Nurses are with other men in times of peak life experiences under the most intimate circumstances. We, too, can not be certain about what we come to know in our betweens. We can be sure that these realities of human experience are worthy of exploration. Our opportunities are unique, only we can describe man in the nursing situation.
In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee voices a similar concern about the need to describe man-in-his-world and the adequacy of human description.[5] Aware of the wonders and complexities of man he considers not trying to describe worse than the inadequacy of description.
Thinkers have also acknowledged that we can come to know from others. A poem by Goethe expresses an attitude about this:
"Somebody says: 'Of no school I am part,
Never to living master lost my heart;
Nor anymore can I be said
To have learned anything from the dead.'
{68}
That statement—subject to appeal—
Means: 'I'm a self-made imbecile.'"[6]
In nursing what better master than the nursing situation in which we become through our relations with others. Each human person has something unique to teach us if we can but hear.
About our inadequacies of expression, many things are, are true, "all-at-once." The law of contradiction does not apply in-the-lived-experienced-world. We each view the world through our unique histories. Wisdom is many sided truth. Wisdom cannot be expressed "all-at-once." Truths can be stated only in sequence or metaphorically. If I were supercritical of my human limitations to express "all-at-once" wisdom, I would say nothing. Jung points up the dangers of this, he says:
"I must prevent my critical powers from destroying my creativeness. I know well enough that every word I utter carries with it something of myself—of my special and unique self with its particular history and its particular world."[7]
Each nurse's uniqueness dictates then a responsibility to share her particular knowing with fellow struggling human beings. Only through each describing can there be correction and complementary synthesis to movement beyond.
The nurse's world is an experiential place for becoming influenced by each participant's "here and now" inclusive or origin, history, and hopes, fears, and alternatives of the confronting future. Positivistic science focuses on selected particulars. Henri Bergson says:
"… for us conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and live the intervals themselves."[8]