In Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyła twice restates the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, in one case omitting the term “merely,” and in another emphasizing that any human being who is the end of one’s action must be treated with the dignity of a person who has his own last end. In essence, Wojtyła argues that a person who is the object of one’s moral action must be treated neither merely as a means, nor merely as an end. Some commentators have seen in his position a simple misapprehension of Kant. A more careful analysis may disclose that Wojtyła performs a comprehensive critique of Kant’s imperative in light of differing epistemological and moral principles. At issue is the philosopher’s stone, the relation between morality and moral insight; Wojtyła seeks the motivating power behind the moral act through a move from a value-oriented approach to a metaphysical analysis. Here, the metaphysics that Wojtyła entertains is not the ontology, or metaphysics of entia, that Kant rejected, but a metaphysics (which Kant did not specifically engage) of the person, based on esse as actus essendi. For Wojtyła, then, the issue is not just whether, but what kind of metaphysics to have.
This issue marks a fundamental divergence between Wojtyła’s thought and Kant’s, which is exemplified in the relationship between moral act and moral experience, and which Wojtyła locates in Kant’s rejection of the possibility of metaphysics as a science. To the extent that reason is conceived as an autonomous subject of acts, independent from human being, the philosophy of consciousness will supplant the philosophy of being. If the motivation for ethical action is sought within reason itself, the philosopher’s stone will remain unsolved; if Wojtyła is correct, however, it may be sought outside, in what Kant would reject as a heteronomous source. Here, however, Kant and Wojtyła affirm different notions of autonomy: Kant, an absolute autonomy, founded in the universality of reason; Wojtyła, a relative autonomy, founded in the normative power of truth.
The categorical imperative will naturally seek a different expression depending on which of these perspectives one adopts. In this paper, then, I will trace the development and application of Wojtyła’s critique of the Kantian imperative in light of their epistemological differences. At the root of Wojtyła’s theory of participation and of his critique of Kant on the categorical imperative and the commandment to love, there is a contention that the human person is a subject of morality, and an object of love, in a way that transcends the limits of autonomous reason. This contention, founded in the biblical commandment to love and in a personalistic norm distilled from it, lies, for Wojtyła, at the heart of Christian ethics. Man’s very subjectivity derives from a transcendent Source, an ultimate foundation toward which it must also morally tend. The normativity of the ethical life is ultimately expressed in a “law of the gift,” according to which the moral creativity of the human person comes to be characterized by an imperative of a gift of self, exemplified in Wojtyła’s reformulated categorical imperative. At stake is the meaning not only of the question, “What must I do?” but even of the question, “What may I hope?”
The paper will explore these questions in light of these issues, briefly showing their application in Wojtyła’s theory of participation, his notion of education, and his vision of marriage and the family, and concluding with the possibility that Wojtyła’s reformulated imperative may display an aperture to hope as an inalienable dimension of human moral experience.
