Caring as Epistemology

The Western intellectual tradition has maintained, with considerable effort, a distinction between knowing and feeling—between the cognitive faculty that perceives the world accurately and the affective faculty that colors those perceptions with emotion. Patricia Benner, drawing on Heidegger's concept of Sorge and on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodied engagement, argued that this distinction is not only philosophically incoherent but clinically dangerous. Caring, in her account developed most fully in The Primacy of Caring with Judith Wrubel, is not a psychological state that accompanies competent clinical practice. It is the condition of possibility for a specific class of perceptions that no amount of analytical thoroughness can produce without it. The nurse whose concern for this particular patient—not patients in the abstract, not nursing as a vocation, but this person, in this bed, at this moment—directs her attention toward the situated, interpersonally constituted meanings of the clinical encounter perceives features of the patient's reality that the comprehensively attentive