Forms of Care: Substitution, Enablement, and the Structure of the Political

This paper reinterprets Heidegger’s distinction between two modes of Fürsorge—einspringende (substitutive) and vorspringende (anticipatory)—as an interpretive tool for analyzing certain transformations in contemporary political language and practice. Although this distinction has an ontological character in Heidegger, it is here employed as a formal structure to describe different configurations of the relationship between subjects and systems. The central hypothesis is that political discourse in recent decades has tended to privilege substitutive modes of care, oriented toward management and control, over anticipatory modes oriented toward the enablement of subjects. This shift is interpreted not in normative terms, but as a reorganization of modes of care within the same structural space, corresponding to different ways of organizing control and autonomy. To clarify this difference without resorting to moral criteria, the distinction is integrated with a constructivist model grounded in the notion of cognitive resonance, understood as the alignment between relational configurations and individual or collective cognitive systems. From this perspective, categories such as cooperation or competition are not values to be grounded, but configurations that emerge and stabilize within complex systems. The paper does not advance claims to universality, but proposes a situated interpretive lens capable of making explicit structural differences in the ways social systems organize and stabilize political experience. In this way, an ontological distinction is transformed into a non-prescriptive analytical tool for reading the present.