Abstract

Schmitz, whose insightful crudition matches that of his subject, traces the development of Wojtyla's project from the plays he wrote in the 1940s for the underground "theater of the living word," through his assimilation of the philosophical tradition as professor of ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, then through the maturation of his own thought as Archbishop of Krakow and active participant in Vatican II, and into its flowering in the remarkable series of papal documents beginning with his Wednesday talks on Genesis and first encyclical, The Redeemer of Man. Schmitz assesses the effort to integrate contemporary phenomenology into the metaphysical tradition as depending on several careful distinctions. The first is between a Husserlian bracketing of being and an algebraic one. Another is between phenomenology as a technique that presupposes a realistic metaphysics, and as an effort to establish realism that must fail because the intended object of consciousness is still consciousness itself, not an extramental world. A third is between value as a felt good and goodness as coincident with being. Only this latter allows for objective moral norms, for moral goodness that coincides with the existential fullness of human nature, and for moral obligation. The answer to the question "Why be moral?" thus has its solid answer in the potentiality of human nature for fuller, self-transcendent being.