Abstract

This study is a philosophical analysis of the experience of home care nurses. Pivotal to this study is the idea that nursing caregiving, as a kind of human activity, is the source of experience, with all its attendant meanings and values, as well as the avenue through which ideal ends are constructed. Because human experience is meaningful and expressive of values and ends, it is also capable of revealing inherent problems as well as possible means of redress. This "denotative" feature of experience, an idea belonging to the American philosopher John Dewey, is utilized as the method of analysis. ;From the perspective of experience as meaningful activity, I argue that the nursing caregiving experience embodies the characteristics of art. Such characteristics emerge from the values of human caring and mutuality, as well as multifarious meanings inherent in the notion of praxis. These foundational values of nursing caregiving conduce an experience that is capable of intensifying and furthering meanings, and bring about heightened awareness of consummatory ideals. ;Home care nursing caregiving, however, is experience by nurses as highly unsatisfactory and problematic. The difficulties lie not only in the incommensurable worldviews, and necessarily different goals and methods, of the larger health care context and professional nursing, but also in dissonant values, meanings, and contradictory ideals within nursing itself. ;The problem that marks this experience of nursing caregiving is the inability of nurses to realize the same meaning and satisfaction of human connection and mutuality in nurse-client relations once nursing activities are placed within the larger context of nursing service and health care. The experience of nursing caregiving, as a practice, is continually blunted and aesthetically-curtailed, and is far removed from being a coherent, meaningful, and complete aesthetic experience. ;To reconstruct the experience of home care nursing caregiving, nurses might look towards the cultivation and furtherance of aesthetic qualities in both the personal and professional community's work of nursing. Such qualities emerge from human caring and interconnectedness, and from a multitude of values inherent in the notion of praxis, such as skillful action, excellence in conduct, and moral and political accountability, all of which firmly belong to a relational view of the world. Nursing actions, grounded in a relational worldview, are manifest as a distinctive mode of conduct. Nursing practice is thus recognizable in the public world as a characteristic professional stance of care and responsibility