Wojtyla, Karol. Man in the Field of Responsibility.

Simpson, Peter

WOJTYLA, Karol. Man in the Field of Responsibility. Translated by Kenneth W. Kemp and Maslanka Kieron. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2011. xx + 84 pp. Cloth, $17.00--Man in the Field of Responsibility was written by Karol Wojtyla in 1972 as a conspectus for a book that he and his student Fr. Tadeusz Styczen were planning to write. The conspectus became the basis for discussion between Wojtyla and others at Lublin, but Wojtyla's election to Pope in 1978 ended the discussions and the project. He agreed to let Fr. Styczen publish the conspectus in 1991.

The book is about what Wojtyla "bracketed" or "factored out" in his study The Acting Person. The latter was a phenomenological analysis of the person as a doer of acts, and, while it could not fail to touch on moral norms, it was not concerned with norms but with the experiential ground of norms in the acting person. Man in the Field of Responsibility is meant to be the companion work that does deal with norms.

The book is divided into three parts with multiple chapters in each. These parts are: "Morality as the Field Proper to Ethics"; "The Normativity of Ethics and the Responsibility of the Person"; and "The Natural Law and the Personalistic Norm." The work is heavily informed by the phenomenology of the person. The starting point is the person's experience of morality, and this experience is to be taken as an indubitable given, not as a problematic posit or a methodological construct or an illusion of consciousness needing to be deconstructed.

The experience of morality is the experience of normativity or of duty, the "I ought," but only the "I ought" that is bound to the person and to being good and bad as a person (and not, say, as an electrician): "The essence of morality lies in the fact that a man, as a man, becomes good or evil through the act." This becoming is my making myself, through my own efficacy, to be or not to be good, and it is the experience, not merely of good, but of good as command to be good. Morality is essentially normative because the good of morality is essentially normative.

Wojtyla is both Kantian and not Kantian here: Kantian in centering morality on duty and not Kantian in centering duty on the good. He is not conceiving the good as command, but conceiving command as the call of the good. He embraces teleology, then, but with a certain "correction," by moving the central questions of ethics "one entire step back." One must be teleological, but one must conceive the telos or the good normatively, not practically. To conceive the good as end of action is to conceive it practically; to conceive the good as prescribing action is to conceive it normatively. The weight of Wojtyla's analysis shifts, if you like, from the "bonum" in the traditional "bonum est faciendum" to the "faciendum" or even to the "... endum," but without the Kantian loss of the "bonum." Desire is not at the center of morality for Wojtyla, but rather conscience is, and so he focuses, not on an Aristotelian "highest good," nor indeed on a Kantian "thou shalt," but rather on a Wojtylan "thou shalt be good."

Man in the Field of Responsibility's three parts may be seen as saying the following three things: part one: take conscience as the primary datum in morals; part two: see conscience as pointing to the good one should make oneself to be; part three: see the good one should make oneself to be as expressed in the natural law of the personalistic norm. The first two parts, one may say, are about the fundamental normative structure of morality, the third part about the norms of morality.

These norms are whatever is entailed in or by the personalistic norm, or by respect for persons, both oneself and others. What norms are thus entailed? We are not told in the work. We could perhaps read them off from traditional natural law teaching. If we want to know how Wojtyla would or did "read them off," we should turn either to Love and Responsibility or to his papal encyclicals, above all Evangelium Vitae.

Man in the Field of Responsibility gives insight into how Wojtyla would have written a book on moral theory if he had not become pope. Its schematic nature does make the book tantalizingly brief, yet not so brief that one cannot see how to fill it out (he gives occasional asides how to fill it out). It might well serve as a fine text book in how to do ethics in the light of phenomenology, for it is brief enough to provoke independent thought about what might be missing, yet schematic enough not to leave that independent thought without guidance.--Peter Simpson, City University of New York.