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The Possibility of a Post-modern Metaphysics of the Human Person: The Thomistic-Phenomenology of Karol Wojty³a /Pope John Paul II
By André Ong

It has become commonplace to talk about “The End of Metaphysics,” and “Religion after Metaphysics,” to express a sense of relief over the liberation of religion and philosophy from an oppressive and extrinsic concept. Religious thought “after metaphysics,” according to this sentiment, should not be beholden to or be dependent on ontology. Arguments for this sentiment have become more refined since Hume called for books on metaphysics to be committed to the flames. Given this sensibility, is it possible to construct a Post-modern metaphysics of the human person? It will be argued in this paper that Karol Wojty³a has done just that in his philosophical anthropology. While much of recent philosophy has insisted that we cannot get to the truth of things, Wojty³a has argued that we can get to metaphysics and the truth of reality through anthropology. This paper will first focus on how Wojty³a arrives at the metaphysics of the human person through the phenomenology of experience. Second, is Wojty³a a phenomenologist or a Thomist, or both? Third, how does Wojtyla develop and example his Post-modern metaphysics of the human person in the Papal Encyclicals?

The Metaphysics of the Human Person through the Phenomenology of Experience

The starting point of Wojty³a’s philosophical anthropology is concrete human experience. This experience that man has of himself “is the richest and apparently the most complex of all experiences accessible to him.”1 This is because even experiences that are external to himself include, and are associated with, himself, for it is he who is experiencing that which is external to himself. In any experience, a man has to face himself in a cognitive relation with himself. This relation is continuous in a sense that it will be disrupted, renewed and reestablished according to when the consciousness is active or stops, e.g. when a person sleeps. This relation is uninterrupted in the sense that man is always his own company and picks up where he leaves off, even if the experiences are dull or vivid. Wojty³a focuses on this culminating totality of experience that is composed of a multiplicity of experiences.

This unity of experience is important for Wojty³a because phenomenology overlooks the unitary nature of experience. Phenomenology does not capture the unity of diverse experiences but rather sees them as single events that are unique and unrepeatable. While phenomenologists’ initial analysis of empirical moments is correct, the sequence leading up to the unitary “experience of man” reveals a more complete picture of a person emerging from the total experience that has been present in all of these moments. This unitary experience cannot be found existing in any one moment of experience.

Wojty³a appeals to common experience by inviting the experiences of others, every human person and the reader to confirm his reflections. His philosophical originality is his attempt to correct the one-sidedness in the philosophical approaches to the person that has existed since Descartes. This one-sidedness comes from approaching the person primarily through knowledge and cognition. As Wojty³a explains in his preface:

Since Descartes, knowledge about man and his world has been identified with the cognitive function. . . . And yet, in reality, does man reveal himself in thinking or, rather, in the actual enacting of his existence — in observing, interpreting, speculating, or reasoning . . . or in the confrontation itself when he has to take an active stand upon issues requiring vital decisions and having vital consequences and repercussions? In fact, it is in reversing the post-Cartesian attitude toward man that we undertake our study: by approaching him through action.2

Wojty³a reverses “I think, therefore I am,” to, “I act, therefore revealing the concrete totality of who I am.” It will be through the special moment of action that Wojty³a “exfoliates” the person. This disclosure will not be done on the level of consciousness alone but will include the aspect of consciousness. The person is not constituted in consciousness but action, as the moment of disclosure of the person is manifested through consciousness.

Wojty³a makes a critical shift and reversal in the traditional conceptions of action. He achieves a significant conceptual innovation here. It has always been correctly observed that action as conceived is only attributable to a person, and that it presupposes the person as well. This has been true in ethics as well as in other disciplines. But Wojty³a intends to reverse this relation. He does not want the person to be presupposed. Rather, “action reveals the person, and we look at the person through his action…Action gives us the best insight into the inherent essence of the person and allows us to understand the person most fully.”3 It is through the moment of action that the totality of the constituted person is revealed. For Wojty³a, his specific use of action is a dramatic shift from what has been traditionally conceived. In spite of this innovation, Wojty³a is not abandoning its metaphysical origins. He clearly states that the disclosure of the person through action is an “ontological interpretation of the person through action as the action. By ‘ontological interpretation’ we mean an interpretation that shows what the reality of the person is.”4 Instead of the presupposed person, his use of action reveals the person, and this is his starting point. Action is the most adequate starting point to begin understanding the dynamic nature of the human person.

Wojty³a writes that, foundationally, “The whole of The Acting Person is grounded on the premise that operari sequitur esse: the act of personal existence has its direct consequences in the activity of the person (i.e., in action). And so action, in turn, is the basis for disclosing and understanding the person.”5 In their scholastic conception, activity and action follow from and depend on the act of existence. Wojty³a, however, innovatively takes this in its epistemological sense through its reversal.6 If action depends on its being, then it is through action or operari that we discover its being. It is through operari that the subjectivity and whole dynamism of the person are disclosed. It is through this phenomenon of experienced reality, “man acts or I act,” that this lived experience will disclose the integral whole of the human person. Wojty³a takes the concept of action and extends it beyond its traditional understanding. But he first wants to make it clear in The Acting Person where this concept comes from. His interpretation of action is “found in the philosophies of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. The interpretation is realistic and objectivistic as well as metaphysical.”7 This traditional conception locates the person as the source of action. What Wojty³a wants to do is to “bring into full view precisely that which is only assumed in the classical conception of the ‘human act.’”8

Wojty³a credits metaphysics as the intellectual soil in which all domains of knowledge have their roots.9 Every investigation of the human person must begin with a proper foundation that metaphysics supplies. Wojty³a credits his concept of the human act (actus humanus) to Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, having derived it from the latter’s dynamic conception of being.10 It is this metaphysics that provides the conception and language that accounts for the dynamism inherent in being, especially the concept of action as the actualization and fulfillment of potentiality. Wojty³a argues that there is currently no such conception or language that can account for the dynamic essence of change.11 It is only through the metaphysical account of potency and act that we can understand and describe the dynamism occurring in any being.

In the metaphysical structure of a being as a person, Wojty³a borrows the full range of Thomistic terminology, e.g., actus-potentia, actus secundus, actus humanus et hominis, agere et pati, actus voluntarius, actus personae, operari sequitur esse, and praxis sequitar theoriam. It is the full range of the metaphysics of the person as developed by Thomas.12 This goes beyond the one-sided Boethian definition of a person with a rational nature. Wojty³a’s anthropology now includes a range of actions of varying order.

From a metaphysical point of view, the human person is a substantial being because this concept allows a person to be the causative subject and efficient cause of actions and values.13 This person is self-determining, independent and non-transferable. The person is a substantial being because as a dynamic subject, the person is constituted of human acts through which the inner dynamism and the totality of the person, including self-consciousness, is revealed. This metaphysical dimension of a substantial being provides the causation of the person’s own subjectivity. Wojty³a gives priority to the person as an ontologically self-contained entity over the phenomenological description of a person as a self-conscious self.14 Priority is given to the person’s beingness. “However we analyze the structure, conditions, and source of action we cannot bypass its ultimate ontological foundation…It is in the subject as a being that every dynamic structure is rooted, every acting and happening. It is given as a real, actually existing, being, the man-being that actually exists and hence also ‘really’ acts.”15 Wojty³a uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical category of substance to dynamically interpret the subjectivity of the person.16

Woznicki has pointed out that Wojty³a, while accepting the entire metaphysics of the person as developed by Thomas, also goes beyond it.17 Wojty³a’s modification includes placing more emphasis on experience than on beingness. But his interpretation of this experience is done more metaphysically because a phenomenological view of experience is narrower and limited to events and happenings. By adopting Thomas’ composition of body and soul metaphysically, the classical theory of act-potency through experience reveals a self-determined person who possesses self-cognition. This allows for the person to reveal and manifest his beingness through his actions. This in a way reveals Wojty³a’s intricate relationship between phenomenology and his metaphysics. The relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics will be discussed next. Nevertheless for Wojty³a, there is a possibility of reaching into ontology by starting out from the phenomenology of the person or the concrete reality of the person. Phenomenology provides an access, which begins from experience, that could enhance our understanding of the truth of being. This would be an example of Wojty³a, in his own words, bringing about “some sort of translation from one philosophical language to another one.”18 It is also important to note that because Wojty³a takes Thomas’ ethics and anthropology as his point of departure, he cannot avoid Thomas’ fundamental ontology as well.

Wojty³a’s Methodology and Anthropology – Phenomenologist or Thomist?

There is much debate about whether Wojty³a is a Thomist , a Phenomenologist, or a synthesis of both. I will not enter that debate here.19 There are, however, clear statements made by Wojty³a himself that clarify his general orientation. Three brief comments are in order here.

Firstly, Wojty³a does make it explicit at the conclusion of his second dissertation, Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Principles of Max Scheler’s System that,

A Christian thinker, and specifically a theologian, although availing himself in his writings of the phenomenological experience, cannot, however, be a phenomenologist. Consistent phenomenology will reveal to him, ethical values as appearing in the experience of a person ‘on occasion’ of acting. However, it will always be the task of a theologian-ethician to scrutinize the ethical value of human actions themselves, in the light of objective principles.20

So while Wojty³a finds phenomenology to be a method useful for arriving at the metaphysical and ontological foundations of the person, his philosophical anthropology is not strictly phenomenological. While phenomenology is crucial in disclosing the various dimensions of human experience, it would drift into forms of solipsism if it were not grounded “in a general theory of things-as-they-are that was resolutely realistic and that could defend the capacity of human beings to get at the truth of things.”21

Phenomenology needs metaphysics because “phenomena themselves can visualize a thing clearly enough, but they are incapable of a sufficient explanation of themselves.”22 He also writes regarding The Acting Person, that, “Any attempt at combining these two philosophies is out of question, especially with respect to merging the philosophy of being with a philosophy of consciousness, as one that reduces all reality to the subject-consciousness and its contents. In The Acting Person, such a melding is completely out of question.”23 This, however, seems to be Wojty³a’s early view. It seems to have softened later, as indicated by his later statements regarding the place of phenomenology in his thought.

Secondly, Wojty³a, later in his softened and more nuanced view of phenomenology shows an appreciation for both systems, even if he has critiqued them, and at times quite severely. He describes his own methodology with a greater appreciation for phenomenology:

Although I arrived at the concept of the ‘human act’ within the framework of a phenomenological inquiry of Husserlian orientation it has to be pointed out that it coincides with the notion of ‘actus humanus’ as elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. Actus humanus’ follows from the nature of the acting person, from man understood as subject and author of his action. Indubitably the most valuable element in Thomas’ concept of ‘actus humanus,’ is that it expresses the dynamism of a concrete being, man in its specific complete determination drawn from the total man. That specific dynamism finds further elaboration in Thomas’ studies of ‘voluntarium’, for, dynamism, proper to the activity of man (agere humanum), and to the human act (in German it is expressed best through die menschliche Tat) finds its roots in the will. St. Thomas analyzes the nature, structure, and actualization of the will very much in detail.24

Thirdly, it appears that allegiance to either system was not a priority to Wojty³a and we find him arriving at a more nuanced synthesis of both systems. Perhaps a more accurate description would be a Hegelian Aufgehoben (sublation)of both systems that negates inadequate aspects and transcends them in a new synthesis that preserves the previously adequate into a higher unity in a dialectical process. Wojty³a was deeply familiar with both systems and his higher interest was to develop a richer theory of the person in order to better inform his ethics.25 It was more important to find the appropriate tools to uncover the deepest layers of the human person. In doing so, he would also have to “purify” and update both philosophical systems to be up to the task. In this sense, the consensus of scholarship seems to correctly approximate that of a synthesis (through a sublation) of both systems, modified and updated in order to grasp the complete, concrete totality of the person. Galkowski’s summary of this synthesis would be representative of this view:

In his considerations the Author employs a two-fold concept of the person: metaphysical and phenomenological. This distinction is not made in order that one or the other would be negated, but in order that we may grasp in full the reality of the person. The person, from the metaphysical point of view is the subject of existence and activity; however from the phenomenological point of view [person] is a synthesis of efficacy (the power to bring something about) and subjectivity (suppositum). . . . Thanks to it Wojty³a builds a theory of man which is modified in relation to the Thomistic theory, more developed and richer.26

Wojty³a himself writes implicitly about this synthesis: “I wrote on the contribution which Scheler’s phenomenological type of ethical system can make to the development of moral theology. This research benefited me greatly. My previous Aristotelian-Thomistic formation was enriched by the phenomenological method.”27

Buttiglione also notes that, in this synthesis, Wojty³a takes all the contents of Thomistic anthropology “but aligned with a different methodology.” It is not a crude combining of two philosophical systems but a critically nuanced one. For Wojty³a, “It is not a question of demonstrating phenomenologically that man is a person, but seeing with the aid of phenomenology in which way man is a person, in which way the metaphysical structures proper to his being are reflected in his consciousness.”28 Wojty³a also critically uses the philosophy of being and consciousness “without blurring distinctions and generating an equivocal syncretism.”29 Schmitz, however, inverts this interpretation to suggest that it is through the conception of action that the two systems find their fullest expression:

It is in the acting person that the acts of phenomenological interpretation and the acts of metaphysical explanation meet in their concrete and efficacious source. So that by acting, the human person outreaches both explanation and interpretation. For it is the concrete human person who, in acting, takes up the task of integration and transcendence and thereby becomes the human agent who engages with others in the community of being.30

This discussion on methodology finds an echo is his encyclical Fides et ratio. He argues in the encyclical that philosophy has its own methodology and legitimate autonomy apart from theology. But philosophy’s autonomy does not make it self-sufficient.31 It is revelation that complements the inherent weakness in human reason, confirming the principle that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. Wojty³a stands as the quintessential exponent of this position. He borrows philosophical tools such as phenomenology but perfects its inherent weaknesses by the complement of critical theology and a modified Thomistic metaphysics.

Wojtyla’s Post-modern Metaphysics of the Human Person in the Encyclicals32

Buttiglione has noted that while the other popes that came before John Paul II were expressions of a constituted Christianity where values were largely inherited, John Paul II comes into a cultural situation where “values were largely destroyed and could only be discovered again because they were true.”33 Buttiglione argues that John Paul II is post-modern in at least three ways. First, he encountered the annihilation of values in the post-modern philosophy and poetry of 20th century Central Europe, the very thinkers that are being rediscovered as the prophets of post-modern culture. Second, in a different post-modern sense, his attack on Marxism and liberal secularism was not because they were potentialities worth considering but precisely because they had failed. Third, post-modern society begins with the end of immanence. This immanent outlook was the signature of modern society where God is not transcendent but immanent in us. Marxism represents the last expression of this belief, and with its collapse, man is again alone. This man is “de-centered’ and de-constructed” according to Derrida, and Lyotard, with no grand narrative to give him or her meaning or an identity. It is out of this post-modern experience and outlook that Wojty³a reconstructs and refines his philosophical and theological anthropology in order to preserve the dignity of the human person.

Wojty³a argues that it is through a proper understanding of the human person that we can arrive at a post-modern metaphysics of the human person. It is especially in his encyclicals as Pope John Paul II that we see this possibility developed and exampled, a development that owes its foundations in his earlier philosophical anthropology. In particular, it is the metaphysics of the human person, seen theologically and philosophically that grounds, protects and preserves human freedom, morality and the capacity for apprehending truth.

In Veritatis splendor, Wojty³a makes the argument that the injustice of political economics and problems of corruption are at their foundations, “properly ‘cultural,’ linked to particular ways of looking at mankind, society and the world. Indeed, at the heart of the issue of culture we find the moral sense, which is in turn rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense.”34 This is because it is only in God as the “Supreme Good” and the “unshakable foundation and essential condition of morality” that the genuine complex problems of society can be overcome. It is only when morality is situated in the “truth of God” and the “truth of man” that the “authentic freedom of the person” can be secured.35 In both the personal and societal dimensions, Wojty³a argues repeatedly in this and other encyclicals that persons can order their lives according to the dialectic of freedom and objective moral truths.

Two issues are critically important here. The first is the nature of human freedom. Without a firm and correct understanding of human freedom, convictions about morality would be partial. If freedom becomes exalted to an absolute, subjective freedom would itself become the source of values and moral judgment without regard to other persons or the common good. The second critical issue is the nature of moral truth and the possibility of discerning and apprehending that truth. If a person’s capacity to know the truth is limited and merely conditioned, confident appeals to the very sources that promote the dignity of persons and the common good are suspicious. If persons are not capable of attaining truth, what remains is the will to power alone. The purpose of Veritatis splendor is to “reflect on the whole of the Church’s moral teaching” especially in confronting ideas both from within and without that challenge foundational anthropological and ethical presuppositions. Wojty³a contends that at the “root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth.”36

How does Wojty³a’s philosophical anthropology allow for the confident apprehension of moral truth and the subsequent understanding of proper human freedom? Wojty³a, in the encyclicals, repeatedly makes a link between truth and freedom that warrants a closer examination. In short, authentic freedom depends on, and needs to be governed by, truth. This truth lies in our anthropology, humanity, and nature that directs us, as expressed in natural moral law. Our freedom to act must be governed by our respect for the truth of things, or objective truth, especially the truth about human nature, the truth about our place in the world, and the truth about our relation to God. Without this orientation to the truth, our freedom becomes arbitrary and subjective. And what is the nature of this truth? Ratzinger, in commenting on the nature of truth in Wojty³a’s encyclicals defines truth as that which “orders our conduct, [and] lies in our very humanity. Our essence, our ‘nature,’ which comes from the Creator, is the truth which directs us. That we ourselves carry our truth in us, that our essence (our "nature") is our truth is expressed by the term natural moral law (‘natural law’).”37

Wojty³a is fond of quoting John 8:32, “The truth will set you free,” to show the relationship between truth and freedom. Freedom is a function of truth, as it is the truth of the person and the truth of Biblical revelation that posit the capacity for freedom. Additionally, freedom cannot reach its own end without the help of truth because it is objective truth that guides freedom away from arbitrary, subjective ends. While truth is an objective fact, it is through our subjective experience that we find confirmation in our free adherence towards objective truths. A person’s freedom is a freedom in search of the truth that in turn protects and preserves her freedom. What unites freedom and truth? It is responsibility, for it “is not sufficient, on this point, to say ‘I am free.’ It is necessary to say rather ‘I am responsible.’…Responsibility is the necessary culmination and fulfillment of freedom.”38 Wojty³a would approve of Lord Acton’s maxim that freedom is "not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought," and Polanyi’s contention that “the freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must.”39 Taken together, freedom is “the condition for the exercise of the responsibility of man toward the truth.”40

Wojty³a argues in Centesimus annus that “freedom attains its full development only by accepting the truth. In a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation and man is exposed to the violence of passion and to manipulation, both open and hidden.”41 The message of Veritatis splendor is that only in truth does a person’s freedom become truly human and responsible, that subsequently and directly affects the character of the common good in all its societal manifestations.

Already in The Acting Person, Wojty³a had considered the intimate relationship between freedom and truth. The concept of efficacy introduces the element of the will, an element that presupposes freedom and moral responsibility. Efficacy, along with self-determination, introduces the “moral moment” and “becoming” of the acting person. Efficacy now needs to be directed towards a frame of reference, the reference of truth. Without this reference to truth, blind emotivity can take over and self-teleology risks being unfulfilled. According to Wojty³a, “Freedom is expressed by efficacy, and efficacy leads to responsibility, which in turn reveals the dependence of freedom on truth; but this relation of freedom to truth constitutes the real significance of the conscience as the decisive factor for the transcendence of the person in his actions.”42 He asks rhetorically, “Is it not freedom, obligation, and responsibility which allows us to see that not only truthfulness but also the person’s surrender to truth in judging as well as in acting constitute the real and concrete fabric of the personal life of man?”43

In The Acting Person, the structure of self-determination reveals the will making decisions in the conscience, and, according to Wojty³a, this dynamic presupposes an objective reference to truth. This reference to truth is a vertical transcendence that goes beyond the horizontal limit of the subject. The conscience reveals the transcendence of freedom and truth that comes from willing and choosing a true good that results in the realization of true freedom. This truth that conscience appeals to fulfills the potentiality of the person. This presupposes that the conscience is somehow primordially prepared and shaped by truth as its inner principle and decision in order to provide the condition and ability to direct the will towards the proper object of truth as its fulfillment and completion. Moral conduct would be incomprehensible without this reference to truth. Truth that is recognized and evaluated in the conscience conditions the performance of action as well as fulfilling the person in the action. In Veritatis splendor, Wojty³a continues this line of thinking and specifies in greater detail what are the content and relationship of this freedom, truth and conscience.

Wojty³a exposes some contemporary, distorted conceptions of freedom. When there is a loss of a sense of transcendence as a frame of reference, individual consciences are accorded the “status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil.”44 Without the notion of universal truth, individual consciences are granted the prerogative of independently determining the criteria for good and evil. This would eventually pit all against all without any recourse to a final court of arbitration. On the other hand, the behavioral sciences question the reality of human freedom, believing that human thoughts and actions are the result of social or psychological conditions. In sum, these contemporary conceptions lead to a relativistic conception of morality. Wojty³a concludes, “The question of morality, to which Christ provides the answer, cannot prescind from the issue of freedom. Indeed, it considers that issue central, for there can be no morality without freedom: ‘It is only in freedom that man can turn to what is good.’” And genuine freedom recognizes “the dependence of freedom on truth.45 Wojty³a’s consistency in this conviction never wavers in his 1995 address to the 50th General Assembly of the United Nations Organization in New York:

The basic question which we must all face today is the responsible use of freedom, in both its personal and social dimensions. . . . Freedom is not simply the absence of tyranny or oppression. Nor is freedom a license to do whatever we like. Freedom has an inner "logic" which distinguishes it and ennobles it: freedom is ordered to the truth, and is fulfilled in man's quest for truth and in man's living in the truth. Detached from the truth about the human person, freedom deteriorates into license in the lives of individuals, and, in political life, it becomes the caprice of the most powerful and the arrogance of power. Far from being a limitation upon freedom or a threat to it, reference to the truth about the human person — a truth universally knowable through the moral law written on the hearts of all — is, in fact, the guarantor of freedom's future.46

Without metaphysical grounding, even ethics would be elusive. The nature of ethics demands a category for universal application. Aristotle argues that all persons seek happiness. Kant’s categorical imperative applies to all persons. Wojtyla follows suit. His philosophical anthropology argues for a personalist ethics and the personalist norm as the only systems adequate to meet the universal demands of our concrete totality and ethics for all persons everywhere. Wojty³a’s designation of personalist is a universal category. It captures the universal nature of all persons in their totality and human dignity. Wojty³a’s personalist designation does not only refer to utilitarian ends, the highest moral value of love, or ethics based on reason alone. Rather, Wojty³a sublates all of these categories into a higher unity in the personalistic because the totality of the person is more than these categories and not reducible to any of them. The personalistic human being reasons, seeks after happiness in the different dimensions of existence, has a self-teleology, flourishes best under conditions that encourage and protect freedom and self-determination, pursues the common good, and preserves the dimensions proper to subjective concrete persons.

Wojty³a’s personalist ethics is a genuine foundation for the metaphysics of morals. This foundation is the person in his or her totality who is disclosed most fully through action. Kant’s categorical imperative is based on the “metaphysic” of pure reason as it relates to the moral experience. Knowledge of the totality of the human person cannot be reduced to the cognitive function alone. As a result, Kant’s prescriptive imperatives are formalistic. He lacks the experiential totality of the moral experience. While Kant’s ethics is radically egalitarian, it is not concrete enough because it bypasses the subjectivity of the person, who is not reducible to reason alone. Kant’s metaphysics of pure reason has no access into things as they really are or “things in themselves.” In contrast, Wojty³a states the following:

I do not mean to speak of metaphysics in the sense of a specific school or a particular historical current of thought. I want only to state that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical, and to vindicate the human being's capacity to know this transcendent and metaphysical dimension in a way that is true and certain, albeit imperfect and analogical. In this sense, metaphysics should not be seen as an alternative to anthropology, since it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of their spiritual nature. In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.47

Wojty³a argues for a genuine metaphysic of morals, because we can know about the human person. And because we have access to the knowledge of the person, our morality is most adequately governed by personalistic norms.

In Fides et ratio, Wojty³a wants to demonstrate that even as finite beings, truth is accessible to us. How trustworthy are the instruments through which we arrive at the contemplation of truth? In Wojty³a’s earlier analysis, it is the instrument of reason that acknowledges and establishes the truth and universality of the law in its application in concrete circumstances. How reliable is the instrument of reason in identifying moral truths and norms? The Church has continuously taught that God is the author of the natural moral law and human persons participate in the eternal law48 through the use of reason. But in Fides et ratio, Wojty³a contends that “Modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned,” and has fostered “attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being's great capacity for knowledge.”49 Wojty³a’s response is not so much to question the capacity of reason but rather to ask how, given fallen human nature, we can still confidently and properly use reason to apprehend truth. Wojty³a talks about “the correct use of reason”50 or “right reason”51 that enables us to understand the truth and moral norms.

Looking at the larger question of whether the instrument of reason is reliable in identifying moral truths and norms, Wojty³a answers in the affirmative because of the human capacity for metaphysical enquiry. Again, using Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Wojty³a argues that persons can come to know God through an intuition that God stirs in our reason (see Romans1:20) that allows human reason to surpass its own natural limitations. Human reason, even if it is limited by sin and duplicity, can grasp truth, even if “certitude is partially obscured and weakened.”52 Reason, illumined by faith, has access to a fuller truth. Persons are capable of a genuinely metaphysical range that is able to transcend the empirical “in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth . . . and in particular it is a requirement for knowing the moral good, which has its ultimate foundation in the Supreme Good, God himself.”53 The human person is capable of knowing the transcendent and metaphysical dimension in an imperfect and analogical way, but nevertheless, a true and certain way. This is important because metaphysics makes it possible for humans to “ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of their spiritual nature.” Metaphysics allows the movement from “phenomenon to foundation.54

The confident apprehending of moral truth is possible for five reasons: First, an adequate understanding of human freedom depends on and is governed by truth. Second, there is rational access to the universal and immutable natural law or natural moral law that lies within the person’s structure as a measure of truth. Third, the truth of the moral law is discovered in the moral conscience of the person with the proviso that this faculty is trained and conformed towards the truth, as well as through the proper development of connaturality located in this faculty. Fourth, faith, as another faculty of the person, is able to grasp truth more fully by complementing reason. Fifth, reason is reliable in identifying moral truths and norms because of the human capacity for metaphysical enquiry.



Endnotes

1 Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrezej Potocki, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. (The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979), 3.

2 Ibid., vii-viii.

3 Ibid., 11.

4 Ibid., 303.

5 Karol Wojtyla, “The Person: Subject and Community,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays, Trans. and ed. Teresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 260.

6 Peter Simpson, On Karol Wojtyla (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 23.

7 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 25.

8 Ibid., 26.

9 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 64.

10 Ibid., 25.

11 Ibid., 64.

12 Andrew Woznicki, A Christian Humanism: Karol Wojtyla’s Existential Personalism (New Britain, Connecticut: Mariel Publications, 1980), 17.

13 Woznicki argues that Wojtyla departs from the old metaphysical understanding of substance as a mere subject supporting accidents. Andrew Woznicki, A Christian Humanism, 10-11.

14 Ibid., 9-16.

15 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 72.

16 Woznicki, A Christian Humanism, 16.

17 Ibid., 17.

18 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 64.

19 For a fuller treatment on the views of this debate, see Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, 323-330.

20 See quote in Woznicki, A Christian Humanism, 19

21 George Weigel, Witness to Hope, The Biography of John Paul II, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999),129.

22 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 70.

23 See quote in Woznicki, A Christian Humanism, 20

24 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 279-280 n 2.

25 See Jarosaw Kupczak, Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, (Washington, D.C.:Catholic University of American Press, 2000),146. for a fair representation of Wojtyla’s method: “Wojtyla’s method consists of two steps: phenomenological description, and metaphysical synthesis. Phenomenology is useful as a starting point for anthropology and ethics, Wojtyla holds, because of its ability to discover and describe many aspects of the human phenomenon which otherwise would be unknown to a metaphysician.” See also Peter Simpson, On Karol Wojtyla, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, c2001), Acknowledgements Page. Peter Simpson concludes that “Wojtyla was not trying to write Thomism in non-Thomistic language; he was trying to achieve a whole new perspective on the topic of the human person that went beyond, even if it also used, the achievements of St. Thomas.”

26 Jerzy W. Galkowski in “The Place of Thomism in the Anthropology of K. Wojtyla” Angelicum, Vol 65, 1988:190.

27John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1996), 108.

28 Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, trans. Paolo Guietti (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1997), 129, 356.

29 Ibid., 129, 357.

30 Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991),145.

31 John Paul II, Fides et ratio, [encyclical online]; available from http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0216/_INDEX.HTM; Internet; accessed 31 March 2008, 75.

32 John Paul II, Veritatis splendor; Centesimus annus; Fides et ratio, [encyclicals on-line]; available from http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/index.htm; Internet; accessed 31 March 2008. John Paul II’s encyclicals have been translated into various English translations. I will be using the Vatican’s official English translation.

33 Nathan Gardels, “John Paul II: The Post-Modern Pope – An Interview with Rocco Buttiglione,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Spring 1987, Vol. 4 #3. This article is no longer available on the internet.

34 John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, 98.

35 Ibid., 99.

36 Ibid., 4.

37 Joseph Ratzinger, "Christian Faith as 'the Way': An Introduction to Veritatis Splendor," Communio 21, no. 2 (1994): 199-207.

38 Quoted in Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, 193, from Acta Synodalia.

39 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 309.

40 Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, 193.

41 John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 46.

42 Wojtyla, Acting Person, 180.

43 Ibid., 181.

44 John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, 32.

45 Ibid., 34.

46 John Paul II, Address to 50th General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, [speech online]; available from: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1995/october/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_05101995_address-to-uno_en.html; Internet; accessed 31 March 2008.

47 John Paul II, Fides et ratio, 83.

48Augustine defines God’s eternal law as the “reason or will of God.” Thomas identifies eternal law as “the type of the divine wisdom as moving all things to their due end.” Persons have a natural knowledge of God’s eternal law accessible from within through reason, and therefore can participate in God’s providence. Natural law then is the human expression of God’s eternal law. Thomas writes that the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called natural law.” Thomas concludes that “the natural law is itself the eternal law, implanted in beings endowed with reason, and inclining them towards their right action and end, it is none other than the eternal reason of the Creator and Ruler of the universe.''

49 John Paul II, Fides et ratio, 5.

50 John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 46.

51 John Paul II, Fides et ratio, 4.

52 Ibid., 82.

53 Ibid., 83.

54 Ibid.



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