existence who is communicating is “concerned for” and “deals with” those who are listening, and that they are always there in the lived world and hence fall within the circle of its being concerned-about. But this wrongly interprets the phenomenal state of affairs.
You the listeners are not objects of a concern-about. As a form of communicating the subject matter and helping people see it in a lecture, care is never being concerned-about, because the lecture cannot really produce in you the vision of the subject matter but can only awaken it or arouse it. Therefore, that which care qua communication wants to communicate cannot, in its most proper essence, be an object of concern in that care. Instead, another existence, as care, takes it into its care. Accordingly the kind of being that the communicating existence has in relation to [223] the listeners is not a being-familiar-with, and it is not a being concerned-about. Rather it is a being-with, it is a mutual-care, or better: being concerned-for [Mitsorge, genauer: Fürsorge]. This expression too must be understood as a phenomenological concept.
Being concerned-for likewise has other possibilities and forms (although this is not the place to go into them). But regarding being-with-others in the basic comportment of being concerned-for, we have to make a fundamental distinction.
Concern-for can be carried out in a way that virtually takes away the other’s care. In concern-for him I put myself in his place: I step in for him, which entails that he give himself up, step back, and accept ready-made the concern I show him, thereby completely freeing himself from his care. In the kind of being concerned-for where care “steps in,” the person on the receiving end becomes dependent and dominated, even though the domination may be entirely unspoken and not experienced. We characterize this first kind of being concerned-for as one that “steps in” and takes the place of the other—takes away and dominates. By contrast there is a second kind of being-with-the-other that does not step into his place (his situation and project) and take it away, but instead carefully steps ahead of him, not so as to take away his care—which is himself, his very existence—but to give it back to him. Such concern-for does not dominate but liberates.16
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The second kind of concern-for is the concern-for of authenticity, because the existence who receives it can and should return to himself and
16. [Here (Moser, p. 476) Heidegger ends his lecture of Friday, 15 January 1926, to be followed by that of Tuesday, 19 January (Heidegger did not lecture on Monday, 18 January), which opened with a 550-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]