In the first of these two posts, I very briefly sketched Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities project, focusing on her epistemology of person.  Here I will expand why Karol Wojtyla’s Person and Act can well support Nussbaum’s capabilities project.  As is Nussbaum, Wojtyla was an Aristotelian scholar; not just for this his project complements and supports hers, but in what follows some Aristotelian aspects of his thought will perhaps be evident.

Wojtyla begins by considering the “experience of the person”.  His is a phenomenological approach; an experience is not merely phenomenal, with the intellect then shaping the idea of “person”.  Rather, the experience itself is at once sensation and comprehension; in experience there is a sort of direct cognitive contact (832).

Significantly, Wojtyla grounds the experience of the person in one’s experience of oneself.  Our experience of ourselves is our basic experience of the person: “The experience of the person, the person that I am, obtains as long as that direct cognitive contact of which I am at once both subject and object” (832).

Our larger “experience of the person” is not limited to ourselves and includes all others with whom we are in contact.  Where we experience ourselves as both subject and object, we experience others as “objects of experience, that is, in direct cognitive contact” (832).  It might be tempting to consider these as separate experiences, one as of the person as object, the other as of the “I”.  Wojtyla argues that, while in some respects there is an incommensurability between these two experiences, but “one cannot deny their fundamental qualitative identity” (834).  The experience of oneself is not outside the scope of the experience of the person (835).  The experience of oneself is an once as interiority and as exteriority; we experience others only as exteriority, though each other has his or her own interiority, and in certain close relationships we can become quite aware of the interiority of others (836-837).

Based on this shared experience of ourselves and others, “every human experience is thus also a sort of comprehension of that which I am experiencing” (840).  Through this shared cognitive experience of ourselves and others, the intentional act is what reveals the person: “the act is a particular moment of the vision—or the experience—of the person” (840, emphasis in the original).  It is through the act that the person reveals him- or herself to us, whether the person revealed be ours or others; in Aristotelian terms, it is a property of the person to reveal herself through her intentional acts (840).

Wojtyla pointedly states that his project is not a study in ethics; typically, a study of ethics as regarding intentional human acts presupposes the person as an agent (841).  He proposes to reverse that; his is a “study of the act that reveals the person, a study of the person through the act” (841, emphasis in the original).  Such a study will permit us, in the most fitting manner, to “analyze the essence of the person and to understand it in the most complete way possible” (841).

What remains is to tie what has been said so far to Nussbaum’s project.  I suggest three ways in which this can be done.

We saw in the first post that Nussbaum’s project was to determine, through an internalist, empirical analysis, the essentials of what it means to be human.  Wojtyla’s project gives us just that: phenomenologically grounded, it is a study that reveals the essentials of the person from within human experience, through persons revealing themselves through their acts, “based on the entire continuity of empirical data” (832).

Nussbaum argued for “thick”, or direct, epistemic access; Wojtyla’s realist phenomenology claims just that sort of direct cognitive access to the essentials of the person.

Finally, one of Nussbaum’s goals was to bridge the alterity of the other, establishing a set of essentials that is held in common with all other humans, regardless how culturally different they may be; Wojtyla again provides a bridge to the other, in that our direct, objective, and cognitive experience of others is grounded by, and inextricably interwoven with, our direct cognitive experience of ourselves as both subject and object.  We reveal ourselves to ourselves and others through our acts, just as others reveal themselves to us and themselves through their acts.  This is not a collapse of the subject/object distinction; rather, it interweaves subject and object in our relationships both to ourselves and to others.

In summary, in my view Wojtyla’s study of the person, revealed through his acts, can provide a robust epistemological support to discover the human essentials on which Nussbaum’s capabilities project is grounded.

Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 202-246.

Karol Wojtyla, “Persona e atto” ["Person and Act"], from the anthology Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e T. Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano 2003.  Any English translations are my own.  The available English translation of this work is The Acting Person, which I do not reference.

Martha Nussbaum’s “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism” seeks to delineate certain essential human characteristics.  Nussbaum’s goal is to define the most basic essential human characteristics that cut across culture and time in order to lay out a minimal set of capabilities that should be provided by a liberal government.

She proposes a list of ten capabilities; listed in summary form, these are: living a complete life; adequate health, shelter, and nutrition; avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure; able to think, imagine, and reason; to love, feel, and belong; form an idea of the good and critically plan one’s life; interact in family and society; live with and concern for nature; laugh, play and recreate; live one’s own life in one’s own surroundings (222).

These capabilities are designed toward the end of promoting the flourishing of each person (215), though each one has the option of functioning, or not, in the provided capabilities (221).  She argues that the essentials she defines are such that a human life without all of them is less than fully human (222).  Crucially, these essentials are not transitive: the lack of one cannot be compensated by the increase in another (231).

My focus here is less on the capabilities per se and more on her epistemology of person.  Nussbaum’s is an internalist, historically grounded view of humanity; she specifically disclaims an externalist metaphysics (215).  She calls her account a “thick vague theory of the good” (214).  By “thick” she intends her work to stand in contrast with John Rawls’ “thin theory of the good” (214).*  I understand her term “thick” as signifying that in observing humanity, we have direct epistemic access to real phenomena on which a liberal polity can be normatively grounded.  She understands that the essentials determined by internalist observation will be imprecise, or “vague”; that is as it should be, as the capabilities would apply across a broad range of cultures such that people could determine their own best ends (215).

Nussbaum makes two basic observations that ground her internalist view: “first, that we do recognize others as human across many divisions of time and place … [s]econd, we do have a broadly shared general consensus about the features whose absence means the end of a human form of life” (215).  Her goal is ultimately to establish an essentialist understanding of humanity on which it is possible to bridge the alterity of the other: in certain key ways the other is like us, regardless how culturally dissimilar she may be.  Her argument is that there is a robust, empirically verifiable commonality to all of humanity that can ground a normative capabilities polity.

Clearly her empirical, internalist view must obtain if it is to successfully ground a normative liberal capabilities polity.  In support of her argument, I find important parallels to Nussbaum’s epistemology of person in Karol Wojtyla’s Persona e atto.  To be sure, the aims of the two works are different.  Wojtyla’s goal is to understand the person as revealed in his conscious acts; in this sense, the whole of Wojtyla’s project could support Nussbaum’s capabilities argument.  In my view, Wojtyla’s phenomenological realist approach can add significant epistemic support to Nussbaum’s larger capabilities project, for a particular reason that I will expand in a later post.

* Jody Azzouni gives useful definitions of thick and think epistemic access.  Thick access is “any form of epistemic access which is robust, can be refined, enables us to track the object (in either sense), and which (certain) properties of the object itself play a role in how we come to know (possibly other) properties of the object is a  thick form of epistemic access.’ By this definition, all observations of something are thick” (477).  Thin access is more a matter of theory; “if a theory has these virtues, we have good (epistemic) reasons for adopting it, and all the posits that come with it. I shall call this sort of epistemic access to a posit, that it is a quantifier commitment (see footnote 5)  of a theory which has Quine’s five virtues, thin epistemic access” (479).

Jody Azzouni, “Thick Epistemic Access: Distinguishing the Mathematical from the Empirical”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94, No. 9 (Sep., 1997), pp. 472-484.

Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 202-246.

Karol Wojtyla, “Persona e atto” ["Person and Act"], from the anthology Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e T. Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano 2003.  Any English translations are my own.  The available English translation of this work is The Acting Person, which I do not reference.

Foundationalism is an ancient theory of knowledge, going back at least as far as Aristotle, that we can know the world 1) immediately (i.e. directly, in an unmediated manner) and 2) incorrigibly (i.e. with no need of correction).  The problem is, foundationalism does not hold up well under criticism.  Nicholas Wolterstorff has explored the collapse of foundationalism in his brief work Reason within the Bounds of Religion (see also this helpful review).  Some in discussing an alternative to a total post-modern collapse have discussed various versions of a moderate foundationalism in which we can at least partially know the world veridically.  The question remains: what of our experiences are true, and how might we know them as true?  Where do we start?

I have a friend profoundly mired in a post-foundationalist crisis.  His worldview, once anchored in a naïvely foundationalist, modernist Christianity (and he is intelligent and well-educated), has crumbled under the 20 year weight of his experiences in what he thought was an authentic Christian community, which he now understands to be a deeply deceitful cult.  Now nothing at all is certain, and he told me recently that he was well on his way to becoming a Logical Positivist (in which the meaning of a statement is the possibility of its verification; with no possibility of verification a statement is simply unintelligible).  I think I have dissuaded him of that futile path, but he remains without an epistemic anchor.

Having lived through something of the same process as my friend, I have begun recounting to him what for me has been the best fallback to date, which is Karol Wojtyla’s Person and Act.**  This was Wojtyla’s most significant pre-papal work, in which he explores the concept of “person” through a phenomenological lens.  Summarizing extremely, we come to know ourselves through our interaction with others; we are not detached knowers of the world in the typical modern sense, but our knowledge of ourselves is intimately bound up in relation to others and to the world.  Precisely because our self-knowledge is intertwined with our experiences of the world, when we encounter something outside ourselves that seems true, to then deny its veridicality, though perhaps provisionally and subject to further understanding, is in some way to deny ourselves.  We most fully become ourselves in transcending ourselves toward the truth we encounter outside ourselves.

The starting point thus becomes not a near-solipcistic Cartesian cogito, but our knowledge of ourselves through experience of the world, and, most significantly, the other.  This seems the best explanation of how I have come to recognize the truth to which I can hold.  It may be partial, mediated, and subject to correction and fuller knowledge, but certain things ring so true that for me to deny them is to deny myself.  As I experience the world, I find things that present themselves as true, in that I can re-cognize an underlying reality; to deny the truth of the world as it presents itself is at some level to deny my existence in it.  As I experience the love of and for another, to deny that love is to deny my existence as one who can love and be loved.  I have had certain mystical experiences, some of which involve the most immediate knowledge I have ever had of both good and evil, that are as real to me as any sense-based experience; to deny those would perhaps be the most profound denial of myself, as these touch me at my core, well beyond my normal interaction with the world.  In Wolterstorff’s terms, I think of these as my “authentic commitments”, or a set of control beliefs, from which basis I seek to further understand the world.

Such an epistemology loses the comfortable certainly of foundationalism.  So be it; contra Protagoras, I am not the measure of all things.  As I see things at the moment, any certainty that I have does not derive from my ability to reduce the world to the scope of my theories, whether scientific or theological, but from these truths which I re-cognize outside myself, toward which I reach beyond myself.

——

** The text I am reading is the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (“The Acting Person” in its English translation) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (“Person and Act“) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).

Wojtyla opens the forth section of the introduction with a startling claim: that one person can reproduce, in an “adequate” if not complete manner, the subjectivity of another person.  While fully admitting that the incommensurability of the other poses certain difficulties, he nonetheless argues this point on the basis of one’s observation of oneself as an integrated subjective/objective, inner/outer whole.  That is, since in observing oneself acting the experience is at once from within and from without, in observing the external act of another it is also possible to adequately recreate the subjectivity of the other.  This claim is foundational to the development of his view of person and of act.

This is essentially a restatement of what he has already said in the second section of the introduction.  There he notes that we can know nothing of the subjectivity of animals, apart from individual cases in which a dog or a horse recognizes its owner from another.  When observing another human that changes.  We simultaneously know ourselves from within and without, as subject and as object; this opens the possibility for partially understanding another human because our perceptions by which the other is given to us pass through the categories and distinctions we have through our experience of ourselves as subject and object.

The second point in the fourth section develops this further along the lines of consciousness.  Again Wojtyla points out that this is not a study of the person as constituted by the consciousness of the perceiver.  Yes, the perception of the other happens through consciousness, but Wojtyla is clear on this point: the reason by which the action of another is a conscious action is not simply because it is constituted as such by the perceiver.  Rather, in the perception of another person something adequate of the person as conscious agent is already given in the experience itself, and it is the phenomenological, intellectual engagement of these perceptions that reveals the acting person.

In chapters I and II of the work proper this relationship between consciousness and the person as actor will be explored.  In so doing the transcendency of the person will emerge through his or her actions, and chapters III and IV will explore a “possibly accurate” analysis of the person as transcendent agent.  Chapters V and VI will examine the complexity of the person not only as revealed as transcendent in the act, but also through its complement of the person as integrated in the act.

The final chapter of the work is entitled simply “Participation”.  Wojtyla notes that most of our efforts go into understanding the external world; relatively little goes into understanding ourselves.  Yet, this understanding of ourselves is critical to how we act and what we accomplish.  Because we are constantly exposed to ourselves as subject/object, we run the great risk of becoming commonplace or accustomed to ourselves.  We must constantly be recalled to marvel at ourselves, because in that we can begin a process of discovery of who we are through questions and responses.  The importance of this seems to sum up in a single sentence, emphasized in the original: “humanity cannot lose its proper place in the world that we ourselves have configured” (“l’uomo non puo perdere il posto che gli è proprio in quel mondo che egli stesso ha configurato”, p. 856). The implication that I draw from this is that unless we understand ourselves and how we act, we stand to lose that place.

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the third section of the introduction, Wojtyla discusses two stages in the comprehension of the person, intuition and reduction.

In observing a person acting, at the phenomenal level we gather an innumerable set of facts regarding specific acts by a person.  These facts source both externally from the actions of others and internally from our own acts.  This set of facts is processed by the intellect in a sort of pre-theoretic stage in which a quantitative multiplicity of facts about a particular human are distilled into a qualitative identity of a single person as the source of the actions; this process is an intuitive induction in the Aristotelian sense (see for example http://www.friesian.com/arch.htm).  It is not necessary to first prove that a human is a person and then that what that human does is an act; in each experience the person and the act are both given in some manner.

Wojtyla specifically rejects the later, more analytic, sense of a form of argumentation or reasoning as the generalization of a set of specific cases to other yet unobserved cases (“all the ravens I have ever observed are black, therefore it must be the case that all ravens are black”).

Following the pre-theoretic intuitive induction of a person as the source of a set of (f)acts, we then want to explore that process, examining and explaining more deeply; this move to a theoretical understanding of the person is reduction.  This process is the intellectual analysis of how myriad facts and experiences are reduced to the identity of a single acting person; through deepening this understanding process the person emerges in more clear relief against the background of the variety of observed acts.

Again Wojtyla rejects the understanding that reduction is somehow limiting or diminishing the person as an entity, as can sometimes occur in analytic philosophy.  Rather than reductively diminishing the person through (for example) behaviorist or dispositional tendencies as observed in acts, Wojtyla argues for just the opposite; the acting person emerges even more clearly as a result of these analyses.

Wojtyla notes several things that follow from this approach.  One is that the proposed study of the person by means of acts is grounded in praxis; that is, it is not a study in how to act consciously, rather a study of conscious action itself and how it reveals the person.  Nor is it a study grounded so much in the person as an object as known intersubjectively, partly through our own knowledge of ourselves intrasubjectively.  Further, it is not the derivation of the person by abstracting from observed (f)acts; it is rather a penetration into and beyond the acts to the reality of the person behind them.

The object of the study then is to move from the initial inductive intuition of the person to a full explanation of the same such that the experienced reality corresponds to the theory.  The task is challenged by the incommensurability of the experienced person-act.  We proceed from the basis of our own interior knowledge of ourselves, but the experience of ourselves and of others is beyond complete comprehension.  Wojtyla sees as one of the principals tasks of his study the attempt to come to a correct integration of theory and experience.

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the second half of the second section of the introduction to Person and Act, Wojtyla considers that the intellectual vision of the person formed in the observation of acts derives not only from the acts themselves, but also from the moral value of those acts.  The acts of a person are different than actions in general in that persons are presupposed to be agents.  The acts of an agent have an intrinsic moral property which cannot be separated from the act without artificially reducing the full dynamic experience of the act.

For Wojtyla the morality of the person is existential in nature.  Not only do we come to understand a person through the experience of moral acts, the person him- or herself becomes good or evil through the moral nature of the acts chosen through one’s agency.  Thus the person is found both at the point of departure, i.e. in the experience of a moral act as performed, as well as the end point, i.e. the person that one becomes as a result of a moral act.

Again Wojtyla notes that ethics typically considers moral values per se, in the light of which individual acts are then considered.  Neither is it an anthropological approach that sets out to discover, without valuation, the moral values of a person.  Wojtyla’s study, in difference with ethics, will reverse this to consider how we come to understand something of the person, either of self or other, through acts and their intrinsic morality.  Wojtyla notes that both ethics and anthropology are based on the unity in the experience of human acts and the experience of their morality.  By considering the morality of acts we arrive at a much fuller comprehension of the person than through acts alone; in a fully integrated phenomenology of the person morality cannot be set aside.

In concluding the second section of the introduction, to better define the methodology in this study to contrast the relationship between ethics and anthropology, Wojtyla gives the analogy of factoring common terms in a mathematical equation outside of enclosing parentheses.  In this study ethical considerations will be “placed outside the parentheses” in order to better highlight the unique qualities of the experiences which remain inside the parentheses, now unentangled from ethical considerations per se.  In so doing Wojtyla chooses to set aside essential ethical considerations in favor of essential anthropological considerations, without however altogether ignoring ethical considerations.

Attingendo al saggio del dott. Carlo Lottieri, Dall’ontologia della cosa all’etica dell’altro, vorrei proporre una breve riflessione riguardo una differenza tra Emanuel Lévinas e Karol Wojtyla sul rapporto con l’altro.

Nell’introduzione di «Persona e atto» di Karol Wojtyla (dall’antologia Metafisica della persona, a cura di G. Reale e T. Styczen, Bompiani, Milano 2003) Wojtyla considera come si viene a conoscere qualcosa dell’altro come uomo, come persona.  Nella prima sezione dell’introduzione considera cosa vuol dire «sperimentare l’uomo» ovvero «l’esperienza dell’uomo», e nota che nello sperimentare l’altro si sperimenta pure se stessi.  Cioè, nell’atto conoscitivo dello sperimentare l’altro come uomo, come esteriorità, si sperimenta se stessi simultaneamente sia come interiorità sia come esteriorità.

Per Wotyla allora, nella fenomenologia dell’altro si sperimenta pure se stessi fenomenologicamente, almeno in parte, come «altro». È da questa prospettiva dell’osservatore su di sé, sia come «uomo» che come «altro», che si può capire l’altro come «uomo». È poi da questo punto di vista che si viene ad intendere qualcosa dell’altro come «persona», dagli atti che l’altro compie.  Questa conoscenza deriva da un rapporto intrinsecamente simmetrico con l’altro, simmetrico nel senso che in un certo modo si sperimenta sia l’altro sia se stessi nella stessa maniera.

Mentre consideravo quest’argomento ho pensato al saggio di Lottieri proprio su come Lévinas considera l’altro come trascendente in modo asimmetrico rispetto a se stessi.  L’altro eccede sempre la mia capacità conoscitiva e quindi ci rimane sempre un rapporto asimmetrico (in modo reciproco, s’intende) con l’altro.  Da quando ho letto e tradotto il saggio sono rimasto un po’ perplesso come si possa mai avere un rapporto sociale più o meno uguale con l’altro, se in ogni modo l’altro sempre mi trascende.  Purtroppo non ho ancora avuto il tempo di leggere Lévinas per capire come risolva la domanda.

(In un breve scambio di mail col dott. Lottieri m’ha indicato che in Lévinas l’uguaglianza e la giustizia entrano con il terzo, cioè l’altro dell’altro.  Quindi dai suoi commenti pare che l’uguaglianza sia un rapporto non tanto interpersonale quanto societario.  Qui c’è da approfondire senza dubbio.)

Riflettendo sull’argomento di Wojtyla, mi domando se il suo approccio non preservi qualcosa d’un uguaglianza essenziale del rapporto con l’altro, basato proprio sul modo di sperimentarlo. Cioè, conoscere l’altro significa conoscere me stesso, e senza l’altro non posso neanche conoscere me stesso.  Sì, è vero che l’altro m’eccede sempre, ma è anche vero che in qualche modo io m’eccedo sempre a me stesso in quanto mi sperimento come «altro».

Mantenere una tale simmetria nei rapporti altrui non mi sembra problematico in quanto non credo che ci voglia necessariamente una trascendente asimmetria levinasiana perché non si sfrutti l’altro.  Mi pare che non è tanto la simmetria stessa il problema quanto una simmetria che possa divenire asimmetrica nell’diminuire l’altro.

È appunto perché il rapporto con l’altro è essenzialmente allo stesso tempo simmetrico, trascendente e auto-riflessivo nel modo di conoscerci l’un l’altro che non sono libero di negare l’altro, di definirlo inferiore.  Ne segue appunto che negando l’altro nego me stesso.  Nel definire inferiore l’altro, mi definisco inferiore.

Questa qualità auto-riferente del mio rapporto con l’altro nel pensiero di Wojtyla mi pare un punto cardinale della sua etica.  Insomma non credo che cambii la conclusione del saggio di Lottieri in quanto l’altro, in contrasto alla visione della persona sotto l’ottica moderna, rimane sempre trascendente.  Volevo però mettere in rilievo questa distinzione tra Wojtyla e Lévinas per meglio riflettere sugli eventuali esiti diversi dei loro sistemi etici.

Am I myself when, by an act of free choice, I deny the truth that I have established as such, having ascertained it as an eyewitness?

Did Peter, who affirmed “I do not know the man” (Mt. 26:72), deny only the truth?

Did he not also deny himself?

In betraying Christ, did he not also betray himself?

Would he not remain himself only by siding with the truth, by choosing to testify to it, and, in a certain sense, “transcending himself toward it”?

(My translation of the opening lines of Tadeuz Styczen’s Introduction to “Persona e atto” (“Person and Act”) by Karol Wojtyla, in Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e Tadeuz Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano, 2003.)

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the first half of the second section of the Introduction to Person and Act, having begun from the experience of the human, Wojtyla comes to how we know something of a “person”.  We observe ourselves and others as human, and this empirical experience of the human is the starting point for how we intend, or come to know, something of a person.  In experiencing a human one of the facts which is given is that “a human acts”.  The observation that humans act is the starting point for Wojtyla’s work Person and Act.

Again, Wojtyla explicitly rejects a purely phenomenal empiricism, as the reduction of experience to the function and content of the senses alone results in profound contradictions and equivocations.  In the phenomenal experience of a human only a “surface” is directly given, nothing of the human him- or herself.  In particular what is not given in mere sense data is the human and his or her conscious action, or the act itself.  That knowledge sources from the action of the intellect of the observer in intending, or understanding, that the source of the perceived sense changes when a human acts is that a human has made a conscious decision and has done something as a result.

Nor does Wojtyla accept that the human or the act as understood by the intellect is an object constructed or synthesized by the intellect.  Rather, it is that the intellect of the observer is somehow engaged in the very experience itself, and in that engagement a direct contact with the observed is somehow established, different from but no less direct than the sensible.  In other words, what the intellect engages is not just some assembled bundle of sense data, but somehow, in the very sense experience of the other, the intellect makes a different but equally direct contact with the other.  Thus every experience is also a sort of comprehension of what is experienced.  This direct knowledge of the other will be important for his argument how we intend, or come to know, the other as person.

It is our experience of a human as acting that is the “moment of intuition” into the person of the other.  Since in the experience of another as acting we engage as well in a different but equally direct knowing of the person, the act is that which reveals the person, and the means by which we understand the person.  Wojtyla notes that the general approach is that the act presupposes the person; in ethics, as an example, consideration begins from the person and proceeds to the act.

Wojtyla however proposes to reverse that order.  His will instead be a study of the act as revealing the person, a study of the person by means of his or her actions.  This actually fits with how we experience others; it is in their actions that we understand who they are.  Were we unable to observe the actions of others, we could know nothing of the persons that they are.  We are convinced of the personhood of others because we observe that they act.  Thus it is through the acts of others that we comprehend, intend, them as persons.

In the second half of the second section of the introduction Wojtyla will take up morality as a property of human acts.

Karol Wojtyla, in his life before his election as Pope John Paul II, was a highly regarded philosopher in the Catholic University of Lublin.  His major philosophical work is Person and Act, published in 1969, to which I here begin to set myself.  What follows is drawn from the Italian translation of the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).  This is a fresh and careful translation, done with great care and recognized by John Paul II himself.

The opening sentences of the first section of the introduction, which is what I will consider in this post, state that the purpose of the work is show the objective aspect of the rich and complex cognitive process which can be defined as, in Italian, “l’esperienza dell’uomo“.  This is accurately translated as the “experience of man”, “man” in this case being clearly understood multi-dimensionally both as an individual “man”, whether myself or others, and in its collective sense of “mankind”.  For that the English “experience of man” is, I think, quite adequate.  Perhaps the best gender neutral translation is however “experience of the human”, as this seems to best capture the multi-dimensionality of the Italian; it can be at once individual of oneself, of another human and of what is common to humanity.  (“Experience of human” is not a well formed English phrase, and “experience of humanity” tends exclusively toward the collective and misses a crucial individual aspect of Wojtyla’s thought.)

A critical point must be made here.  By “experience of the human” Wojtyla does not mean an experience which a human has.  Rather he means the direct, cognitive experience of that which is human, whether of oneself or of another or others.

A brief sketch of what Wojtyla is about might be in order.  He is ultimately working toward how we know something of what a person is, whether oneself or another.  With the very rapidly deepening scientific understanding of how we as humans tick physically, contemporary philosophy has tended to reduce metaphysical entities, in this instance a “person”, to either pure sense data or to a construction of the perceiver.  Working from a phenomenological approach, he will first examine how we experience the human, and from there he will move to the phenomenology of person intended through actions.

For Wojtyla, the primary experience of the human is to be understood as one’s approaching oneself experientially, and thus establish a cognitive contact with oneself.  The experiential nature of one’s contact with oneself is not constant; it is interrupted during sleep, and in waking moments the clarity of one’s experiential self-awareness varies.  Yet, since one is ever oneself, the experience of one’s self persists in some manner.  The experience of oneself as human is constituted as the result of the manifold of experiences of oneself, at once as subject and as object.

In the course of the first section Wojtyla specifically mentions three things that what we experience as human are not.

First, a person does not reduce to a collection of phenomena or, as David Hume would have it, a bundle of perceptions, though Wojtyla does not mention Hume by name.  Wojtyla counters that while each experience is unique and unrepeatable, there exists nonetheless something that can be called the experience of the human that is based on the entire continuity of empirical sense data.  The object of experience is not only the momentary sense phenomenon, but also the human as him- or herself, which emerges from all such experiences and which is present in each one.

Second, a person is not merely an intellectual construct, formed on the basis of the current totality of individually perceived phenomena.  The experience of the human, of the particular human who I am, persists as long as there is the direct cognitive contact with myself, as both subject and object.  The object perceived as a human does not reduce to a construction formed by the intellect from continuous empirical sense data.  While the intellect does form such a construction from sense data, resulting in my understanding of who I am, my experience of myself as human is based upon a cognitive experiential contact with the human that I am, apart from what I have experienced of myself.

Third, without mentioning Kant by name, Wojtyla rejects that ascertaining the identity of a human object entails any proof of an a priori operation of the mind in constructing the object.  Rather, this is simply the proof of the indispensable operation of the intellect in the perception of the objective world and the formation of the objects of experience.  It is precisely to the intellect that we owe the qualitative identity of the object of experience of the human, whether when the subject identifies with the object, as within the same person, or when the subject differs from the object as with others.

Summarizing the first section of the introduction, in experiencing myself it is not that I somehow divide within myself to observe myself; it is rather that I experience myself simultaneously as subject and object, as observer and observed.  What I know of myself is what I have perceived in cognitive experiential contact with myself; for that to be the case, there is something which I experience that does not reduce to sense data or to a construction from sense data.

Furthermore, it is not that I experience myself “interiorly”, and I experience others “exteriorly”; it is rather that I experience myself at once interiorly and exteriorly.  Thus when I experience others as exterior to myself, there is a common aspect with how I experience myself, as part of how I experience myself is exteriorly.  Because of this common aspect of my experience of myself and others as external, I can at times, though never as immediately as in contact with myself, partially come to something of an experience of the interiority of the other.  Thus the experience of the human is the totality of my experience of myself and others, sourcing primarily in cognitive contact with myself, yet inseparably from my contact with all other humans.

For Wojtyla then the “experience of the human” is not just of the other, but both for self and other.  In the second section of the introduction he will approach how we know the person.