The life goal of Heidegger’s works is to free our thinking (Denken), in thinking about being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) and the hermeneutic space in the ontological difference between the two different understandings of being (Sein), from the illusions of ousia in Greek metaphysical thinking about being (Sein). In other words, by reading Heidegger and trying to understand him, the German philosopher appeared to promise us a philosophical freedom that before him was unknown in the history of Western philosophy. Dasein, as the embodied place and time of understanding of being (Seinsverständnis), becomes synonymous with freedom and liberation in its potentiality-of-being (Seinkönnen).

In nursing, given that care (Sorge) about being (Sein) is primordial to the humane and professional care (Pflege) that it provides to the sick and the suffering, the question of being (Seinsfrage) enters into the everyday discourse and practice of a nurse’s work. Hermeneutically speaking, this is potentially existentially liberating for both the nurse and the patient, if the Gadamerian notion of the fusion of horizons in mutual understanding of each other’s Dasein is attained in the ecstasis of time in the hermeneutic circle.

Is the question of freedom, namely in the form of liberation of understanding of being, consciously included in the methodology of “qualitative” studies in nursing that are becoming a research paradigm in its own right? Is not this liberation then, without avoiding philosophical controversy in nursing theory, opposed to the metaphysics of ousia, manifest today as the positivism in the substantialist reduction of being?