title: [A theory on care].
abstract: Trying to define the nature of care when you are a health care professional, means, inevitably, going back to the very source of your professional commitment. Caring, an essential form of responsibility for the other, is thus revealed as a way of behaving towards other people, as an active and concrete commitment testifying as much to the humanity of the one who gives it as to that of the one who receives it. Starting with the notion of the phenomenology of human capacity, Paul Ricoeur thinks of independence in terms of capacity. He calls upon work of the Indian economist Amartya Sen published in the 1980s on the notion of capabilities. This leads to conceiving disease or disability as a lack of elementary or basic capacity. According to Ricoeur, this notion of capacity can only be understood by looking at its contrary: vulnerability. In this way, only a weakened frail person can be called upon to become independent. Thus the human being, and particularly the ill human being, must be looked upon as both vulnerable, and thus suffering, and capable, and thus active.
authors.affiliation: Cadre supérieur de santé/Formateur, Université Paris Est/Marne la Vallée, Institut Hannah Arendt/Pôle formation Centre Hospitalier Sainte Anne.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Svandra
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009726:Nurses; D009732:Nursing Care; D009742:Nursing Theory; D017009:Professional Autonomy; D012941:Social Responsibility