Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II

Introduction: The Christian Philosophy of John Paul

INTRODUCTION The Christian Philosophy offohn Paul II BY MICHAEL NOVAK Unless many recent conversations around the country mislead me, intelligent Catholics in significant numbers seem not to be on the same wavelength as Pope John Paul II. In some ways this is odd, because intelligent Catholics usually like an intelligent and articulate pope, and this one is perhaps the most intellectually original, articulate , and prolific pope of the past one hundred years. Some of this discordance results (those who don't cotton to him sometimes suggest) from their very different reading of Vatican II. Some of it results, they say, from very strong feelings of disagreement about particular questions such as women priests, contraception, and celibacy. Many are willing to admit, however, that they simply do not see what this pope is up to-do not follow, and cannot recount, his arguments. To a remarkable extent, in rather wide circles of American Catholicism a certain resistance to John Paul II seems to be the expected attitude. It is sad, I think, to be alive during one of the great pontificates in history and to be in passive opposition to it. This general lack of insight into why the Pope teaches and acts as he does is apparent in two popular, recent biographies, that by Tad xi Xll Introduction Szulc and that by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, as well as in the recent account American Catholic by Charles R. Morris, not to mention the running commentaries of the late Peter Hebblethewaite. Nonetheless, it should be possible to set out an account of John Paul II's method, and to assist readers in grasping the originality of several of his conceptual achievements, even without attempting to close the disagreements on particular questions that some Catholics express. I hope that even those who do not go along with the Pope may find such an effort of service. It has often been pointed out, of course, that the Pope was a professional philosopher before he became a bishop, and that he is probably better identified as belonging to the school of phenomenology than, say, as a Neo-Thomist. People often said that Paul VI, for example, was an admirer and even follower of Jacques Maritain, but while there are points of contact with Maritain in Wojtyla's work, one could not readily understand him within Maritain's framework. One key to understanding Karol Wojtyla, I think, is that he is first of all a poet and dramatist. His sensibility is that of an artist. He is sensitive, feels things deeply, responds instantly to persons and situations through his emotions, takes things in as wholes, and learns quickly from concrete experience. He trusts experience more than words. He likes to reflect on concrete wholes, as an artist would, in order to allow their inner form to emerge subtly and slowly. He is not in a rush to slash, channel, contort, or ignore parts of these concrete wholes in concepts or systems. These dispositions led him at a very young age to find both release and congenial techniques in phenomenological method, particularly as he found it in Max Scheler (d. 1928), the philosopher par excellence of the feelings. It is a rare American, of course, who is helped by hearing the term phenomenology. I have seen even professional philosophers blanch on Introduction Xlll being asked to offer a thumbnail sketch of phenomenology, and listened as well-travelled journalists approached even the pronunciation of the term the way they would approach a three-foot-wide ditch: back up a few steps, take a deep breath, and lunge. Simply put, phenomenology is a sustained effort to bring back into philosophy everyday things, concrete wholes, the basic experiences of life as they come to us. It wishes to recapture these quotidian realities from the empiricists, on the one hand, who analyze them into sense data, impressions, chemical compositions, neural reactions, etc., and from the idealists, on the other hand, who break them up into ideal types, categories, and forms. When girl meets boy (as Rebecca in Genesis first sees Isaac coming toward her across the field), the psychologist may be interested in her prior relation to her father, and Kant may be concerned that her attachment to the categorical imperative may be going wobbly in the face of teleological hedonism. But the phenomenologist is interested in her experience of love as a concrete whole, in the...