| The immediate aim of this study is to bring to light the political implications of the thought of Karol Wojtyla as expressed in his primary philosophic work, The Acting Person. In brief, we argue that The Acting Person speaks to what is, perhaps, the most important political question---namely, which way of life is best for man. As Leo Strauss contends, answering this question requires choosing between the philosophic life and the moral life. In Strauss' reading, ancient political philosophy presupposes the priority of theory to praxis. Yet Wojtyla, who claims to follow Aristotle here, maintains that self-fulfillment consists of moral perfection. Does Wojtyla's philosophy, then, represent a consistent development of the "Aristotelian-Thomistic" tradition? With this question in mind, Part I of this inquiry examines Aristotle's views regarding the relation between theory and praxis, looking primarily at the Nicomachean Ethics and the De Anima.; Parts II and III of this study consider Wojtyla's attempt to synthesize the Boethian-Thomistic definition of the person as a rational substance of an individual nature with Max Scheler's description of the person as a unity of diverse acts. Herein, we provide a detailed analysis of Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, with special attention paid to Wojtyla's reform of Scheler's phenomenology.; After showing that Wojtyla adopts a "maximalist" interpretation of the traditional idea of man as a rational suppositum, we delineate Wojtyla's vision of the person as a subjective/objective unity animated by the structures of self-possession, self-determination, and self-fulfillment. Finally, we turn to Wojtyla's political philosophy as explicitly articulated in the last chapter of The Acting Person. In conclusion, although The Acting Person does not quite prove that man's final end is moral perfection, Wojtyla's personalism holds great promise, especially as a means of overcoming the limitations of both metaphysics and phenomenology. Questions remain, however---in particular, as regards the relation between the natural order and the personal order, as well as Wojtyla's claim that man's final end is to love. |
