Summaries and Comments Elizabeth C. Shaw and Staff

This collaborative volume is a serviceable guide to reading the best-known anthropological work of Karol Wojtyła (later, Pope John Paul II), Person and Act (published in English as The Acting Person). Each of its three parts is a distinct contribution of one of the two authors.

Part 1 comprises Acosta's exposition of significant influences in Wojtyła's intellectual formation, and his presentation of Wojtyła's singular method. Acosta relies on biographers to sketch the background, and reproduces arguments from two Spanish-language authors to outline the methodology. The purpose is to prepare the reader for the more original material that follows.

Part 2 reproduces three lectures by Reimers on Wojtyła (and John Paul) on human experience (introducing notions from Person and Act), human love and the truth about the person (referring to John Paul's Theology of the Body), and the meaning of life (citing Fides et Ratio against nihilism). Reimers applies Wojtyła's (John Paul's) thought to contemporary problems and perspectives, inviting the reader to engage them from Wojtyła's (John Paul's) perspective. Although he does not critically distinguish Wojtyła's work from John Paul's, perhaps due to the lecture format, he writes with a characteristic clarity that conveys his meaning with ease and attractiveness.

Part 3 is a commentary by Acosta on Person and Act. The English translation, finalized as Wojtyła was distracted by his ascent to the papacy, departs significantly from the original Polish text, and contradicts positions taken in his contemporaneous articles. Acosta thus supplies comparative citations to the Polish, and to a reasonably accurate Italian translation that is the text he appears to follow.

Person and Act, Wojtyła's exposition of an anthropology implied in his earlier work Love and Responsibility, is best understood in light of several articles that Wojtyła published during the decade between its Polish publication and its English translation. Like Reimers, Acosta carefully integrates aspects of the articles into his treatment of the book. Person and Act is a descriptive account of personal self-transcendence through human action, in which self-integration, self-possession, self-dominion, and self-determination culminate in self-gift. Wojtyła's account ends in a discussion of attitudes related to the authentic participation of persons in a community. Wojtyła wrote Person and Act for Poles who had experienced two totalitarian systems, and his final chapter is something of an anthropological handbook for the Catholic resistance in Poland.

First-time readers and veterans of Wojtyła's prose will find Acosta's close reading of Wojtyła's text useful for its consistency and depth. Typically clear and incisive, Acosta's solid analysis may, infrequently, profit from further explanation or clearer citation. For example: (1) His description of an "illuminating" function of consciousness lacks evident textual support. (2) He sees the epoché as implying "a rupture with reality" not patently consistent with Wojtyła's realistic transphenomenology. (3) He reduces the Thomistic actus humanus/actus hominis distinction, omitting treatment of acts not fully voluntary. (4) He posits self-determination as not intentional, possibly conflating Wojtyła's notion of intentio (pertaining to the will) with one strictly phenomenological. (5) He misses Wojtyła's reference to "wanting" as a causal disposition within the structure of willing, rather opposing wanting to willing, and critiquing that Wojtyła refers to a "weaker term than 'volition'." (6) His treatment of the relation between intellect and will seems reductive compared with Wojtyła's text. (7) His assignment of the office of judgment to consciousness seems inconsistent with his acknowledgment that Wojtyła rejects the active role that Husserl ascribes to consciousness. These relatively few exceptions might be obviated with further explanation of Acosta's position; perhaps they may be attributed to challenges inherent in synthesizing a difficult work at the risk of reduction or oversimplification.

Some chapters of Acosta's commentary, translated from Spanish, rarely employ inconsistent terminology. A reference to "acts that 'happen'" contradicts Wojtyła's usage, correctly reflected earlier (Wojtyła distinguishes "act" from what "happens in a man").

Two rare typographical errors may confound the reader: (1) a missing comma in a translation, from the Italian, of Wojtyła's statement that "the person is manifest as a reality[,] with relation to its dynamism, which is itself constituted by the will" leaves the impression that the will constitutes the dynamism, not the reality, of the person. (2) A misquotation of Wojtyła as referring to the "attraction of repulsion," where "of" should be "and," is simply jarring.

These observations are minor relative to the contribution of this worthwhile companion, which is intended to facilitate, not replace, a reading of Wojtyła's The Acting Person (in Polish or Italian, if possible). It is a capable handbook that complements Wojtyła's study, and suggests avenues of authentic development that Reimers and Acosta may explore in future studies.