Social Doctrine: Classes
5 and 6 (April 1, 2015).
Fix the Man, You Fix the World
There was a man who had a little boy that he loved very much. Everyday after work the man would come home and play with the little boy. He would always spend all of his extra time playing with the little boy.
One night, while the man was at work, he realized that he had extra work to do for the evening, and that he wouldn't be able to play with his little boy. But, he wanted to be able to give the boy something to keep him busy. So, looking around his office, he saw a magazine with a large map of the world on the cover. He got an idea. He removed the map, and then patiently tore it up into small pieces. Then he put all the pieces in his coat pocket.
When he got home, the little boy came running to him and was ready to play. The man explained that he had extra work to do and couldn't play just now, but he led the little boy into the dining room, and taking out all the pieces of the map, he spread them on the table. He explained that it was a map of the world, and that by the time he could put it back together, his extra work would be finished, and they could both play. Surely this would keep the child busy for hours, he thought.
About half an hour later the boy came to the man and said, "Okay, it's finished. Can we play now?"
The man was surprised, saying, "That's impossible. Let's go see." And sure enough, there was the picture of the world, all put together, every piece in its place.
The man said, "That's amazing! How did you do that?" The boy said, "It was simple. On the back of the page was a picture of a man. When I put the man together the whole world fell into place."
Notice that the two encyclicals I have given you (“Of Social Concern” and “Charity in Truth” are about development and relation as solidarity and subsidiarity. What they are talking about is the human person developing into himself by actualizing his relational physiognomy, i.e. giving himself away. The hidden dynamic that these encyclicals are talking about is the human person as subject and the relation to God and the others that is its ontological structure.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Truth is a Person - an ”I,”
not an essence - an “it.” The
failure to appreciate this profundity rises like the horns of a dilemma that
has champions like Cardinal Walter Kasper (not to say the Pope) who appears to be “liberal” vis a vis doctrine for putting it at the
service of the downtrodden at the “peripheries,” and Cardinal Raymond Burke who
said, “The classic formulation is that ‘the Pope has the plenitude, the
fullness, of power.’ This is true. But it is not absolute power. His power is
at the service of the doctrine of the faith. And thus the Pope does not have
the power to change teaching, doctrine.”[1]
So it always comes down to opting
for love or for truth. And the problem – or better, the “mystery” – is that
they are the same thing: the divine Person, and therefore, the image of same
which is the human person. And this has been spelled out with the most absolute
authority in Gaudium et spes #24:
“Furthermore,
the Lord Jesus, when praying to the Father ‘that they may all be one… even as
we are one’ (Jn. 17, 21-22), has opened up new horizons closed to human reason
by implying that there is a certain parallel between the union existing among
the divine persons and the union of the sons of God in truth and love. It
follows, then, that if man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted
for its own sake, man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving
of himself.”
To the question: what do we mean by a divine Person, Joseph
Ratzinger responded: “The
Son as Son, and in so far as he is Son, does not proceed in any way from
himself and so is completely one with the Father; since he is nothing beside
him, claims no special position of his own, confronts the Father with nothing
belonging only to him, retains no room for his own individuality, therefore he
is completely equal to the Father. The logic is compelling: if there is nothing
in which he is just he, no kind of fenced-off private ground, then he coincides
with the Father, is ‘one’ with him. It is precisely this totality of interplay
that the word ‘Son’ aims at expressing. To John ‘Son’ means being-from-another;
thus with this word he defines the being of this man as being from another and
for others, as a being that is completely open on both sides, knows no reserved
area of the mere ‘I.’ When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus as
Christ is a completely open being, a being ‘from’ and ‘towards,’ that nowhere
clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the
same time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure
relation, pure unity. This fundamental statement about Christ becomes, as we
have seen, at the same time the explanation of Christian existence. To John,
being a Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not
standing on one’s own and in oneself, but living completely open in the ‘from’
and ‘towards.’ In so far as the Christian is a ‘Christian,’ this is true of
him. And certainly such utterances will make him aware to how small an extent
he is a Christian.[2][3]
This
will demand a new way of experiencing and knowing reality, and then attempting
to explain it conceptually and semantically. For example, the experience is not
of “things” as experienced sensibly, but of the self as experienced interiorly.
What we experience sensibly and outside of ourselves we call “objects.” But we
have confused what we experience inside of ourselves as “subjective” (which means
“not real,” and “not scientific”[4]),
and this because we have not distinguished between the real ontological self
(“I”) and consciousness. Wojtyla has
done that[5]
(cf. “The Acting Person”). The key to
recovering the “I”, not only as real,
but the key reality to the under standing of the Church’s social teaching is to
go deeper in the meaning of “lived experience.”
Wojtyla’s phenomenological metaphysics that
gave the Council the tools to be pastoral as social teaching, i.e. to talk living
Christ in metaphysical terms. The quest ion of the Council was not what is the doctrine, but what are we to do? [The Acting Person]:
3.
LIVED EXPERIENCE AS AN ELEMENT IN
INTERPRETATION
INTERPRETATION
The category to which we must go in order to do this "building" seems to be that of lived experience. This is a category foreign to Aristotle's metaphysics. The Aristotelian categories that may appear relatively closest to lived experience—those of agere and pati—cannot be identified with it. These categories serve to describe the dynamism of a being, and they also do a good job of differentiating what merely happens in the human being from what the human being does.3But when the dynamic reality of the human being is interpreted in Aristotelian categories, there is in each case (including in the case of agere and pati) an aspect not directly apprehended by such a metaphysical interpretation or reduction, namely, the aspect of lived experience as the irreducible, as the element that defies reduction. From the point of view of the meta-physical structure of being and acting, and thus also from the point of view of the dynamism of the human being understood meta-physically, the apprehension of this element may seem unnecessary. Even without it, we obtain an adequate understanding of the human being and of the fact that the human being acts and that things happen in the human being. Such an understanding formed the basis of the entire edifice of anthropology and ethics for many centuries.
But
as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and
unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings
proper to the human being—in other words, as the need increases to understand
the personal subjectivity of the human being—the
category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then 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 a subject experiencing
its acts and inner happenings,
and with them its own subjectivity(for example, replicating the sentiments of
Jesus Christ). From the moment the
need to interpret the acting human being(I'homeagissant)
is expressed, the category of
lived experiencemust have a place in anthropology and ethics—and even somehow be at the center of their respective interpretations.4
One might immediately ask whether, by giving lived experience such a key
function in the interpretation of the human being as a personal subject, we
are not inevitably condemned to subjectivism. Without going into a
detailed response, I would simply say that, so long as in this interpretation
we maintain a firm enough connection with the integral experience of
the human being, not only are we not doomed to subjectivism, but we will
also safeguard the authentic personal subjectivity of the human being in the realistic
interpretation of human existence.
4. THE NECESSITY OF PAUSING AT THE IRREDUCIBLE: The “I”
[That cannot be reduced to “thing”]
In order to interpret the human being in the context of
lived experience, the aspect of consciousness
must be introduced into the analysis of human existence. The human being is then given
to us not merely as a being defined according
to species [Blogger: this would be an
abstraction], but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject.
Our own subjective being and the
existence proper to it (that of a suppositum)
appear to us in experience precisely as a self-experiencing
subject. If we pause here, this being
discloses the structures that determine it as a concrete self [Blogger: they will be
self-mastery, self-governance, self-gift]. The disclosure of these
structures constituting the human self need in no way signify a break with
reduction and the species-definition of the human being—rather, it signifies the kind of methodological operation that may be
described as pausing at the irreducible. We should pause in the process of
reduction, which leads us in
the direction of understanding the human being in the world (a cosmological type of understanding),
in order to understand the human being inwardly [me:
we are in search in search of the meaning
of “sense of divine filiation” that will be a consciousness of the
action of being “another Christ”]. This latter type of understanding may be
called personalistic. The personalistic type of understanding the human being
is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its complement
(my underline). As I mentioned earlier, the definition of the person formulated by Boethius only marks out the
"metaphysical terrain" for interpreting the personal
subjectivity of the human being.
The experience of the human being cannot be derived by
way of cosmological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at
that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of
which he or she is not just a
particular human being—an individual of a certain species—but a personal subject [To be a subject is to be
the protagonist of action – Helen Keller]. Only then do we get a true
and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this
picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the
framework of the irreducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond
the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the
other. Nevertheless, given the variety of circumstances of the real
existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this
cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were, give the irreducible
the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory
and in practice (my underline). For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human
being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human
being, myself included, is an "eyewitness" of his or her own
self—of his or her own humanity
and person.
My lived
experience discloses not only my actions
but also my inner happenings in
their profoundest dependence on my own self. It also discloses my
whole personal structure of self-determination, in which I discover myself
as that through which I possess myself[6] and govern myself—or,
at any rate, should possess
myself and govern myself. The dynamic structure of self-determination reveals to me that
I am given to myself and assigned to myself. This is precisely how I appear to
myself in my acts and in my inner decisions of conscience: as
permanently assigned to myself, as having continually to affirm and
monitor myself, and thus, in a sense, as having continually to
"achieve" this dynamic structure of my self, a structure that is given to me as self-possession
and self-governance. At the same time, this is a completely
internal and totally immanent structure. It is a real endowment of the personal
subject; in a sense, it is this
subject. In my lived experience of
self-possession and self-governance, I experience
that I am a person and that I am a subject.
These
structures of self-possession and self-governance, which are essential to
every personal self and shape the personal subjectivity of every human being,
are experienced by each of us in the lived experience of moral
value—good and evil. And perhaps this reality is often revealed to us more
intensely when it is threatened by evil than when—at least for the
moment—nothing threatens it. In any case, experience teaches that the morale is very deeply rooted in the humanum, or, more precisely, in what should be defined as the personals. Morality defines the
personalistic dimension of the human being
in a fundamental way; it is subjectified in this dimension and can also be properly understood only in it. At the same time, however, the morale is a basic expression of the transcendence proper to the personal self. Our decisions of
conscience at each step reveal us as
persons who fulfill ourselves by going beyond ourselves toward values accepted in truth and realized, therefore,
with a deep sense of responsibility.
5. A CHALLENGING PERSPECTIVE
This topic has been the subject of many penetrating
analyses, some already completed and others ongoing. While not
continuing those analyses here, I wish only to state that, when it comes to
understanding the human being, the whole rich and complex reality of
lived experience is not so much an element or aspect as a dimension in its own
right. And this
is the dimension at which we must necessarily pause if the subjective structure—including the subjective personal
structure—of the human being is to be fully delineated.
What does it mean to pause cognitively at lived experience? This "pausing"
should be understood in relation to
the irreducible. The traditions of philosophical anthropology would have
us believe that we can, so to speak, pass right over this dimension, that we can
cognitively omit it by means of an abstraction that provides us with a species
definition of the human being as a being, or, in other words, with a
cosmological type of reduction (homo =
animal rationale). One might ask, however, whether in so
defining the essence of the human being we do not in a sense leave out what is
most human, since the humanum expresses and realizes itself as the personale. If so, then
the irreducible would suggest that we cannot come to know
and understand the human being in a reductive way alone. This is also
what the contemporary philosophy of the subject seems to be telling the traditional
philosophy of the object.
But that is not all. The irreducible signifies that which
is essentially incapable of reduction, that which cannot be reduced but
can only be disclosed or revealed. Lived experience essentially
defies reduction. This does not mean, however, that it eludes our
knowledge; it only means that we must arrive at the knowledge of it differently, namely, by a
method or means of
analysis that merely reveals and discloses its essence. The method of phenomenological
analysis allows us to pause at lived experience
as the irreducible. This method is not just a descriptive cataloging of individual phenomena (in the Kantian sense,
i.e., phenomena as sense-perceptible
contents). When we pause at the lived experience of the irreducible, we attempt to permeate cognitively the whole
essence of this experience. We thus apprehend both the essentially subjective
structure of lived experience and its
structural relation to the subjectivity of the human being. Phenomenological analysis thus contributes to trans-phenomenal understanding; it also contributes to a
disclosure of the richness proper to
human existence in the whole complex compositumhumanum.
Such a disclosure—the deepest possible disclosure—would
seem to be an indispensable means for coming to know the human being
as a personal subject. At the same time, this personal human
subjectivity is a determinate reality: it
is a reality when we strive to understand it within the objective totality that goes by the name human being. The same applies to the whole
character of this method of understanding. After all, lived experience
is also—and above all—a reality. A legitimate method of disclosing this
reality can only enrich and deepen the whole realism of the conception
of the human being. The personal profile of the human being then enters
the sphere of cognitive vision, and the composition of human nature, far
from being blurred, is even more distinctly accentuated. The thinker
seeking the ultimate philosophical truth about the human being no longer moves
in a "purely metaphysical terrain," but finds elements in abundance
testifying to both the materiality and the spirituality of the human being,
elements that bring both of these aspects into sharper relief. These
elements then form the building blocks for further philosophical construction.
But certain
questions always remain: Are these two types of understanding the human being—the cosmological
and the personalitic—ultimately mutually exclusive?
Where, if at all, do reduction and the disclosure of the irreducible in the human being converge? How is the philosophy
of the subject to disclose the objectivity of the human being in the
personal subjectivity of this
being? These seem to be the questions
that today determine the perspective for thinking about the human being, the perspective for contemporary anthropology and ethics. They are
essential and burning questions.
Anthropology and ethics must be pursued today within this challenging
but promising perspective.
NOTES
1.
One such effort is my book Osobaiczyn [Person and Action] (Krakow: Polskie Tow.
Teologiczne, 1969; rev. ed. 1985). [English edition: The Acting Person, trans. AndrzejPotocki, ed.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Boston: Reidel, 1979).] Another even more relevant work in this regard is my essay "The
Person: Subject and Community" 219-261 below.
2.
See the section entitled "Subjectivity and
Subjectivism" in The Acting Person
56-59.
3.
My
work The Acting Person is in
large measure constructed upon this basis.
4.
One can observe this by comparing my book The Acting Person with Mieczyslaw
A. Krapiec's book I—Man: An Outline of
Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Marie Lescoe, Andrew Woznicki, Theresa Sandok et
al. (New Britain: Mariel,
1983).
Karol
WoJtyla, "Podmiotowosci I 'to, co nieredukowalne' w eflowieku," Ethos 1.2-3
(1988): 21-28. A paper sent to an international
conferencein Paris (13-14 June 1975).
* * * * * * * *
“The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” Person and Community Lang (1993)188-195.
(…)
In phenomenological experience, I appear as someone who
possesses myself and who is simultaneously
possessed by myself. I also appear as someone who governs myself and who
is simultaneously governed by myself. Both the one and the other are revealed
by self-determination; they are implied by
self-determination and also enrich its content. Through self-possession and self-governance, the personal structure of
self-determination comes to light in its whole proper fullness.
In determining myself—and this takes
place through an act of will—I become aware and also testify to others that I
possess myself and govern myself. In this
way, my acts give me a unique insight into myself as a person. By virtue
of self-determination, I experience in the relatively most immediate way that I am a person. Of course, the
path from this experience to an
understanding that would qualify as a complete theory of the person must
lead through metaphysical analysis. Still, experience is the indispensable
beginning of this path, and the lived experience of self-determination seems
to be the nucleus of this beginning. In any case, if a full affirmation of the
personal value of human acts requires a theory of the person as its basis, the construction of this theory seems impossible without an analytic insight into the dynamic
reality of action, and above all into the structure of the
self-determination essential for action, a structure that from the very
beginning presents itself in some sense as a personal structure (my emphasis).
IV
In Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, we read that "the
human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself or herself
except through a disinterested gift of
himself or herself" (24). The document of the last
Council seems in these
words to sum up the age-old traditions and inquiries of Christian anthropology,
for which divine revelation became a liberating light. The anthropology of St.
Thomas Aquinas is deeply rooted in these traditions, while also being open to
all the achievements of human thought that in various
ways supplement the Thomistic view of the person and confirm its realistic character. The words of Vatican II
cited above seem chiefly to accentuate the axiological aspect, speaking
of the person as a being of special intrinsic worth, who is, therefore,
specially qualified to make a gift of self.
Beneath this axiological aspect, however, we can easily discern a deeper, ontological aspect. The ontology of the person
suggested by this text seems again to
coincide closely with the experience discussed above. In other words, if we wish to accentuate fully the truth
concerning the human person brought out by Gaudium et Spes, we must once again look to the personal
structure of self-determination.
As I said earlier, in the experience of self-determination
the human person stands revealed before us
as a distinctive structure of self-possession
and self-governance. Neither the one nor the other, however, implies being
closed in on oneself. On the contrary, both self-possession and self-governance imply a special disposition to make a
"gift of oneself," and this
a "disinterested" gift. Only if one possesses oneself can one give oneself and do this in a disinterested way. And only if
one governs oneself can one make a gift
of oneself, and this again a disinterested gift. The problematic of disinterestedness certainly deserves a
separate analysis, which it is not my
intention to present here. An understanding of the person in categories of gift, which the teaching of
Vatican II reemphasizes, seems to reach even
more deeply into those dimensions brought to light by the foregoing analysis. Such an understanding seems to
disclose even more fully the personal structure of
self-determination.
Only
if one can determine oneself—as I attempted to show earlier—can one also become
a gift for others. The Council's statement that "the human being... cannot fully find himself or herself except
through a disinterested gift of himself or
herself' allows us to conclude that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that one most fully becomes
oneself. This "law of the gift," if
it may be so designated, is inscribed deep within the dynamic structure of the person. The text of Vatican II
certainly draws its inspiration
from revelation, in the light of which it paints this portrait of the human being as a person. One could say that this
is a portrait in which the person is depicted as a being willed by God
"for itself' and, at the same time,
as a being turned "toward" others. This relational portrait of the person, however, necessarily presupposes the
immanent (and indirectly
"substantial") portrait that unfolds before us from an analysis of the
personal structure of self-determination.
[1]
“Inside the Vatican,” March 2015, Robert Moynihan Editorial: “Decisions.”
[2] J.
Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 134.
[3]Ratzinger: “I think it is not unimportant to note how
the doctrine of the Trinity here passes over into a statement about existence,
how the assertion that relation is at the same time pure unity becomes
transparently clear to us. It is the nature of the Trinitarian personality to
be pure relation and so the most absolute unity. That there is no contradiction
in this is probably now perceptible. And one can understand from now on more
clearly than before that it is not the ‘atom,’ the indivisible smallest piece
of matter, that possesses the highest unity; that on the contrary pure oneness
can only occur in the spirit and embraces the relativity of love. Thus the
profession of faith in the oneness of God is just as radical as in any other
monotheistic religion; indeed only in Christianity does it reach its full
stature. But it is the nature of Christian existence to receive and to live
life as relatedness, and thus to enter into that unity which is the ground of
all reality and sustains it. This will perhaps make it clear how the doctrine
of the Trinity, when properly understood, can become the nodal point of
theology and of Christian thought in general.”[3]
[4] “Now,
if the natural science model is to be followed without hesitation, then the
importance of the Heisenberg principle should be applied to the historical
method as well. Heisenberg has shown that the outcome of a given experiment is
heavily influenced by the point of view of the observer. So much so that both
the observer’s questions and the observations continue to change in the natural
course of events… Pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction. It is not the
uninvolved who comes to knowledge; rather, interest itself is a requirement for
the possibility of coming to know;” Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, in The Essential Pope
Benedict XVI Harper Collins (2007)
247.
[5] “Consciousness
is under stood realistically when it is connect
with the person’s being as its subject, when it is an act of this being.
Consciousness divorced from the being of the person and treated as an
autonomous subject of activity is consciousness understood idealistically;” K.
Wojtyla, “In Search of the Basisof P:erfectionism in Ethics,” in Person and
Community op. cit. 54,
[6] By
self-determination, one owns oneself because property becomes one’s own by
subduing/mastering it. Since “the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the
ground” (Gen 2, 7), man becomes his own private property by subduing himself in
order to work and subdue the
earth/name the animals. Whatever he subdues belongs to him as his own. But he
cannot keep it for himself because as image of the Son, he is not his own. He is to become “for” the
Father, and therefore anything he owns must is destined for others. Nothing is
so little his own as his very self, and a fortiori the goods he possesses. Because of this, work has not only an
objective sense of making/doing “things” (objects), but a subjective and
principal sense of making and becoming “I” [JPII, “Laborem Exercens,” 6], i.e.
“another Christ.” Pope Francis privileges the word “dignity” for one who works.
Since the ontological constitution of the human person is to image the “son” as
seen on page 1 above, work is the occasion of actualizing that image. That is,
one develops into Christ by work.
