Page 281 - 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
ter tends to be a love in which self-interest is involved, whereas Caritas
denotes a caring or love for something that lies beyond the self-interest
of any given individual. Further, Caritas is not intended to convey a
mere sentiment. The term suggests a certain form of care, a care to
be cognizant of the other. This notion is related to the Greek word
agape, meaning literally “open” or “attitude of wonder” but in this case
“open to the other,” to the difference of other. Levinas develops this
point by using the image of “the face” to distinguish the difference of
other, this particular individual who differs from a universal other—an
“other” that tends toward the impersonal or impartial in which the
face is largely marginalized because it is unseen.
For the moment, we can say that Caring Science is a model of
thought and practice in which biomedical science and technical evi-
dence alone are not simply blended with Caritas but that biomedical
science and evidence per se are subsumed within an ethical dimension
as the prime consideration—that which recognizes “the face,” beyond
“any case.”
In this respect, “Caring Science” can be defined as “an evolving
ethical-epistemic field of study that is grounded in the discipline of
nursing and informed by related fields” (Watson and Smith 2002:456).
When one places Caring within an ethical science model, it automati-
cally grounds the phenomenon as a values-laden, relational ethic that
informs the ontology and the epistemology, reversing the negative
mythology of epistemology put forth by Palmer. As the philosopher
Levinas (1969) reminds us, ethics becomes the first principle and thus
informs our ontology and epistemology rather than the other way
around. The fact that nursing deals with phenomena of human caring,
relationships, health-illness, living, dying, pain, suffering, and all the
vicissitudes of human existence forces nursing education and practice
to acknowledge and further develop an expanded view of science.
To ground nursing within the principles of Caritas in a Caring
Science model, we can say that biomedical science and its objectiv-
ist epistemology and separatist ontology are invited once again to
take account of “the face” of the other, the uniqueness of others. A
purely objectivist epistemology is blind to the face wherein individ-
uals are subsumed into units of comparison in which the difference

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