KAROL WOJTYLA: Modes of Relationship

The ‘other’ has taken on an increased theological significance for the Church in the advent of post-
modern reflection, resulting in a myriad of possibilities for those who would reflect on the significance
of the other in relation to the ‘self’, largely in connection with various theories of embodiment.
Following Karol Wojtyla’s (John Paul II) emphasis on the given-ness of the body I wish to illustrate a way
in which the other might be understood theologically, informed by the insights of the continental
philosophical tradition. Bringing Levinas’ continental philosophy into dialogue with Wojtyla’s
philosophical theology,it will be argued that the other must be re-approached in terms of their
subjective self-disclosure, centering upon the en-fleshed and bodily form of the human person, who
confronts us as a reflection of both that which is most other to ourselves (the divine) and paradoxically
that which most resembles ourselves (the human). The other is always an en-fleshed subject and in their
action, their subjective identity is disclosed on the relational level.

The ‘other’ or the stranger, the face of whom is perceived by my gaze and yet remains other to my own
self, is an important category of investigation within post-modern scholarship, emphasizing perhaps the
requirement for humanity to consider the role of difference and
diversity in the modern experience of human discourse. Within the constellation of theologies of the
body which are evident in this context, a nuanced theory of embodiment remains difficult to unravel or
define, despite the polemic between those who hold to an essentialist conceptualization of the
integrated mind/body/soul structure of the human person and those who take a more deconstructive
approach. The following study of two
philosophical voices who focus on the notion of embodiment is conducted on theunderstanding that eth
ics is an important consideration in terms of both the human embodied subject as well as our social (and
therefore relational) identity. Our ethical relationship with others is a key theme in the work both of
Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II, 1920–2005) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–
1995). Each admired thephenomenological methodology of Edmund Husserl and sought to pursue their
philosophical projects within the respective perspectives of Catholic and Jewish standpoints.

In Wojtyla, the whole person is imagined as embodied gift, giving form to the
differentiated substanceof human nature. Wojtyla’s personalism is the philosophical frame work in
which he constructs this anthropology, informed as it is within the broaderThomist tradition. The human
person, as embodied soul, is always either man or womanand carries within their own self the desire for
some form of communion with the other, asocial and immanent longing of which reciprocal giving is the
transparent sign. The ImagoDei for Wojtyla is an anthropological reality. Without an understanding of
the other as complimentary to oneself, Trinitarian difference is askew and marred – it is a
disfiguredicon, upholding an anthropology which lacks the ingredients essential to the notion of person
as ‘gift’. But the other in Wojtyla (not a term he regularly employs) does not make me whole – rather,
their wholeness compliments my own wholeness, enabling a salvificcommunity to be instigated. Wojtyla
takes a different, but not contradictory approach.

Wojtyla’s emphasis is not so much in acting for others, but in the a acting with
others. He determines in the personalistic value of the action the opening up of opportunity for the hum
an self to operate alongside and in conjunction with otherpersons, who of course, while reflecting
human nature back to the human self, remain in themselves strangers, with their own thoughts, desires
and hopes. Indeed, some may bare the human burden of particular forms of seduction or threat, yet
these are aspects for Wojtyla of the disintegration of the self, by the revulsion against the personalist
nature each person carries within themselves and which is disclosed in their action

Insight

Frank John Paul. Tresvalles G11-Dianoia