Karol Wojtyła jako fenomenolog

Abstract

The article analyzes Karol Wojtyła’s phenomenology understood as a method. Such phenomenology must be critical: the meaning of all fundamental terms (such as subject, consciousness) must be grasped in their original intuitive givenness. The analyses in Person and Act focus on the subject who simultaneously constitutes a certain objectivity. The person is constituted as a hierarchical, stratified system, which the author unveils in its successive aspects (consciousness, agency, act, will, participation). Such an approach to the subject–object can only be achieved through a purely noematic phenomenology. Only this guarantees the realism of cognition, primarily by revealing the proper role of consciousness in the constitution of human personal existence. Human contact with being is, in this view, direct: it occurs before the threshold of consciousness and is therefore not mediated by consciousness as if it were a separate region of being. Consciousness can exist neither as a substantial subject, nor as the ontic foundation of experiences, nor as a faculty. Consciousness does not objectify but merely reflects what has already been objectified through knowledge and self-knowledge, which guarantees the primacy of being over consciousness. The article also discloses many other aspects of Wojtyła’s phenomenology: the primacy of ontology in the analysis of cognition, the primacy of the analysis of action over cognition in shaping a realistic conception of the human being, the weakness of a phenomenology built on perception alone, the significance of language in the intuitive disclosure of phenomena, etc.