Notre Dame professor of philosophy Adrian J. Reimers is in Poland on a Fulbright Scholarship this semester. He currently resides in an apartment just two blocks away from young Karol Wojtyla’s (later Pope John Paul II) home during the Nazi occupation between 1938 and 1944. It is also within an easy walk of the Wawel Cathedral and Castle, which overlook the Vistula River. This was Cardinal Wojtyla’s Cathedral in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Reimers received his BS in Mathematics and MA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD from Internationale Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein. Reimers then returned to his alma mater to teach philosophy. Reimer teaches popular courses such as “Philosophy and Theology of the Body” and “Philosophy of Human Nature” at the University of Notre Dame.
In the following interview, Reimers shares with The Rover a description of the work he plans to do in Poland.
Can you describe metaphysical personalism to me such that I could explain it to friends who have never heard of it?
There are several schools of thought that can or do describe themselves in terms of “metaphysical personalism,” but I don’t think this expression helps us to understand John Paul II’s thought. When it comes to metaphysics, he was very much a disciple of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. “But wait, Professor,” you may object, “he doesn’t write like any Thomist I’ve ever read. And anyway, wasn’t he a phenomenologist?” This is true on both counts. His philosophical writings do not look or sound very much like Aquinas. And he does owe an explicit debt to the 20th Century phenomenological school—especially to Max Scheler. And this is where his originality lies.
Does personalism emphasize neither body nor soul, but an immaterial consciousness, an awareness of self?
Certainly much of contemporary personalism does emphasize immaterial consciousness or awareness of self. We could say that this is even characteristic of what many thinkers mean by “personalism.” John Paul II clearly rejects this kind of personalism. He says that if all we focus on is consciousness, then the person simply disappears. This is the point of his book THE ACTING PERSON. The person is revealed not so much in consciousness but in his free acts.
Although he had read a lot of personalist thinking, John Paul II never called himself a personalist. He did speak a lot about the person. Let me share an example: Most of his career in Poland was spent in confrontation with Marxists, who spoke constantly about “the worker, the worker” as simply a member of his class. As a proletarian, the worker is oppressed, exploited by capitalists, and thus in inevitable conflict with the bourgeoisie.
Wojtyla argued that even if he is oppressed and exploited, the worker is more than a member of a class. He is a person who realizes himself in his work, in his family life, in his other activities and relationships. The Marxists found this hard to refute. Later, in his first encyclical, REDEMPTOR HOMINIS, he said that man—this man (that is, the person)—is the way for the Church.
I understand that personalism is a school of thought that dates back to the ancient philosophers. What has John Paul II specifically contributed to this way of thinking?
The concept of PERSON traces back to the Middle Ages and to the efforts of Christian theologians to come to grips with the doctrine of the Trinity—one God and three Persons. But this concept, which Boethius characterized as “individual substance of a rational nature,” also applies to human beings. The Holy Spirit is thus a substance, but so are you and I and Donald Trump. Later thinkers—and here St. Thomas Aquinas stands out—recognized that to be a person is to have a special dignity. But in his writings, Thomas and his contemporaries focused primarily on human nature, on the composition of body and soul, the powers of the soul (intellect and will), and so on. They didn’t do a personalism as such.
So we come to the modern era—empirical science and the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment—and the legacy of Descartes, Kant, and Hume (among others). Increasingly personhood becomes identified with the consciousness we have of ourselves. So the answer to the question, “Who am I?” becomes entirely subjective: “I am my thoughts and desires, my memories and current perceptions. The person that I am is my inner life.” A person is a being with a conscious inner life. An effect of this is that the body and mind of the person can be seen as radically separated, and this has serious consequences.
For instance, Peter Singer and others will argue that although a fetus or even a newborn infant may be a HUMAN BEING, he is not a PERSON, because he lacks that inner mental life that a person must have. Many people will argue that as persons we cannot be biologically destined. That is, whether one is male or female is only incidental to his or her personhood. WHO I AM cannot be determined by my biological constitution, i.e. my sex. And so we come to speak of ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex’. I am born—and perhaps “stuck”—with a male body, but I can identify as female.
Karol Wojtyla recognized the importance of the modern accentuation of consciousness—and hence on the subjective—and rather than to fight it, he addressed it and used it. In a way, he tried to think St Thomas from the inside. So he used the intellectual tools provided by phenomenology (which is a very well developed and disciplined philosophy of consciousness) to delve into the analyses offered by St Thomas. In this way he hoped to develop an “adequate anthropology” that will be both true and accessible to the modern mentality. The fullest expression of this adequate anthropology is in his Theology of the Body teachings.
Did metaphysical personalism emerge from personalism? Is the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition “pre-personalism?”
I’m not sure what to say about “metaphysical personalism,” because I’m not sure that it has a univocal meaning. The metaphysical personalists I know best are reacting against the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. I would say that they emerged from modern, Enlightenment tendencies of thought. In this sense you could say that Thomas and his forebears were “pre-personalist,” but I wouldn’t—largely because Thomas says so much that is important to an authentic personalism (such as that of John Paul II).
If the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition is “pre-personalism,” why is it important that JPII’s metaphysics are like St. Thomas’s metaphysics? Is it because John Paul II is essentially bringing a Thomistic perspective to personalism through Thomistic metaphysics?
A couple of days ago I was walking through my new neighborhood, just a couple of blocks where young Wojtyla had lived, and I became very aware of how these selfsame streets and houses were filled with sick fear. I walk openly and freely, carrying in my pocket the secure guarantees from my American passport. When young Karol walked these streets, people were picked up for no reason at all and never seen again—taken to the camps or shot, and after the Nazis left the communists took over. How can this happen? Young Fr. Wojtyla came to realize that these ideologies were based on a badly flawed understanding of human nature, that reduced the individual human being—the person—to a thing to be used by the power of the State. And he saw that even in free Western cultures there is the same tendency to see human beings not as persons but as things, as parts of a whole or as isolated atoms of a kind of statistical mass. For this reason he focused his thought and his teaching on the prerogatives of the person and his inherent dignity. This dignity, he argues, is rooted in the fact that each person is created in the image of God. In the final analysis, the only way truly to understand the person is through the Incarnate Word, Christ, who shares our human nature and is a person like us.
What do you hope to accomplish during this semester in the homeland of John Paul II?
First of all, I want to know John Paul II better, to learn his language and to read his works in it. I hope to get to know the Polish thinkers who have been working with his writings and to learn from them. Really, it’s a pilgrimage that is both spiritual and scholarly. There are unpublished lectures here which I hope to be able to access, and I want to see more of what he wrote about marriage and about society and the common good. But my real purpose is to know him better.
In many ways, we have been blessed already during the first week of our stay here. A couple of days before we left for Poland, the Holy Father announced the beatification of John Paul II on May 1. So as Krakow celebrates this great event, we will be here with them. And Fr. Gregory Holub, who was a visiting scholar through the Nanovic Institute back in ’97, has found us an apartment near the Vistula River and the Wawel Cathedral.
My Polish hosts have been very gracious, and because of my association with Notre Dame, they think I must be important!
According to Gabby Speach, Elliott Marie Argue doesn’t march – she flies. Gracefully of course. Contact her for lessons at eargue@nd.edu.
