Page 276 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

Carita s cur ricul um and t e achin g -le ar ni n g
he noted, the Gulf War had overcome the “Vietnam syndrome,” which
was a subjective war, fought face-to-face, a war that tore us apart
because we were so troubled by the subjective evidence. This con-
trast of these past wars and their effect on the public worldwide also
helps to explain in part the growing resistance to the Iraq War, which
is closer and closer to the day-to-day world of the public around the
world.
With this line of thinking, one can begin to see how our thin line
of epistemology crosses over into ethics. That is how objectivity for its
own sake and the mythology of rightness create cruelty if they do not
accurately portray how events/knowledge really exist in the world.
The objectivist mythology, whether in war metaphors or per-
sonal life events, is a distortion of both reality and knowledge, a
distortion of values; it is a distortion of science and how science is
done. Palmer helps us remember: great knowing and great learn-
ing are not simply done objectively. Paradoxically, they constitute a
dance between the objective and subjective, between intimacy and
distance, between the personal, inner-life world and the outer, profes-
sional-political domain. This is true in all disciplines, not just nursing.
The mythology of objectivism is “more about [power] and control
over the world, or over each other [or a given phenomenon], more a
mythology of power than a real epistemology that reflects how real
knowing proceeds.” As such, perpetuating this mythology of objec-
tivism does not help us to see that “every epistemology becomes an
ethic” (Palmer 2004:2) and affects how we value and see the different
phenomena in our world.

nightingale as exeMplar of
understanding “episteMology as ethic”
The story of Nightingale and her hands-on approach to knowing is a
historic as well as a modern example of the “dance” of great know-
ing, the paradoxical integration of the subjective and objective. She
skillfully wove together objective data and subjective visions, a per-
sonal sense of calling for her mission and outer-world life’s work that
transcended any objectivist logic of her era. Yet her internal ethics
guided her approach to knowing, to valuing, to teaching, and to learn-

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