Man is an individual being necessarily related to other men in time and space. As every man is beholden to other men for his birth and development, interdependence is inherent in the human situation. In this sense, human existence is coexistence. The deeper significance of this truth has been recognized and elucidated by many thinkers, especially those in the existential stream. Over { 16} and over, their writings reveal the paradoxical tension of being human: each man is, at once, independent, a unique individual and interdependent, a necessarily related being. As Wilfrid Desan says, referring to man as subsistent relation, "He is towards-the-other but he is not-the-other."[1]
Furthermore, as Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel maintain, it is actually through his relations with other men that a man becomes, that his unique individuality is actualized. To know myself as "individual" is to experience myself as this particular unique here-and-now person and other than that there-and-now person. Or in other words, to know myself as me is to see myself in relation to and distant from other selves. As Buber so beautifully states, "It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed."[2]
Logically, it follows that the possibility for self-confirmation exists in any intersubjective situation. However, in everyday life this self-confirmation is experienced to different degrees or on different levels in interhuman relating. Since both persons are independent subjects acting with their human capacity for disclosing or enclosing themselves, there is no guarantee that the availability and presence necessary for a genuine confirming encounter will come forth. Presence, the gift of one's self, cannot be seized or called forth by demand, it can only be given freely and be invoked or evoked.
Since man becomes more through his choices and the aim of nursing is to help man toward well-being or more-being, the humanistic nursing effort is directed toward increasing the possibilities of making responsible choices. Such choice involves, in the first place, an openness to and an awareness of one's own situation. A choice is a response to possibility. Therefore, one must first recognize that possibilities or alternatives exist. This openness to options is experienced as a freedom to choose as well as a freedom from the bonds of habit and stereotyped response, from routine, from the veils of the obvious. It means getting in touch with one's experience, one's subjective-objective world. As one becomes more acutely aware of his personal freedom of choice, there arises concurrently an awareness of the quality of choice, of the responsibility that is always implied in the freedom. Then follows reflective consideration of one's unique situation with its possible alternatives and an examination of the values inherent in them. Finally, the act of choosing is expressed in a response to the situation with a willingness to accept the responsibility for its foreseeable consequences. Through this experience the person becomes aware of himself as an individual. As a subject choosing freely and responsibly, he knows himself as distinct from and yet related to others.