The Phenomenological Experience Of The Human Person In St. Karol Wojtyła's Philosophy

Chapter 3
The Phenomenological Experience of the Human Person in St. Karol Wojtyła’s Philosophy

In the previous chapter, the researcher elucidated an important element, or should say the foundation, of St. Karol Wojtyła’s notion of the human person which is grounded on metaphysics. Henceforth, Wojtyła is indebted with that of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas’ objectivistic view of the human person. As presented, Aquinas used the term ‘persona’ in his treatises on the Trinity and Incarnation. Hence, being a person is also shared to man by God which implies the highest perfection in the created world. He is the perfectissimum ens. Aquinas following Boethian definition of person as “individual substance of a rational nature” would sum
Karol Wojtyła, which is vital in his analysis of man’s nature, is his notion of the experience of man. Hence, he commences his magnum opus, The Acting Person with this notion. For Buttiglione, in experience man encounters reality and reality comes to dwell with him. This reality is made out of things but is made also and above all of other people. The basis of the experience of man lies in here that, “I” as the subject of experience is also the object of experience of the “other.” As Wojtyła puts it: This experience, which man has of himself, is the richest and apparently the most complex of all experiences accessible to him. Man’s experience of anything outside of himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external without having at the same time the experience of himself. Each one has the experience of the other as the object and at the same time as the subject. The self becomes the object of experience by the fact that, man has to face himself; that is, he comes into a cognitive relation with himself. Hence, every experience is something that is unique and unrepeatable and no external relation that could remove the experiential relation that the subject has in himself. Since experience also concerns on the cognitive faculty of the person it could be a basis for knowledge. There is old adage that says, “We learn with or from our experience.” It could be rightly to say that an
In its deeper sense, it is a descriptive method of engaging in philosophical reflection that gives proper attention to a given phenomenon or experience in order to grasp its essence. According to West, Wojtyła used this method to retrieve the ordinary experiences of everyday life and study these phenomena precisely as we experience them. Phenomenology in this sense involves a style of thought that humbly receives whatever is given by experience. It is a determination to see things whole and get to the reality of things-as-they-are. The biographer of John Paul II would propose that, Phenomenology is an effort to “bring back into philosophy everyday things, concrete wholes, the basic experiences of life as they come to us. It was an important instrument for probing various dimensions of the human experience. Wojtyła hopes that the full interior depth of the person will show itself through this method. This method would provide a good way of clarifying consciousness as vital facet of human subjectivity. A person is a substance in a metaphysical sense. On the other hand, he is also a personal subject who experiencing himself and an active agent which are the components of man’s subjectivity. Hence, the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as