Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Karol Wojtyła

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Karol Wojtyła

Karol Wojtyła — the later Pope John Paul II — is, as a philosopher, an important point of reference for the book. His formulation of the Personalistic Norm sums up in a single sentence what follows from personhood for the treatment of the person.

Key Contribution

Wojtyła formulates the Personalistic Norm: “The person is a being that is to be affirmed and loved for its own sake.” This norm is no mere moral demand, but follows from the very being of the person: because the person is a someone — a unique, unrepeatable being endowed with dignity — the only adequate response to her is affirmation and love. Every instrumentalization of the person violates her dignity (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 205 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Personalistic Norm and Dignity

The Personalistic Norm joins ontology and ethics: the being of the person (her dignity) grounds the way she is to be treated. Agere sequitur esse holds here as well: right action toward the person follows from insight into her being. Whoever treats the person as a mere means does not merely disregard a rule, but fails to recognize what the person is.

Person and Love

For Wojtyła, love is the most perfect response to the person. Love here means not merely a feeling, but the act of affirmation: affirming the person for her own sake, acknowledging her existence as good. This affirmation belongs to the Third Dimension of personhood — self-transcendence, in which the person goes beyond herself and turns toward the other.

Against the Oblivion of the Person

The Personalistic Norm is at the same time the antidote to the oblivion of the person: where the person is affirmed as someone, her personhood is recognized. Wojtyła thus stands in line with Spaemann, who stresses that persons exist “only in the plural” — in the face-to-face of persons who recognize one another.

Place in the Book

Wojtyła is drawn upon above all in the chapters Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German) and Chapter 6: Summary (German). The Personalistic Norm joins the ontological analysis of personhood with the ethical consequence: because the human being is a person from the very beginning, he is to be respected and loved for his own sake from the very beginning.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 205 ff. (Wojtyła’s Personalistic Norm and love as affirmation of the person for her own sake).

Further sources:

  • The Acting Person (Osoba i czyn, 1969, Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Teologiczne), trans. Andrzej Potocki, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979 (analysis of personal action and of the self-determination of the person)
  • Love and Responsibility (Miłość i odpowiedzialność, 1960, Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL), trans. H. T. Willetts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981 (Personalistic Norm, love as affirmation of the person for her own sake)

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