The problem of personalism in Karol Wojtyła’s debate with Max Scheler

Abstract

The article shows that already in his habilitation dissertation on Max Scheler’s ethics Karol Wojtyła defended the consistent ethical personalism, distorted by the German phenomenologist. However, the pertinent tying of moral values to the supreme, supra-instrumental value of the human person, involved its subjectivization, as a result of which Scheler’s claims to ethical objectivism are unfounded. Besides, in a completely unfounded manner he considered spontaneous emotionality as the centre of the person, thereby losing the person’s causative agency towards moral values, i.e. the central role of the human reason and free will in moral life, thus negating man’s moral responsibility for his actions. This assessment of Scheler’s ethics has relevance for discernment in contemporary posthumanist ethics, which – following Scheler’s lead – attributes the guiding role in moral life to spontaneous emotions.