The Value of Addressing Subjectivity in Pastoral Ministry and Karol Wojtyla’s Support for its Primacy in the Philosophy of the Person
By: Fr. Thomas Dunton
Fr. Thomas Dunton is a religious priest of the Congregation of Saint John. He fulfilled a master’s degree in philosophy at Franciscan University, Steubenville, and he is currently serving as the local superior at Princeville Priory, Illinois.
Keywords: Karol Wojtyla, John Henry Newman, Subjectivity
With the sea change in human thinking that came with modern thought, bringing its distinct character of the ‘turn to the subject’,[1] few philosophers appeared to successfully present a valuable holding together of both the new and the old. Karol Wojtyla was one such philosopher and, as history shows, it became his thinking that principally shaped the Catholic Church’s theology of the body. Wojtyla took hold of the modern approach to the human person through subjectivity, yet in so doing he didn’t relinquish the rich value of objectivity found in classical thought.
Indeed, whilst it would be a truly valuable work to identify differences, similarities, and the overlapping, between these two distinct intellectual approaches to the human person – the classical and the modern – our focus in this essay will predominantly remain on the modern approach which brings subjectivity to light. By way of an outline, I will, firstly, highlight the pastoral importance that should be given to the Church’s ministers being able to speak from their own (personal) subjectivity and into the subjectivity of others. I will then, secondly, draw out why a certain primacy should be given (according to Karol Wojtyla) to the subjective perspective in the philosophy of the person. Let us now proceed to develop this twofold contribution.
I. The Pastoral Importance of Being Able to Speak from and into (Personal) Subjectivity
The human capability to think from the perspective of the self-experiencing subject has been identified as an important skillset in the workforce of today. Whilst relational skills, or the capacity to relate effectively and meaningfully with individuals and groups, is highly valued in the job market, it is also favorably sought after in the Church’s mission of evangelization. Indeed, it appears as being helpful to every person to be able to truly empathize with the people in their lives and build meaningful connections with them.
Engaging Well with Subjectivity is a Pastoral Blessing
Today, as the Church’s ministers live their sending into the world, a growing intellectual familiarity with subjectivity (and personalist philosophy) will enable them to be more pastorally fruitful and to better experience themselves as being instruments of grace. The Church has concluded this for centuries, which is why those called to shepherd God’s sheep as ordained ministers, mandated as they are to both guide the sheep and to go looking for those who have strayed, need to receive a proper philosophical training. Without the formation of mind in understanding subjectivity, how else could the Lord’s representatives draw upon their own self-presence so as to know (and argue for) the dignity of the human person? Or from where else would their understanding come to explain to believers (and non-believers alike) that personal fulfilment is not to be found in pleasure, power, or possession, but in the different forms of intersubjectivity?
That the priests and future priests of today truly engage in understanding subjectivity will be a blessing for the whole Church in the years to come. My very own journey of having to work through the healing of childhood wounds – which undeniably is a work of exploration into subjectivity – has enabled me to better understand and assist the lay faithful who come to me seeking to grow into greater wholeness. Sadly though, these people oftentimes arrive having succeeded little more than to manage as best they could the sorrowful fruits of their unmet (and unexplored) childhood needs. Certainly, this far-reaching call to minister in the domain of subjectivity is made abundantly visible by the many practical and pastoral instances that day after day bear witness to this truth. This visibility appears across the full range of the Church’s life: from the local parish where the helpful story-telling of the homilist draws upon his own inner experience of self-governing, right through to the Holy Father instructing the Universal Church about how today’s practice of discernment needs in particular to start with the heart: “At this time in history, which risks becoming rich in technology and poor in humanity, our reflections must begin with the human heart,”[2] and, again, “only by adopting a spiritual way of viewing reality, only by recovering a wisdom of the heart, can we confront and interpret the newness of our time.”[3]
Concerns about Subjectivity: Subjectivism
Though there appear many clear signs of the pastoral importance of being formed in what concerns human subjectivity, like many of us who have encountered the overreaching of a harmful subjectivity into human morality, the Church’s ministers are not exempt from having to wrestle with real concerns about giving great weight to knowledge that implies turning to subjectivity (or interiority). For is there real objectivity in a person’s interiority, and, if there is, can this be demonstrated?
The apostolic exhortation on the formation of priests, Pastores Dabo Vobis, which asserts human formation as the basis of all priestly formation, acknowledges our “extremely widespread cultural situation which emphasizes subjectivism as a criterion and measure of truth.”[4] But, unlike our ambient subjectivist culture, can we not argue for there being an objectivity in subjectivity, claiming that the subjectivity of the human person is also something objective, whilst rejecting any imposed acceptance of subjectivism?
In The Acting Person, Wojtyla tackles head-on this question of subjectivism when seeking “to discriminate clearly between man’s subjectivity (…) and subjectivism as a mental attitude.”[5] In contrast to what is purely subjectivity, Wojtyla asserts subjectivism as also implying (and originating in the person themselves) a mental attitude. This mental attitude that the person can take on is further developed by Wojtyla when drawing out its relation to a most fundamental aspect of human subjectivity, that of consciousness: “subjectivism conceives consciousness itself as a total and exclusive subject.”[6] In so claiming, Wojtyla is disclosing the attitude of subjectivism as what brings forth the unfounded conception that the person’s subject does not go beyond the consciousness they have of their subject. This is succinctly captured by Rocco Buttiglione, the acclaimed Italian philosopher, former statesman, and close personal friend of Wojtyla, when writing that “generally speaking, for subjectivism, reality is what happens in consciousness.”[7] In equally clear terms, Wojtyla asserts that “when consciousness is absolutized [and consciousness is that aspect of man which lends itself to being absolutized], it at once ceases to account for the subjectivity of man… it becomes a substitute for the subject.”[8] Hence subjectivism appears in a person’s life when human consciousness is absolutized, thereupon disturbing what should otherwise be a well-ordered subjectivity. In such a case, the person recognizes nothing being real and having existent value other than what they themselves experience and feel, for their mental attitude has made themselves the measure of the reality.
We ourselves also, following in the footsteps of Wojtyla, should not let the fear of subjectivism prevent us from turning our attention to the subjectivity of human beings, so as to understand better what it means to say that we are persons. For it is when this understanding of persons is well taken on board by Catholic pastors that energy and heartfelt motivation will be readily found to fully engage in the Church’s ministry.
Historical Insights concerning the Emerging Interest in Subjectivity
In recent centuries, there have been many Western thinkers in our Church’s history who have contributed to reflections about the person from the point of view of self-experience. These contributors have taken seriously their approach of examining the person from within and being attentive to what is really personal. One such philosopher is Juan Manuel Burgos, professor at the University of San Pablo CEU, Madrid, who has worked on the systematization of the philosophical vision (“personalism”) that places the person at the centre of its reflection. Burgos’ detailing of the origins of the personalist movement in philosophy, and his choice to focus both on the currents of thinking (linguistically influenced for the most part as they were) and the individual thinkers themselves, presents itself as a helpful resource with which to pursue these matters further.[9]
Of particular significance for us, some of these thinkers have taken on an added pastoral importance in the life of the Church owing to them being raised to the honour of the altars. As canonized saints, their voices continue to resound and carry with them great authority in the lives of today’s faithful, with certain of these holy men and women receiving universal acceptation of having been able to speak from their own interiority in ways that truly reached into the interiority of their listeners (most of whom lived centuries afterwards). An obvious example is Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890) whose cardinal’s coat of arms expresses well his giftedness in this capability: “cor ad cor loquitur” (“heart speaks to heart”).
Going back further in time, we find a thinker in Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) – though we might also similarly argue for other Fathers of the Church – who unusually for his time gives an emphasis to the experiencing subject in more explicit terms. His well-known “Confessions,” widely seen as the first Western autobiography ever written and outlining his conversion to Christianity, includes these acknowledging words that what he was seeking was to be found within himself: “You were there before my eyes, but I had deserted even my own self, and I did not find the God of my own heart.”[10]
Now, it might first appear a little far-fetched of us to reach beyond Saint Augustine to the Apostle Saint John and to argue that the Evangelist, moved by grace, wrote divinely-inspired insights into the truths of self-understanding. Such a claim might seem to be an exaggeration given that John never once speaks in the first person throughout the whole of his Gospel, except, significantly, in the very last verse (Jn 21:25). Nevertheless, it still remains deeply mysterious that he keenly knows his deepest identity by means of his subjectivity: “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (Jn 13:23; Jn 19:26; Jn 20:2; Jn 21:7; and Jn 21:20). John’s self-experience coming from his exemplary reception of Jesus’s love is a self-knowledge that all Christians desire to come into. Is there any other disciple of Jesus who is revealed to us as knowing himself so radically well through his subjectivity?
As we have indirectly inferred, the intellectual interest in subjectivity arose in the West above all as a fruit of a vibrant humanity (and, a Christian would add, of a fallen humanity aided by God’s grace). In a certain sense, the intellectual propulsion over many centuries to turn to the subject, thereby preparing the way for the philosophers of modernity to knowingly take hold of the subjective perspective, reflects the unquenchable thirst for self-knowledge that resides in every human being. Our historical considerations now finished, we are fittingly (albeit indirectly) led into our second contribution: the human search for truth and the philosophical importance given to exploring subjectivity.
II. Primacy should be given (as argued by Karol Wojtyla) to the Subjective Perspective in the Philosophy of the Person
We now move to consider Karol Wojtyla’s fascinating claims in a 1975 paper delivered in Paris for the philosophical importance of exploring subjectivity.[11] Wojtyla presents in clear terms the modern perspective on subjectivity as a needed complement to our traditional understanding of the human person, and he even supports subjectivity as holding a certain primacy of place in the philosophy of the person.
For the Philosopher, what is Subjectivity?
If we take a spatial metaphor to assist our understanding of subjectivity, the fundamental distinction to be grasped can be articulated as follows: the difference between “experiencing myself (within me) as subject” from “cognizing myself as object (outside of me).” It follows, therefore, that my subjectivity is not found in what is over and against me as object. Rather, my subjectivity is attained by me experiencing myself from within. The reality of our subjectivity should be a given for us persons, and any of us who have experienced their “heart” being powerfully swayed (in contrast with their mind or intellect) knows with conviction the imposing truth of the inner world. Subjectivity is the centrepiece of our true selves but, oftentimes, we can easily forget this as when we pay attention to ourselves, or talk about ourselves, in the exact same ways that we do when understanding the world around us as objects of our experience. In those instances, we fail to recognize the dignity of our human person (and so fail to take full possession of it) and we lose sight of the privileged access to self-experience that we enjoy in our God-given nobility. Significantly for our consideration, a concrete connection with God’s hungry people, each of them needing to feel their pastor as being closely alongside them and understanding them from within, risks to be lost because the pastors themselves are not living in a way that is sufficiently subjectively aware. On this particular point, we could make an appeal (as other authors have done) for the importance of cultivating a “recollected subjectivity,”[12] which helps us to remember (through a process of deepening) the primary experience of ourselves as being “from within as subject” and not “from without as object.”
Wojtyla’s Great Support for Subjectivity in the Philosophy of the Person
Now that we have outlined our understanding of subjectivity, we are ready to hear Wojtyla’s claims for the distinct importance to be given to it in the philosophy of the person. We will proceed, therefore, by briefly pondering four excerpts from Wojtyla’s 1975 paper with our modest twofold goal being the following: to notice how Wojtyla highlights subjectivity and to hear his support for it holding a certain primacy of place in the philosophy of the person.
So, in this 1975 paper, what is Wojtyla’s claim for subjectivity?
Excerpt 1
“Today [in 1975] more than ever before we feel the need – and also see a greater possibility – of objectifying the problem of the subjectivity of the human being.”[13]
Wojtyla recognizes a “need” to explore subjectivity, and he claims that “we feel” this need too. Do I experience feeling a need to explore the richness of human subjectivity to better know my inner self (and the human person) in my philosophical search for truth? And do I recognize that in today’s times I have the tools to do so, and in an “objectifying” way? Thankfully for us, one could say, it appears clearly so to Wojtyla! Certainly, Wojtyla is alluding to some degree to the contribution of phenomenology, a philosophical movement for which he had a real interest, recognizing its valuable approach by which the richness and drama of concrete living (including the making of moral decisions) is more fully investigated.
Excerpt 2
“Objectivity was connected with the general assumption of the reducibility of the human being…. Subjectivity is a kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human being.”[14]
What is it to treat the human being, this person before me, as an object that is one among many objects in the world and, in that sense, to know the person by reducing them to being intellectually treated like all other things in the world? What is it to “run the risk… of failing to do justice to the proprium of man”?[15] Alternatively, what is it to approach the human being, this person before me, not with the same set of categories as all other things in the world but by that which is irreducible and unique in them? Surely in the concreteness of a pastoral setting, the irreducible and the unique needs to come to the fore if the counsel of the Catholic pastor is to be significantly fruitful? True universal principles – cognitively assented to by the mind – certainly have a place in pastoral counsel, but so also, and arguably more so, do particular movements that first arise from within the uniqueness of the heart.
Excerpt 3
“… lived experience. This is a category foreign to Aristotle’s metaphysics… the aspect of lived experience as the irreducible… the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity.”[16]
Here Wojtyla argues for a particular understanding of the person, of “the revelation of the person” as he calls it, that is not found in treating the human person as an object (which he designates by the “cosmological” understanding) but is found in treating the human person “as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject”[17] (to use language Wojtyla uses elsewhere in this same paper). Wojtyla designates this latter understanding “personalistic” (or “personalist”) for this vision implies inwardly looking to the (human) person as an example of a personal subject.
Now, what does Wojtyla say concerning the comparison of these two understandings, “cosmological” and “personalist”? Does he speak of there being any order between them?
Excerpt 4
“The one [understanding] must be cognitively supplemented by the other… We must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were, give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice.”[18]
Indeed, with sufficient clarity of expression we now hear Wojtyla’s claim for there being an ordering in the value of importance between the “cosmological” and the “personalist” approaches to the human person, “both in theory and in practice.” Having now heard Wojtyla speak in comparative terms (when saying “the greater space” and “the upper hand”), we may be curious to explore further his claim, especially given that both theory and practise are undeniably present in the Church’s pastoral ministry.
A Reason of Necessity to Attend to Subjectivity in the Philosophy of the Person
One way to explore further Wojtyla’s claim is to draw out something specific from the “personalist” vision of man, something that is not able to be explored to the same degree in the “cosmological” vision, as when the philosopher explores the coming alive subjectively of the human person. What does the philosopher discover when inquiring into the person acting through their subjectivity, with this being for them an experience of their personal freedom?
For this essay, I intend to develop only one reason[19] for why the philosopher needs to attend to subjectivity in the philosophy of the person: the grandeur of personal self-transcendence (given the inseparable connection between subjectivity and transcendence), itself being foundational for living the Christian vocation to love of God and love of neighbour.
Personal Subjectivity and Self-transcendence
By his personal subjectivity, man’s interior life is the primordial place for encounter with the world of objects around him, and therefore also the place of his self-transcendence. As Buttiglione comments, “engagement with the world of objects and of exteriority, including his body and his faculties, comes about through interiority.”[20] It is the person’s interiority (or subjectivity) that gives them a capacity to reach the reality which surrounds them. For it is by means of their living out of their personal subjectivity that the human being is most in touch with (or connected to) the whole (external) world that they experience. Hence, we must acknowledge a crucial contribution to the philosophy of the person that is disclosed when turning to subjectivity for it is precisely in the consciousness of their own self-transcendence that the person is most alive and is, therefore, most themselves. This concept of self-transcendence fundamentally refers to what is found in Wojtyla’s writings under the term of “horizontal transcendence”: “reaching out and beyond the subject… toward external objects.”[21] It concerns the person being connected to values such as truth and being exterior to themselves. In addition, our philosophical support to affirm the place of the person’s subjectivity as being the privileged place of their self-transcendence finds strong convergence with the Catholic Church’s teaching that “man… cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”[22] For the person, the sincere gift of themselves is by a taking hold of their interiority as their proper means to reach out beyond their own subject. Indeed, the Catholic pastors need to cultivate a personalist approach in order that they will counsel persons to be rightly concerned that their subjectivity remains open to being connected to exterior objective values (for love of neighbour, as revealed to us by Jesus,[23] is the essence of the new commandment).
In order to assist us in the further examining of the subjective richness of the person it is important for us to turn to two key structures within the person being their own agent: “self-possession” and “self-governance.” For Wojtyla, these two philosophical conceptions signify structures that are “essential to every personal self and shape the personal subjectivity of every being.”[24] What therefore is understood by these personal structures (or distinct forms of subjective relations of the person to themselves) and how are they related to self-transcendence?
Self-determination in the Freedom to Self-transcend
These distinct personal structures as presented by Wojtyla concern the distinct ways that the person is subjectively related to themselves. In and through each of them, the human being experiences that they are a person and that they are a subject, hence that they are a subject who is a person. Self-possession discloses the belonging to oneself that the person experiences, for the person is their own subject whilst equally being their own possession, whilst self-governance reveals to the person their innate capability to direct themselves as a free being.
Now, Wojtyla puts forth these structures in personhood that are manifestly subjective in character with the intellectual assurance that they are connected to self-transcending objectivity. For by these personal structures, the human person truly transcends themselves and hence is not merely driven by their own inner forces. Similarly, though the person truly attains to other persons and to the world that surrounds them (and so is influenced by this reality), they are nevertheless not lost in them like one who would be emphatically determined by outside things. Both subjectivity and objectivity (outside the person) are found to be united together, and experienced as being such, in the personal freedom that accompanies self-transcendence. Indeed, these two dimensions (of subjectivity and of objects exterior to the person) are united in a living synthesis as William Norris Clarke (1915-2008), an American Thomist philosopher and Jesuit priest, asserts when commenting that “the whole life of a personal being revolves around this basic polarity of presence to self and presence to others.”[25] It is also the pastoral fruitfulness of personalism, therefore, that can be acknowledged when Catholic pastors are mindful of this basic polarity in such a way that they minister to the “whole life,” or to the fullness of a growing integrated life, of a beloved child of God.
For our purposes, it suffices to indicate that these internal structures are what Wojtyla proposes as constituting the structural composition of the human being in their personal subjectivity. If there would be anything else for us to add, it would perhaps simply be that the philosophy of the person would do well to provide further insights into personal subjectivity and, in particular, to continue the work towards better articulating the personal structures or forms constituting the person’s deepest subjectivity.
Concluding Remarks
Having now reached the term of our essay, we can conclude how it is by means of the person’s living out of their subjectivity that the person is most in touch with (or connected to) the reality of the objects surrounding them. Norris Clarke picks up on this understanding of the dyadic structure of the person when asserting that “a person is a living synthesis of substantiality and relationality.”[26] It is a person’s interiority that empowers them to achieve actual transcendence, thereby enabling the person to live in an interpersonal way through reaching out from their inner centre in an attitude of openness to the world around them. Consequently, and most significantly, it is by the Catholic pastors turning to consider subjectivity that they will minister in a more enlightened and conscious way to a person’s capacity to self-determine and thereby take hold of their interiority in order to live a sincere gift of self. Pastors can draw upon the wonderful example of Saint John Henry Newman who knew that he had to appeal to the interiority of his listeners, and to their hearts even more than their minds: “This is our real and true bliss, not to know, or to affect, or to pursue; but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore. Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied.”[27]
The underlying philosophical discoveries to this more fruitful way of Christian ministry, Wojtyla is wanting to tell us (with Newman), would be crucially absent from the philosophy of the person were the person’s subjectivity to go unexplored and the philosophy of the person to be confined to only the “cosmological” perspective.
[1] Mark K. Spencer writes in his review of the book “Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern,” R.J. Snell and Steven F. McGuire (eds.): “By ‘turn to the subject’, I mean the emphasis in certain strands of philosophy of the last few centuries on the interior, first-person, or subjective perspective, as opposed to an exterior or third-person perspective.” https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/subjectivity-ancient-and-modern/
[2] Pope Francis, Message for the 58th World Day of Social Communications, 24 January 2024.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Pastores Dabo Vobis, 52.
[5] Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki and established in collaboration with the author by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979, pp. 56-57.
[6] Ibid., p. 58.
[7] Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: the Thought of the Man who became Pope John Paul II, trans. Paolo Guietti and Francesca Murphy, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997, p. 134.
[8] Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki and established in collaboration with the author by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979, p. 58.
[9] Juan Manuel Burgos, An Introduction to Personalism, trans. R. T. Allen, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018.
[10] Augustine, of Hippo, The Confessions, 5.2.
[11] Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man, found in Person and Community, trans. Theresa Sandok, New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
[12] John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996, pp. 98-106.
[13] Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man, found in Person and Community, trans. Theresa Sandok, New York: Peter Lang, 1993, p. 209.
[14] Ibid., p. 211.
[15] John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996, p.82 (italics in original).
[16] Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man, found in Person and Community, trans. Theresa Sandok, New York: Peter Lang, 1993, pp. 212-213.
[17] Ibid., p. 213.
[18] Ibid., p. 214.
[19] In my master’s thesis work, I presented five reasons to attend to human subjectivity in the philosophy of the person.
[20] Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: the Thought of the Man who became Pope John Paul II, trans. Paolo Guietti and Francesca Murphy, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997, p. 89.
[21] Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki and established in collaboration with the author by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979, p.179.
[22] Gaudium et Spes, 24.
[23] Jn 13:34.
[24] Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man, found in Person and Community, trans. Theresa Sandok, New York: Peter Lang, 1993, p. 214.
[25] W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Person and Being, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993, p. 64.
[26] Ibid., p. 64.
[27] John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons V, London: Longmans, Green, And Co., 1909, p. 316.
