Two Anthropological Errors according to Karol Wojtyła

Abstract

Throughout his philosophical writings and, indeed, into his papacy, Karol Wojtyła addresses and warns against two common errors in modern philosophy. The first is the reduction of our concept of reality to materialistic premises. In Love and Responsibility, he distinguishes the “biological order”, which is the order studied according to the canons of biological sciences, from the “order of being,” which is the order of reality knowable to metaphysics. This confusion leads to misunderstanding in ethics. The second error is complementary to the first and consists in what Wojtyła calls the “hypostatization of consciousness,” which is the reduction of personal experience entirely to the contents of consciousness. The historical roots of this error trace back to Descartes and his identification of himself as a “thinking thing,” whose body is simply an extended 3-dimensional solid in space and time. Both errors arise from a neglect or even a rejection of metaphysics, without which it is impossible to give an adequate account of the human being.