Philippine E-Journals

PERSON, COSMOS, AND TRADITION: (RE-)DISCOVERING THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION WITH KAROL WOJTYŁA AND ERIC VOEGELIN

William Tullius

 

Abstract:

Wojtyła has famously proposed a distinction between two contrasting but complementary interpretations of the human being, the personalistic and cosmological understandings,respectively. The latter characteristically treats the human being as reducible to the world of which man is a part, while the former recognizes the irreducibility of the person to her surrounding world. He argues that each understanding is necessary for a complete picture of the nature of the human being in its totality. However, given the history of philosophy’s apparently one-sided emphasis, since Aristotle, upon treating man from the cosmological perspective, Wojtyła argues for the necessity of’ pausing at the irreducible’ following the emergence of philosophical personalism in modern philosophy. Although Wojtyła insists that the two understandings can be harmonized, he gives little indication as to how such a difficult perspective can be accomplished. In Volume V of his Order and History, Eric Voegelin develops a similar distinction to Wojtyła’s personalist and cosmological understandings. For Voegelin, the delimitation of the person as equally an object in the world and as a subject for the world represents the specific paradox of consciousness, which entered into Western philosophy in the Platonic analysis of the structure of human consciousness through the symbol of the metaxy. This paper argues that a dialogue between the personalisms of Voegelin and Wojtyła may hold the key to the advancement of Wojtyła’s anthropology through the recovery of the classical movements in philosophy, which have been the carriers of the personalistic insight up to the present.