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CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
A Philosophy of
Action and Love
Some basic ideas in the ethics of Karol Wojtyla
by Peter A. Kwasniewski
(First of Two Articles)
Judging from current books and articles, it appears that people are becoming more and more interested in the philosophical theories of Karol Wojtyla, who was elevated to the papacy in 1978 and took John Paul II as his name. Thanks to this growing interest, many lay Catholics are now aware that the pope in his younger days did much work as a philosopher and a playwright, producing profoundly original treatises and dramas characterized by a confident synthesis of ancient, medieval, and contemporary elements.
Although most of the pope’s philosophical works
are difficult for non-philosophers to read owing to the complex phenomenological and
scholastic concepts they discuss, some can be read with great profit by any well-educated
Catholic who puts suitable time into them. Foremost among this class of works is his Love
and Responsibility.1 In this work Wojtyla, using observations gathered from his wide
pastoral experience, develops a comprehensive account of the theoretical foundations and
practical dimensions of human sexuality, elucidating the nature and ends of marriage, the
psychological background to sexual ethics, and related matters. The book is outstanding
for its depth of ideas, clarity of argument, and forceful refutations of modern errors
stemming from materialism, dualism, and other false theories of the human person. It is
not a book to bring to the beach or a picnic, but it certainly repays all the effort one
invests in it.
In this article we will consider a few important and recurring themes
found in Wojtyla’s dramas and ethical works. (The plays themselves abound in
philosophical meditations, as do the plays of another eminent contemporary philosopher,
Gabriel Marcel.) It is important for us to gain a better appreciation of his philosophical
ideas because they can shed a great deal of light on his teachings as pope. Indeed, much
of the substance of Wojtyla’s philosophy, expressed earlier in abstract and academic
language, has over the past twenty years been incorporated into his broader and more
accessible writings as supreme pastor of the Church. Moreover, a few inventive misreaders
of Wojtyla’s works declare him to be an opponent of traditional Catholic philosophy.
Certain critics have insufficiently pondered the rich tapestry of his ethics, woven of old
and new in a way that gives prominence no less to Aristotle and St. Thomas than to
Husserl, Scheler, and other moderns. After this article and its sequel, it should become
evident that much of what is said in criticism of Wojtyla’s ethics stems from a
failure to grasp certain fundamental features of his thought.
Personalism and Ethics
In the psychological drama Radiation of Fatherhood, written in 1964,
Wojtyla has the character Adam speak the following poignant line: “Everyone carries
in himself an unrealized substance called humanity.”2 This assertion is a simple
overture to Wojtyla’s multifaceted Christian humanism. Grappling with the modern
feeling of alienation from nature, other people, God, and oneself—a feeling well
expressed by his character Monica in the same drama: “Why do you sometimes appear so
distant, though you are closest to me?”3—Wojtyla develops a system of ethics
based on the intrinsic value of man as a person and not simply a thing, a subject and not
merely an object. In order to achieve a fuller vision of man, Wojtyla stresses the
importance of evaluating praxis, the whole range of human activity, in the light of the
subject’s self-actualization which is itself a pre-ethical value. In other words,
before any discussion of the particulars of ethics we must realize that man as a subject
(that is, a being with intrinsic worth) acts in order to perfect himself. This striving
for perfection, which originates in the conscience, is essentially rooted in human dignity
and is consequently a reality which must be taken seriously on its own terms. Human acts
have a “personalistic value”; they give expression to character and must be
weighed according to a full estimation of what man is. The human person may never be
evaluated as though he were merely an animal, a sociological stick figure, a consumer in
the artificial world of economic forces, a piece of raw material upon which government
agencies or global organizations can operate in the manner of laboratory technicians.
Tyrannical systems of East and West attempt to turn man into a mere
object either by stripping him of personal dignity in favor of impersonal production and
consumption (liberal capitalism) or by the violent denial of the individual in favor of
the state machine and its project of social transformation (communism and socialism). In
opposition to these brutal reductions, Wojtyla proclaims the uniqueness, the innate worth,
of the individual human being, whose actions and sufferings truly belong to him and endow
his life with a meaning prior to and higher than any conventional political or economic
order. This is part of the deeper reason why the pope has taken such an unequivocal stand
against the programs espoused by the Cairo and Beijing conferences. In each of these
conferences, the God-given dignity of the human person, as expressed through the natural
use of sexuality or the natural structure of the family, was under attack by small groups
of ideologues who made no secret of their materialistic agendas. Social engineering or
ideological intrusions of any sort undermine the legitimate self-determination every
person enjoys within the boundaries of the natural law. This natural law is still followed
to a greater or lesser extent in all traditional societies; only in decadent societies,
where fallen nature has been further perverted by the rejection of religion and of sound
custom, are the basic verities of behavior called into question. Thus, for Western secular
leaders to try to impose their distorted understanding of sexuality on the Third World is,
in the eyes of the pope, a supreme act of moral corruption.
Wojtyla places his ethical system on a foundation of
“personalism,” where the different aspects of the human person, whose natural
dignity is considered as a basic given, are examined in the context of the
individual’s conscience, circumstances, and choices. Examples of this kind of
personalism at work are to be found in the pope’s encyclicals, e.g., Redemptor
Hominis, Laborem Exercens, and Veritatis Splendor. In general, his philosophical works aim
to explicate a valid Christian humanism; his plays, on the other hand, dramatize the
stubborn difficulties that Christian life presents for the ordinary man in the modern
world. More specifically, he seeks to provide a basis for authentic anthropology
(understood in the medieval sense of the “study of human nature,” not the modern
sociological discipline), including a “theology of the body,” as well as
personalistic moral theology, which takes into account both the inviolability of
conscience and its need for outside enlightenment, i.e., the relationship between
objective unchanging norms and the subjective response to those norms. In his sensitivity
to the influence of culture, environment, and life history, Wojtyla denies the sufficiency
of any system which analyzes human nature purely in the abstract, or which claims to be
able to deduce human behavior from axioms and postulates.
In defining his concepts, Wojtyla stresses the centrality of experience
and freely employs the phenomenological terms of thinkers like Max Scheler and Edmund
Husserl. As a result of this emphasis on subjectivity and conscience, some hasty readers
have concluded that his system minimizes, if not eliminates, objective standards and
ethical norms. Wojtyla firmly counters this interpretation:
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 the 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.4
In his writings Wojtyla makes constant use of traditional principles and
distinctions while exploring for means to enrich them in modern terms more responsive to
the subtlety of moral perceptions. It is important to point out that Wojtyla is a member
of a group of thinkers in Poland connected with the Catholic University of Lublin, all of
whom are committed disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas and the perennial philosophy he
expounds. As another member of this school, Andrew Woznicki, has said: “Phenomenology
performs an ancillary function: in experiencing his actions, man discovers values—he
neither fashions nor invents them.”5
Wojtyla argues that traditional metaphysics, in its doctrine of esse or
being, endows personalist ethics with an objective foundation. Esse pertinet ad ipsam
constitutionem personae: to be pertains to the very constitution of a person. Man
expresses this being through his action; he reveals his interior self, who he is, in his
relations with the outside world. Since man does not act in a vacuum or a self-projected
world but in a world of beings which possess their own intrinsic truth-value, not
susceptible to modification by the will, it follows that “the entire existence of
man—all his existentia—actualizes itself in the presence of truth.”6 The
act of existence is always tied to some essence or nature; it is from the being of things
that their truth or goodness derives. The being of the self, no less than the being of the
world in which the self acts, are given in nature prior to all evaluations, choices, or
deeds. When man acts, therefore, he always acts in regard to (or in disregard of) the
truth of things. As a consequence, the will in its moral acts is objectively bound to
honor the truth of things discerned by reason: “this unavoidable and necessary (as
proceeding from the very nature of man) participation of truth in the action and existence
of man constitutes the very essence of a moral norm, which St. Thomas conceives
existentially,” Wojtyla explains.7 He thus steers clear of a relativistic or
situational ethics: “Reason, which is naturally related to the will, must also search
for the truth in everything that the will strives after in each of its actions.”8
Personhood and Action
Wojtyla enters into human perception and experience to obtain his
definitions. When I see another man (who will be called here “the Other”), I see
a human being, a somebody who addresses me or whom I address. Perceiving the Other merely
as “human,” however, would not disclose the most significant quality he
possesses: personality, or personhood, which transcends the physical world of objects. The
Other is just as much a person as I am; he is someone and not simply somebody. If I
consider the Other to be no more than an object, I fail to appreciate his subjectivity,
his being-a-subject. How, then, am I to recognize the Other as a subject (person) rather
than an object (e.g., species-member)? The basic recognition of human subjectivity emerges
first from within oneself, from the consciousness of one’s actions, which belongs
strictly to oneself and to no other. This consciousness ultimately brings about what
Wojtyla calls reflexiveness, that is, consciousness of conscience.9 In conscience I awaken
to the personality of the Other and come to understand that I should act towards him as I
would have him act towards me. (This process of discovering the Other through reflection
on oneself provides a philosophical rationale for the Golden Rule.) The internal
progression from seeing the Other as species-being10 to recognizing him as a person is
thus achieved in three steps: awareness of myself as a person (i.e., more than a mere
object), consciousness of my outer actions following from this awareness, and, in regard
to these actions, moral responsibility or accountability produced by my insight into the
Other’s personhood. If I have followed out these steps, as usually happens
immediately and intuitively, I shall see in the Other a share in the same personal dignity
I recognize in myself. In the end, my ability to communicate with, and more importantly,
love the Other, will depend entirely on my realization of his irreducible personhood, his
inalienable dignity as a source and goal of moral behavior.
The basic component of consciousness is the conscience itself, which
“warns against evil and urges man toward the good” because it is, in
Wojtyla’s words, an “inner obedience to the objective principle that enables
human praxis to distinguish between good and evil.”11 In man’s desire to engage
the world and to achieve happiness, we encounter the uniquely human activity of
self-reflection which uses for its material the distillation, so to speak, of what was
learned in outward engagements. Developed by reflecting on experience, the sense of a
value system is embedded deep within the individual conscience and therefore necessarily
imprinted on every human action.12 The discernment of values revealed in actions marks the
beginning of self-knowledge. Because conscience is matured in a certain sense by the post
factum evaluation of one’s own actions, we are led inevitably to a consideration of
action itself.
Praxis is at the center of Wojtyla’s system. Through action
emerges self-awareness; through self-awareness comes moral responsibility; and within this
responsibility is felt a need to participate in joint activities with others and to love
them for their own sakes. Wojtyla contends that the term act, for human beings, is
“identical to conscious action and expresses for us the dynamism specific to man as a
self.”13 Using this definition, he then states that man “does not become an
individual in the truest and fullest sense (i.e., in actu) until he experiences himself as
an acting (in actu) individual.”14 Thus, by its very nature, though not to the
exclusion of its objective aspect, action is always subjective, tied to an acting
person’s self-consciousness. Abstractly speaking, a “man” acts, but more
central is the concrete and singular act of the unique person.15 In reflecting on his
ability to act and to shape the world, the individual discovers the dynamism of the
“person-act,” the intimate correlation between selfhood and behavior. One cannot
separate an act from the person who performs it, as though they existed separately; only a
person is acting and the act is always personal. Actions thus acquire the dual character
of self-actualization (the gradual “making” of the self) and self-manifestation
(the communication of the self).16 Wojtyla expresses this by saying an act “is a
specific revelation of the self” as well as a specific revelation of the self to
itself.17
Uniting the self, the act, and consciousness, Wojtyla arrives at what
he calls the “personalistic value of the act.” Owing to the union of these
elements, an act can be said to belong to a definite agent and to possess all the weight,
so to speak, of an irrevocable performance. “The mere performance of an act by a self
determines its fundamental value,” argues Wojtyla. “This value differs from all
other moral values, which are evaluated in relation to a norm, while the personalistic
value is entirely contained within the performance of an act by a self.”18 Because
the act truly belongs to a certain person, one must next consider this person’s
responsibility for it. If a given act belongs to one person and to no other—the
logical consequence of the indissoluble bond between person and act—then the
consciously acting person is fully responsible; his action is non-transferable. Thus, we
arrive at the properly ethical dimension of human action, and a “pre-ethical” or
descriptive approach gives way to the evaluation of action in terms of responsibility
towards oneself and others.
One is responsible for an act over which one has dominion, that is to
say, a free or voluntary act. The capacity to choose is termed the will; the individual
acts in the world by willing his actions. Wojtyla thus brings personal responsibility to
the fore as a response to widespread contemporary attitudes that project responsibility
onto society, humanity, civilization, culture, economic structures, and so forth, in
effect reducing action to “reaction” and minimizing culpability by invoking
impersonal “forces” over which the individual has no control. Notice how such an
attitude depends on the reduction of the person-subject to an impersonal object. But the
fact remains: the person, by himself, consciously acts for good or for evil. “The
close relationship that exists between a particular person and a particular human act is
one of cause and effect. Given this context, authorship of the act in question cannot be
detached from one individual and assigned to some other person.”19
Traditional moral philosophy distinguishes, however, between a perfect
willing and an imperfect willing (voluntarium perfectum et voluntarium imperfectum).
Wojtyla employs this distinction in order to ascribe culpability or merit from both the
objective and the subjective angles. Objectively, a given act is definitively attributed
to its author and categorized under a norm, i.e., judged with respect to type.
Subjectively, we consider the degree to which a person really understood or was in control
of what he did—the degree of ignorance and dominion, in traditional terms—and
thus to what extent he can be held morally responsible for the act.20 For example, a
person who kills someone in a rage and a person who kills someone “in cold
blood” perform the same objective act, murder. While objectively the acts are
identical, subjectively they are not. Culpability, then, must be determined by a reference
to the motives behind the act and the corresponding degree of conscious willing.
Responsibility is connected to the context and content of the act more than to its
external categorization.
In the drama Radiation of Fatherhood, Wojtyla’s character Adam
struggles internally with much the same idea:
The word “mine”—a tiny, simple word. How long I had to stand on its threshold. How long I looked into it through all the logic of existence. . . This word had an eternal sense . . . Do you know that we must not accept what emerges only on the wave of heart until we assume responsibility for the truth of this word, the common simple word “mine”?21
Action, Value, and Fulfillment
After showing that man is a “person-act” who consciously
wills to act and therefore bears the responsibility for what he does, Wojtyla delves into
the question of values: What do the words “good” and “evil” mean when
applied to the realm of subjective action?
As we showed earlier, man engages the world in order to perfect and
manifest himself. Echoing Aristotle, Wojtyla states that human beings pursue what is good
because they desire happiness or completion.22 As a person encounters the reality that
exists outside of his own consciousness, he confronts values revealed in other
persons’ actions, and witnesses in others the effects of his own action-producing
values. Because the actions of others impinge on him in his innermost being and his
actions clearly affect them in the same way, he learns to discern good and evil within
action, so that he himself may act in accordance with the good he has discovered.
“Values appear always in a certain hierarchical order,” Wojtyla writes.
“Man esteems more the higher ones, expressing his conviction that they will bring him
closer to the objective good—that in themselves, they contain more of the
good.”23
Although Wojtyla, like any Christian ethicist, accepts as a starting
point the normative status of natural law and revelation, his thought is characterized by
a heightened emphasis on active love as the fulfillment of man—love of self and
neighbor in constant relation to God who is the font of love. Wojtyla uses the term
“fulfillment” to signify what is concretely good for a person. As a state of
being (or rather an orderly becoming, as man can never be totally fulfilled during this
life), fulfillment comprises a number of personal victories: achieving steady happiness,
discovering universal truth and beauty, overcoming the existential loneliness created by
the contingencies and trials of this life. All of these victories taken together Wojtyla
calls “self-completion.” The acting person reaches his highest state of
fulfillment when he has actualized his personhood, when he has entered deeply into an
awareness of his subjectivity and into the resulting hunger for truth, beauty, meaning,
and self-completion, according to the objective order he has glimpsed by engaging the
world with full commitment. A unique “auto-teleology” (derived ultimately from
the eternal law written in the heart) prescribes that man must search for the true and the
good, he must seek fulfillment. Self-completion or perfection is the primary and
inescapable duty towards oneself. In a way which is not to be construed as self-centered,
man is his own object. “When man makes a choice between other objects and values, he
will inevitably make a determination as to himself and his own value. He thus becomes his
own primary object.”24
For the egoist, man is an end in himself who does not need to refer
himself to any higher reality that endows him with dignity and places him in a position of
moral responsibility. Wojtyla understands auto-teleology, or having one’s fulfillment
as a goal, quite differently. Man achieves his proper end of self-completion only to the
degree that he subjugates himself to a reality greater than his individual self. The
greater reality is by nature transcendent, the changeless anchor of objectivity; it
surpasses whatever limited reality resides in any individual. When he acts, the person
expresses his interpretation of self-fulfillment, his yearning for transcendence. The act
will lead either to greater fulfillment if it accords with the objective law of his human
nature, or to nonfulfillment, a lessening of the fullness present in his soul, if it
should contradict that immutable law. Fulfillment “as a subjective reality given to
us also in the experience of conscience—though not limited or reduced to that
experience—is clearly connected with transcendence.”25 Thus man “realizes
the auto-teleology of his person-self through the transcendent dimension of his
action,”26 i.e., in the final analysis, through his relation to God, who is the
“absolute value,” the measure of all other values.27
Living in a world of self-help slogans and promises of easy salvation,
the individual must struggle against man-made and, as a result, actually destructive
models of fulfillment.
The transcendence of truth and of the good has a decisive influence in forming the personal subject, as is perfectly evident in the analysis of conscience and morality. The same analysis allows us to penetrate more profoundly the contingency of man, both by better appreciating how essential is his striving for self-completion and, above all, by showing how, in this striving, he is constantly torn between good and evil—between self-completion and non-completion—and how perseveringly he must conquer the forces operating both from within and from without.28
The identification of fulfillment as the good for man contains a direct
internal reference to morality or moral norms, by which genuine goods are distinguished
from sham ones. “The fulfillment of the self in an act is closely related to an
ethical value because nonfulfillment of a self in the performance of an act is a moral
evil.”29 Even if a person does not realize he is acting immorally, he nonetheless
damages himself because he executes an act of nonfulfillment, an act that threatens the
integrity of his personhood and siphons life, truth, and virtue from him. Because a person
is fulfilled only by cleaving in all of his actions to the transcendent truth or good, to
fall away from this truth or good is necessarily a failure to fulfill one’s nature;
and such a failure can only lead to spiritual and psychological disintegration.
Wojtyla makes use of artistic and theological ideas to present the same
conflict between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. In his drama Radiation of Fatherhood, the
image of birth acts as a recurrent theme. At one point, the character Adam speaks these
words:
We are born. . .through choice—then we are born from within, and not at once but bit by bit. . .So we are not born but rather become. But at a particular moment we may not become, may not be born. This depends on us.30
Fulfillment takes place when a man is “born anew,” reborn into a
deeper understanding of life and of himself. The conversation between Christ and Nicodemus
is clearly the intended background.31 In a similar vein, Wojtyla speaks of the Logos and
its offspring, the Gospel, as the only means for coming to understand and achieve
fulfillment. In the retreat he preached to Pope Paul VI, translated into English as Sign
of Contradiction, he forcefully describes the struggle for dominion in this world:
“Here, in the third chapter of Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, it
becomes clear that the history of mankind, and with it the history of the world with which
man is united through the work of divine creation, will both be subject to rule by the
Word and the Anti-Word, the Gospel and the Anti-Gospel.”32
Fulfillment is man’s good, his birth and his link to the Word, the
transcendent Person. The binding thread or common denominator in Wojtyla’s ethics is
therefore love, the sole path along which man can overcome his aloneness and enter into
communion with others based on truth. Love demands and begets moral goodness; it urges
men, once they are reborn in truth, to become active co-creators of the mystery of life;
and it directs our gaze towards the absolute source of love, the Word of the Father.
Peter A. Kwasniewski is studying for a Doctorate in Philosophy at The Catholic
University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.
End Notes
1 Available from Ignatius Press in San Francisco.
2 Radiation of Fatherhood, in Collected Plays and Writings on the
Theatre, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 335.
3 Ibid., 358.
4 Ocena mozliwosci zbudowania etyki chrzescijanskeij przy zalozeniach
systemu Maxa Schelera [“Evaluation of the possibility of constructing a Christian
ethics on the principles of Max Scheler’s system”], quoted in Andrew Woznicki, A
Christian Humanism: Karol Wojtyla’s Existential Personalism (New Britain,
Connecticut: Mariel Publications, 1980), 19. Hereafter referred to as Woznicki.
5 Woznicki, 29.
6 “This subject, as a being, remains at the basis of each dynamic
structure, of each activity or each happening, of each causality or subjectivization. It
is a real being. It is man who really exists, and as a consequence, really acts. . . Esse
itself is found at the beginning of activity. It is also found at the beginning of
everything that happens to man. It is found at the beginning of the entire and actual
dynamism of man” (The Acting Person, in Woznicki, 15).
7 Ibid.
8 O metafizycznej I fenomenologicznej podstawie normy moralnej. / W
oparciu o koncepcje sw. Tomasza z Akwinu oraz Maxa Schelera [“On the metaphysical and
phenomenological foundation of moral norms, according to the conception of St. Thomas
Aquinas and Max Scheler”], in Woznicki, 8.
9 Wojtyla terms this state of reflexiveness, or turning back to oneself
as a knower and a subject, “samowiedza” (self-cognition, self-knowledge).
10 This term, Gattungswesen, is used by Marxists to deny the uniqueness
or dignity of the individual human being, and to dissolve individuality into the
socio-economic collectivity.
11 Wojtyla, Sign of Contradiction, in Towards a Philosophy of Praxis: An
Anthology, ed. Alfred Bloch and George T. Czuczka (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,
1981), 113. Hereafter referred to as Bloch.
12 See Bloch, 14-15.
13 The Acting Person, in Woznicki, 17.
14 The Controversy About Man, in Bloch, 13.
15 “Act itself is interpretable not only as actus humanus, but also
as actus personae” (The Acting Person, in Woznicki, 25).
16 Naturally, “communication” in this sense does not conflict
with the metaphysical doctrine of the incommunicability of personhood.
17 The Acting Person, in Bloch, 30.
18 The Acting Person, in Block, 32.
19 The Controversy About Man, in Bloch, 13.
20 “The personalistic value of an act is hereby fundamentally
differentiated from strictly moral values of an accomplished act that are established by a
reference to a norm. The difference is evident because the personalistic value of the act
precedes and conditions its moral values. It is quite clear that any kind of moral value,
like good or evil, presumes that an act has already been fully performed” (The Acting
Person, in Bloch, 33).
21 Radiation of Fatherhood, in Collected Plays, 353. Ellipses in
original.
22 “Man experiences many values, but in his acts he realizes good.
It is a good of his own existence, an objective perfection of a person” (Wartosci
[“Values”], in Woznicki, 27).
23 Ibid.
24 The Controversy About Man, in Bloch, 14.
25 The Controversy About Man, in Woznicki, 57.
26 Ibid.
27 It should be noted that this argument clearly parallels the Fourth
Way of St. Thomas (Summa Theologiae Ia, qu. 2, art. 3, corp.), where Thomas proves that
there must be a being which is most noble, most true, most good, etc., and the cause of
all being and perfection, in order to account for the degrees of nobility, truth,
goodness, etc., found in things. Nobility or goodness in this argument is signified by
“value” in Wojtyla’s ethics, and the degrees of perfection are referred to
as the “hierarchy of values.”
28 The Controversy About Man, in Woznicki, 57-58.
29 The Acting Person, 34.
30 Radiation of Fatherhood, in Collected Plays, 354. Ellipses in
original.
31 See John 3:1-15.
32 Sign of Contradiction, in Bloch, 106-107. The Holy Father returns
many times to the Garden of Eden and its inexhaustible lessons: in his addresses On the
Original Unity of Man and Woman, his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, and his
encyclicals Dominum et Vivificantem and Veritatis Splendor, to name but a few.
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