Part 7 (1/2)

Considering the complexity of each man's being and becoming, it is surprising that we come to understand each other in community at all, rather than the reverse.

How can we hope for a sustained thereness, presences of nurses with other man (patients, patients' families, professional colleagues, and other health service personnel) as ”We” in an ongoing struggle of community considering their mult.i.tudinous differences? Norman Cousins, in _Who Speaks for Man_, comments on man's inability to respond affirmatively to those he experiences as different from himself.[14] For the human community to progress he suggests federation. A unity in which differences would be valued as promoting thought, human evolvement, and community advancement. Cousins gives examples of man's inhumanity to man based on differences viewed as nonvalues. The prevalence of this latter view of differences is very evident in our commonplace health-nursing world. Can nurses and other health care maintainers look at the ways they respond to differences consciously, and can they deliberately choose to be open to responding to them as valuable? Can we conceive of there being value in that which we see as ”not right,” ”untrue,”

”wrong?”

The ability to be there, to stay involved in community with my fellows, is a problem worthy of concern to me as a nurse. How do I stay in an existential way with my contemporaries, patients, patients' families when their values in reality are so different from my own? How do I go beyond a negative judgmental to a prizing att.i.tude that would open the possibility of seeing strengths in others' views perhaps lost, discarded, or never previously existent in my own? Nonsuperimposing of my own value system through recognizing and bracketing it is a difficult professional goal. And yet, a goal that if coupled with the courage for personal existence, could sustain me in the health-nursing community.

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So for a health-nursing community to truly be actualized each nurse would prepare to be all it was possible for her to be as a nurse. Then, through exploration there would be a recognition of the reality of the existent community. Over time a merger of the values of the nurse and of the existing community would be reflected as moreness in each. The nurse would be more through her relation with the community; the community would be more through its relation with the nurse. Each would make an important difference in the other. The macrocosm, the community, would reflect the nurse's quality of presence. The microcosm, the nurse, would reflect the presence of the community with her. Each unique man becomes in community through communication with other uniquely different men.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Plato, _The Republic_, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945).

[2] Wilfrid Desan, _Planetary Man_ (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972).

[3] John Hersey, _A Single Pebble_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p.

18.

[4] Hermann Hesse, _Steppenwolf_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 60.

[5] Gabriel Marcel, _h.o.m.o Viator_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, 1962), p. 121.

[6] Teilhard de Chardin, _The Phenomenon of Man_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961).

[7] Norman Kiell, _The Universal Experience of Adolescence_ (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), pp. 22-44.

[8] Martin Buber, _I and Thou_, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1958).

[9] Hesse, _Steppenwolf_, p. 60.

[10] Plato, _The Republic_.

[11] Robert A. Heinlein, _Time Enough for Love_ (New York: G. P.

Putnam's Sons. 1973).

[12] Frederich Nietzsche, ”Beyond Good and Evil,” trans. Helen Zimmern, in _The Philosophy of Nietzsche_ (New York: Random House, 1927) and ”Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” trans. Thomas Common, in the _Philosophy of Nietzsche_ (New York: Random House, 1927).

[13] Martin Buber, _Between Man and Man_, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

[14] Norman Cousins, _Who Speaks for Man?_ (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953).

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Part 2

METHODOLOGY--A PROCESS OF BEING {50} {51}

5

TOWARD A RESPONSIBLE FREE RESEARCH NURSE IN THE HEALTH ARENA