Wojtyla: The Acting Person

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Wojtyla The Acting Person
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Coda
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Husserl

• Wojtyla

Reinach Scheler Ingarden
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Holism / Granularity

• Wojtyla The Acting Person (Person and Deed,
  1969)
• a study of the human person / substance /
  organism / individual
• and of the structures common to all persons and
  of all human action

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Reinach action vs. passion

• what merely happens in a person
• vs. spontaneous doings of a person, both internal
  (choosing, deciding) and external (kissing,
  kicking).
• the person is an enduring dynamic centre of
  spontaneous acts
• Problem there is a range of different dynamic
  orders in which each person is involved which he
  must somehow integrate through the choices he
  makes through his life.
• Persons create themselves by acting.

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Man acts

• Acting is the first of many dynamisms
  (dimensions of dynamic activity and
  organization) in the structure of the human
  person.
• Acting is conscious,
• and consciousness, too, is a dynamism in the
  structure of the person.
• There are also bodily dynamisms, e.g. the
  circulation of the blood
• How is this multiplicity of dynamisms to be
  unified by the person through actions?

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Consciousness mirrors external reality

• But it is aware also (as it were from the
  inside) of the actions of the person whose
  consciousness it is.
• When we act we experience our action
• 1. as a doing of which we are the agent, as
  something which we are now directly (causally)
  responsible for bringing about.
• 2. as reflecting certain conscious processes in
  ourselves called desires.
• 3. (sometimes) as a bearer of moral value or
  disvalue ( as part of a drama of good and evil
  within ourselves)

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The dynamism of feelings and emotions

• Some of our consciousness is so intensely
  emotionalized that the emotions take over from a
  more reasonable, cognitive consciousness.
• The objects and the actions which make up our
  world are to different degrees valuable and our
  emotions are sensitive to these values.
• Our cognitive, reasoned consciousness, too, is
  then able to grasp these same values as it were
  second hand. It then has the task of bringing
  about a unity of the person through diminution of
  the strife to which our awareness of values would
  otherwise give rise.
• In the case of an over-emotionalized
  consciousness, there is a struggle between the
  intense emotions which our consciousness is
  effected by and our consciousness itself. And
  sometimes, of course, consciousness loses, we
  find it impossible to act in such a way as to
  bring about an integration of our person. The
  person as unity disintegrates.

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Freedom

• Every action is in principle able to involve an
  experience of freedom
• But only a person who has a relatively low
  degree of emotionalization of his consciousness
  and a relatively high degree of integration of
  his person experiences this "I may, but I need
  not". Hence only such a person is free.
• Freedom presupposes self-possession
• Self-possession presupposes the cognitive
  awareness that my decisions are contributing to
  the integration or unification of my person.

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Freedom thus presupposes a reference to truth

• and not only a reference to the objects which
  elicit the corresponding actions
• Someone who is living in error is not free
• Just as there is a dynamism which makes us
  constantly aware of and constantly receptive to
  value in the outer world, constantly choosing and
  deciding, moving this way and that in relation to
  outer objects, so there is a similar dynamism in
  the inner world, a receptivity to inner value,
  called "conscience". Conscience serves control
  the goodness or the badness of our actions it
  serves to control the degree to which our acts of
  will are such as to respect the truth.

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Two broad classes of human dynamisms relating to
consciousness, and relating to the body

• ? solution to the mind-body problem
• The mental and bodily dynamisms are brought to a
  unity on the higher level constituted by the
  dynamisms of human action. Integration occurs,
  for instance, through the cultivation of bodily
  skills through work and practice à la
  Merleau-Ponty (and virtue, too, is a skill which
  can be acquired, like swimming or piano-playing).
  

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All men

• have the ability to use conscience in order to
  distinguish truth from falsity as far as their
  acts are concerned, and to do this infallibly (a
  view embraced also by Brentano in his Religion
  und Philosophie)