Page 277 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

C ar it as cu rr icu lu m a n d t ea c h i n g-l ea r n i n g
ing. She is arguably an exemplar of living the paradox of oneness with
her being, knowing, doing in the world. This is not to say that we
must agree with everything she said and did, but it is worth remem-
bering that her weltanschauung (worldview) was largely what moti-
vated her actions as one of the key figures in the emergence of mod-
ern nursing.

the analytic and experiMental as Mythic episteMology
Just as objectivism is a mythology yet can destructively become our
ethic, ethos, and mind-set for teaching, learning, scholarship, and so
on, Parker Palmer pointed out the same misstep with the notion that
“analytic” and “experimental” mean “Being scientific.” Analytic, as he
makes explicit, means that once you have objectified a phenomenon as
something to be studied, you are then free to cut it into little pieces to
see how it works; to break it down into parts, hold it at a distance, ana-
lyze it, and thus understand it. Palmer used this cutting-things-up phe-
nomenon in order to look at, to understand, something “objectively,”
as a metaphor for what education often does to the human mind and
human heart and human soul—the human experience in its totality.
Palmer argues that this great facility for taking things apart, dissect-
ing them to the point that one cannot know the original, is a form of
violence in that it cultivates a lack of sensitivity and little capacity for
putting things back together, including the human heart.
The same is true for the myth of “experimental,” in that the
mythology of objectivity, analytic, sets up mythological imprints that
suggest that once things are objectified, dissected into parts, we are
free to experiment. This focus in turn leads us to justify reducing a
human to the moral status of object so we can objectively know, study,
experiment, and conduct science.
This form of experimentation with humans and nature leads us to
seek designs with what we think the world should be like, to control
and dominate the outcome, so to speak, with our logic, our distant
data, and our moving things around from their original form. We do
this without paying attention to potentially destructive outcomes for
self, society, humanity, the environment, and nature alike. This thesis
of Palmer’s about the epistemological myths that deform our ethics

249