Nieprzekazywalność podmiotu osobowego a możliwość spełnienia się poprzez drugiego w myśli antropologicznej Karola Wojtyły

Abstract

Inga Mizdrak

Incommunicability of the Personal Subject and the Possibility
of Self-Fulfilment through the Other in the Anthropological Thought
of Karol Wojtyła

Abstract

The problem of incommunicability of the person actually relates to the way in which personal subjectivity is understood. In the case of Karol Wojtyła’s approach, as the subjectivity of the person is concretized, the veil is gradually lifted from what makes the person irreducible and unique. Step by step but consistently, Wojtyła includes the Latin expression alteri incommunicabilis in his personalist concept of man as a being “non-transferable beyond its own self,” a being constituted as a person, irreducible to the world of things and animals, possessed of an inalienable identity and dignity, capability of self-creation and affirmation of others, and finally, rationality and freedom, which shape man’s humanity.
The main claim of the article is that in Wojtyła’s view the incommunicability and, in some way, inaccessibility of the person is not a monadic expression of the identity of self and can be a pre-condition for an interpersonal relationship. Besides, that inaccessibility, expressed by the concept of irreducibility of the person, preserves and strengthens an individual’s identity even though he or she enters into various relationships with others.
Furthermore, in connection with the problem of incommunicability of the person there arises a question of the possibility of self-fulfilment through others. We consider the question of man’s subjectivity in the context of experience and of freedom and rationality as the ontic conditions of personal self-fulfilment (including self-fulfilment through others).

Keywords: incommunicability, person, self-fulfilment.