From an anthropology of solitude to an ethics of care

This essay addresses the development of an anthropology of solitude in situations of extreme vulnerability (i.e., not willed solitude, but solitude resulting from exclusion) and of an ethics for dealing with it. A contextualization of solitude in the framework of today's society is thus followed by a description of five anthropological dimensions of solitude: personal rupture, loss of identity, loss of a sense of the future, self-enclosure, forgetting one's body, and loss of voice and speech. In the second part, the care-based ethics is reoriented in order to address such situations, as an attempt is also made to link it to an ethics and a politics of capabilities leading to an empowerment of the human person.