| Nursing is a creative discipline, an art, whose activities are directed towards caring for people. The most important tool of this profession is the perceptual palette which guides a nurse to seize the whole of the people she is caring for and express that understanding of meaning in her transpersonal caring. The essence of the art of nursing lies in the creative imagination, the sensitive spirit in the background of the nurses knowledge not in the technical knowledge per se.;The question that arose, that gave purpose to this philosophical inquiry, was how could I help illuminate the missing link between how we are taught to care for patients, and what we really need to know to practice the art of nursing. Nursing education focuses on knowledge acquisition but needs to also nurture the caring being that is the nurse as artist. The importance of developing the aesthetics as well as the technical knowledge, nurturing the caring being and the art of nursing, is brought out through the use of the dialectic. This dialectic method allows for the presentation of existing knowledge which gives a foundation for the inquiry to be joined with new ideas and then to integrate both in a form that keeps the ideas whole and rich. Frames of reference about the paradigmatic and philosophical perspectives are given. The dialectic then moves to address the composition of the perceptual palette. Aesthetics, aesthetics in nursing, empathy, perception, imagination, wide-awakeness, living metaphors and ethics are discussed.;Movement of the dialectic embraces the similarities of developmental theories of whole beings, particularly, Parson's development of aesthetic experience and Benner's professional nursing. The recurring themes found in these exemplars evolve toward the development of the nurse artist as caring being.;The final chapter seizes the whole of this inquiry of ideas and plays out the concepts developed in the finished work in the metaphor; Pentimento Praxis: Weaving Aesthetic Experiences to Evolve the Caring Beings in Nursing. |
