Karol Wojtyla’s Response to 19th and 20th Century Materialist Philosophies of Man - Paper by Stephen Beach

Karol Wojtyla’s Response to 19th and 20th Century Materialist Philosophies of Man

Excerpt:

Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 and lived most of his life in his beloved Poland. During this time, he experienced the occupation of Poland by the German Nazis during the Second World War, as well as a longer occupation by the Soviet Communists after the war. The philosophical and theological writings he produced were undoubtedly shaped by these experiences. A central theme to his writings deals with establishing an adequate understanding of the dignity of the human person against the sweeping Materialist philosophies that drove the totalitarian regimes of the time. These regimes committed acts against humanity by exterminating groups of people into the tens of millions. In fact, in the 20th Century, almost everywhere in which fascism or communism took hold, it was inevitably followed by a mass genocide of people. These new movements were driven by a philosophical understanding of man which was a break from the Christian influenced West of the past. Consider the sign above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, “Work will set you free.” A demonic taunt of irony in a place which more represents Hell on earth than any type of rehabilitation. They had to destroy humanity for humanity to be reborn in a new image. The goal of this paper is to lay out the underlying philosophies of the Materialist anthropologies of 20th Century Nazism and Communism in order to better understand the justification used for these mass genocides. The paper will then present the philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyla as a response to those ideologies, holding that man is grounded in a metaphysical nature, called into authentic intersubjectivity with others, and who is only fully understood in the light of the Absolute.

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