The ever-present individual differences may be regarded as intractable elements to be conquered for the sake of the efficiency of the system (for example, fit the patient to the treatment program). Or they may be valued as indicators of the inexhaustible richness of human potential to be developed. In their daily practice, nurses are drawn toward the two realities--the reality of the "objective" scientific world and the reality of the "subjective-objective" lived world. This tension is lived out in the nursing act. Doing with and being with the patient calls for a complementary synthesis by the nurse of these two forms of human dialogue, "I-It" and "I-Thou." Both are inherent in humanistic nursing for it is a dialogue lived in the objective and intersubjective realms of the real world. In the highly complex health care system nurses experience many demands from many directions. Their clinical judgments in daily practice must be made within a continuous stream of decisions about priorities of investment of their time and efforts. Sometimes, survival in the system reduces the nurse to following the line of least resistance, that is, responding to the immediate or to the loudest demands. However, even with their total commitment this course of response does not guarantee that nurses are making their greatest possible contribution to health care. This can happen only if we are able to see demands and opportunities in relation to our reason for being--nurturing the well-being and more-being of persons in need. Humanistic nursing, viewed as a lived dialogue, offers a frame of orientation that places the center of our universe at the nurse-patient inter subjective transaction. Insightful recognition of the lived nursing act as the point around which all our functions revolve, could require a Copernican revolution of orientation of some nurses. It does provide, for all nurses, a true sense of direction that can be actualized by each unique nurse through creative human dialogue. {37} 4 PHENOMENON OF COMMUNITY Humanistic nursing creates, happens within, and is affected by community. This chapter will discuss the abstract term "community." To stimulate thought on a nurse's influence on community, consideration will be given to three points: (1) my angular view of community and its evolvement, (2) how man has considered community over time, (3) how a human being comes to be through community. MY ANGULAR VIEW One can view members of a family, a student class, a hospital unit, a hospital staff, several related hospital staffs, health services organizations within a geographic area, a profession, a town to a world or universe as community. Man's mind, my mind, determines where I superimpose the limits or lift the limits or relate components. In _The Republic_ Plato depicted a community as a macrocosm.[1] Its nature was conditioned by the kinds of men, the microcosms, that composed it. The macrocosm was a reflection of its microcosms.