Part 11 (1/2)
This phase of phenomenological nursology is highly probable if not absolutely necessary. Desan says:
”Truth emerges in and through the relational operation. For the way of paradox is the way of truth.”[20]
The investigator may struggle with the multiplicity of views now consciously part of and within herself. Again Desan:
”... this unrest ”is” the mind of man, reaching its center....
From this center the splendor of multiplicity is visible.”[21]
The researcher, mulling over and considering the relations.h.i.+ps between the multiple views, insightfully corrects and expands her own angular view. This is not a right-wrong type of correction. Such correction would amount only to an ongoing eternal recurrence of a frustrating nature. Rather this correction takes the form of ever more inclusiveness. Struggling with the communion of the different ideas the knower takes an intuitive leap, through and yet beyond these ideas, into a greater understanding. She then may come up with a conception or abstraction that is inclusive of and beyond the multiplicities and contradictions.
This inclusive conception or abstraction is an expression of the investigator in her here and now, with the old truths and the novel truths, none obliterated.
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The fifth phase of this phenomenological nursology method can be equated to that phase of clinical professional nursing in which the nurse propels nursing knowledge forward. In this phase a nurse struggling with the mutual communion of multiple nursing situations arrives at a conception that is meaningful to the many or to all. From the specific concrete ideas of the many situations she moves through dilemma to resolution which is nursing expressed abstractly in units or as a whole, as one.
Experiential knowledge of nursing, years in which I came to know self and the other while implementing scientific facts, allowed me as a knower to recognize the relevance of this philosophical nursology method. This method does not aim at conventionality. Rather it strives to meaningfully augment and share conceptualized nurse-world realities.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Josephine G. Paterson, ”Echo into Tomorrow: A Mental Health Psychiatric Philosophical Conceptualization of Nursing” D.N.Sc.
dissertation, Boston University, 1969.
[2] Josephine G. Paterson ”From a Philosophy of Clinical Nursing to a Method of Nursology,” _Nursing Research_, Vol. XX (March-April, 1971), pp. 143-146.
[3] Abraham Kaplan, _Conduct of Inquiry_ (San Francisco: Chandler Publis.h.i.+ng Co., 1964), p. 23.
[4] Plato, _The Republic_, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 45.
[5] James Agee, _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1939), pp. 91-102.
[6] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ”On Originality.” In _Great Writings of Goethe_, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Mentor Press, 1958), p. 45.
[7] C. G. Jung, _Modern Man in Search of a Soul_, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1933), p. 118.
[8] Henri Bergson, ”Time in the History of Western Philosophy,” in _Philosophy in the Twentieth Century_, ed. William Barrett and Henry D.
Aiken (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 252.
[9] Will Durant and Ariel Durant, _Lessons of History_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 102.
[10] Hermann Hesse, _Demian_, trans. Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 4.
[11] Martin Buber, _Between Man and Man_, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 93.
[12] Bertrand Russell, _The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944_ (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), p. 97.
[13] Frederick Nietzsche ”Thus Spake Zarathustra,” trans. Thomas Common, in _The Philosophy of Nietzsche_ (New York: Random House, 1927), p. 239.