Since 1960 Loretta T. Zderad and myself in dialogue, together, and with groups of nurses in graduate schools and in nursing service situations have reflected on, explored, and questioned our own and others' nursing situational experiences. Over this period we have come to value and appreciate the meaningfulness of these situations to man's existence. This constantly augmented our feelings of responsibility for contributing to these situations beneficially. Therefore, we looked at them for their tractability to research methodology. Their loadedness with variations, changes, uncontrollables, and our negative feelings about the implications of viewing human beings as predictable left the strict scientism of positivistic method wanting at this stage of man's knowing. We saw objectivity in nursing situations or our questions, nursing questions, in the realm of needing to now how man experienced his existence. This objectivity, or man's real lived reality paradoxically is subjectively ridden, man-world. The existential literature dealt with substantive themes encountered in nursing experiences. As I previously stated this literature evolves from a phenomenological {9} approach to studying being and existence. This approach to studying, describing, and developing an artistic science of nursing became Dr. Zderad's and my long-sought haven. All along existentialism and phenomenology had been ours 'and many nurses' "what" and "how." Now we had labels that were acceptable and reputable to many--most of all to ourselves. FOOTNOTES: [1] Martin Buber, "Distance and Relation," trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, in _The Knowledge of Man_, ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965), p. 71. {10} {11} 2 FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISTIC NURSING Nursing is a response to the human situation. It comes into being under certain conditions--one human being needs a kind of help and another gives it. The meaning of nursing as a living human act is in the act itself. To understand it, therefore, it is necessary to consider nursing as an existent, a phenomenon occurring in the real world. THE PHENOMENON OF NURSING