"... every nurse is more than just herself, she also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the nursing world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again."
To me, human freedom means recognizing our unique potential, responsibility, and limitations. Our singularity as a nurse among nurses, then, confronts us with a responsibility that belongs to one else. Martin Buber, philosophical anthropologist says:
"As we become free ... our responsibility must become personal and solitary."[11]
Our unlikeness to other nurses is a lonely, very person conditioned state. Only each nurse can be responsible for herself. The wonders of freedom are { 70} paradoxically, "all-at-once," both a delight and a burden. In nursing it is important for us to understand freedom not as opposing or agreeing: freedom is choosing--choosing and saying "yes" to one's self.
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.
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.