Karol Wojtyła’s Thomistic Understanding of Consciousness

407 The Thomist 79 (2015): 407-37 KAROL WOJTYŁA’S THOMISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS ANGEL PÉREZ LÓPEZ St. John Vianney Seminary Denver, Colorado HE RECENT CANONIZATION of St. John Paul II offers an invitation to revisit the philosophical thought of Karol Wojtyła.1 In this article, I would like to concentrate on a topic that is in need of clarification, namely, Wojtyła’s understanding of consciousness. Many scholars have interpreted it as a reaction against the philosophy of Aquinas. Indeed, it has become commonplace to say that, according to Wojtyła, the philosophy of being offered by Aquinas is insufficient to account for the human person. According to some of Wojtyła’s commentators, Aquinas’s philosophy needs to be complemented with a modern and contemporary element: a theory of consciousness that accounts for the lived experience of the singular and unique human person. Thus, these commentators hold that Wojtyła goes beyond Aquinas, because Wojtyła gives light to the phenomenological darkness in which the Angelic Doctor’s philosophy is imprisoned. This alleged “dark night” of lived experience makes Aquinas an objectivistic thinker incapable of accounting for that which is subjective and irreducible to the world within the 1 For a broader study on the integral vision of man according to Karol Wojtyła see Angel Pérez López, De la experiencia de la integración a la visión integral de la persona: Estudio histórico-analítico de la integración en “Persona y Acción” de Karol Wojtyła (Valencia: Edicep, 2012). T 408 ANGEL PÉREZ LÓPEZ human person. According to this view, Wojtyła has gone beyond Aquinas in his personalism, integrating a sound ontology of the person rediscovered from within subjective experience.2 2 According to Ronald Modras: “Thomism’s metaphysical concept of the human person in a certain sense reduces personhood to nature. If one defines a person as an ‘individual substance of a rational nature,’ it follows that personhood is understood in terms of the faculties (potentiae) of human nature. Wojtyła sees Thomistic anthropology as open to enrichment with the concept of the human person offered by the philosophy of consciousness and phenomenology” (Ronald Modras, “The Moral Philosophy of Pope John Paul II,” Theological Studies 41 [1980]: 683-97, at 685). Andrzej Szostek holds a similar view but in relation with Thomistic philosophy at large: “On the one hand, the Thomistic philosophy of being treats the problematics of morality too objectivistically at the cost of diminishing the subjective dimension which is so important for philosophy of morality” (Andrzej Szostek, “Karol Wojtyła’s View of the Human Person in the Light of the Experience of Morality,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 58 [1986]: 50-64, at 51-52). Anselm Min also argues the following: “First, John Paul’s critique of Aristotelian Thomism. The basic flaw of this tradition is that it fails to grasp man as a ‘personal’ subject, which constitutes both the specificity of the human whole and its concrete dynamism” (Anselm Min, “John Paul II’s Anthropology of Concrete Totality,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 58 [1984]: 120-29, at 121). Juan Manuel Burgos, president of the Personalist Association of Spain and editor of the works of Wojtyła in Spanish, holds a similar position in different articles he has written. In one article he affirms, when trying to compare Aquinas and Wojtyła on the way to study the human person: “The first difficulty appears in the same departure point: experience. This is neither a Thomistic nor an Aristotelian concept because subjectivity is specifically included. It would be possible to accept that the objective knowledge of man can be identified substantially with the traditional gnoseology, but the knowledge of the self subjective inner experience as a departure point of the anthropology can’t be” (Juan Manuel Burgos, “The Method of Karol Wojtyła: A Way Between Phenomenology, Personalism, and Metaphysics,” Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century 104 [2009]: 107-29, at 121). In a better-known article on The Acting Person, Burgos argues that the Thomistic notion of suppositum applied to man is “in itself...