WORDS DISTINCTLY HUMAN: LIMITING, YET HUMANIZING
Through words we humanly share the meaning to us of our behavior, experience, and profession. Words attest to and endure. Thus, a professional history is possible, accrues, and has lasting duration. The study of the nursing event itself and its conceptualization as proposed in humanistic nursing practice theory is an application of phenomenology. Articulation of our perspective, experience, and ideas is the human way of phenomenology.
Words are symbols to which man gives meaning as an outgrowth of his civilization within his culture. Through words man attempts to communicatively describe his experienced states of being-in-his-world. In describing, of necessity, he relegates his uniquely known experiences to already known word symbols or categories. Thus, the conceptualized experience is limited, or less real than the lived unique experience. So, while words prevent the loss of the wisdom of lived experience, they are both a wonder of humanness and a limitation of humanness.
In describing human experiences there are efforts that can cut back this limitation. If we truly wish to convey meaning to others, really want to share what we have experienced in living, we will put forth the effort. To put forth such effort requires going beyond "I must publish to publish." It takes writing, structuring, rewriting, and restructuring often to a point where for a period one comes to hate materials he once held dear.
Through the years many of us come to use words as a means of passing a course, or we view words as a mode for self-explosion, expression, and self-understanding. In these ways they hold much purpose. The requirement that words convey unique experiences of being to others demands much more. This necessitates one selecting words that depict one's perspective, his unique human angular view; or depict for another, this particular man as he perceives and responds to his unique experience. Such a depiction has to be unknown to the other; each one's vantage point, given his history as an existent in this time and place, is singular. Then it requires finding words and putting them {61} together in a way that best conveys the meaning the nursing event had to the nurse. An adequate dictionary and thesaurus can be useful.
The actual presentation of experience for an audience demands an ordering of data in a sequence that will be sensibly logical for them. We live experience in an order that flows from our being and history within a multiplicity of calls and responses. Presently human expression is limited to sequentiality. So again we see that the conceptualized experience is different from and lacks the reality of the uniquely lived event. Structuring a logical sequential presentation of data, deciding on those aspects that influenced meaning, and having it conform as closely as possible to the real is difficult.
Often, when it seems that one has done his very best, it is wise to have a trusted other react to conceptualizations. Another's questions can bring to the conceptualizer's awareness thought connections that moved him along and that he has failed to convey. Also, such a reader can indicate aspects of thought trips the writer took that add nothing to the issue at stake and weaken his message. Too, another's response can make apparent to a writer the need to clarify meaning. This clarification may merely entail a better choice of words or phrases, or it may suggest the use of a meaningful metaphor, analogy, or parable.
These last imaginative forms of expression we frequently use meaningfully, sometimes like a shorthand, with our intimates. A phrase, metaphor, or analogy conveys with an immediacy the quality or spirit of an event. For example, a nurse working in a psychiatric hospital unit speaking of a patient said, "He came down the hall looking like an accident about to happen." A page of technical description could not have given me as much feeling for what she and the patient were experiencing at that moment. In nurses' efforts to express objectively, scientifically, and eruditely such modes of expression are often deleted from our written professional works. It is as if we enforce the rules of medical record charting of precision, conciseness, and use of "weasel" words onto all our written works to the detriment of a theoretical and professional enduring body of nursing knowledge being actualized. It takes considerable pain and endeavor to find egress from such human programming. With it we have purified, equalized, wearied, and dehumanized supreme experiences of human existence. And, we have negated the meaning and importance of ourselves and nursing. How often have you heard, "I am just a nurse"?
Phenomenology requires rigorous investment into respectfully, appreciatively, and acceptingly making evident our lived worlds and their ramifications for the now, the past, and the anticipated future. Nursing literature of this caliber would call and inspire those who attended it to further nursing practice and responsibly share the meaning they attribute to their area of specialized dedication.
The raw data of our lived nursing worlds do not easily reveal their meanings or messages. Many see their worlds only superficially, and themselves as mere functions. How often a nurse is surprised, confounded, on hearing a relative or friend speak of a nursing event in their lives that may have occurred {62} from 10 to 40 years previously. Frequently persons express appreciation for the meaning these events have had for them through the years. They remember the pleasure, anger, pain, fear, and/or joy they experienced.
It is not loose performance that allows raw data to convey its message to a nurse. New data are sucked easily and immediately into old, worn out, known theoretical frames and networks of words. Severe self-discipline enters into describing nursing experience with the vigor of how it was lived. Too easily the description is let fall to mediocre common forms. Proper grammar and plain English should suffice. This would carry the nursing message, as jargon borrowed from other disciplines in which the nurse always speaks as an alien, never will. Humanistic nursing practice theory in asking for description does not ask one to forget or deny known terms and knowledge. Rather it asks for a bracketing or holding of this knowledge to the side. The nursing experience should be given an opportunity to be seen in its pure form, rather than forcing it to conform to foreign prestigious terms borrowed from other areas of specialization, which beg the meaning of the nursing event. Prior to dispersion, of course, one should weigh one's expression in English against one's expression in one's known foreign jargon. Then one will be open to choose how one wants to express and share the meaning of her nursing world.
Phenomenology accepts categorization as a necessity of communicating. It holds, nevertheless, that this is secondary to initial aware experiencing. This study method acknowledges the unfathomable complexity of existing and knowing. It strives for as adequate conceptualization of the existential experience as possible. It honors the knowing person's continued capacity for surprise and wonderment. Phenomenology asks us to go beyond the common labels to the surprise of our own and other's unique existences-in-the-world. A nurse who had been struggling over many months with a family in their home, on the day she first experienced an "I-Thou" relationship with them said, "It was as if I had gone beyond the uncooperativeness and dirtiness of the situation." Immediacy in labeling offers us the complacency and security of a wrapped up problem. How could a nurse be held responsible for what happened to a "dirty," "uncooperative" family. The many commonly heard labels humans attribute inhumanely to others rarely relate to answers in situations or to the dreadful human suffering problems generate.
Phenomenology seeks attestation of the meaning of a situation to a participant. Positivism seeks general objective categories within the universal. Phenomenology prizes differences, variations, and struggles for their representation as parts of the whole. Rather than emphasize the majority as holding sway, it recognizes that the unique contribution can possibly be the weightiest in meaning. {63}