by Denis Larrivee
Karol Wojtyla approached ethics
through an enduring interest in man’s fundamentally personalist nature.[1] Following
this path, his ethical study had two objectives: to characterize the
personalist subject as an agent of ethical activity and as an end for the
pursuit of the good, that is, as a value contingent locus. His interest in
validating ethical praxis thus fell outside the pragmatic question of the
manner of its practice; meaning that it fell within a sphere more properly
characterized as metaethical.
Although
Wojtyla distinguished both objectives conceptually, he recognized that this
distinction did not imply their mutual independence. Linking these two, he
argued, was the experience of morality that manifested itself in action.
Understood as the ground for value contingency in the person, the capacity for
the performance of the ‘good’ thereby established the personal agent as a value
locus.
[T]he
reality of the person inheres in morality, that morality is a thoroughly
specific and connatural reality with respect to the person – with respect
precisely to the person and only to the person… man as a man, becomes good or evil
through the act.[2]
As a metaethical object for the evolution of
ethical praxis, thus, the capacity for morality validated the wholly
referential status of the person.
It
was in view of this referential status, that is, as a meta domain that defined
and determined ethical praxis in inquiry and practice, that the objective
reality of the person could be normatively qualified. Holub[3] points
out that in Wojtyla’s specific exploration this reality was constituted in the
phenomenal subject, that is, in the specific sphere of reality that defined the
unique interiority and operativity of the individual. Wojtyla’s emphasis on the
phenomenal subject, accordingly, is reminiscent of distinctively modern
elements such as consciousness and self-awareness and a performative dimension
that originates from within a personal ‘someone’, hence belonging to no other.
However, by invoking a Thomistic metaphysical deduction, he goes beyond this
exterior and phenomenal expression to forge a link to an inner and
integral unity, a ‘humanum suppositum,’
for which the expressed dimension is only one manifestation. By this integral
unity he meant a metaphysical subjectivity that grounded the objective,
epistemological reality of the personalist subject. Karol Wojtyla’s personalism
thus drew, as he claimed, from a philosophy of ‘genuinely metaphysical range’[4]
where the person ‘constitutes a privileged
locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical inquiry’.
For
ethical praxis this conception is significant in linking the subject’s
dynamical operativity not solely, or merely, to a collection of phenomenal
events, but to an integral and unique subject. Hence, it is fundamentally
constitutive for ethics. What Wojtyla offers, therefore, is a metaphysical
justification for ethical praxis, and an exploration of those modalities that
would be normatively qualified through this metaphysical link. Burgos has
specifically identified the object of Wojtyla’s exploration with personal
subjectivity:
...what
Wojtyla is searching for is a reelaboration of Thomistic gnoseology that
considers the advances of modernity and mostly the possibility offered by the
phenomenology of directly accessing the subjectivity of the person.[5]
Such a characterization, indeed, reflects the
phenomenal emphasis of Wojtyla’s personalist exploration; however, it
nonetheless fails to consider other manifestations that are metaphysically
anchored, since his metaphysical subject is neither purely phenomenological nor
wholly structured by the phenomenal dimension. In fact, the humanum suppositum
both extends and confirms the possibility for exploring a multiplicity of other
modalities that may constitute its predicates, and that do not rely on such a
unimodal manifestation. This extension allows Wojtyla to move beyond the purely
phenomenological to other dimensions of the subject.
Crucially,
as Holub points out, the humanum suppositum bridges and integrates alternative,
manifestations that are constitutively present, thereby subordinating these
also within the ethical sphere.
[T]he
subject is not a sequence or stream of psycho-physical events taking place in
the human individual. Rather it must be characterized by a metaphysical
structure, which precedes all acts and happenings.[6]
The metaphysical structure therefore also
anchors physical attributes of the person, especially of the
nervous system, which is widely invoked as the physical substrate for the
phenomenal subject, and where questions of praxis have been classed in the
domain of neuroethics.[7] By
identifying the subject as a metaethical principle, that is, as a value
contingent object, he thus extends, by virtue of the metaphysical unity of the
person, value to all those attributes that constitute the subject. Indeed, this
metaphysical inference enables Wojtyla to caution in Veritatis Splendor[8] ‘against a manipulation of corporeity which
would alter its human meaning...’ on grounds that the ‘...nature of the human
person is in the unity of body and soul ...that stand and fall together...’ a
clear indication that he regarded the corporal manifestation to be subsumed
within the metaphysical concept of the suppositum,
which thus acts to validate an ethical praxis within the corporal sphere.
Indeed, Wojtyla’s recognition of the fundamental participation of the corpus in
the integral unity of the human is also evident in his opus Man and Woman: He Created Them: A Theology
of the Body,[9] a
position expressed in more nascent form in Montini’s Humanae Vitae[10]
that is probative for technological
interventions circumventing the generation of biological life. In the logic of
the metaphysical argument the suppositum
can be expected, therefore, to anchor neuroethical praxis concerned with the
impact of neural intervention on the specifically human meaning of life.
The
utility of the metaphysical dimension to neuroethics thus emerges from its link
to the specifically corporal contribution made to the unity of the person, that
is, as a physical structure that is enabling to a human ontological, subjective
and integrative order. As such its utility to neuroethical praxis devolves from
the fundamental participation of the corporal manifestation in structuring the
ontological unity of the individual. By extension, this corporal contribution
may be used to assess the validity of metaphysical presuppositions of other,
modern neuroethical variants.
[1] Cf. K. Wojtyla, Man in the Field of Responsibility,
Vatican City 1991, passim.
[2] Ibid., p. 17.
[3] Cf. G. Holub, The Human Subject and its
Interiority: Karol Wojtyla and the Crisis in Philosophical Anthropology, “Quien”,
vol. 4 (2016) p. 47-66.
[4] Cf. G. Holub, The Human Subject and its
Interiority: Karol Wojtyla and the Crisis in Philosophical Anthropology, “Quien”,
vol. 4 (2016), p. 47-66.
[5] Cf. J.M. Burgos, The Method of Karol
Wojtyla: A Way Between Phenomenology, Personalism and Metaphysics, in
"Analecta Husserliana", vol. 104(2009), p. 110.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Cf. P. Reiner, The Rise in Neuroessentialism
in (eds) J. Iles, B. Sahakian, "The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics",
Oxford 2011; Cf. N. Levy, Neuroethics and the Extended Mind, in
(eds) J. Iles, B. Sahakian, "The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics",
Oxford 2011; Cf. A. Roskies http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2016/08/mental-alchemy_23.html.
[8] Cf. John Paul II, Pope. The Splendor of Truth = Veritatis Splendor: Encyclical Letter.
Boston, Mass 1993.
[9] Cf. John Paul II, Pope. Man and
Woman: He Created Them. A Theology of the Body, (trans. M. Waldstein)
Boston 2006.
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