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At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II. By KENNETH L. SCHMITZ. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Pp. x + 170. $24.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper).
Not long after Karol Wojtyla was elected pope, a wry remark began circulating back at the Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland, about a very difficult book he had written on moral phenomenology, entitled The Acting Person. He had written the original Polish work ten years ago, it was said, with full foreknowledge that he would one day be pope and that he would then require it as reading for priests in purgatory.
Let's face it: Wojtyla's philosophical writing is difficult. Whatever the cause--whether it lies in his persistent efforts to penetrate ever more deeply into the heart of an issue, in the sustained depth and intricacy of his discussions, or in a convoluted phenomenological style of writing influenced possibly by Scheler--it is one, apparently, that cannot be blamed wholly on faulty translations. Even Wojtyla's best interpreters face a daunting challenge in trying to explain the often dense, enigmatic, seemingly imponderable passages of his philosophical writings.
Kenneth Schmitz, professor of philosophy emeritus at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and professor of philosophy at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., has provided an excellent, concise introduction to Wojtyla's philosophical anthropology. In less than 150 pages, he examines a broad spectrum of Wojtyla's writings--ranging from his early dramas through his philosophical studies to his later theological works--and distills from them a reasonably coherent philosophical view. One thing that undoubtedly helps give this book a certain stylistic accessibility is the fact that it originally took the form of the 1991 McGivney Lectures at the John Paul II Institute in Washington. Yet neither the author's facility in explaining Wojtyla, nor the book's brevity, nor its deceptively nontechnical-sounding title, should mislead the reader. This is no bedtime read. It is a challenging primer in Wojtyla's philosophy, which, like Wojtyla's philosophy itself, rewards study but requires patience.
One of the most technically useful features of the book, for the serious student, is an appendix contributed by John Grondelski on "Sources for the Study of Karol Wojtyla's Thought." This is subdivided into sections on (1) resource centers for the study of his pre-pontifical thought; (2) an extensive bibliography of his books and articles in several languages on the subjects of theology, philosophy, marriage and family; (3) a listing of his statements in the commissions of the Second Vatican Council; (4) anthologies of his writings; and (5) helpful secondary literature.
Most discussions of Wojtyla's philosophy note his primary interests in the areas of ethics and moral phenomenology. If they are discerning, they will also note that these interests are developed within the broad tradition of Christian personalism, and that they are informed by traditional commitments of metaphysical realism represented by the great philosophers of the Middle Ages. Schmitz amply supports all of this. But what he manages to demonstrate particularly well is how Wojtyla's philosophical interests are worked out in the context of a profoundly Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of human beings that runs as a deep undercurrent beneath all of his writings, from his earliest plays to his latest encyclicals.
Schmitz' first chapter is devoted to Wojtyla's plays, the earliest of which were written and clandestinely performed during the dark war years under Nazi occupation. "Let theater be a church where the national spirit will flourish," Wojtyla once declared. One receives the impression that these plays must have been severe intellectual productions, sublimating nationalist feelings into deeply symbolic, Biblical and metaphysical themes. Great attention is given to defining relations between the spoken word and reality, to ethical associations, to justice, truth, and social solidarity. Frequently recurring themes--such as loneliness, selfishness, love, and redemption--take on a deeper religious significance in the postwar plays, such as The Jeweler's Shop, which deals with married love, estrangement, and longing for fulfillment; or Radiation of Fatherhood, which probes the relationship between the choices of self-isolated loneliness and of fatherly love. One can't help thinking that Wojtyla's loss of both of his own parents early in life must have given him a heightened sensibility to such matters, even as they spill over into theological encyclicals on the heavenly Father's love (Dives in Misericordia) or the Motherhood of Mary (Redemptoris Mater).
Chapter 2 treats the development of Wojtyla's philosophical anthropology as represented in his lectures on ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin (1954-57). Schmitz describes the influence of traditional figures (such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Bonaventure, and St. John of the Cross, on whom he wrote a doctoral dissertation in Rome), specific varieties of Thomism (Garrigou-Lagrange, Mar˙eachal, Gilson, Maritain, de Finance, Fabro), Nouvelle Th˙eaologie, Christian personalism (Blondel, Mounier, Maritain, Marcel, Ricoeur), and especially Kant's ethics and Kant's phenomenological critic, Scheler, on whom Wojtyla wrote his "Habilitationsschrift" in Lublin.
Wojtyla's interest in modern philosophy, particularly in phenomenology (Scheler, Husserl, Von Hildebrand), Schmitz notes, is not driven by any desire to reform traditional Catholic philosophy or to replace it with some sort of new hybrid. He sees in the traditional metaphysics of the great Medieval thinkers a secure understanding of the real order. What animates him, rather, is an interest in bringing contemporary philosophical methods and insights to the traditional understanding of human nature and moral action. From beginning to end, Wojtyla's writings embody the two concurrent foci of Vatican II, which sought to update the Church in continuity with its established traditions: aggiornamento and ressourcement. This means that Wojtyla is necessarily critical of certain dimensions of contemporary thought that he finds defective, even as he is appreciative of its positive aspects that shed new light on old truths.
Accordingly, he praises Kant's view of the dignity of the person, respect, duty, will, and moral agency; but he criticizes the purely noumenal and a priori character of his ethics as a defect stemming from his systemic inability to derive metaphysics from experience. By contrast, he finds Scheler's strength in his focus on the interiority of "lived experience," the intuition of values, and his view of persons as the ultimate "bearers" of values. Yet he also notes that Scheler's positive focus on experience, consciousness, and intuition comes at the cost of slighting a proper understanding of action, willing, and being. "Essence" in Scheler's value theory is not the "being" of classical metaphysics, but an ideality indifferent to existence. Scheler's "person" is not a substantial moral agent, in the classical sense, but the subjective unity of lived-through experience. Scheler employs a methodological reservation, claims Wojtyla, that prevents him from acknowledging the experience of the "I" as causal originator of ethical action. Hence, active willing is subordinated to passive feeling, and the deliberate, decisional character of ethical action is not kept adequately in view. Appealing to the metaphysical realism of Aquinas, Wojtyla argues for the convertibility of "good" (in the practical order) into "being" (in the theoretical order), and so offers a reconstruction of a moral phenomenology in which values are not merely "intentional contents" of experience, but real features of existing persons, and we actually experience our own causality as rational-moral agents.
Chapter 3 traces the maturation of Wojtyla's phenomenology in The Acting Person. Schmitz handles with diplomacy the delicate subject of the heavy-handed editing and revising of the English translation of this work by a collaborator-editor, which resulted in an English edition (1979) that is nearly unintelligible, barely resembles the Polish original, and systematically suppresses references to traditional philosophy and classical metaphysics. His discussion will help remove the mistaken impression that Wojtyla in this work abandons his Aristotelian-Thomistic commitments, or even that they are related to his phenomenological interests in merely an external way.
Schmitz also examines here Wojtyla's fascinating disagreement with the view of most phenomenologists that consciousness as a whole is essentially "intentional" and actively involved in the "constitution" of the objects of which it is conscious. Wojtyla limits these to functions of "cognition," which he distinguishes from consciousness as a whole, in order to preserve the realistic posture of consciousness as "mirroring" its objects. He regards consciousness, in turn, as merely a relative "aspect" of the self, in contrast to idealistic inclination to turn it into a self-sufficient absolute. Likewise, he transforms the operation of phenomenological "bracketing" from one that excludes existence and causal factors, into one that includes them in the integral human reality, but highlights the aspect of "consciousness as such" for special consideration. His animus throughout is the desire to preserve the integral interiority of the actual person, who, after all, is the real subject of consciousness, willing and action.
Chapter 4 examines the theological dimensions of Wojtyla's anthropology in his Discoursi and encyclicals as Pope John Paul II. In his Discoursi, or "Wednesday Talks," of 1979-80, which Schmitz describes as nearly as challenging as his philosophical works, Wojtyla examines some of the deepest themes precious to the Christian understanding of humanity in a sustained meditation on the opening chapters of Genesis. These themes include the disclosure of man's creation in God's image, the original solitude that distinguishes man from other creatures, the creation of a suitable companion of different gender, the disclosure through sexuality of mutual self-knowledge and self-realization, the misuse of freedom and transition from innocence to guilt and shame, the condition of alienation and longing for original unity.
In his encyclicals, Schmitz notes, John Paul is conscious of carrying out the intentions of Vatican II, and gives special attention to the constitution on The Church in the Modern World, especially to the famous section 22, "On Christ the New Man," which, according to Schmitz, "forms the very center of his Christian anthropology." Essentially, Christ as the New Adam reveals man to himself as the embodiment of the mature, authentic humanity that God intended for him from the beginning. In the encyclical On the Mercy of God, this truth about our humanity is drawn up into "the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love." Authentic humanism, for Wojtyla, cannot avoid being theocentric.
Chapter 5 offers a concluding assessment of Wojtyla's philosophical project, summarizing and weighing essential elements of his anthropology. One of the most prominent themes to emerge here is that of the momentous shift to subjectivity with the advent of modernity, and Wojtyla's appraisal of it. Wojtyla is intensely aware of this shift, not only as a shift towards subjective consciousness as a kind of apotheosis of the experiencing subject, but also as a shift away from a classical metaphysical apprehension of being, including the being of the human subject. He offers a detailed analysis of the shift. He is critical of the way it has drained off the interior content of things, converting knowledge into "meaning," good into "value," and reality into "objectivity." He is critical of how it has eclipsed the divine "interiority" of things--the ontological connectedness of all beings with their Source. He is critical of how its absolutization of "mind" has denatured "matter," setting "nature" as an object over against "mind," divesting it of its interiority, and augmenting a culture of materialistic self-aggrandizement.
But he is also appreciative of certain positive developments that have accompanied this shift, such as a new appreciation of the subjective, experiential dimensions human existence. Even if modernity is misguided in the way it has conflated interiority with subjectivity, Wojtyla regards its insights into consciousness and "lived experience" as vital for understanding personal subjectivity. Metaphysics "takes up human interiority in the medium of being," as Schmitz notes, "but not in the medium of experience." For such reasons, in Redemptor Hominis, John Paul calls upon the Church neither wholly to endorse nor wholly to condemn modernity. Something can be learned from it.
Philip Blosser
Lenoir-Rhyne College
Hickory, N.C.
Copyright © 1997 The Thomist. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published in The Thomist, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January
1997), 142-146.