Why should nurses care if Heidegger was a Nazi? Pragmatics, politics and philosophy in Nursing.

Abstract

Nursing and nurses have become reliant on qualitative methods to understand the meaning of nursing care, and many nurse researchers use Heideggerian interpretivist phenomenology approaches. Often these nurses are unaware of Martin Heidegger’s role in the German National Socialist Party of the 1930s and his allegiance to fascist ideology. We ask can a bad person have good ideas? In line with pragmatic thinkers such as Richard Rorty, we argue that instead of value judgements on people and their ideas nurses should considered ideas as a product of a historical/social political time and space. In urging a critical political engagement we argue for a Husserlian approach. In opposition to Heidegger’s interpretivist phenomenology approach, in which the hegemony of the day is integral to the phenomena being studied, we propose that a more expressive collaborative engagement using Husserlian descriptive phenomenology approach would serve better, in encouraging a more critical engagement with how ideas are used by groups of people, how some groups might be advantaged and others disadvantaged. Our conclusion is that the separation of ideas from political social context is dangerous and nurses including nurse researchers must understand how their research ideas and methods influence and are influenced by political agendas.