THE ESSENCE OF PERSONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS PRESENTED BY KAROL WOJTYŁA

Abstract

 The author of this publication, entitled "The Essence of Personal Consciousness as Presented by Karol Wojtyła," presents the model of consciousness proposed by Cardinal Wojtyła. It explicates the aspect of being which in traditional philosophy was “implied” by rationality, and in ethics, by freedom of action. Król describes the consciousness of an intellectual nature, which lacks an intentional structure. Following the indications of Person and Action, he writes that whereas understanding and knowledge contribute to the formation of the object in an intentional way, consciousness is limited to reflecting everything that has already become familiar. Consciousness of action is one of many reflections that make up the overall content of a person’s consciousness. This reflection itself is conscious and does not involve active objectification of the action or the person, although it presents the image of the action and the person as faithfully as possible. All human cognition interacts with consciousness: the ability and efficiency of active understanding. !erefore, consciousness is conditioned by this ability and effciency, i.e. the whole cognitive potentiality, which is, according to the Western philosophical tradition, the basic property of a human being as a person. !is consciousness gets the meaning of things “from the outside” as the fruit of knowledge, which results from an active understanding of the objective reality acquired by a human being in di)erent ways and at di)erent stages, which also determine di)erent levels of consciousness. Here is quite a fundamental difference between knowledge and consciousness in terms of intellectual and cognitive formation.