SOURCE: “Objectifying the Subjective,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 4, 1980, p. 397.

In the following review, Poltawski examines John Paul's moral and philosophical perspective in The Acting Person.

This is the present Pope, Karol Wojtyla's, main philosophical work, in which he tries to give an outline of his philosophical anthropology. The point of departure is man as he is given to himself in and through his actions.

The author's position may be described as phenomenological realism. But this is not the realism criticized by Heidegger for introducing ready-made external things into the sense-bestowing human subjectivity; nor does it embrace the tendency of the traditional, cosmological approach to regard man as a thing among other things in the universe. If Wojtyla accepts the traditional Aristotelian metaphysics in its general outline, he at the same time shows its inadequacy when applied to human subjectivity. What the traditional approach could not give was...