Irreducibility and the Personalistic Norm as a Departure from Thomism in the Thought of Karol Wojtyła / John Paul II
Keywords:
Wojtyła, John Paul II, Aquinas, personalism, reductionism, Thomistic personalismAbstract
Karol Wojtyła owed a considerable debt to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, affirming a great deal in Aquinas’s metaphysical apparatus that was wanting, in his estimation, in much of contemporary philosophy: a grounding in substance, and an objectivity according to which we can confidently appeal to the truly knowable in reality, and in which we can locate definitive moral laws. At the same time, however, Wojtyła took from contemporary philosophy, especially the phenomenology of Max Scheler, a new focus upon the human person—a focus lacking, even in the great Christian thinkers of Scholasticism, Aquinas included. Wojtyła criticizes Aquinas’s view of the human person as being too “naturalistic,” instead suggesting that we ought to construct a more thoroughly developed personalism, giving the personal subject’s irreducibility “the upper hand” over natural functionality while avoiding any trace of subjectivism in the determination of moral norms. As a result, analyses that may seem perfectly warranted within the purely metaphysical realm cannot stand unconfronted by the truth available to human reason through the careful application of the phenomenological method. This is the point we wish to explore in this paper. What, in the view of Karol Wojtyła / Pope John Paul II, is the nature of Aquinas’s mistake here? How does Wojtyła correct it? And what practical differences does this make in terms of concrete conclusions with respect to matters of faith and morals?
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