In Guadium et Spes we find the following, almost paradoxical, insight, “… if man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake, man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (§ 24). Not only is this a theological-metaphysical-anthropological claim, it is also very clearly a moral and social one. One cannot be who or what he is supposed to be, metaphysically speaking, unless he first stands in relation to another or others—hence the ‘social’ dimension. Moreover, that relation to an other must be constituted through “self-giving,” a kind of giving, we are told, that must be “sincere”—hence the ‘moral’ dimension. Still, that one should find himself only be giving himself away strikes one as utterly paradoxical. In what follows, I shall turn to Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), who spent a great deal of his intellectual energies unpacking the meaning of self-giving, to explore the meaning of this paradox.
The Phenomenon of Self-Giving
Questions pertaining both to one’s selfhood and place in reality arise and strike the reflective individual with great urgency or “inevitability” (cf. M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1) within the context of one’s everyday experience. It is within the everyday-world that one encounters arising from within his innermost depths the Socratic injunction “Know thyself;” one follows this injunction through an exploration of the phenomenon of self-giving since, upon closer examination, it becomes undeniable that giving of one’s being is particularly crucial to his own coming to self-awareness. The question “who am I?” arises and is answered within the horizon of one’s relation to others, to other selves, that is. “I am the son of my parents, the husband of my wife, the father of my children,” one may answer, and not insignificantly, each of these answers immediately reveals the relational character of one’s self. Not just a being-in-itself, one’s selfhood is also constituted through its being-in-relation.
In and through one’s very relatedness to the other, a person is revealed, first, through the constant claims that the other makes upon it—claims on one’s possessions, what he has, and claims on his very being, what he is. Think, for example, of a child’s cry for its mother’s presence, a neighbor’s plea for help, or even the state’s demand for service. In these situations, one gives himself freely—perhaps eagerly, perhaps reluctantly—to the other or others. At other times, however, one’s self may be taken through force or seductive coercion. All violent crimes clearly exemplify this but so too do those actions, Wojtyła insists, that result in the self’s being reduced to an object of use for another.
Additionally, the person reveals himself through his own reciprocal need of the other. There is, of course, a need of the other insofar as he can provide the material necessities that biological existence requires, and there is even need of the other insofar as he can provide emotional and physical needs for security. But beyond this, and more importantly, one also has need of the other as someone from whom he can receive a reciprocal self-gift. One thus finds himself in situations wherein he has a claim to another person and receives that person as a complement of his own personhood according to varying degrees. From a phenomenological perspective, then, giving and receiving seem to constitute the very fabric of one’s social interaction, indeed one’s very selfhood. And, yet, after offering this briefest of descriptions of self-giving we are still left with the question: what is the meaning of self-giving and also why is the human self constituted through its acts of giving to and receiving from an other?
Personalist Account of the Self
Wojtyła’s account of the nature and dignity of the person offered in his Love and Responsibility, I think, provides an answer to these questions. He begins that work by offering an account of the human person in terms of its subjectivity and objectivity but also in conjunction with Boethius’ classic definition, “persona est individua substantia rationalis naturae: a person is an individual substance of a rational nature” (Love and Responsibility, 22). Accordingly, Wojtyła places himself firmly within the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition, which understands the person in terms of its substantiality specifically differentiated through reason. However, he goes considerably beyond—although not contrary to—that same tradition when his account of the person unfolds in terms of an “inner subjectivity,” an “inner life of self,” (Cf. Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man” in Person and Community (Peter Lang, 1994) proper only to persons. As Wojtyła sees it, a person’s rationality uniquely distinguishes him from all other beings in the visible world; however, he is also unique among men, having an interior life that cannot be replaced by or shared with another, which is simply to say that the person stands out in his unique objectivity and subjectivity. Wojtyła writes, “[T]he person as a subject is distinguished from even the most advanced animals by a specific inner self, an inner life, characteristic only of persons” (LR, 22). Here, rationality is seen as giving rise to consciousness, which, in turn, produces within the person a certain reflexivity of thought, as it were.
Through reflexive consciousness, man becomes aware of himself as an ‘I.’ He is thus capable of self-determination, aware of himself as a being whose actions develop his own self as well as the world. In his acts of self-determination the person actualizes his own unique personality, his selfhood, demonstrating and confirming his personhood both to himself and to the world. One’s power of self-determination, which corresponds to the faculty of free will, Wojtyła explains, functions in part to render the person alteri incommunicabilis, something unique and incommunicable. Wojtyła writes, “The incommunicable, the inalienable, in a person is intrinsic to that person’s inner self, to the power of self determination, free will. No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine”(LR, 24). And yet for all that, in spite of the fact that the person is a free and incommunicable subjectivity endowed with the power of self-determination, he remains, Wojtyła points out, an object, the terminus not only of his own action but of others’ actions as well.
Since the person possesses his own power of self-determination—the ability to choose freely for himself who he is—he can never be treated merely as a means to achieving what another’s will has determined as an end. Rather, as Kant argues and Wojtyła along with him, a person must always be treated as an end in itself (see Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429). Because of the person’s inner life, through which arise his various personal structures, he cannot simply be reduced to a thing or commodity whose only value is instrumental. The only kind of authentic relationship that can exist between two persons, Wojtyła firmly insists against utilitarianism, is a relationship of love, wherein the nature of a person as an end in itself having the power of self-determination is respected and affirmed (LR, 41). But the love arising therefrom exists in varying degrees.
Beyond its forms as desire, attraction, and benevolentia (i.e., goodwill), love attains its greatest intensity and highest form in betrothed love. Resulting in a deeper and more sublime communion than the love of friendship, which is based only on goodwill, betrothed love involves a mutual self-giving or self-surrender of one person to another chosen person (LR, 96, 98). In fact, for Wojtyła, betrothed love is characterized by none other than this very giving and receiving of self. He writes, “Betrothed love differs from all [other] aspects or forms of love…. Its decisive character is the giving of one’s own person (to another). The essence of betrothed love is self-giving, the surrender of one’s ‘I’” (LR, 96).
The marital relationship between wife and husband, in which each spouse gives him or herself to the other and receives the other in return, manifests in a unique way the nature of such love. Here, a spouse’s gift of self is not understood as a making of one’s self into the other’s property to be used at will. Such an understanding of marriage would be a manifest violation of the “personalistic norm” (LR, 40, 41). For Wojtyła, the exchange of self-gifts within marriage must occur with a simultaneous affirmation of the value of that gift, that is, there must be a responsible reception of the other’s self, wherein his or her personhood is affirmed as both a good in itself and end in itself. Each spouse, through the power of his self-determination, willingly submits or subordinates him or herself to the other and, in turn, willing receives the other. Through the exchange of self-gifts two ‘I’s’ become a ‘we’—the two become one. We see then that, as Wojtyła writes, “Love is the unification of persons” (LR, 38).
Further still, while betrothed love is found in a special way within the marital relationship, Wojtyła extends its meaning to include other acts of self-giving between man and God himself (Theology of the Body, 560). For example, through the profession of religious or clerical vows, human persons freely give themselves to God wherein there is a complete and unconditional surrender of one’s freedom, of one’s very self, to God in answer to the divine call (i.e. to their religious vocation). And, of course, this act of self-giving remains reciprocal, for in return the professed receives supernatural gifts of grace through which he attains a greater share in personal or spiritual perfection, thereby imitating to a greater degree the divine being. But as absolute and unconditional as such an act of self-gift to God may be, one can still go further and will the annihilation of his very ego or ‘I,’ submitting himself to death for God’s sake. Along these lines we might consider, for instance, the autobiographical vignette that Thérèse of Lisieux offers of her own self in which she is not only willing to suffer physical death for love of God, but also spiritual death. She writes:
“One evening, not knowing how to tell Jesus that I loved Him and how much I desired that He be loved and glorified everywhere, I was thinking He would never receive a single act of love from hell; then I said to God that to please Him I would consent to see myself plunged into hell so that He would be loved eternally in that place of blasphemy”(Cited in Monica Dodds, Praying in the Presence of Our Lord with St. Thérèse of Lisieux [Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 2004], 30).
Though she acknowledges that such a wish is somewhat childish and even “foolish”—“foolish” perhaps because such a gift of self could never be reciprocated—Thérèse nonetheless provides an example of that yearning so central to one’s personhood to give of himself—even at the cost of one’s own happiness or, here, at the cost of one’s supernatural end.
Commencing from the philosophical point of view, then, with only natural experience at our disposal, the phenomenon of self-giving and receiving appears to be, as Wojtyła describes it and rightly so, a “paradox,” (LR, 97) the same paradox found in the Gospel passage proclaiming, “He who would save his soul shall lose it, and he who would lose his soul for my sake shall find it again” (Matthew 10:39). There can be no greater paradox: that one should be directed from the very core of his being, a personal being, towards his own self-abandonment and sacrifice! Indeed, as Wojtyła sees it, this paradox is twofold: first, “that it is possible to step outside one’s own ‘I’… and secondly in that the ‘I’ far from being destroyed or impaired as a result is enlarged and enriched—of course in a super-physical, a moral sense” (LR, 97). Here, then, human reason comes up against the paradox of self-giving and, like the ocean’s waves that endlessly fail in the attempt to overtake and engulf the shore, falls short of overcoming it. In the end, while from the philosophical perspective one can indeed gain some intellectual traction in answering the question “who am I,” there remains a paradox against which human reason stands in awe, which is both the beginning and end of the philosophical act (cf. Aristotle Metaphysics I.2.982b12-14). How utterly curious that I am a self that, in its very selfhood, loses itself but in so doing fully finds and recovers itself.
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