Thinking the Embodied Person with Karol Wojtyła

Abstract

Thinking the Embodied Person with Karol Wojtyła Angela Franz Franks Can the Body Be Thought? In the epigraph to her book Bodies That Matter, gender theorist Judith Butler quotes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: "If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it."1 The answer of Spivak and Butler to this quandary is to retreat from the field, abandoning the project of assigning meaning to the body. Better to engage the body in other ways than to try to approximate its concrete reality with bloodless abstractions that cannot come to the heart of the matter. Butler is famous for arguing that the body is not known, but performed in a complex activity of reiterating and resisting the power discourses that precede and envelop the human subject.2 [End Page 141] The loss of the body from thought is mirrored by the loss of the subject in recent philosophy, a development that witnesses to the intrinsic connection between the body and the concrete person. Hence the (in)famous "death of the subject" in postmodern thought.3 Nietzsche prophetically united the disparate threads of poststructuralist theory when he declared that "there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything."4 Abandoning himself to the impersonal and uncertain mercies of the will to power, he bid a definitive farewell to "that little changeling, the 'subject.'"5 While no poststructuralist, John Paul II has a similar appreciation for the difficulty of thinking the embodied person. He argues in his theology of the body that the realization of Adam and Eve that they were "naked" and "ashamed" (Gen 3:7) indicates a new and "specific difficulty in sensing the human essentiality of one's own body" after the first sin.6 This difficulty arises out of a "fracture in the human person's interior," in which the body is no longer subject to the spiritual powers of knowing and loving. It is instead "a constant hotbed of resistance against the spirit and threatens in some way man's unity as a person."7 Seen through this theological lens, the dualism [End Page 142] of Rene Descartes—a lordly res cogitans over and against a rebellious res extensa—is a theoretical sedimentation of the experiences of postlapsarian man.8 For John Paul II, however, unlike Butler and Spivak, the body—and the person that the body expresses—can be thought. This meaning is appropriated by the subject in a moment of self-knowledge and self-possession (intellect and will). Rather than a flight from thinking, a certain kind of thinking is necessary—what Karol Wojtyła called "hot thinking" in a passage from his play The Jeweler's Shop. There, he presents three couples: two older (one happy, one not) and one younger. Of the young betrothed lovers, Christopher is the son of the happy couple, while Monica comes from the broken family. As Monica struggles with the immensity of love, Christopher responds to her question "why do you love me?" by observing, "Man must think differently, must leave cold deliberations—and in that 'hot thinking' one question is important: Is it creative?"9 [End Page 143] What is this "hot thinking"? Since it arises in the context of a drama and not a treatise, we do not get a systematic treatment of it. Is it just an appealing metaphor tossed off by a playwright? Or is there something more to be understood? I would like to propose that Wojtyła's philosophical and theological project is intimately connected with elucidating this "hot thinking." He wants to unpack how embodied moral action forms and perfects the human personal subject. This action, however, occurs within the context of meaning ("thinking"). How is it that thought can adequately grapple with the realities intrinsic to concrete human persons, such as the body? Is it possible to think the body and particular human persons? This essay...