Human endeavor between man and men in their-worlds, in this instance professional clinical nursing, if explored and described is viewed as contributing to man's human evolvement and to knowledge of the human condition and how man becomes.
Integrally all the above statements are the bases and biases of this human phenomenological method of nursology. In a phrase, I suppose what all these starting point statements say is: Nursing situations make available human existence events significantly worthy of description. Only human nurses can describe them. Humans' ability to describe reality adequately has its limits. We should describe since pridefully we humans are the only existing beings capable of giving meaning to, looking at, and expressing our consciousness. In the long run this effort could yield a nursing science.
PHASES OF PHENOMENOLOGIC NURSOLOGY
Phase I: Preparation of the Nurse Knower For Coming to Know
This method engages the investigator as a risk taker and as a "knowing place." Risk taking necessitates decision. Decision imposes confronting ambivalence in one's self. The ambivalence of wanting to be "all-at-once" responsible and dependent. Superimposing an already accepted and acceptable structure on data is safe feeling. Approaching the situation or data openly, letting the structure emerge from it, not deciding what to look for, being willing to be surprised, give feelings of excitement, fear, and uncertainty. There exists the possibility that our humanness may include the dilemma of our not being able to perceive the messages of our data, that we will not be able to merge with it and become more. The question arises, Are we knowing places that can relate to otherness and intuitively synthesize knowledge? This process of accepting the decision to approach the unknown openly is experienced as an internal struggle and we become consciously aware of our rigidity and satisfaction with the status quo. Conforming to the usual, in this case positivism, gives a security that is not easily relinquished despite the advantages of actualizing our unique responsible freedom.
Russell's metaphorical phrase, "windows always open to the world," depicts the sought state of mind. His elaboration on this phrase gives the flavor of the process of preparing the mind. He says, "Through one's windows one sees not only the joy and beauty of the world, but also its pain and cruelty and ugliness, and the one is as well worth seeing as the other, and one must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven."[12] Pain, cruelty, ugliness, hell seem appropriate words to convey seeing our {71}long-cherished ideas and values, our security blankets, as only false gods. Nietzsche in speaking of confrontation of one's values said, "And now only cometh to him the great terror, the great outlook, the great sickness, the great nausea, the great seasickness."[13] So this human methodology seeks a condition of being in the investigator. The investigator must be aware of her own angular view and democratically open to giving the angular views apparent in the data, the called for representation.
The first phase of this method of research correlates well with the struggle experienced by me in clarifying my approach to patients in public health, medical-surgical, and psychiatric mental health situations. In these situations, one truly has to struggle with democratically keeping one's windows open to the world. And this is a continual process. Having experienced this struggle in clinical nursing made this approach to research valid and meaningful to me.
Preparing the mind for knowing in clinical or research endeavors may be accomplished by several means. One means is by immersing one's self in dramatic and literary works and contemplating, reflecting on, and discussing them as they relate to the knower's already known, in this case, nursing practice. In clinical or research nursing the selection of literary works to stimulate the opening of one's human view is based on their presentation, depictions, and descriptions of man's nature. In literature authors share their thoughts as men and present possible ways men may view and relate to their worlds.
Phase II: Nurse Knowing of the Other Intuitively
Bergson conceives of man knowing through a dilatation of his imagination getting inside of, into le durée, into the rhythm and mobility of the other. Living the rhythm of the other he believes results in an absolute, intuitive, inexpressible, unique knowledge of the other. He says: