John Paul II’s Exploration of the Full Personhood of Women

The Contemporary Metaphysics of Power and Sex

Are women rational and free persons? Catholicism’s answer should be easy to discern, surely, given that Christianity was uniquely supportive of the equal human dignity of women in the ancient world. Yet many loud voices are claiming that the Catholic faith teaches that the sexes are unequal.

This situation is due, ironically, to mainstream feminism, which is primarily committed to the tenets of the sexual revolution. The inability of this movement to reckon with the ineradicable realities of human generation, as well as its dismissal of the very real costs of technology such as hormonal contraception and abortion, has led to a necessary backlash. Too often, however, the traditionalist forces opposing such feminism have succumbed to ideologies as equally ungrounded in reality as what they oppose.

In particular, such right-wing ways of thinking deny the fundamental humanity of women in an attempt to reverse-engineer the rejection of female fertility. In these accounts, female fertility and more expansively female weakness are embraced as the defining qualities of women. One must admit that this gets us closer to the genuine root of sexed difference—the sexually dual ways of generating a child—than the incoherences of the sexual revolution. But these proposals root female fertility in a hierarchy of inequality, such that the female is a lesser version of the humanity located in the fullest sense in the male.

Further, this inequality is closely grafted to a metaphysics of power (akin to the ontologies of Nietzsche and Foucault), in which power is sexualized, in two ways. Power is now both the most basic difference between the male and female sexes, and it is also the root of sexual attraction between men and women. In other words, according to this way of thinking and desiring, strong men find it sexy to rule over weak women, and women find it sexy to be so ruled. I call this a right-wing power fetish, and if it sounds a lot like the content of about ninety percent of all porn, you would not be wrong, either about what is too often feeding this fetish or about its distinctively contemporary flavor.

For example, one book (now withdrawn from the market) repeatedly uses “boss” language to describe the role of the husband over the wife. Practically speaking, this boss-inferior relation demands that the wife ask permission from her husband to do anything, right down to leaving the house.[1] The spousal relationship is explicitly presented as a relationship of inequality between the superior husband and the inferior wife.

The real neuralgic point is married women working outside the home, but viewing this through the right-wing power fetish helps to make sense of it. What happens if another man rules over a married woman in the working world? Then she is not allowing her husband to be her total boss, according to this book. For this worldview, this situation is not merely a matter of dividing her time and attention away from her husband. It is a kind of spiritual adultery.

Why? Because the husband’s rule concerning practical affairs is on a continuum with his sexual rule. This fact is another reason why the legalistic and, frankly, pornified transformation of the “marital debt” into a free-use fetish is so prominent in this camp, namely, that wives be sexually available to their husbands for “whatever, wherever, whenever.” This power fetish demands constant sexual availability as a stable sign of the constant ontological fact that man’s relation to woman is a matter of power over her. If his authority to rule in this tyrannical way is challenged, the very fabric of the cosmic order as created by God is disrupted. But if wives obey like this, so the idea goes, it will usher in a paradise of human happiness, the only thing necessary being that all men and women buy into this power ontology.

Many traditionally-minded women and not a few men have effectively aimed their intellectual firepower at the weak arguments promoted by the right-wing power fetishists.[2] Here I want to emphasize that, in all metaphysics of power, women with their relative physical weakness vis-à-vis men will always be the losers. To quote Spencer Klavan:

Recently the provocateur H. Pearl Davis tweeted, “I keep trying to think of things women are better at and I can’t think of any lol.” Of course she can’t. She is among the many post-feminist, post-Christian influencers who now size up men and women by the neo-pagan standards of raw strength and wealth. Another is the hugely prominent Andrew Tate, who argues that “the truth about women is they are always gonna be a weakness for a man.” The swaggering edgelords who idolize Tate and the would-be tradwives who nod along with Pearl are united in seeing no real use for women except as subalterns in the harem of some steampunk chieftain in a regressive tribal future.[3]

This anthropology has an increasing hold on both right and left, as they reduce the truth of the human person to a power game between stronger and weaker.

Against this, can we present a fuller vision? The last hundred or so years of the Catholic magisterial tradition has engaged with the questions at a deeper level, reaching a high point with the magisterium of John Paul II, who promoted a “‘new feminism’ which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination,’ in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.” This was a clear play to replace the sexual-revolutionary version of feminism with something grounded in female dignity and its “genius.”[4] Instead of providing a survey of that tradition here, I will engage more deeply with the philosophy of the person as presented by Karol Wojtyła in his masterwork, Person and Act. In that work, the Polish cardinal and future pope, without directly intending to, presents the rationale for why women are indeed fully human. First, however, I will provide some background to the recent English translation of the work.

The Convoluted History of Osoba i Czyn

Osoba i czyn—best translated Person and Act—was first published in 1969 in Kraków. Yet this volume included no subheadings nor footnotes. Anyone who has read a little of Wojtyła knows that his love of subheadings is second only to his love for italics, and so he began to rework the text, editing the introduction and first chapter and adding subheadings plus a few footnotes.

The trouble began almost immediately. Editors of both the Polish and the English texts began to tinker—sometimes significantly—with the texts. The editor of the English Person and Act edition was Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a dedicated phenomenologist who lacked Wojtyła’s appreciation of classical metaphysics. Accordingly, she oversaw a translation in which his clear, traditional terms of art were rendered unrecognizable, the better to obscure Wojtyła’s debts to that tradition. This endeavor began with the title, which was renamed The Acting Person.

The most egregious example of this translational obscuration is seen in the title of §3 in Part 1, ch. 2, which was given as “The Synthesis of Efficacy and Subjectiveness. The Person as a Basic Ontological Structure.” The last phrase is puzzling, because vague. What does “basic” mean? What is an “ontological structure”? For that matter, what does “ontological” signal? The metaphysics of Christian Wolff?

These confusions disappear when the subtitle is translated correctly: “The Synthesis of Efficacy and Subjectivity. Man as ‘Suppositum.’” Ah, suppositum! Reading this, what a different situation we are in now. While Wojtyła’s approach to man as a suppositum is certainly unique, his originality is now seen to be within a broadly Aristotelian metaphysical tradition and not opposed to it.[5]

“Basic ontological structure” was not the only poor translation of suppositum in the first English edition. Other (mis)translations of the same word (which was mostly kept in Latin in the original) included: “ontological basis,” “structural foundation,” “ontological foundation,” “basic structure,” and “structural support”—thereby replacing a single, precise term of art with multiple ciphers. Not only could an English-speaking reader not discern Wojtyła’s original intention, the fact that the one term is used in different contexts was also obscured by the multiple inanities used to represent suppositum.

Given that Polish is not a commonly learned academic language, what were scholars interested in Wojtyła’s magnum opus to do? What most of us did, as did I, was to seek out the most reliable translations into other European languages, while consulting along the way with colleagues who did know Polish.[6] In the end, however, Kenneth Schmitz’s lament was universally shared: “The publication of a new edition is imperative.”[7]

The Current Edition

The prayers of Wojtyła readers were answered 2022 by the publication of a new translation as volume 1 of the English Critical Edition series of Wojtyła’s works, published by the Catholic University of America Press.[8] The book is a treasure-trove for readers, in part because, in addition to the new translation, it translated or retranslated under one volume other important essays.[9]

But further, as a critical edition, the editors and translator worked with the 1969 edition—the only one without external editorial changes—and only introduced changes when they appear in the manuscript as corrected in Wojtyła’s own hand. As far as I can tell, this is not the edition used for the translations into other languages, nor is it the currently published Polish edition. (Differences with the later edited editions are noted in footnotes.) If this translation is indeed alone in relying on a uniquely authoritative manuscript, this would make this publication a landmark not only as an English translation but also as a critical edition.

Person and Act on Human Action

What is the book’s theme? The beginning point is the basic “fact” that “‘man acts’” (102).[10] This act is revelatory of the person, and thus Wojtyła’s approach is to study “the person through the act” (103). The act reveals that man is an agent, one who becomes either good or evil through his acts. The phenomenological analysis that Wojtyła undertakes also tarries with the question of consciousness, because he wishes to examine our experience of our own self. Consciousness mirrors me to myself. Because of this mirroring, the human being can experience himself as an efficacious agent, as chapters 1 and 2 examine. This work is only preparatory, however, to the “main framework” of personal experience, which entails, in one’s acts, both the transcendence of the person (chapters 3 and 4) as well as her integration (chapters 5 and 6, summarized at 114).[11] The book closes with a reflection on “participation,” which is Wojtyła’s way of speaking about the communal aspect of the human person. Let us examine his ideas with an eye to the status of women as human persons.

What makes human acts distinctive, as contrasted to those of other animals, is in the first place their conscious quality. We can be aware of our action, and reflect upon it, because, secondly, we are rational and free. Man’s consciousness of his personal acts means that he experiences himself as an efficacious agent, that is, as a “cause conscious of his causation” (168).[12] Here the previously obscured term suppositum serves an important function: “Traditional ontology describes this subject of existence and action, which is man, by the term suppositum” (143). The suppositum serves metaphysically as “the dynamic source itself of [man’s] dynamism” (177), his ability to actualize multiple possibilities in forming the world and himself. Both the objective reality of being a suppositum as well as the subjective experience of consciousness are needed to paint a complete picture of human lived experience.

Consciousness opens us up to the interiority of our acts; we become capable of reflection upon them. In this conscious experience, we “experience these acts as acts and as our own” (141). Consciousness gives us access to our rationality and, thus, to the moral weight of our acts. Because we experience that we are rational and free, we know that we are capable of acting in good or evil ways. Further, we experience our bodiliness and the emotions that flow from it.

All of these facets make up our awareness of ourselves as true agents. This experience is a kind of self-transcendence: “He who in acting experiences himself as the agent thereby stands in a sense above his action” (169). This conscious self-transcendence gives us the ability to examine our choices critically, which leads to a sense of responsibility to act well. This responsibility extends not only to the good or evil our actions might cause in the world, but also to the good or evil that is effected within ourselves: “Man is not only the agent of his action but also its creator. . . . This is the creativity for which man himself is the first material. Man first of all shapes himself by action” (171-73). Wojtyła writes elsewhere, “Man is a being, so to speak, doomed to creativity.”[13] This creativity begins in the basic structure of human action, by which man is the artist who forms not only the external world but also and most importantly himself.[14] The human suppositum “simultaneously becomes more and more ‘of some sort’ and even, in a sense, more and more ‘somebody’ through everything that he does and everything that happens in him,” dynamisms that are “proper to him” (200).

Man acts creatively and dynamically not in spite of but because of his human nature. We are inclined to oppose the two, person and nature, because nature appears to be that which holds us back, while acting as free subjects should enable us to transcend our natural human limitations (see Simone de Beauvoir for an influential feminist example of this approach). But that idea is a fundamental error, according to Wojtyła, because human nature is precisely the birth (natus, “born”) of our rational and free subjectivity (178). “The existence as an individual proper to humanity is personal” (185). In other words, it is natural to humans to be persons. As a corollary, therefore, every human being is a person, that is, a conscious, intelligent, creative, and free subject and agent.

Person and Act on Personal and Communal Self-Determination and Fulfillment

Now we get to the heart of the book: how it is that the human person naturally has a structural self-determination and how that structure is fulfilled for the person and within community.

This structural self-determination is not the same as self-mastery, which Wojtyła understands as a virtue attained through action (208). Nor is it the same thing as Locke’s self-ownership, by which a person through her labors can own herself (much as a man laboring on the land procures ownership of it).[15] For both of these accounts, the governance over oneself is acquired, posterior to one’s existence. For Wojtyła, self-determination is structural, that is, built into the metaphysical structure of the human person. No matter one’s maturity or activity, the human being contains within himself the structure of self-determination.

How so? Wojtyła points to the medieval motto Persona est alteri incommunicabilis: a person is incommunicable to another. We cannot give away our personhood to become another’s possession. “Every man actually governs himself by self-determination; he actually exercises the specific power over himself that no one else can exercise or perform.” This requirement to possess and determine oneself through our rational and free acts is why we have a will. “The will has no reason for existing in non-personal beings, whose dynamism proceeds from a given nature. . . . But self-determination is proper to the person. It . . . binds and integrates the various manifestations of man’s dynamism on the level of the person” (209).

The will creates the possibility of transcending ourselves in freedom; we are not determined the way the other animals are. Rather, through our will we are properly ordered to the good. Every interior act that approves of a good, even if remains interior, is marked by a “constant readiness to go out toward the good” (231). But the will’s dynamism is equally marked by the truth: “The essential reason for choosing and for the very ability to choose cannot be anything but a particular relation to truth—the relation that penetrates the intentionality of volition and forms its interior principle” (230). The truth is part of the will’s transcendence, in that it can choose greater goods when they are in competition with lesser goods—the good of fasting, for example, over the good of eating—in accord with the truth.

But what happens when integration fails? One is disintegrated when he has an “inability to possess and govern oneself through self-determination.” He cannot “subordinate himself to himself and . . . be fully possessed by himself” (301). Such disintegration can be a sign of serious mental illness, and wherever it occurs, it is an attempt to deny the person’s fundamental ontological structures.

To conclude this part: the anthropological reality of self-governance and self-possession underlies the personal structure of self-determination. “Being the agent of the act, man at the same time fulfills himself in it” (253), when he acts in accord with the truth. Such an act itself “constitutes a fundamental value” (380), because it is the proper and fulfilling activity of the human person, who is valuable in herself.

In so acting, she simultaneously fulfills other persons, as she acts in the service of the common good. This activity entails “solidarity” or “complementarity,” namely, a “readiness to ‘complement’ by the act that I perform what others perform in the community” (401-2). Alongside that attitude is what Wojtyła calls “opposition,” which does not negate solidarity. Opposition is how persons “seek their own place in this community” by defending what they believe is the truth and the prudent path. People “who contend with one another” in the truth are not self-willed; rather, they do so “precisely because they are concerned about the common good. For example, parents contend with each other because they are concerned about how to best educate their children” (402). He emphasizes the inevitability and goodness of this “opposition”: “We must deem such opposition constructive. This is a condition of the correct structuring of communities, a condition of their correct constitution” (403). No doubt Wojtyła’s experience of totalitarian societies that tried to stamp out opposition heightened his awareness of its social value.

Indeed, one deformed and “non-authentic attitude” persons can take up toward communal life is “conformism,” the active attempt to become like others and so to avoid conflict. This is in fact “a lack of fundamental solidarity and at the same [time] an avoidance of [positive] opposition.” For Wojtyła, conformism is a sign of “some weakness . . . of self-determination and choice” and is therefore a deficiency of the person. In this case, “the man-person in a sense agrees to the fact that the community deprives him of himself. At the same time, he deprives the community of himself” (405). This is a failure of the truth and the good at the level of both the person and the community.

Woman as an Acting and Responsible Person

Let us connect the dots. By the fact of their human nature, shared with men, women are also conscious, rational, creative, and free persons. Like all persons, they are structured to flourish through self-possession and self-governance, which leads to their self-formation through freely chosen virtuous action. Attempting to outsource this responsible and intelligent activity to someone else, even one’s husband, is not only bound to lead to disintegration, even mental illness. Such outsourcing is also impossible, because personhood is incommunicable. A human person cannot in fact uproot her self-determining personal structure.

This personal structure allows for and is perfected in the virtue of obedience, which is owed by all human beings to God and to legitimate human authorities. Yet a totalitarian imposition of arbitrariness or a denial of a person’s rationality, done in the name of hierarchical “obedience,” will taint the whole community. Such poorly conceived “obedience” leads to malformation and abuse, as too many recent examples in religious life testify. Indeed, a healthy community—explicitly including the family, as Wojtyła notes when speaking of parents—must allow for moments of healthy opposition.[16] A rigid conformism is not virtuous self-denial but instead rooted in the desire to avoid uncomfortable conflict; it actually selfish.

Right-wing power fetishists try to claim certain basic human actions as prerogatives of the male sex, such as thinking and arguing about the good, acting freely and creatively in moving toward that good, and possessing and governing oneself. Such actions, they argue, pertain properly only to the leadership and strength of men, and furthermore the wife is owned by the husband.[17] As a result, a wife should defer to her husband on all intellectual and practical matters. As one book’s chapter titles state, “The Basics: Do Whatever He Tells You,” which also means “Wear What He Likes, Do What He Likes.” On Wojtyła’s terms, this denial of the personalistic structure of women amounts to their dehumanization.

It should not need to be said that this is not how Jesus interacted with women, nor how he relates to his bride the Church, for whom he died: “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). Paul does not exhort husbands to rule over their wives or discipline them as though they were children. Rather, he insists that their primary job is not ruling at all but instead love:

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband (Eph 5:28-33).

The wife can only be loved like the body of the husband (echoes of the Church once more), and a husband can only love himself by loving his wife, if they are both equally and fully human. For Karol Wojtyła, the creative drama of the relations between the sexes requires nothing less.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Angela Franks will participate in the True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture conference on March 26-28, 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. Recordings of the event sessions will be made available at a later date. You can preorder her forthcoming book Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self (click link) from our friends at the University of Notre Dame Press.

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