Everyone who had lived through the brutalities of the Occupation and the imposition of communism had confronted the ancient philosophical question, “What is a human being?” in urgent, unavoidable ways. Why had some men and women acted like beasts while others had shown remarkable heroism? What accounted for the fact that, while some people were grotesquely self-serving, to the point of betraying their friends, others were nobly self-sacrificing, laying down their lives for others they may have known only slightly? The only way to get at these problems, the KUL philosophers agreed, was through a deepening of philosophical anthropology, the subdiscipline of philosophy that dealt with the nature, circumstances, and destiny of the human person. What is “human nature,” and how are we to understand its dynamics? How is that curious blend of matter and spirit, the human person, built? How are we to explain the difference in kind between human beings and other sentient creatures? What, if anything, is the point or goal of life? These questions, hardy perennials in the garden of philosophical inquiry since the ancient Greeks, took on an especially sharp edge at KUL in the late 1940s and the early 1950s.
Convinced that a crisis in modernity’s understanding of the human person lay at the root of the century’s distress, the KUL philosophers began to sketch out a philosophical initiative that would link together three large sets of questions: metaphysics (a general theory of reality, a way of explaining things-as-they-are) and anthropology (the nature and destiny of the human person) would meet in ethics (the question, “What ought we do?”). The KUL philosophers believed that the problem of ethics posed itself in a particularly urgent way because of the new political situation. Communism was not only an unsatisfactory, reductionistic account of things-as-they-are and a crude caricature of humanism; communism’s totalitarian politics stripped men and women of their power of choice, of responsibility, and thus of their humanity.
The counter to both communist materialism and communist politics, the KUL philosophers thought, was a more complete humanism that gave a more compelling account of human moral intuitions and human moral action. In proposing to do this without falling into the quicksand of thinking about thinking about thinking, the KUL philosophers set themselves no small task. Indeed, it involved nothing less than recasting the entire direction of philosophy since the Enlightenment. Moreover, it was a project with a distinctive edge, for the KUL philosophers proposed to fight the great political-philosophical battle on Marxism’s own ground—the question of the true liberation of the human person.
The KUL project was defined by a quartet of relatively young men who had become professors at KUL because Poland’s Stalinist rulers had expelled the older teachers. The four included Jerzy Kalinowski (the dean of the Philosophy Faculty, a specialist in logic and the philosophy of law), Stefan Swiezawski (a historian of philosophy and an exponent of the existential Thomism of Jacques Maritain), Father Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec (a Dominican specialist in metaphysics), and Father Karol Wojtyła (a specialist in ethics). They were later joined by Fathers Marian Kurdziałek (who specialized in ancient philosophy) and Stanisław Kamiński (a specialist in epistemology, or the theory of knowledge).40 These were very different personalities, with divergent interests and academic specialties. They nonetheless achieved what Swiezawski later called a “rare and exceptionally fruitful collaboration,” built around four agreements.41
They began with an ancient conviction—they would be radically realistic about the world and about the human capacity to know it. If our thinking and choosing lacks a tether to reality, the KUL philosophers believed, raw force takes over the world and truth becomes a function of power, not an expression of things-as-they-are. A communist-era joke in Poland expressed this realist imperative in a way that everyone could grasp: “Party boss: ‘How much is 2+2?’ Polish worker: ‘How much would you like it to be?’” The political meaning of the realist assumption of the KUL philosophers was later expressed in the famous Solidarity election poster that read, “For Poland to be Poland, 2+2 must always = 4.” Human beings can only be free in the truth, and the measure of truth is reality.42
The KUL philosophers also agreed to adopt a distinctively modern starting point for philosophical inquiry. Philosophy would begin with a disciplined reflection on human experience rather than with cosmology (a general theory of the universe), as ancient and medieval philosophy and the neo-scholasticism Wojtyła had been taught at the Angelicum had done. Because human beings are the only creatures aware of their own being and capable of wonder at that amazing fact, thinking should begin with the human person, “a remarkable psychophysical unity, each one a unique person, never again to be repeated in the entire universe.”43 The stakes were high here. If philosophy could get to the truth of things-as-they-are through an analysis of human experience, then the path to a reconciliation between Catholic philosophy and the scientific method could be opened while, concurrently, modernity would be free from the dungeon of solipsism.44 Adopting this starting point was also important in the confrontation with Marxism. There, the serious questions did not involve who understood physics better, but certain very basic issues: What is the human vocation? How do we build history? Is the redemption of history to be understood in material and political terms, or does history have a transcendent dimension?45
Another fundamental agreement among the KUL philosophers was their commitment to reason. Other thinkers might have had the cultural, economic, and political freedom to speculate about the alleged absurdity of life. The KUL philosophers, veterans of the cultural resistance against Nazism, had no such luxury. They had seen the films of Hitler’s Nuremberg party rallies; they had been subjected to more than five years of Nazi propaganda; they had lived through a brutal occupation. They knew what irrationalism could do if it got loose in history with sufficient material force. But the KUL philosophers’ commitment to the method of reason was coupled with a determination that they would not get caught in the endless cycle that the Polish philosopher Wojciech Chudy would later call the “trap of reflection.” Rather, their thought would illuminate what good men and women ought to do.
Finally, the KUL philosophers agreed that they would practice an ecumenism of time. If they refused to be imprisoned inside their own consciousness, they also declined to be slaves to contemporaneity. The history of philosophy had things to teach the present; the past had not been made completely disposable by modernity.46
These were men who believed that ideas were not intellectuals’ toys. Ideas had consequences, for good and for ill. The history of the twentieth century’s various torments, proved that defective understandings of the human person, human community, and human destiny were responsible for mountains of corpses and oceans of blood. If they could help the world get a firmer purchase on the truth of the human condition, in a way that was distinctively modern and grounded in the great philosophical tradition of the West, the future might be different.
The KUL philosophers were a community of personal and intellectual friendship. Prior to being a reader of Wojtyła’s dissertation on Scheler, Stefan Swiezawski and his wife, Maria, had known the young priest at St. Florian’s in Kraków, where he had been the catechist and confessor of their two daughters. There was virtually no family anniversary at the Swiezawskis in which Wojtyła did not participate. He, in turn, acknowledged on many occasions his great intellectual debt to Swiezawski’s book, Being. (During his entire tenure at KUL, Professor Swiezawski commuted to Lublin from Kraków or Warsaw, the authorities being mysteriously unable to grant him an apartment in the city where he taught—a perfect illustration of the petty harassment meted out to the KUL faculty by the Polish communist regime.) Wojtyła also became close to the Kalinowski family, and was godfather for Jerzy Kalinowski’s daughter.47 Hiking and skiing trips together cemented the bonds of friendship in more pleasant circumstances than the departmental offices.
The KUL philosophers were also that rarity in academic life, a genuine team. On virtually every trip Father Wojtyła made to Lublin, he and his
colleagues met as a group to talk through the common project in which they were engaged. Although Kalinowski, as dean, was the initiator of their conversations, this was a gathering of equals who, as John Paul II later recalled, found it a “great advantage” to learn from each other’s distinctive perspective and current work.48
At the same time there were real arguments and intellectual differences among the KUL philosophers, some of whom (like Father Krąpiec) had combative personalities. Karol Wojtyła’s continuing interest in phenomenology and his ongoing investigation of modern and contemporary philosophy raised eyebrows among some of his more traditional colleagues, as did his philosophical and professorial style. He had a generally “unfootnoted” way of doing philosophy—rather “like a peasant,” his premier student later noted—and he was far more concerned with mapping the terrain of things-as-they-are than with providing an extensive academic apparatus of citations and cross-references for every proposal or assertion.49 Father Wojtyła was also singularly free of that professorial gravitas usually associated with senior academics in European universities.
To say that the KUL philosophy faculty had its disagreements and, in some respects, its rivalries, is simply to say that it was a faculty of men, not angels. The important thing about the KUL philosophers was the boldness of their intention. They first conceived their project as a response to the peculiar circumstances of their time and place. The range of its reach and its capacity to shed light on the human condition in very different situations would only come into focus when Professor Karol Wojtyła took the most adventurous part of the Lublin project to an audience whose numbers vastly exceeded the readership of Polish philosophical journals.
THE PROFESSOR
Stefan Swiezawski was not much taken by phenomenology himself, his tastes in contemporary philosophy running more to the linguistic analysts. Still, he had studied under the great Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden in Lwów, and his appointment as one of the three readers of Karol Wojtyła’s habilitation thesis on Max Scheler had convinced him that the young priest’s rapid development as a philosopher warranted bringing him into the KUL project. In September 1954, Swiezawski and his wife, Maria, were hiking with their friend Father Wojtyła in the mountains south of Kraków, and Swiezawski “heatedly” urged Wojtyła to join the KUL Philosophy Faculty. Wojtyła may have imagined that his post-habilitation academic work would be in Kraków, but Swiezawski pressed him hard, and within a month the KUL academic senate had agreed to Wojtyła’s appointment as a docent in philosophical ethics. After the arrangement had been approved by Archbishop Baziak, Father Karol Wojtyła began commuting to Lublin from Kraków. In November 1956, at the beginning of his third year on the KUL staff, Wojtyła succeeded the Dominican Feliks Bednarski (who had been transferred to the Angelicum) in the Chair of Ethics in the KUL Faculty of Philosophy, a position he would hold for twenty-two years.
While continuing his student and health-care chaplaincies in Kraków, Father Wojtyła came to KUL every two weeks during the academic year. To save time, he took the overnight train, arriving in Lublin early in the morning. He was sometimes joined on the train by Father Franciszek Tokarz, a professor of Hindu philosophy, who, after getting to know Wojtyła, once betook himself to the Kraków chancery office and said, “Make him a bishop. He is wise, pious, and good. That’s the difference between him and me. When I get up in the morning and go out for a cigarette, he’s praying. And when I get back he’s still praying.”50 The impact, if any, of Professor Tokarz’s unsolicited advice is unknown to history, but the two men, whose philosophical interests were vastly different, became friends.
The accommodations for visiting faculty at KUL were not elegant. The transients bunked down in a multiroomed apartment, where the only permanent resident, Stefan Sawicki, a young assistant professor of literature, lived in the kitchen. The apartment included a double room, a triple room, and one single room. Commuting professors used to argue about who would get the single room. Wojtyła never asked for it. Once, when there was no bed free, he slept on a table.51
The trains being what they were, Wojtyła was often late for class, rushing to KUL from the station. He told his students that he was operating on “Kraków time,” not Lublin time.52 He donated his salary, anonymously, to a scholarship fund that helped impoverished students pay for their education. His students in the mid-1950s remember his walking around the KUL campus in a frayed cassock and old overcoat. They also remember that he would frequently step into the campus chapel for a moment of prayer between classes or meetings.53
Wojtyła was an enormously popular professor, always approachable, in or out of class. His talent for relating theoretical material to the issues of everyday life gave his classes a concreteness that students found attractive. This was someone fascinated by people and the human condition in all its variety, a man capable of fostering a “deeper interaction” with his students than other faculty members. “He was interested in us as persons,” as one former student summarized his magnetism.54 Wojtyła also immersed himself in pastoral work at KUL, hearing confessions and counseling students who came to him with personal problems or for spiritual direction.55
His introductory-level courses on general philosophical ethics were delivered without notes. Wojtyła spoke slowly and developed his material through illustrations drawn from the students’ own experiences. He used the examples of women in childbirth, soldiers together in combat, and religious celibates to demonstrate how men and women well-known to undergraduates exemplified the giving of oneself in service to others—a key norm in Wojtyła’s personalist ethic.56 This “Law of the Gift” was built into the human condition, he argued philosophically. Responsible self-giving, not self-assertion, was the road to human fulfillment. Wojtyła posed it not only as an ethic for Christians, but as a universal moral demand arising from the dynamics of the human person, who is truly a person only in relationship. A genuinely human existence was always coexistence, a meeting with others wisely.57
Wojtyła also taught upper-level philosophy courses for students in the later years of the five-year basic program at KUL, which led to a master’s degree. These “monographic lectures” (as the advanced courses were known), delivered from handwritten notes over a year-long cycle, were far more difficult than the introductory course and involved an intense dialogue between Wojtyła and major figures in the Western philosophical tradition: Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant, Hume, and Bentham, and, of course, Max Scheler. In delivering these demanding lectures, which emphasized freedom as the essence of man’s spiritual nature, Wojtyła did not simply read his notes to his students. This was a dialogue with the philosophies of others, an exercise in “thinking as contemplation.” Sometimes both professor and students would stop “and simply admire the beauty of the text.”58
The lecture titles illustrated Wojtyła’s effort to link philosophical realism (the analysis of things-as-they-are) to a philosophy of human consciousness: a “both/and” approach that demonstrated the lecturer’s attempt to present the human reality in as full and rich a manner as possible and his conviction that Western philosophy had gone off the rails when our way of knowing the world got detached from the world itself. In 1954–1955, Wojtyła’s monographic lectures dealt with “Act and Moral Experience”—the “structure” of a moral act and how we experience ourselves as moral actors. The principal interlocutors here were Max Scheler and his ethics of value, Immanuel Kant and his ethics of duty, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of potency and action.59 Wojtyła’s synthetic conclusion to this four-way dialogue was another demonstration of his personalism: “The moral values of honesty and courage, through honest and courageous action, become an honest and courageous person.”60
The next two years of monographic lectures filled in the detail of this framework in conversation with two millennia of Western thinking.61 His 1955–1956 lectures addressed “Goodness and Value,” the possibility of defining an objective measure of moral action, and the way
that moral norms grow in us through our moral action. The 1956–1957 lectures took up the issue of “Norm and Happiness.” Again, the question was to put an objective moral standard, “given” in reality, into conversation with the experience of happiness that derives from acting well. In 1957–1958 and 1958–1959, Wojtyła worked through questions of sexual ethics in a series of lectures entitled “Love and Responsibility.” His 1960–1961 upper-division course was the most abstract of the series, dealing with the “Theory and Methodology of Ethics.” Pastoral obligations in Kraków made it impossible for Wojtyła to teach the advanced course in 1959–1960, and after the 1960–1961 series he dropped the course for lack of time.62
In addition to his other teaching responsibilities, Professor Wojtyła led a doctoral seminar in philosophical ethics in which his most advanced students began to prepare their dissertations. Even as his pastoral responsibilities in Kraków expanded, Wojtyła tenaciously held on to the responsibility of preparing doctoral candidates, bringing the students to him when necessary. This was the venue in which Wojtyła began to develop philosophical disciples and he enjoyed it tremendously.
The doctoral seminar was often conducted outdoors, in the hills or along mountain trails, Wojtyła sometimes lecturing while seated on a log. He was, according to his students, an excellent seminar leader, refusing to dominate, helping his students learn to think philosophically by gently compelling them to comment on what they were reading or writing. His skills as a listener, honed in pastoral life, were particularly transferable to this kind of teaching. So was his sometimes disconcerting capacity to do two things at once. When the seminar moved to the archbishop’s residence in Kraków, Professor Cardinal Wojtyła would handle his correspondence while listening to a presentation and discussion, saying little, but then offering a cogent summary of the discussion in which no essential point was missed.63
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