The Role of Experience in Karol Wojtiła’s Ethical Thought

Abstract

The getting away from traditional models of legitimization of knowledge and of action—coming from classical metaphysics, realism, trascendentalism, etc—is one of the dominant features of the contemporary intellectual disposition, submerged into what could be called a “crisis of foundations”. The disenchantment regarding the traditional models of laying fundaments, instead of paving the way—as happened in other epochal transitions—for the establishment of new ones, has frequently led to an impugnation of the very possibility of the philosophical enterprise. It is notwithstanding presumptuous, to proclaim the end of the issue of the foundation of virtuous life. This difficulty, far from reducing ethical reflection to a mere procedure or consensual models which are in themselves insufficient, rather calls for a new method of philosophical analysis that could allow for an authentic way of founding human praxis. The phenomenological method offers this possibility, inasmuch as it permits to overcome the solipsism of enlightened conscience that, directly or indirectly, led to this epochal sentiment. Karol Wojtyła offers the possibility of a phenomenological re-thinking of philosophical ethics, from a perspective which is somehow epistemological, but which, at the same time, involves novel anthropological and metaphysical postures. His starting point is the recovery of the experiential foundation of ethics, thus widening the empiricist perspective of ethics, and reestablishing the link between the action of conscience and the data of reality. In the first place, to the data of the acting man’s own experience, to discover the ontological structure which reveals man as a being with dignity, i.e., with an absolute value. The Kantian imperative of regarding the person as an end in itself finds in Karol Wojtyła’s philosophy the acknowledgement that it is still valid as an actually relating principle, and at the same time, the expression of a language close to the concrete life of living men, at tension between emotion and intrinsic moral imperatives. Through the path of personalism, doors open up again to the task of\break philosophical ethics.