“Beauty of the Person” According to Karol Wojtyła (Ontology and Experience)

Abstract

This paper outlines the essential core of Karol Wojtyła’s thought on beauty. By introducing the central category of “beauty of the person”, Wojtyła essentially integrated and ordered therewith all the other meanings of the term. Whatever is beautiful in an adequate sense is also morally good. As far as human beauty is concerned, Wojtyła pointed out that it is differentiated by gender, i.e. female beauty and male beauty, and by “layers,” i.e. external beauty (aesthetic, sensual and bodily beauty) and, more importantly, internal beauty, which constitutes the beauty of a person as a person. Outer beauty allows a person to be noticed, to be discovered, but in love one cannot stop at outer beauty (the temptation to treat the body as a possible object of use). For love is love of the whole person, not only of his or her beautiful body and sexual attractiveness. A specific issue is the analysis of the creation of beautiful things, which at the same time are imprinted in the interior of man and – as long as man does not give in to the egoistic “temptation of self-emptying” – bear witness to his “immortality.”