Karol Wojtyla on the Natural Moral Order
by
Adrian J. Reimers
In his encyclical Veritatis
splendor, John Paul II argues on the basis of natural law that some acts
are “intrinsically evil”; because they violate the order of nature, they cannot
be morally good. Such acts cannot be redeemed or justified by appeal to good
intention or their potential to serve some higher good. In one respect, such an
understanding of the moral law makes good sense. If nature has a law, then it
must be wrong to violate that law. More to the point, if the Author of nature has
established a natural law, then to violate that law would be to violate the
will of that Author. But what constitutes a violation of the law of nature?
There are those who argue that by building great cities with enormous
skyscrapers and by escaping the confines of the earth’s atmosphere and gravity,
we invite the wrath of him who confused the languages at
We may now state the problem more precisely. If, through enhanced understanding of the laws of nature, human beings can do what was formerly impossible and unnatural, what constitutes moral action against natural laws? If it is morally permissible to implant a pacemaker in the heart, why is it unnatural and wrong by chemical means to prevent conception or by laboratory techniques to engender new life for couples unable to conceive? If by medical means we may morally make the human body hostile to infectious viruses, why is it wrong to render that same body immune to pregnancy? If by means of transplants and artificial organs we can extend the lifespan of those afflicted with certain diseases, wherein lies the evil of in vitro fertilization to enable the beginning of life? The Church insists that human life be respected from conception until natural death. But we can ask what constitutes a “natural death.” In what sense can the law of nature be said to be violated? How can we know the intentions of nature’s Author? In his scholarly writings from his academic years as ethics professor Karol Wojtyła at the Catholic University of Lublin, as well as in many of his papal writings, John Paul II has reflected on this problem, offering us a significant interpretation of the relationship and difference between scientific laws and the order of nature properly understood, on the basis of which natural law is discerned.[1] This difference becomes critical in the analysis of the nature of human beings.
This essay will explore John Paul II’s analysis of this difference and, in doing so, will clarify what “natural order” means within his thought. This essay will thus serve as a kind of propaedeutic to a discussion of natural law and moral questions of the sort mentioned above.
In Love and Responsibility, his philosophical study of sexual morality, Karol Wojtyła discusses human sexuality in both its subjective and its objective aspects in relation to scientific knowledge of human and animal biology. On the subjective level, human beings experience strong sexual urges that impel them towards sexual union. These subjective urges seem to be shared by the higher animals, whose behavior betrays many of the same characters that mark human sexual interactions. The human sexual urge appears, then, as related to and possibly a variant of the sexual instincts of the animals, especially those animals closest to homo sapiens. On the objective level, it is clear that the human reproductive processes are a variant of the reproductive processes in the higher mammals. Allowing for some specific differences (most notably that human sexual activity is not restricted to those periods during which the woman is fertile), we find that the biology of human reproduction is remarkably like that of other primates. Karol Wojtyła’s treatment of these two factors shed important light on his understanding of the relationship between the laws of nature and natural law. In the context of this analysis, I cite two important texts. The first is from his encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis splendor.
At this point the true meaning of the natural law can be
understood: it refers to man’s proper and primordial nature, the “nature of the
human person”, which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in
the unity of his spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other
specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his end.… Indeed, natural
inclinations take on moral relevance only insofar as they refer to the human
person and his authentic fulfillment, a fulfillment which for that matter can
take place always and only in human nature.[2]
The second is from his work on sexual ethics, Love and Responsibility, where Wojtyła makes an important distinction, expressed in this remarkable paragraph, which is crucial for understanding his concept of natural law.
This habit of confusing the order of
being[3]
with the biological order, or rather of allowing the second to obscure the
first, is part of that generalized empiricism which seems to weigh so heavily
on the mind of modern man, and particularly on modern intellectuals.... The
sexual urge owes its objective importance to its connection with the divine
work of creation ... and this importance vanishes almost completely if our way
of thinking is inspired only by the biological order of nature.... The “biological
order,” as a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a
larger reality, has man for its immediate author. The claim to autonomy in one’s
ethical views is a short jump from this. It is otherwise with the “order of
nature,” which means the totality of the cosmic relationships that arise among
really existing entities. It is therefore the order of being, and the laws
which govern it have their foundation in Him, Who is the unfailing source of
that existence, in God the Creator.[4]
This paragraph hangs on the distinction between the “order of being,” or “order of nature,” and the “biological order.” Unlike the order of being, the biological order is a “product of human intellect,” an abstraction, and as such, we allow it to obscure the order of nature. This is a dramatic claim, one that contemporary thinkers—especially in the scientific community—would reject out of hand; if biology does not study the order of nature, then what science does? The pope does not mean, of course, that the results of the biological sciences are fictions or irrelevant abstractions. Nevertheless, he denies the biological order the fundamental importance that our contemporary intelligentsia ascribes it. Scholars (and not only biologists) now almost routinely speak in terms suggesting that any aspect of human behavior, from mating practices to language to religion, is a product of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms.[5] The significance of evolutionary theory for our discussion will become apparent shortly. At this point, we need to determine more precisely what Karol Wojtyła means by “order of being” (“order of nature”). Clearly, his appeal is to metaphysics—a form of knowledge beyond that of the empirical sciences. Addressing the question of the inner dynamism of the acting person in Person and Act,[6] he writes: “[W]e can say that at this point metaphysics emerges as that field of thought where [the concepts of potencia and actus] deepen the roots of all the sciences.”[7] To understand the human person and the laws governing his being and activity, we must turn to metaphysical reflection.
We should note that Karol Wojtyła does not mean simply that biology fails to accomplish its proper task or that it derives its fundamental principles from some other science, as though ultimately all biological laws will reduce to those of physics or some other fundamental science.[8] Wojtyła has a more profound point to make. He calls the biological order an abstraction, a “product of the human intellect,” that “has man for its immediate author,” and he contrasts this with the “order of being” or the “order of nature.” His point is that the biological sciences (and indeed the physical sciences taken in their totality) do not account for the order of nature as such but only certain aspects of it. When Karol Wojtyła calls the “biological order” an abstraction, he does not mean simply that biological theories are expressed in general terms; in this sense, every human science or understanding is abstract. His point is that what we call the “biological order,” that about which biological theories are formulated, is itself an abstraction, and he accounts for that abstraction in terms of a “generalized empiricism.” This order, abstracted from the order of being, fails to provide an adequate basis for moral guidance, for the natural law. By contrast, let us consider this comment from his theology of the body: “The body reveals man. This concise formula already contains everything that human science could ever say about the structure of the body as organism, about its vitality, and its particular sexual physiology, etc.”[9] The human being, although it includes the entire reality of the biological, is more than the biological organism. The pope continues: “This first expression of the man, ‘flesh of my flesh,’ also contains a reference to what makes that body truly human. Therefore it referred to what determines man as a person, that is, as a being who, even in all his corporality, is similar to God.” The biological order is abstract because it prescinds from the totality of what is human to regard only that which pertains to certain aspects of its organism. John Paul II’s remarks concerning the charges of “biologism” in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae further develop this point: “In this discussion, natural law was taken to mean merely the biological regularity we find in people in the area of sexual actualization. This was said to be natural law.”[10] But all that the biological sciences can do is to identify biological regularities. The order of being, on the other hand, is expected to provide a basis for moral norms.
In the discussion immediately before the text from Love and Responsibility quoted on page 4, Wojtyła considers whether the sexual urge is simply a “force of nature”[11] with a purely biological significance. “That would be untrue. It has an existential significance, for it is closely bound up with the whole existence of the species Homo, and not just with the physiology or even the psycho-physiology of man as studied by the natural sciences.”[12] Despite the apparent similarity between human and animal sexual urges, Wojtyła refuses to apply the term “instinct” to human sexual urges.[13] The instinct is a natural desire that the animal cannot help obeying, a “reflex mode of action, which is not dependent on conscious thought.”[14] The human being, on the other hand, has the capability to decide whether or not to act on the basis of the urge. Were this not so, then morality would be meaningless.[15] In this Wojtyła closely follows Thomas Aquinas, who also denies that the concupiscible appetites of themselves determine human behavior. For Aquinas, the desires of the body and its organic systems—desires that he calls “concupiscible”—are governed by the will or rational appetite.[16] Concupiscence recognizes only the good given immediately to sense, whereas will is drawn to the good in its universal aspect, to the good as such. Therefore will can override and control the desires of concupiscence. Given the usual negative moral connotations of this term “concupiscence,” it is important to note that Aquinas attaches no sense of opprobrium to the concupiscible appetites as such.[17] The Common Doctor recognizes these appetites as necessary aspects of our animal nature, which are to be governed by the rational principle. For his part, Karol Wojtyła describes the sexual urge as a “vector of aspiration,” directing the human subject toward a proposed good, but not of itself determining that the action will be carried out.
When we speak of the sexual urge in man we have in mind not an interior source of specific actions somehow “imposed in advance,” but a certain orientation, a certain direction in man’s life implicit in his very nature. The sexual urge in this conception is a natural drive born in all human beings, a vector of aspiration along which their whole existence develops and perfects itself from within.[18]
The sexual urge is therefore an experience of something as worth pursuing. It cannot dictate what must be done, but—as it were—proposes a particular value to be realized.
In Person and Act, Karol Wojtyła contrasts this expression, “what happens in a human being” with “a human being acts.”[19] The distinction is phenomenological, between the respective essences of two kinds of human experience. What happens in a human being is not necessarily subject to his personal control. On the other hand, it is essential to an action that one experience himself as its author, as responsible for effecting it. (And so we commonly say that a person is not responsible for her feelings, only for her choices.) The act is a realization of the dynamism of the acting person, an actualization of his potentiality. Consequently, with respect to sexual behavior, one’s urges occur within one, independently of one’s will. An urge is something that happens in a human being.[20] To act, however, is to realize one’s efficient causality, his potency to change things in the world (and himself in the process). Although what happens in a human being can remain, as it were, confined within personal subjectivity, the action, as efficacious, extends into the world, where it effects change.[21] As a result, the person is always responsible for her actions, since the act intends its effects, and its consequences can be known. Knowledge of the laws of nature makes effective action possible. This means, among other things, that the action is always morally determined, for, by choosing a particular form of action, one is forming not just one’s own subjective experience but oneself and the world about one. As a consequence, in Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyła rejects the notion that one may legitimately act simply to satisfy his sexual urges, because the acts by which those urges are satisfied have their own effects. Sexual behavior is more than simply the reflexive result of an urge or the satisfaction of a subjective desire. This means that urges are not instincts. The phenomenon of acting cannot reduce to the experience of urges and sensations.
As “vectors of aspiration” the urges play an important role nevertheless. That which satisfies the urge is experienced as worth attaining, as a value. Although similar, the notion of “value” is not exactly the same as “good,” at least as Aristotle and Aquinas use the term. To be a value is to deserve being striven for.[22] Values reveal themselves, as it were, in a kind of hierarchy, and the totality of a person’s (or a community’s) values constitutes his ethos. Wojtyła writes: “We each have our own world of values (Ethos), which arises on the basis of our emotional life and is the expression of the love or hate by which we live.”[23] Values make up not only the world of our desires, but also the moral tone of our environment. And among the values revealed in consciousness are the sexual values, experienced as such through sexual urges. Karol Wojtyła argues against Max Scheler that values are not fundamental, but that the order of values must be determined in relation to an objective criterion of good.[24] The import of this is that for Wojtyła, it is illegitimate to subjectivize or emotionalize the realm of values, to separate it sharply from the realm of objective fact. Rather, the realm of fact must be fundamentally related to the order of the good, according to which values are judged.
The analysis of urges (values as experienced) vis-à-vis the dynamics of animal instinct suggests a kind of dualism, a repetition of the fact-value distinction that so dominated philosophy since David Hume. Facts and physical interactions, according to this paradigm, are valueless; to speak of values intrinsic to facts is to read into them something foreign. Values arise not in things but in human subjectivity. Although Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Scheler may well disagree about the status and objectivity of these values, they share this in common, that values are rooted in the human subject or his consciousness and not in facts about the world. Facts are public, but values are personal. Teachers may require students to know facts but not to accept their values. For Scheler, one of Karol Wojtyła’s principal interlocutors, values are intuited emotionally and not derivable from facts. If the sexual urge, therefore, reveals a value, that value is not directly or necessarily related to states of things in the world. That is to say, the value that is discovered in consciousness finds its realization in consciousness and not in the effective interaction with the world. Wojtyła is willing, up to a point, to accept this concept of value. However, he argues that it is not sufficient to determine moral worth. Properly to assign moral value it is necessary to find an objective foundation for values, taking account of the agent’s efficient causality. In other words, Karol Wojtyła intends to show the underlying connection between facts and values, or, as he expresses it, between value and the good. It does not suffice, therefore, to find the values that fulfill the sexual urges without locating those values within the context of objectively existing goods.
Continuing his analysis of the sexual urge, Wojtyła notes that the sciences do not investigate being[25] as such, but rather take it for granted. To study being is the province of philosophy. At this point our earlier mention of Darwinian evolution becomes relevant. Darwin himself held that the existence of the human species could be attributed to the mechanisms of random variation and natural selection; indeed, even with regard to our intellectual faculties, there is “no fundamental difference” between human beings and lower animal forms.[26] How, then, can Karol Wojtyła claim that science does not concern itself with existence? The answer, which Darwin and any of his successors could readily accept, is fairly straightforward. Within the scientific conception, the appearance of a new entity is nothing more than a rearrangement of preexisting components. In principle, at least, the existence and nature of a more complex entity can be adequately explained in terms of its simpler components. For example, under the influence of their own gravity, clouds of hydrogen gas become more and more concentrated, eventually forming galaxies and then stars, within which heavier elements are formed. The existence of human beings is the outcome of a long series of more complex interactions that eventually resulted in a kind of living being complex enough to sustain abstract thought and language. This process of development was not directed, that is, did not have human beings as its goal,[27] and the only thing that differentiates human beings from chimpanzees and—indeed—salamanders is the arrangement and complexity of our material constitution. The scientific order is a closed system within which material change occurs according to nonteleological laws of physical interaction. The only kind of being that the sciences (qua science) can acknowledge is material being. Wojtyła’s point, then, is not that the sciences are wrong, but that there is an aspect of reality to which they do not attend. So the biological sciences can indeed account for the sexual urge as a “force of nature” that impels men and women to mate. However, this account is necessarily incomplete as an account of the human reality.
If the biological account is incomplete, an abstraction, then it is necessary to specify what else there was to the natural order. What is it that remains after the biological order is abstracted? The key text from Love and Responsibility states that while the biological order has human beings as its author, the order of being is founded on the Creator. The natural order has God as its author, who designed and called it into existence. As the product of an intelligent artificer, the natural order exists according to an underlying plan. There is a way that things are supposed to be, a preexistent pattern that they are intended to follow. In other words, things in nature have standards by which they can be measured. Creation is teleological, because it stands in relation to the mind and intention of the Creator. These concepts of intelligent design, preexistent order, and teleology are excluded from the biological sciences.[28]
To speak in terms of the Creator’s intentions certainly raises a host of problems. If the universe is the way the omniscient and omnipotent Creator intended, then must this in some sense be the best of all possible worlds? We should, presumably, be able to discern his intentions from the way things are and, quite possibly, to speculate as to how things are by reflecting on how they would most appropriately be. And precisely here is the rub. The sciences got to their present level of accuracy and predictive power by controlled experimentation and mathematical abstraction,[29] ignoring questions and speculations about what is most fitting and what God intended. In a nutshell, the realm before us, the physical measurable world is all that science has to work with. There is no direct access to the mind of God, a mind that quite evidently does things in a way that no human mind would have imagined. (Why have an expanding universe? What is the point in proliferating ephemeral subatomic particles with hyper-short life spans? Who would create such marvelous animals as the dinosaurs only to eliminate them in a geological moment?) Furthermore, we are well familiar with the problems created by attempting to use God’s revelation in Scripture to judge the conclusions of science. The scientist can and will object that the introduction of teleological and design considerations gives him no new predictive power, and it fails to enhance his ability to explain in terms of known, measurable factors. Indeed, this is precisely the criticism that has been leveled against Intelligent Design theorists: What is their experimental program or strategy?[30] To introduce teleology—it is feared—amounts to a surrender of science to the judgment of others (theologians or philosophers) without gaining new explanatory powers.
Karol Wojtyła’s point, however, is not a criticism of how scientists do their work but rather of how we use their work. Even if science cannot get into the Creator’s mind and Scripture does not reveal all his creative intentions, the fact that He has created the world intelligently and for his purposes may still be important. Although empirical science perhaps cannot use these truths, philosophy can and does.[31] In particular, the conceptions of design and teleology entail an order of good, not a value-free realm of matter in motion. If there is a way things are supposed to be, a standard intended by the Artificer, then we can legitimately use the term “good,” a term that finds no place in the scientific account. Searle makes the point nicely by considering these two propositions:
1) The heart causes the pumping of blood;
2) The function of the heart is to pump blood.
He notes that there is no factual difference between these two propositions, in what they describe. “But 2),” he continues, “assigns a normative status to the sheer brute causal facts about the heart, and it does this because of our interest in the relation of this fact to a whole lot of other facts, such as our interest in survival.... All of the teleological features are entirely in the mind of the observer.”[32] The brute facts about the heart are as they are, according to Searle, and receive value only from human intention. Wojtyła contests this point. The world is not such a value-free realm. In contrast to the empiricist’s “biological order,” the “order of being” is an order of goods. In the context of the discussion in Love and Responsibility, this means that we cannot treat the sexual urge (or indeed any human urge or impulse) as a blind, value-neutral force, but rather as a good that is itself directed toward some other good or goods.
The implications of this for ethics quickly become apparent. If the sexual urge is not a neutral, blind force of nature, deriving its value only from that imposed by a human being, but is instead somehow ordered to a preexisting good, then a moral response to that urge must take that good into account. Similarly, if the natural environment and the place of human beings in it are determined by the Mind that created both, then human responsibility for it and use of it are governed by criteria that do not derive only from human intention. This is Wojtyła’s point: the natural order—the order of being—is an order of goods, and this order can be known. It can be known because things have intrinsic meanings.
In his famous series of Wednesday audiences on human sexuality, published under the title The Theology of the Body,[33] John Paul II refers repeatedly to the “meaning of the body.” Indeed the argument of the book turns on the claims that there is such a meaning and that we can know it. In virtue of this meaning, John Paul II draws important conclusions concerning sexual behavior, the respective vocations of men and women, artificial contraception, and the permanence of marriage. The question before us here is how the body, a physical entity, can have meaning.
We can speak of bodies and bodily things having meaning in a conventional or derivative sense. Conventionally, to nod one’s head up and down means “yes,” although there are cultures where this gesture means “no.” Dancers use their bodies to express relationships and emotions. Such meanings, however, depend on the body’s having a certain indeterminacy of meaning. The actress, who is personally elated over her Tony Award nomination, steps onto the stage and, by word and gesture, dramatically expresses her character’s utter despair. In such examples the meaning the body expresses depends on the mind, and not on its physical constitution. We also speak of the “meaning” of certain states of the body. If the child’s forehead is especially warm and her face flushed, we ask the pediatrician what this means. She says it is probably a sign of roseola. The symptom means something to the doctor. Similarly, we may say that the overall structure of the human body in comparison with that of the chimpanzee means that the two are evolutionarily related. This is a different kind of meaning from the conventional. The symptom is a sign to the physician, who knows that a fever is caused by infection. That is, it acquires its significance from a human being’s knowledge of its physical relationships with other things. The vocabulary of meaning and significance could accurately be replaced by the vocabulary of physical interaction in a manner analogous to Searle’s two propositions cited above. To say “The fever means she has an infection” conveys the same information as “An infection is causing the fever.” In such cases, the meaning we find is present in things not as meaning but as aspects of their structure. One could well argue (as Searle, indeed, does) that such meaning is in the mind of the interpreter, that the physical reality itself is devoid of meaning.
When John Paul II speaks of the meaning of the human body, he clearly understands this meaning to be intrinsic and independent of the mind or intentions of the person embodied. This is evident from his insistence that the body has its own language, which the person does wrong to deny.[34] Furthermore, this meaning is not simply an interpretation or understanding of the causal relations in which the human body stands. If this were the case, then we could say that the biological (or more broadly, the scientific) order does indeed constitute the order of nature, and therefore changes to the body—whether through prosthetics or genetic engineering—would change its meaning. John Paul II argues, however, that there is a fundamental meaning of the body that is not subject to change by varying aspects of one’s physical constitution. The meaning of the body is given to us rather as the meaning of a text is given us by the author. For example, to interpret the term “substance” in a text by Aristotle, it is pointless (except perhaps by way of contrast) to examine occurrences of the term in the writings of René Descartes or contemporary physical scientists. In the Aristotelian context, this symbol, “substance,” has a specific meaning; to use it in another way is to falsify the text at hand.[35] Similarly, the body has a meaning, ascribed it by its Author.
The “theology of the body” audiences were theology, teachings presented by the pope to his Church, and as such their premises were taken from Revelation. Particularly important is the scriptural characterization of the human being as “image of God” (Gn 1:26–27), a concept that governs John Paul II’s theological reflections on human nature. John Paul II develops this theological premise throughout The Theology of the Body, as he considers human love in relation to the life of the Trinity and procreation in relation to God’s act of creation. Every image, of course, has meaning: it means or signifies that which it images. In virtue of the text from Genesis, the theologian finds a meaning inscribed in each human being as human. But to argue from Revelation is to have left the realm of natural understanding; the truths of Revelation are accessible only in faith, a supernatural virtue. Our present investigation concerns the status of the order of being, or the natural order. Faith believes that during the Mass the consecrated host is the Body of Christ, and no believer understands this to entail a change to our understanding of what bread or human flesh is. Similarly, one may argue that if the significance of the human body is—strictly speaking—a theological fact, then this has no bearing on the order of nature. Indeed, it is precisely on this point that one may well argue for a sharp separation of the natural and the religious orders, the natural order being objective, but devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, and the religious being the subjectively created sphere of meaning. John Paul II rejects this approach. For him, we recall, the biological order is an abstraction; the order of nature transcends this abstraction and is accessible to human reflection. Therefore the meaning of the body cannot be given only in Revelation.
In discussing the biblical account of the origins of the human race, John Paul II considers the consciousness of the first human being. According to the Genesis account, the Lord God, realizing that it was not good for the man to be alone, brought all the animals before Adam to be named. Having named all the animals, Adam did not find among them a fitting helpmate (Gn 2:19–20), and the Lord God then created the woman. John Paul II uses this passage as a starting point for philosophical speculation. He treats two specific moments of this theme: the man’s solitude and the naming of the animals. The man was “alone,” in need of a “helper.” But what did this solitude consist in? According to John Paul II’s analysis, it consists in his self-consciousness before the world. Standing before the animals that he has named, the man finds that he is unlike them.
In this way, consciousness reveals man as the one who possesses a cognitive faculty as regards the visible world. With this knowledge which, in a certain way, brings him out of his own being, man at the same time reveals himself to himself in all the peculiarity of his being. He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. Solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which is constituted through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is “different” from the visible world, from the world of living beings.[36]
What the John Paul II points to here is not a theological datum, but a universal human experience. The conscious human subject experiences himself as over against the world and different from it. “Man is alone because he is ‘different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings.” Adam is the one who knows, and in this he is different, alone. The animals cannot share his thoughts and his knowledge. In this respect, solitude refers to human self-consciousness, which cannot be separated from any consideration of human nature as a whole.[37] In a sense, he experiences his body almost as an obstacle to overcoming his loneliness. He first glimpses the spiritual aspect of his own being.
Further, precisely in virtue of his power to know them and himself, the man experiences himself as superior to other beings. In the animals he recognizes beings that are like him in some respects, but still fundamentally different. John Paul II writes: “Linking up with the Aristotelian tradition, it leads to indicating the proximate genus. Chapter 2 of Genesis expresses this with the words: ‘The man gave names....’ There corresponds to this the specific differentia which is, according to Aristotle’s definition, nôus, zōón noētikón.”[38] The man discovers that he is “rational animal.” The naming of the animals differs dramatically from the man’s first encounter with the woman. To her the man responds, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gn 2:23), recognizing that now he has found someone like himself, another self. Like him, the woman is self-conscious—in solitude—and capable of knowledge. She is a helpmate fit for him precisely because she, like him, is a conscious, knowing human subject. John Paul II speaks of “double solitude.” Only with her, and not with any of the animals, is the man able to enter into communion, to form a friendship and community.[39]
In this analysis, there is no question of our author’s using the Scriptures to found creedal statement or theological conclusions. Rather, the scriptural text is the basis for an essentially philosophical reflection. (We may note that it is in this context that John Paul II acknowledges the mythical character of Genesis.) The experience of solitude, which Genesis 2 illustrates, is common to all, as is the recognition of another as a person, a self-conscious being. Adam did not need God to tell him that he was different from the animals or that Eve was a person like him. Nor did he require an extended philosophical reflection to determine that the being before him was also human, one like himself. In a philosophical context, Karol Wojtyła makes the same point in these terms: “There can be no doubt that I—thou and we relationships as experiential facts, as facts given in our experience, occur in each of us much earlier than any attempt … on our part to reflectively objectify these relationships.”[40] For the sake of argument and to develop a philosophical point, Descartes could ask himself whether the figures outside his window were truly men,[41] and philosophers today can debate whether it is possibly truly to know that the other is a conscious, thinking being and how such knowledge is possible. Nevertheless it is a universal human experience—and this is the pope’s point—that a human being can instantly recognize another person as “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.” This is why, according to John Paul II, the body reveals the human being.[42] Elsewhere, our author writes:
Thus the reality of the other does not result principally from categorical knowledge from humanity as the conceptualized essence “human being,” but from an even richer lived experience, one in which I as though transfer what is given to me as my own I beyond myself to one of the others, who, as a result, appears primarily as a different I, another I, my neighbor.[43]
When the person enters the world, as it were, he encounters not only objects manifesting purely physical properties (shape, color, density, mass, and so on), but also living beings and persons. And like Adam, whose response to the first woman is one of joy, the human person characteristically responds to the other with some kind of emotion. Meaning is an intrinsic element of this encounter with the other self.
In our author’s thought, it is the experience of human acting that most directly reveals the nature of the human person.[44] We turn, therefore, to consider this analysis, which underlies Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II’s philosophical conception of human nature. It is by considering the human being, whose personhood is distinctively revealed in action, that Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II finds within the order of being (the natural order) that which the biological order does not explain. Two aspects of human action are especially important. First is the experience of freedom or self-determination,[45] that I am author of and responsible for my act.
I can determine myself by my will, and I determine myself as often as I bring myself to act. I am the author of the act, and my agency in this act, that is, my will (“I will”), turns out to be self-determination. Self-determination, which reveals the freedom of the will and the freedom of the human being in the most direct and complete way, also allows us to define what makes each individual his or her own I.[46]
Second, and closely related to the first, is the relationship with truth. As a rational being, the human person wants and needs to know the truth. In his encyclical on faith and reason, John Paul II remarks, “One may define the human being, therefore, as the one who seeks the truth.”[47] This truth is not simply the theoretical knowledge one pursues in schools and laboratories, but the truth concerning suffering and death, concerning the meaning of our lives.[48] This being, then, that exists in the world as an object subject to physical, chemical, and biological laws, is also present as the conscious subject related in freedom to the truth. As such, it is inextricably concerned with meaning; whatever he does has meaning.
Objectivity is one of the touchstones of the physical sciences. It is fundamental to scientific research that experiments be reproducible and their results independent of the mind of the investigator. No result is accepted in the sciences until other scientists have tested and evaluated the experiment according to accepted criteria. According to Wojtyła, our knowledge of the human person, however, does not—and cannot—consist only in the results of objective experience. The human person lives from the inside, as it were, and, although it does not admit of direct inspection by others, this interior experience is nevertheless fully authentic human experience. Wojtyła notes that this difference between outer and inner experience can lead one to embrace dualism. That is, the inner life of the conscious self can be conceived as independent of the events in the world about one. This is a central aspect of his critique of Max Scheler.[49] The problem, however, is not so much one of overcoming a dualism as of recognizing its origins. Wojtyła’s fundamental phenomenological argument is that the ordinary human experience of acting is irreducibly and simultaneously both objective and subjective. It is subjectively experienced in consciousness, but because the act is efficacious, it cannot be fully accounted for in terms of conscious experience alone. By the same token, the act cannot be reduced to its being an objectively determined event in the physical world, because the act has its origins in the person’s subjectivity. I am present in my act not only as a privileged observer—its closest witness, as it were—but as the one responsible for initiating and endeavoring to complete it. The conception of “human act” is completely lost if one ignores either its objective or its subjective aspect. But the experience of acting is one that each human being experiences repeatedly every day.
This experience of acting is fundamental to understanding human nature. It is through a being’s behavior that we know what it is: operari sequitur esse.[50] “I believe that the form of human operari that has the most basic and essential significance for grasping the subjectivity of the human being is action: conscious human activity, in which the freedom of the human person is simultaneously expressed and concretized.”[51] Because the human being exists in the world both as an efficacious agent working within the objective order and as a free, knowing, and therefore self-conscious and self-determining self, the human appears not only as a physical being in motion but also as emotional and in need of communion with others. An adequate account of human nature must address both these aspects.
Every act aims at the realization of some good.[52] By undertaking an action, the human subject engages his efficient causality to bring about some desired state of affairs, a value, something that is a good; and he judges his action according to whether it succeeds or fails of its end. To avoid failure and ensure success, he may study the situation in which he proposes to act, in order to plan his activity. This orientation toward the good of things and the truth about them is what Wojtyła calls “horizontal transcendence.” The horizontal transcendence of the human person in the act leads necessarily to a “vertical transcendence,”[53] as the acting person reflects on the relationships of specific desired goods to the notion of good itself. Wojtyła writes: “In human activity, or action, I turn toward a variety of ends, objects, and values. In turning toward those ends, objects, and values, however, I cannot help but also in my conscious activity turn toward myself as an end, for I cannot relate to different objects of activity and choose different values without thereby determining myself ... and my own value.”[54] The dynamisms of the human organism naturally turn to various values, which are then desired as goods. The body’s systems desire food, drink, and sex. Like every other animal, the human being, when in danger, feels the urge to flee or fight. Unlike other living things, however, the human being can know the truth about the good.[55] The human person is able to inquire about the good in general, for beyond asking whether a proposed action will attain a desired goal, he can question whether the performance of this act will be good, whether he will do well to perform this act. So, urged by hunger and a natural desire for tasty food, a man is inclined to eat the last piece of pie, but he further considers whether this is the best way to act. His wife, who baked the treat, has not yet tasted it. We say that he should consider his priorities: to satisfy a craving or to care for his wife. The life of the human person is inevitably such that decisions of this sort force an evaluation of one’s values, a personal ranking of desires according to some standard of goodness. The question ceases to be “What is it I most want now?” and instead becomes “What is it that is best?” In vertical transcendence the acting person comes to recognize that he is responsible to conform himself to a general standard of goodness, to choose to be a good person.[56] An important implication of this dynamic is that the acting person lives in the implicit recognition of the reality of a hierarchy of goods that is independent of his own desires, wishes, cravings, urges, and values. The world in which the human person lives is of necessity a world of values, a realm in which nothing is truly value-neutral.
When the question is raised about what is “natural,” we almost instinctively turn to the natural sciences for authoritative answers. We debate whether the homosexual orientation is genetic (and hence natural) or environmentally acquired. Are the evident differences between human male and female behavior of cultural origin (and hence not natural) or inscribed by our biology? We note that within the animal world the weak are often sacrificed for the sake of the herd; this is natural. Does this tell us that euthanasia for the elderly and incurably infirm is natural and therefore right? Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II’s analysis of the order of being in relation to the biological order denies this inappropriate moral authority of the sciences. The problem is not that the sciences are wrong or that the pope has arcane data that science is precluded from obtaining. Indeed, the problem is not a problem with science at all, but with our misunderstanding of its place within the whole of human understanding.
In his “theology of the body” audiences, John Paul II spoke of the need for an adequate anthropology, an “‘understanding ... of man in what is essentially human.’ … An adequate anthropology rests on essentially ‘human’ experience, opposed to the reductionism of the ‘naturalistic’ type.”[57] Since the point of science, broadly conceived, is to understand the nature of things, the methods of the various sciences conform to the natures of their objects. The empirical sciences attain to truth about the human being, but not to the whole truth. In addressing the question of evolution, the pope put the issue especially clearly:
Consideration of the method used in the various branches
of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem
irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple
manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the
time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of
this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental
level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human
being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and
self-reflection, of moral consciousness, freedom, or again, of aesthetic and
religious experience, falls within the competence of philosophical analysis and
reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the
Creator’s plans.[58]
John Paul II’s point is that as we analyze universal human experiences—the experiences shared by every individual human person and the historical experiences of human communities—we find a common structure underlying human actions as such. Evolutionary biology cannot detect the “transition to the spiritual,” even though archeological sciences can discover signs of this transition (such as burial practices, art, and artifacts). In the final analysis, however, a satisfactory scientific account of human nature is accessible only to metaphysics, for among the human sciences, only metaphysics concerns itself with all being, immaterial and material. The empirical sciences, by their very nature and methods, preclude investigation of the good as such. And yet one cannot understand the human person without understanding his freedom, which is based on the knowledge of the truth about the good.
[1]For
an especially illuminating discussion of natural law as John Paul II
understands and uses it, see also Janet E. Smith, “Natural Law and Personalism
in Veritatis splendor,” in Michael E.
Allsopp and John J. O’Keefe, eds., Veritatis
splendor: American Responses (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1995), 194–207.
[2]John
Paul II, encyclical Veritatis splendor,
n. 50, original emphasis, accessed September 25, 2003, from http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor_en.html.
The internal quote is from Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et
Spes, n. 51.
[3]I
have changed the phrase “order of existence” chosen by the English translator.
The phrase in Polish is “porzadek bytu,” which is better translated “order of
being.”
[4]Karol
Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., 1981), 57. John Paul II puts the
issue considerably more sharply in his encyclical Evangelium vitae, reprinted in The
Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (TOB) (Boston: Pauline
Books & Media, 1997) Appendix, pp. 493-582, n. 22: “Nature itself, from being “mater” (mother), is now reduced to being
“matter,” and is subjected to every kind of manipulation. This is the direction
in which a certain technical and scientific way of thinking, prevalent in
present-day culture, appears to be leading when it rejects the very idea that
there is a truth of creation which must be acknowledged, or a plan of God for
life which must be respected.”
[5]See,
for example, Craig Stanford, Significant
Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature (
[6]Because
of systematic interpretive flaws in The
Acting Person, the English translation of Wojtyła’s Osoba i Czyn (Person and Act), I refer to the work by this literal title.
Citations will be from the Italian translation referenced in the following
footnote. For an account of the difficulties with The Acting Person, see Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 117 note 1.
[7]Karol Wojtyła, Persona
e atto, in Metafisica della Persona:
Tutti le opere filosofiche e saggi interpretivi (Milan: Bompiani, 2003),
915.
[8]See
D.M. Armstrong, A
Materialist Theory of the Mind (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968),
49. It is doubtful that too many practicing scientists today would agree that
such a reduction is actually possible.
[9]John
Paul II, TOB, November 14, 1979.
[10]Karol
Wojtyła, Person and Community:
Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok (New York and San Francisco: Peter
Lang, 1993), “The Human Person and Natural Law,” 183.
[11]Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, 52.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Wojtyła,
Love and Responsibility, 45–46. See
also John Paul II, Theology of the Body,
[14]Wojtyła,
Love and Responsibility, 45, original
emphasis.
[15]Ibid.,
46
[16]Thomas
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, Q.
81.1–3.
[17]Ibid.,
I-II, Q. 24.1.
[18]Wojtyła,
Love and Responsibility, 46.
[19]Wojtyła, Persona
e atto, 893, but especially Capitolo Secondo, “3. La sintesi dell’operatività e della soggettività. L’uomo come «suppositum»:
La differenzioazione tra l’agire e l’accadere rivela il contrasto tra l’operatività
e la soggetività dell’uomo,” (“Synthesis of efficacy and subjectivity. The
human being as “suppositum”: the differentiation between acting and happening
reveals the contrast between the human being’s efficacy and subjectivity”), 924–925.
[20]Wojtyła, Love
and Responsibility, 46–47; idem, Persona
e atto, 911–913.
[21]Wojtyła, Persona
e atto, “Capitolo Secondo. Analisi
dell’operatività sullo sfondo del dinamismo dell’uomo,” (Second Chapter. Analysis
of efficacy against the background of the dynamism of the human being,” pp.
909–962.
[22]See Max Scheler, Der
Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung
eines ethischen Personalismus (Bern
und München: Franke Verlag, 1966), especially 38–41 and 61.
[23]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 35.
[24]Scheler,
Der Formalismus, 47, classifies good
(“Gut”) as a value.
[25]In
the English translation: “existence.”
[26]See
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man,
in Robert M. Hutchins, ed., Great Books
of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 287;
see also Chapter II, “On the Manner of Development of Man from Some Lower Form,”
and Chapter XXI, “General Summary and Conclusion,” especially 590–593.
[27]John
R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT
Press, 1992), 51 ff.
[28]It
is necessary to note that some biologists, most notably Michael J. Behe, have
argued forcefully in recent years, that biology requires the concepts of teleology
and intelligent design, that without these concepts it is impossible to account
for the evolution even of the living cell. See Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical
Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996).
[29]By
“mathematical abstraction” I mean not just algebra and geometry, but the
representation of physical entities by exact diagrams with well-defined
components.
[30]See,
for example, Ryan Nichols, “Scientific Content, Testability, and the Vacuity of
Intelligent Design Theory,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 77.4 (Fall 2003): 591–611. In that same
issue see also Jeffrey Koperski, “Intelligent Design and the End of Science,”
569–590.
[31]Wojtyła,
Love and Responsibility, 52.
[32]Searle,
Rediscovery of the Mind, 52.
[33]See
note 8, above.
[34]John
Paul II, Theology of the Body, January
5, 1983, through January 26, 1983.
[35]Obviously
this is only an example, which foreshortens a complex issue. I do not here
intend to ascribe an unwarranted clarity and simplicity to Aristotle’s corpus.
On the other hand, any philosopher will recognize that there are senses of “substance”
that simply cannot cohere with the Stagirite’s thought.
[36]John
Paul II, Theology of the Body,
[37]Wojtyła,
“The Person: Subject and Community,” in Person
and Community, 226.
[38]John
Paul II, Theology of the Body,
[39]Ibid.,
[40]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 241.
[41]René
Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy, “Mediation 3.”
[42]John
Paul II, Theology of the Body,
[43]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 201.
[44]This
is the central premise of Person and Act.
See also “Person: Subject and Community,” cited above.
[45]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 190.
[46]Ibid.,
199.
[47]John
Paul II, encyclical Fides et ratio, (Pauline
Books and Media, Boston, 1998), n. 28, original emphasis.
[48]Ibid,
nn. 25–27.
[49]See
Wojtyła, “The Problem of the Theory of Morality,” in Person and Community, 129–161, and especially idem, Max Scheler y la ética cristiana (Madrid:
Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1982), 143, 153.
[50]Wojtyła,
“Person: Subject and Community,” especially 223–224.
[51]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 224.
[52]See
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk I,
1. Wojtyła accepts the fundamental structure of Aristotle’s ethics; see
Wojtyła, Person and Community, 42–43.
[53]Wojtyła, Persona
e atto, “Parte Seconda. Trascendenza della persona nell’atto,” especially 989,
and idem, Person and Community, 223–224.
[54]Wojtyła,
Person and Community, 230.
[55]A
recurrent phrase in the writings of John Paul II. See Wojtyła, Persona e atto, 1003–1009, and
especially John Paul II, Veritatis splendor,
nn. 30, 32, 60–64, 75, 82, 91, 104, 110, and 117.
[56]This
responsibility can be rejected, of course, and there are many who do reject it.
The turning from the good normally manifests itself in feelings of guilt.
[57]John
Paul II, Theology of the Body,
[58]John
Paul II, “The Magisterium and the Question of Evolution,” message to Pontifical
Academy of Sciences (October 22, 1996), National
Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 3.3 (Autumn 2003), n. 6.