Essay 3: Material of phenomenological studies

1. How is the text or material of phenomenological studies obtained by investigators? 2. What did you learn about how Ray (1991) created the methodological process to study the experience of caring or compassion in nursing research and the meaning of caring in the researcher’s experience? What are the sources used in this new method? 3. What affects you about the way Ray (1991) looked at caring inquiry?

Smith RN PhD AHN-BC FAAN, Marlaine C.. Caring in Nursing Classics: An Essential Resource (Kindle Locations 9846-9852). Springer Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.

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Years ago, an elderly woman bedridden with a stroke looked at me with her stark, piercing blue eyes. Though I usually didn’t like loud music, I turned up the radio to drown the sorrows of the sick room I was in—to drown out the sounds and, in some strange way, the sight of the suffering one before me. Unspeaking, I looked at her. She spoke with her heart. Uncomfortable in her presence, but responding to the life of compassion deep within my heart and soul, I turned off the radio. The journey of sharing the pain—that is, nursing—began. I wrote this chapter to share ideas and an approach to the method that may capture the complexity of researching—caring. I have spent much time researching and reflecting on the nature of caring and feel intensely that it is the way of compassion, a journey of love. Caring and love are synonymous (Ray, 1981). Inquiring about caring touches the heart and translates through the soul: The “speaking together” between the one caring and the one cared for. It is an immersion into the human encounter that also reveals the human, environmental, and spiritual contexts that are nursing. The metaphorical heart and soul are the symbols and synonyms for life, living, sensitivity, reason, and integrity. These symbols represent a creative process:Essay 3: Material of phenomenological studies

The gradual or, more often, abrupt shifting of consciousness from a focus on the “they” or “I” to a compassionate “we” (Kidd, 1990), which is also spiritual (that which deepens and moves one forward and upward) (Kandinsky, 1977). Compassion is a wounding of the heart by the other, where the “other” enters into us and makes us other. In the minutes of presence and dialogue with the other, we have the transformative powers of the esthetic—the understanding of forms of meaning within the sheer presence of the other and of dialogue or language that exercises the most penetrative authority over consciousness (Steiner, 1989). In the compassionate way of being, the forms of “other” in consciousness communicate a depth of felt-realness or authenticity, which is intuitive (Steiner, 1989) and depends on the granting to the other to whom one communicates a share in one’s being (Buber, 1965). The esthetic act in a compassionate way of being thus communicates in the understanding of forms of meaning a simultaneous immanence and transcendence—human choice to share in the life of the other, and an intuitive knowing, which, as we become “other,” can be translated into a call to a deeper life, a more integrated wholeness, and a coming to understand more fully what we have understood. What does this mean for nursing and nursing inquiry? For nursing, real presence and dialogue as choice and intuition in compassionate forms of meaning in understanding is an act of creation. This esthetic act, this conceiving and bringing into being, is a birthing and growth of the divine or spiritual life within. Steiner has (1989) intimated that in an esthetic act, there can be no experience which does not wager on a presence of sense that is, finally, theological. He states, “So far as it [the esthetic act] wagers on meaning, an account of the act of reading in the fullest sense, of the act of the reception and internalization of significant forms within us, is a metaphysical and, in the last analysis, a theological one”; “[t]he meaning of meaning is a transcendent postulate” (1989, pp. 215–216). Transcendence in the felt-realness of the compassionate encounter is the unwritten theology. The meaning of meaning or transcendence as unwritten theology is an apprehension of the “radically inexplicable presence, facticity and perceptible substantiality of the created, it is; we are” (p. 201) because there is creation. For nursing inquiry as the way of compassion, the esthetic (creative) act of knowing about the meaning of the meaning of nursing as caring, presumes creation—the conceiving of and bringing into being a knowledge of the substantiality of the created. Essay 3: Material of phenomenological studies

There is transcendence that is also theological. There is a presence that, as the researcher dwells with the data to read “being anew” or to apprehend the nature of caring, “is the source of powers, of significations in the text, in the work [that is] neither consciously willed nor consciously understood … the unmastered ‘thereness’ of a secret-sharer, of a prior creation with and against which the art [esthetic] act has been effected” (Steiner, 1989, pp. 211–212). In essence, the felt-realness of compassion (caring) in nursing and nursing research, because of the focus on the compassionate “we,” is a theological enterprise. As Emily Dickinson notes in one of her poems (Stone, 1990), “The soul selects her own society—Then, shuts the door—” (p. 9). CARING INQUIRY: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ESTHETIC RESEARCH Caring inquiry as an esthetic process in research is a unique method of presence and dialogue. It attends to both immanence—communion with and transcendence—and reflective intuition. When a researcher engages in caring inquiry, the compassionate “we” is enacted. Encountering the “other” to learn anew the world of caring, not the world as previously encoded by scientific analysis, is where the word and compassion (love) interact (Steiner, 1989). Both description (phenomenology) and interpretation (phenomenological hermeneutics) and esthetic knowing of the experience of caring are the means by which questions about the meaning of caring are illuminated. Phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics (Van Manen, 1990) are human sciences that study persons who are experiencing the life world. Esthetic knowing in caring research attends to creativity, sensitivity, and the quality of presences