KAROL WOJTYLA, PERSON A N D COMMUNITY—SELECTED ESSAYS.

Trans. T. Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 370 p p .

This collection of twenty-two philosophical papers of Karol Wojtyla

during his academic years (1955-78) in Poland is divided into three sections:
(1) Ethical and Moral Considerations, (2) Personalism, and (3) Marriage
and the Family. One essay, Chapter 12, is of particular interest to readers
of The American Journal of Jurisprudence, as it is specifically devoted to
"The Human Person and Natural Law." This essay too is of some immediate
importance in the light of the Holy Father's vigorous analysis of the natural
law in his recent Veritatis Splendor (1993).
This collection reveals in quite graphic detail the breadth of mind that is

Downloaded from http://ajj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manitoba on June 4, 2015

found in the present Holy Father. We find here many essays originally
published in Polish academic or theological journals in Lublin, Krakow,
and Warsaw. Included also are papers or lectures given to academic
conferences in Paris, "Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being"
(1975); Milan, "The Problem of the Constitution of Culture Through
Human Praxis" (1977); Rome, "The Personal Structure of Self
Determination" (1974); and Fribourg, "Participation or Alienation?" (1975);
as well as one address on Vatican Radio, "On the Dignity of the Human
Person" (1964).
These essays are a systematic treatment of the nature of ethics and of
the structure of the human being, his faculties, that explain his standing in
reality, his action, and the judgments about human action in terms of
conscience, of good and evil. Karol Wojtyla methodically went through the
various questions and perplexities that must be asked about the human
being as an acting person, as a moral agent existing in this world. It is
obvious from the beginning that Wojtyla is directly concerned to follow
and explain in depth the classical tradition, particularly that of Aristotle
and St. Thomas. Indeed, these essays are as good a review and as clear a
representation of the essentials of classic ethics as any I have ever seen.
This is a very clear mind. Wojtyla has the ability of taking a very complex
topic and, without over-simplifying it, stating what is at stake in it and
what is the resolution of the issue.
What is also striking about these essays is the forthrightness with which
Wojtyla dealt with problems in modern experimental psychology or philosophy
that might cause difficulties with or support the classical positions. He
himself studied Kant and Max Scheler very carefully. We find analyses of
Descartes, Hume, and Husserl. In these essays, Kant and Scheler in particular
as representatives of modern thought are treated with respect and with acute
analysis. Wojtyla finds what he can agree with. He is not afraid to reject
what he considers incompatible with experience and truth. The burden of
Wojtyla's analysis is to explain what these alternate positions are and how

499
500 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF JURISPRUDENCE (1994)
they are related to Aristotle or St. Thomas or other issues arising in
revelation or philosophy. There is something magisterial about Karol Wojtyla.
He is obviously fascinated with ethics in all its ramifications. Unlike so
much modern analysis of ethics, Wojtyla takes the metaphysical side of
ethics seriously. He understands that the status of man in being must be
determined before analysis of his action and of its worthiness or unworthiness.
The essay on natural law (pp. 181-85) was presented in Lublin on April
11, 1969. "It is the fashion nowadays to revolt against natural law, to
reject natural law," he began. The next sentence contains a sentiment that
is most characteristic of Karol Wojtyla: "We should, therefore, at least try

Downloaded from http://ajj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manitoba on June 4, 2015

to understand why this is happening." In the spirit of St. Thomas himself,
there is nothing more disarming about this scholar pope than the careful
attention to each position and objection that can be raised against any
claim of truth in philosophy or revelation.
Karol Wojtyla thought that, as far as he could tell, those who objected
to natural law thought they were defending "human action," the topic that
Wojtyla most attended to in his philosophical studies (see his The Acting
Person). Wojtyla frankly did not think that this opposition to natural law
on the grounds of defending the human person and human action was
always justified. "I would . . . like to show the extent to which this conflict,
which is so widespread and spontaneous, is an illusory conflict. "
Nature could refer to the basis for actualizing a thing. But nature can
also refer to what happens without referring to what causes a thing to
happen. Nature, in this sense, just refers to a thing being actualized without
speaking of the cause of its actualizing. This point of view would seem to
neglect the personal side of action and thus make natural law seem anti-
personal. But there is another meaning of nature. Following Boethius and
St. Thomas, a person is defined as "an individual substance of a rational
nature." Here, nature is "integrated into the person." If we understand
nature as the phenomenologists do as the origin of instinctive responses, a
conflict of nature and person will arise.
However, if person is considered to be the source of human action, then
those natural or non-voluntary reactions will seem to be non-personal.
Ethics, however, has always accounted for these involuntary things and
acknowledged that the person is not responsible for natural happenings that
have no voluntary origin. "Ultimately, even with regard to the emotional
life of the human being, I believe a great deal happens without the
participation of free will—happens in the person, but is not an action of
the person."
In resolving these difficulties, Wojtyla followed St. Thomas' definitions
of person, law, and natural law. Natural law is not in opposition to person.
The "ordination of reason" is precisely the mode of procedure of a rational
nature subsisting in an individual. "Law does not imply some sort of
arbitrary interference of subjective reason in the objective world, but rather
implies a basic orientation toward this objective order. This order is the
order of values. Reason's orientation toward this objective order is expressed
JAMES V. SCHALL 501
in its discovery and definition of that order." We do not have some sort
of arbitrary reason interfering in reality, which was the Kantian case.
Rather reason tests, confronts, defines, and affirms an order that is
objective and is not created by human reason. The encounter of human
reason is with what is. "The encounter of human reason in its orientation
toward the objective order is an encounter with the divine source of law.
This encounter is very profound, for it involves participation in the eternal
laws, which is in some sense identical with God, with divine reason." Thus,
no opposition between natural law and person exists but rather the rational
activity of the person itself encounters an objective order that it did not
itself construct.

Downloaded from http://ajj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manitoba on June 4, 2015

Wojtyla concluded by pointing out that a real conflict between person
and natural law can exist if the person claims complete metaphysical
autonomy and not the openness to being that is found in the metaphysics
of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Thus, if we think that "the human being (is)
some sort of pure consciousness, such a philosophical stance immediately
presents us with an image of the human being as a kind of absolute. . . . "
Likewise, the same metaphysics in which the human being has no limits or
ordered place in being views the human will as complete freedom, "as
complete independence unlimited by anything whatsoever." In this case, no
natural law is possible.
Wojtyla pointed out that there is a seeming difficulty with natural law
and a real one. The reconciling of the "reality of the human person" and
the "reality of the natural law" is itself related to our understanding of
reality itself, a reality that includes human persons as given to be what they
are, namely, reasonable. The nobility of natural law, then, is precisely that
of the person acting according to his given rational nature to understand
an objective order that itself needs to be explained because of what it is
and does. The richness of the other essays in this book match that in the
essay on person and natural law.
This book, by way of caveat, maintains that the translation is "accurate"
(viii). It then proceeds to translate Wojtyla from Polish in a completely
sanitized version that has Karol Wojtyla constantly saying the awkward
"him or her," never just he, him, or his. Even Vatican II documents are
sanitized. Gaudium et Spes (#24) is cited (p. 317) as saying "the human
being . . . cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested
gift of himself or herself." The Abbott translation, following the Latin,
says "himself." Obviously everything has been purified so we cannot trust
the "accuracy." Surely this systematic elimination of the normal English
usages, by making most pronouns repeated nouns or replacing all non-
gender "he's and him's" with "he or she," thereby to miss the point of
intellectual abstraction, is a mistake and confusion. Whether it comes from
publisher or translator, it does not literally correspond to what is actually
said in Polish in 1955-78. It serves often to make the reader wonder what
Karol Wojtyla did say, something a really careful translation would obviate.
The translation, in insisting on this sanitized version, is not wholly "accurate."
502 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF JURISPRUDENCE (1994)
The reader deserves some statement of policy to warn him of the rather
inaccurate use of the word "accurate" to describe the translation.
However, we need to read the works of Karol Wojtyla. They are, as this
book demonstrates, profound, systematic, and aware of the central issues
about ethics, revelation, and metaphysics as they appear in modern thought.
Aside from my concern about certain dubious theories of translation, this
is a very welcome and indeed exciting book about a subject Karol Wojtyla
obviously has studied in a most profound manner.

Reviewed by James V. Schall, S.J.

Downloaded from http://ajj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manitoba on June 4, 2015