The Many Meanings of Unitary: A Plea for Clarity

The Many Meanings of Unitary: A Plea for Clarity “A ll I say is, call things by their right names, and do not confuse together ideas which are essentially different . . . . A smattering of a hundred things . . . is not a comprehensive view” (J. H. Newman, 1956, p. 121). In his work On the Scope and Nature of University Education, John Henry Newman pleaded for clarity and consistency in using words and phrases in order to avoid confusion and fortify mutual understanding of ideas. This is particularly important for knowledge development in all disciplines, including nursing. An examination of the nursing literature reflects the juxtaposing of a smattering of things regarding the meaning of a number of core phenomena, which creates confusion and truncates the possibility for mutual understanding. For example, the nursing literature is rife with the use of the term unitary, but the authors have not heeded the plea of John Henry Newman, and confusion prevails. The idea of unitary can be traced to the ancient Greeks, but it arrived in nursing as a description of the human in Rogers’ (1970) work, when she specified the human as whole, more than and different from the sum of the parts, and wholeness as one of the building blocks of her science. Over the years the term wholeness came to be used by nurse theorists and scholars in the totality and simultaneity paradigms to describe the human as both the sum of the parts and more than and different from the sum of the parts. This created confusion and did not foster mutual understanding of wholeness from Rogers’ view. The circumstances moved Rogers (1992) to no longer use the term wholeness but to use unitary and define the unitary human specifically as “an irreducible, indivisible, pandimensional energy field identified by pattern and manifesting characteristics that are specific to the whole and which cannot be predicted from knowledge of the parts” (p. 29). Other theorists within the simultaneity paradigm define unitary with words and phrases different from Rogers. For example, Parse (1998) posited the human as indivisible, unpredictable, and everchanging and as a freely choosing being who can be recognized through paradoxical patterns cocreated allat-once in mutual process with the universe. Margaret A. Newman (1997) stated, “The whole cannot be found in summation or integration of the parts. But the parts are manifestations of the whole. The whole is always present everywhere and, as in a hologram, is experienced by going into the parts” (p. 37). Also M. A. Newman, Sime, and Corcoran-Perry (1991) specified characteristics of the unitary-transformative paradigm such as these: humans are unitary self-organizing fields in interaction with the larger whole, change is unidirectional, and systems move through stages; however, these are inconsistent with the definitions of unitary as specified in the works of Rogers and Parse. Also some theorists from the totality paradigm have begun to use the term unitary to describe the human, along with the other terms generic to their theories, such as, adaptation, caritative factors, and others. Thus, the term unitary is ubiquitous in the nursing literature, and, like its forerunner wholeness, it has arrived at a similar juncture—with many scattered meanings—thus truncating the possibility for clear understanding of ideas. The challenge for nurse theorists and scholars is to specify within their systems of thought what is meant when referring to the human being by using semantically appropriate and logically coherent words and phrases. In order to “not confuse together ideas which are essentially different” (J. H. Newman, 1956, p. 121), scholars must clarify meanings in the quest for mutual understanding in the development of nursing knowledge.