch in which, tediously and yet dangerously, the overall technical project defining the world imposes itself, unstoppable, devastating. Socio-economic poverty is no more than the factical side through which a deeper spiritual poverty announces itself, a poverty springing from the loss of sense and the richness of the primordial bound between man and being. Hölderlin gave poetical expression to this idea and Heidegger developed it philosophically as Geviert, ‘the fourfold’. The recovery of that bound does not mean a turning back, but rather implies a thoughtful missing of the origins (andenkendes Denken) which should enable us to poetically recover the grounding of ‘another beginning’. The experience of this missing is a very different kind of poverty. And yet this route can but be made from the factical world in which we live: the world of technique and the ‘cybernetic world project’. This, in its turn, implies making use of it, with a released detachment, leading it to the discovery of something else. It is in this pathway, defined between 1938 and 1945, and which shall take one from facticity to its ontological correlate, that the truly Heideggerian question of poverty is thematised. Following it should enable one to detect in it the formal structure of care, as well as the novum it represents regarding the most common notio