HeyJ L (2009), pp.

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KAROL WOJTYLA AND EMMANUEL LEVINAS ON THE EMBODIED SELF: THE FORMING OF THE OTHER AS MORAL SELF-DISCLOSURE
NIGEL K. ZIMMERMANN

The University of Edinburgh

The other has taken on an increased theological signicance for the Church in the advent of postmodern reection, resulting in a myriad of possibilities for those who would reect on the signicance of the other in relation to the self, largely in connection with various theories of embodiment. Following Karol Wojtylas (John Paul II) emphasis on the given-ness of the body I wish to illustrate a way in which the other might be understood theologically, informed by the insights of the continental philosophical tradition, specically Emmanuel Levinas phenomenological outline of the other as a key locus of ethical reection. Bringing Levinas continental philosophy into dialogue with Wojtylas philosophical theology, it will be argued that the other must be re-approached in terms of their subjective self-disclosure, centring upon the en-eshed and bodily form of the human person, who confronts us as a reection of both that which is most other to ourselves (the divine) and paradoxically that which most resembles ourselves (the human). The other is always an en-eshed subject and in their action, their subjective identity is disclosed on the relational level.

INTRODUCTION

The other or the stranger, the face of whom is perceived by my gaze and yet remains other to my own self, is an important category of investigation within post-modern scholarship, emphasising perhaps the requirement for humanity to consider the role of difference and diversity in the modern experience of human discourse. Within the constellation of theologies of the body which are evident in this context, a nuanced theory of embodiment remains difcult to unravel or dene, despite the polemic between those who hold to an essentialist conceptualisation of the integrated mind/body/soul structure of the human person and those who take a more deconstructive approach.1 The following study of two philosophical voices who focus on the notion of embodiment is conducted on the understanding that ethics is an important consideration in terms of both the human embodied subject as well as our social (and therefore relational) identity. Our ethical relationship with others is a key theme in the work both of Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II, 19202005) and Emmanuel Levinas (19061995). Each admired the phenomenological methodology of Edmund Husserl and sought to pursue their philosophical projects within the respective perspectives of Catholic and Jewish standpoints. There remains much to learn about our understanding of the ethical from the fruitful engagement of these thinkers; one, the Polish Catholic philosopher who became Pope and the other the Jewish philosopher who promoted early Husserlian phenomenology to the French academy. This article will draw attention to some possibilities from a more substantive conversation between them. Wojtyla, whose personalist approach to moral
r The author 2009. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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issues became crucial to his articulation of the faith after his election as Pope John Paul II, was known to advocate the reading of Levinas, whose Talmudic commentaries form an interesting corollary to his phenomenological insistence on the primacy of the other in ethics.2 Both thinkers bring an ethical awareness to their work which is signicantly formed by their experiences of the systematic atrocities against particular persons and social groups during World War II and subsequent political history. As David Walsh has observed, . . . Wojtyla and Levinas point us toward the key experience of responsibility for the other as the privileged access human beings have to the inner meaning of reality.3

THE HUMAN PERSON AS KEY CONCERN TO BOTH WOJTYLA AND LEVINAS

Wojtylas personalism was developed under the ideologies of rst German National Socialism, then Soviet Communism, and was inuenced largely by the phenomenological enquiry of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. His consideration of faith and its expression as a drama of human action in community fuelled much of his articulation of doctrine in the face of totalitarianism, which came to its conclusion in his Polish homeland during his time in the Papal Ofce.4 His understanding of the human person was born from this historical meeting of Catholic dogma with this same totalitarianism and the countercultural blossoming of an underground movement to keep alive Polish language, art and culture.5 In Wojtyla, the whole person is imagined as embodied gift, giving form to the differentiated substance of human nature. Wojtylas personalism is the philosophical framework in which he constructs this anthropology, informed as it is within the broader Thomist tradition.6 The human person, as embodied soul, is always either man or woman and carries within their own self the desire for some form of communion with the other, a social and immanent longing of which reciprocal giving is the transparent sign.7 The Imago Dei for Wojtyla is an anthropological reality. Without an understanding of the other as complimentary to oneself, Trinitarian difference is askew and marred it is a disgured icon, upholding an anthropology which lacks the ingredients essential to the notion of person as gift.8 But the other in Wojtyla (not a term he regularly employs) does not make me whole rather, their wholeness compliments my own wholeness, enabling a salvic community to be instigated. Levinas Jewishness adds an important dimension to his enquiry, providing the religious and cultural texture to what became his primary philosophical interest: the inter-subjective nature of ethics and the rejection of much of the Western tradition which preceded him. His initial training at Freiburg University in Germany brought him under the inuence of Edmund Husserl, during which time he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas developed Husserls phenomenological engagement with things in themselves into an ethical structure of relationality, in which the other is paramount, providing a methodological course out of the Heideggerian philosophical climate.9 The new context in which Levinasian ethics concentrates our attention is one in which ethics becomes rst philosophy. As rst philosophy, Levinas conceptualisation of the self in relation to the other is based very rmly in the world, offering a clear and un-truncated basis of esh and of matter for the working out of his ethical system; it offers a substantial defence of the sensory nature of subjective understanding.10 This in no way represents a rejection of ontology as a crucial category, but rather specically, the devastating negation of Heideggers particular ontological priority, his understanding of human existence: of Heideggers notion of the priority of equipment for Dasein, in which the human person is

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dwarfed against the pre-potency of a totalising force, which both precedes the person and instrumentalises them as object.11 In both Wojtyla and Levinas the concern for the welfare of the other shapes their thinking profoundly. In what follows, it is hoped also that their ethical concerns for the nature of the inter-subjective might be shown to share a common nuance, which is the incarnate, en-eshed nature of human experience. This may not be a surprise in studying Wojtyla, but for Levinas, whose insistence on the wholly otherness of the other as a hermeneutical necessity, this reveals the way in which neither approach can escape the embodied reality of what we call human experience.

LEVINAS REJECTION OF THE SELF AS LIVING ONLY FOR THE SELF, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE OTHER

It will be here argued that Levinas emphasis upon the ethical and upon the personal is reected in the ethical system of Karol Wojtyla, in which the other is also given a privileged place, albeit in a specically theological framework. It is important to note a conscious reception of much of Wojtylas methodology in Levinas,12 who describes what he nds most appealing in Wojtylas work as:
. . . above all the utter delity to the norm of philosophical discourse: the persistence of analysis in a language that is rigorous in the light of day and which is suspicious, if one can say, of theological inspiration.13

By a suspicion of theological imagination, Levinas is indicating his respect for Wojtylas desire for a philosophical outline of human subjectivity which is informed directly from human experience. Without suspending his theological perspective, Wojtylas methodology is a move away from reliance upon it, and thus a development of human understanding which can be intuited within the strictures of phenomenological discourse. Wojtylas approach, which is of a personalist nature, offers a sacramental and textual reality to Levinas ethics, by which the person becomes both heart and gift to human existence. Importantly though, Wojtyla emphasises the dynamic integration between person and act, in which action discloses the subject, which in a personalist dimension, presupposes the presence of moral agency. Further to this, I hope to show how Wojtylas personalist structure demands the approach, and the traversing of the distance between the self and the other, thus forming the ethical dimension so central to Levinas. For both Wojtyla and Levinas ethics is foundational. For Wojtyla however, the ethical responsibility we have is given esh and form, substance and direction, within a broader totality of inter-subjective disclosure. At the outset, the extent to which Levinas also acknowledges the incarnate aspect of existence is of importance, as he says:
The body of course has always been taken to be more than a chunk of matter. It was taken to house a soul, which it had the power of expressing. The body might be more or less expressive, and had parts which were more or less expressive. The face and the eyes, those mirrors of the soul, were especially the organs of expression. But the spirituality of the body does not lie in this power to express what is inward. By its position it realises the condition necessary for any inwardness. It does not express an event; it is itself this event.14

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The embodied other (like the embodied self), must be re-imagined for the event of the body to enter into an authentic ethical engagement, in which the I asserts a responsibility for the other. The person who is other to ourselves represents a concrete and en-eshed stranger, who is at once the embodiment of our own nature (we both constitute the sharing of human nature) and the representation of the divine (separate, distant, different). The body, in its dynamic integrity, will need to enter the fore of our ethical commitment, if we are to allow that distance between the one self and the stranger to be redeemed. The concern here with extending difference into the realm of ethics rather than limiting it is of course a key concern of a wider post-modern approach.15 In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas continues to articulate a comprehensive phenomenological vision of human intercourse, by which he establishes meta physics rmly on the basis of ethics. Indeed, he seeks to present philosophy as rst ethics,16 and thus as a methodology which sees as its end a properly formed humanism, encompassing questions of morality, justice, the human person, religious experience, to name but a few.17 In this book, which appears as a sequel to his previous publication Totality and Innity, Levinas continues his project of contesting the Heideggerian emphasis upon being, and responding with a meta physical enterprise basing itself upon the other the stranger that which is other to ourselves, and negating the inevitable instrumentality prevalent in Heideggers philosophy of being. Levinas does this by considering the complex nature of subjectivity as something deeper than that found in Heidegger, and analysing the sense of subjectivity, turning rather to the sense of subjectivity as nding its basis in the sensing of sensations, what I will view in terms of the experience of embodied nature, so intrinsic to human existence. It is worth noting briey that Heideggers attention to the problem of embodiment and its lack of escape from traditional meta physics was cursory at best. David Michael Levin has observed this fact in his essay The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment, and creatively explores consequences for embodiment theory in the context of Heideggers work on perception. Levins essay concludes with a process of multiple levels of awareness, in which embodiment is engaged.18 He asserts that an openness to the otherness of that which is other, is the basis upon which a proper care for the other might be exercised. In this, he suggests that there is an ontological basis by which an openness to the other can be fostered, in that a preontological determination by the Legein (to consider) of the primordial Logos calls us to a true fullment, in which the body bears the very potentiality for being in the world. Levin observes that what is at stake is
. . . the gift of a body of ontological understanding: a body that manifests our ontological understanding a body that is responsive to the demand for openness constitutive of the question of being . . .19

In considering this body of ontological understanding, Levin draws together aspects of the spatiality of the body, encompassing a view of being which is able also to cultivate the individuality, the special-temporal creativity of bodily movement and the basis upon which the embodied person might also grasp being in its fullness. Levinas also sees within the sensibility of the subject an opportunity for the self to grasp a responsibility for that which is not of itself, and move outside of a restricted and multifariously located movement of the self. In his chapter on substitution in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas builds further upon his notion of sensibility, as previously outlined in Totality and Innity, through which moral implications of his metaphysic of the other might become clearer. It is here, having exposed the way in which

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subjects have a continuous moral engagement on the eld of consciousness, upon which Levinas locates all spirituality in the tradition of Western thought, that he turns his attention again to the self.20 In the same chapter, Levinas has insisted that there is more to subjectivity than simple consciousness, in which (the) oneself is known by the self. He argues that Georg Hegels understanding of consciousness, the for-itself, is predicated by a recurrence in which the I is assigned a meaning, a movement, an expulsion, even
. . . before I show myself, before I set myself up. I am assigned without recourse, without fatherland, already sent back to myself, but without being able to stay there, compelled before commencing . . .21

This expulsion is understood as a compelled movement, constraining ones own responsibility for the other (or in fact negating it completely) prior to a personal commitment, making the I only for itself, even beyond a choice or the acceptance of any kind of responsibility. Levinas argues that this Hegelian (and indeed Sartrean) recurrence of the I, forcing oneself into a movement in which it is, and can only ever be for-itself , does not resemble in any way a true self-consciousness. The reason for this, as Levinas explains, is that the self, or more specically the oneself, is not derived from its own initiative, but is constrained and restricted, forced into this recurrence upon itself by the Heideggerian conceptualisation of being. Levinas issues a poetic and rhetorical phraseology, in which the oneself is described by what, according to Heideggers model of being, it is not. The model of being which Levinas is so enthusiastically rejecting, is one in which self-consciousness is claimed to have some aspect of free agency integral to its structure, yet retaining its insistent and irreversible recurrence of the I upon oneself. While its self-understanding might appear clear, this notion of self-consciousness is exposed by Levinas as a prevarication, concealing an utter rejection of the possibility of the oneself offering a true responsibility for the other. In this recurrence of the I upon its source, its own movement away and back to itself cannot be broken or dissembled, or even re-directed. It is uncancellable. As he explains,
The uncancellable recurrence of the oneself in the subject is prior to any distinction between moments which could present themselves to a synthesizing activity of identication and assemblage to recall or expectation. The recurrence of the oneself is not relaxed and lighted up again, illuminating itself thereby like consciousness which lights up by interrupting itself and nding itself again in the temporal play of retentions and protentions.22

Without possibility of recall or expectation, the oneself is then caught in a tension, a kind of endless self return, in which the ego can be seen as both pinnacle and prisoner of its own essence. The oneself is not relaxed, precisely because it cannot be, it is caught in the impossibility of a new ethical discourse of interruption (by itself or others), or even of once again locating its own self amongst the various powers of the ego. It may understand itself, but it remains immersed in the vagaries of its own entrapment. Even self-critique will become impossible, for it is immediately made redundant by the real impossibility of moving ethically outside of itself, of moving beyond the for itself . One could describe this continuous movement back upon the oneself as essentially banal, utterly beyond the possibility of living for that which is outside of oneself.23 The self is constituted for itself, but entrenched in this fashion, it is peculiarly directed against itself, for it cannot go beyond oneself. The oneself then is entrapped, yet wreathing in its own self-recurrence, struggling against nothing, for the relationship it has with itself lacks the dynamic, intersubjective quality of the relationships it may like to enjoy, preceding in a singularity which

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Levinas argues is prior to the distinction between the particular and universal.24 It is a recurrence which, in a way, cancels out its own self.
This recurrence would be the ultimate secret of the incarnation of the subject; prior to all reection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made out of assignation, like the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound.25

Levinas coincides the Heideggerian for itself with a recurrence of the self that is irreducibly beyond interruption, and therefore a negative return of the self upon the self. It is prior to the other in a concrete and uncancellable form, conducting oneself always for oneself, without possibility for genuine, or even convincingly tangible means of responsibility for subjects outside of oneself. In these terms, a true social and ethical discourse cannot occur, for there will be no dialogue without the possibility of true interruption, of the breaking of this self-recurrence. The self must always return in and upon its own ego, even reecting the words of others through its own self, not allowing them to break the recurrence, even for a moment in time.

LEVINAS NOTION OF THE OTHER AS EMBODIED

Levinas has described in this context the oneself in ones skin, as contorted within the connes of its own embodied state, unable to break or transcend its recurrence upon itself.26 Levinas writes,
The ego is not in itself like matter which, perfectly espoused by its form, is what it is; it is in itself like one is in ones skin, that is, already tight, ill at ease in ones own skin.27

This constricted image of the embodied self reveals Levinas dual recollection of the self with its own embodied state. The body does not simply give expression to itself, but is the form and content of the oneself. As the body turns in upon itself, it is disenfranchised from a truly ethical intercourse with the other, showing once more the recurring nature of the concept of the being in the model he is at pains to critique. In such a recurrence of the self upon the self, no reference is made to a thematisation, for being itself has the character of a nothingness, itself unbreakable, un-interruptible. The self is both body and ego, turned away from the other, without a true recourse to the stranger or to the possibility of responsibility. In such a world, Levinas says, despite the purity of its philosophical system, it behoves a sterility which is unattractive. It is completely cut off from adventure and reminiscence.28 The ego is manifest in glory, yet withers in a self-perpetuating ethic (if the word can be used in this context) of self-aggrandisement, tense and uncancellable. To further enunciate the correlation of body with self, Levinas explains:
The expression in ones skin is not a metaphor for the in-itself; it refers to a recurrence in the dead time or the meanwhile which separates inspiration and expiation, the diastole and systole of the heart beating dully against the walls of ones skin. The body is not only an image or gure here; it is the distinctive in-oneself of the contraction of ipseity and its breakup.29

Here, Levinas is eloquently illustrating the fact of the self embodied in ones own skin, in ones own embodiment in which one is enlivened by the constant beat of the heart, the unceasing movement of blood coursing through the veins of ones own body. The body is therefore not simply image or gure; it cannot be interpreted in the bounds of mere

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metaphor because to consider the body is to correlate the oneself with its own embodied nature. The emphasis is upon the concrete actuality of living in the world, interacting not ethereally with the cosmos (and by extension, the other), but through the movement of skin and sinew, esh and blood. The body, as much as it experiences the recurrence spoken of above, does so in the context of its own inertia between restlessness and patience, prior to either action or passion. Levinas freely correlates ipseity with the concept of incarnation, and views its self-recurrence as a deeply negative movement, exposing the subject in terms which de-value and underrate the embodied being. The other becomes here the category by which we are able to witness the devaluing of the one-self (the embodied person), because the recurrence of oneself is driven by a duty only to itself. Yet, as explored above, this duty (which becomes debt) is ultimately corrosive, or in Levinas words, oppresses and contracts the soul.30 Such a stagnation of the self predicts an ultimate and inescapable guilt in relation to the other, for it negates the very possibility of living for an-other. Responsibility becomes a vacuous category and the stranger to myself becomes of little immediate, or ultimate moral concern. The notion of responsibility in this sense is a category without real prescience, a valueless notion which is empty of meaning. It is responsibility to oneself only, prior to any free commitment, and therefore less than a true responsibility in which one has exercised a moral choice, let alone engaged ethically with those whose nature one shares, therefore containing only within oneself the notion of freedom, but even then a false freedom. Levinas cannot help but describe this ethical impasse in personal and bodily terms: The irremissible guilt with regard to the neighbour is like a Nessus tunic my skin would be.31 Levinas reference to the ancient Greek myth of the hero Heracles, and his catastrophic death by the malicious Nessus, is indicative of the ultimate ruin of the self by the self, which he seeks to reject. Heracles of course, had seen his lover Deianeira taken from him by the Centaur Nessus. Nessus then attempted the tragic rape of Deianeira, which Heracles thwarted by his arrow. But in this moment of justice of salvation Nessus conducted one last intrigue of dark intent, by which he informed Heracles lover that she would retain the affections of her champion for ever, by the magical properties of the Centaurs own blood. And so, in retaining a sample of Heracles dead bodys blood, Deianeira sought later to apply it to Heracles clothing at some juncture when his love was in doubt. Alas, when that time came, his shirt, his own clothing, marked with the deadly blood of his felled enemy the Centaur, became the course of his own death, falling tragically as Deianira wept in anguish from afar. We see here the despairing interplay between the desire of the self, caught up in its own selsh intrigues, ultimately consuming and forging the destruction of its own being. I argue that Levinas notion of the embodiment of the self, of being in ones skin, is inescapably grounded in his incarnate view of the existential experience. His philosophy of being, in which he rejects the ontological priority of being over the ethical espoused by Heidegger, ensures that the individual is not lost in a broader context of being, but is rather situated, upheld and dignied in this broader context. The self here is very much a concrete reality, en-eshed and existing within a temporal-spatial intersection of esh and exteriority. This experience of the self is therefore rightly understood phenomenologically, beginning as it is with the embodied experience of the self. The self experiences itself in the esh, of which substance it recognises also in the esh of others. In Levinas, contrary to the model of recurrence, the self must live for others. As he explains in incarnate language in the context of his understanding of the vulnerable nature of the subject in its fullness:

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Subjectivity of esh and blood in matter the signifyingness of sensibility, the-one-for-the-other itself is the preoriginal signifyingness that gives sense, because it gives.32

The given-ness of which Levinas speaks here is a subjective offering in the inter-subjective context of real esh and blood. The other to which my own embodied self gives itself to (and for) remains a wholly other subject, through which the language of relationality bears witness to the concrete and incarnate presence of both they and I. The one-for-the-other becomes the measure of the self, for the self is ethically situated. Indeed, without the esh and blood of the self, the self would be unable to overcome the ontic priority, all too prevalently facing itself against Western philosophy. In the human person then, which remains a subject in tension with both itself and the other, a kind of self-giving reveals itself in vulnerability, not extrinsic to itself but essential, which guides the phenomenological method toward a grasping for the ethical. It is helpful here to consider briey Maurice Merleau-Pontys account of the same theme. In Merleau-Ponty, the priority of the body in the beginning of the selfs ethical engagement of the world is a crucial factor to moral discourse. In The Spatiality of Ones Own Body and Motility, he examines the subjects (the patient) bodily space and the way in which spatiality congures our relationality; with both ourselves and the exterior world. Time and space are intersected by the self through the movement of the body.
By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic signicance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations.33

Merleau-Ponty draws out the notion that the body not only intersects with the dimensions of time and space, but assumes them, taking them into itself and operating in conjunction with their assumed forms. The body has a dynamic operation in regards to the process of history, taking on a moral form in the manner in which it is subject to time and space, yet exercising an effect on them in due turn. Such a placing of the body as the nexus point of our engagement with a moral universe demonstrates further Levinas own thinking on the relationality of the subject in ones own skin in that it exercises an en-eshed moral responsibility for the other. Levinas, of course, goes on to demonstrate an ethical priority, in which one lives for the other and no longer for itself. Levinas, in Totality and Innity, offers a bold assertion as to the bodily basis for the living out of the self for the other. He locates in the body its own ontological regime, surpassing a nullifying objectication, in which the very nature of embodiment traverses the distance into the realm of the other. Far from being a voluntarist agenda, in which the will forces a decision lacking the cognition of a moral act, the will becomes an operation of true moral act, in which, . . . This status of the will is the body.34 True, the work of the will in bodily terms can be corrupted by threat or seduction, yet it remains no less a co-aligning of the nature of will and body, in which the self is shown to have a moral freedom: the freedom to choose. Levinas refers to the activity of the body as an inversion into a thing. Surely this very thingness of the body illustrates the way in which the morality of the will is shown forth and given the poetry of movement precisely because of the selfs embodied nature. The human condition is still grounded in the subject, but removed from the false recurrence of itself upon itself, in which the individual appears to melt against the backdrop of being. And by entering the court of moral action, so too does the embodied person nd entrance into a true discourse with other persons other selves. In fact, by no

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other way can the human person act within the moral sphere, than to act within the sphere of that which is a stranger to oneself.
The body, where expression can dawn forth and where the ego-ism of the will becomes discourse and primal opposition, at the same time conveys the entry of the I into the calculations of the Other.35

There within the calculations of the other, can both concord and conict nd something of a moral meaning, for it is based within the context in which the will can be truly embodied moral decisions are given esh morality itself becomes an en-eshed discourse. While Levinas steers away from using the terminology of morality here, he does insist ultimately upon the ethical engagement which must be pursued, the living out for the other. The body therefore, is essential to the moral freedom to choose, and to reveal in time and space, the will. Not driven by the will but giving expression to it, embodied existence grounds the self in esh and blood, in the realm of the ethical and in the true possibility for living with an enabled responsibility for that which is not myself, but with whom I share a common nature. Levinas insistence on the failure of an ethical priority emerging from a theory of being in which the self is trapped in an (amoral) recurrence of itself, without reference to moral choice or responsibility for the other, is, I would argue, a helpful starting point in reconsidering a framework in which theology might re-imagine the body. It is primarily an ethical re-imagining of the embodied self.

KAROL WOJTYLA ON THE DYNAMIC SUBJECT

Karol Wojtylas emphasis on embodiment is, obviously, a more robustly theological anthropology; one in which theological categories such as the Trinity and Incarnation play an important role. His anthropology is really a theology, shaped by a phenomenological consideration of the human love in its concrete and varied forms, addressing his insights as both philosopher (a private, intellectual capacity), and later in his life as Bishop of Rome (an ofcial, authoritative capacity).36 In each of the capacities of Bishop and lecturer in the University of Lublin, and then in his more universal capacity in the Holy See, Wojtylas reections are constantly enchanted with the idea of human love, and the philosophical question of the human person; both these phases of his life have been described by Wojtyla commentator John McNerney as movements within the unnished symphony which Wojtyla inaugurated.37 In both capacities, Wojtylas work is offered in the realm of contemporary Catholic philosophical and theological discourse. He begins with a consideration of human love in the beginning, grounding his later conclusions in a treatment of the love apparent in Eden, preceding the extension of sin and death, and summed up in the divine economy of truth and love and centred upon the embodied human person as made in the image of God.38 Wojtylas gaze is Augustinian in its concern for the interplay between esh and spirit in those rst moments, imaged in both Genesis accounts of Creation. How happy, then, were the rst human beings, neither troubled by any disturbance of the mind nor pained by any disorder of the body!39 Augustines contended observation reects a conceptualisation of the human subject as initially an icon of order, of harmonious interchange between will and esh, of a unity in the self expressed in the body. Augustine, at the close of the same chapter in Civitas Dei, expresses the hope transparent in the lives of the rst human parents, in that their faithful obedience would

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have predicated the pre-destined lives of the saints in whom there would be no sin or corruptibility, and in which we would nd models and guides in the perfections of the spiritual life.40 Wojtyla reects an Augustinian hopefulness grounded in the beginning of Creation when he explores the en-eshed state of the inter-subjective dialogue (or indeed, relationship).41 Wojtyla explicates the personal nature of the human body in his philosophical work, The Acting Person. In it, he seeks to build further upon his previous analysis of the work of the phenomenologist Max Scheler, in synthesising the questions of action as interpreted by a traditional philosophical ethic (actus humanus) and action as an experience.42 Wojtyla outlines his synthesis methodically, by synthesising action in both these categories in terms of the dignity of the person. The human person, understood as a free moral agent, bears within their bodily nature an integral relationship with their own action, by which a dynamic totality is apparent; this dynamic totality exhibits the structure of the human person in terms of a moral freedom which frees the human person uniquely to engage in the ethical. Wojtylas nuanced phenomenology of human action is an attempt to reharmonise human action with the human self the subject who is above all a person in the full and dignied sense of the term. As he observes at the outset of his explorations of the Person and the Body and the Soma:
Obviously, we cannot discuss the human body apart from the whole that is man, that is, without recognizing that he is a person. Neither can we examine the dynamisms and potentialities proper to the human body without understanding the essentials of action and of its specically personal character.43

Wojtylas theory of embodiment takes form as an integrated and dynamic subject. By emphasising the personal reality of the human person he opens up, philosophically, the manner in which the person must engage not just with their own inner complexity, but with the other, who also acts and who remains a dynamic subject in themselves. At this point, Levinas posture of responsibility, as outlined above, merges in a kind of necessary tension with Wojtylas inter-subjectivity.44 We nd here the basis of Wojtylas understanding of the body, which was to evolve further into his unpublished work Man and Woman He Created Them, presented a number of years later as a series of catechesis under the broader title, Theology of the Body. Indeed, it is Wojtylas nal chapter in The Acting Person which he dedicates (in what he deems a cursory way) to Intersubjectivity By Participation. At this stage of his argumentation, Wojtyla has synthesised in the human person a dynamic unity of constituent features, including the category of action. He views human action as a means and a basis for an intuition of the human person, through which the subject is authentically disclosed in the complex context of overlapping membership in human communities.45 We might justly interpret this as the moral shaping of the embodied person (the subject). Even at the juncture of emotion and action, Wojtyla notes in his work Love and Responsibility that the affective, as exercised upon the body by the will, does not blunt the moral action of the embodied subject but allows it an intensity, a liveliness and a revelatory quality:
In itself, an objective act would sometimes be a dim event, barely perceptible to human consciousness, if it were not heightened and thrown into relief by the varied and intense emotions (or sentimental states) experienced. What is more, these emotions or sentiments usually have some inuence in determining the objective structure of peoples actions.46

Thus we can see how the free moral agent which is the human subject is revealed in their action, connecting the reality of their course of action with a disclosure of their very self.

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On the inter-human stage, the self acts within engagement with other persons, themselves also constituting the activity of moral agents. The very nature of the person is the basis upon which human action is enabled and revelatory of the quiddity of the self. Human nature includes, without being deterministic, the moral agency of the actions of the person. Wojtyla uses this approach to depart from a traditional relationship between the will and its functions, in that he grounds action in a personalist dimension, preceding its moral character, but also determining the ethical direction of the action in the rst place. Wojtyla does not go as far as Levinas in arguing that philosophy is rst ethics, but his personalist project reveals the priority he places upon the axiological signicance of the performance of action, occurring as it does in the context of other persons. Of course, not every action has a direct effect upon another person or persons. However, for Wojtyla, the person is a person always amongst other persons, even in their solitary moments, for the self exists in the wider, inter-subjective, embodied (and therefore ethical) human context.

CONCLUSION: SPEAKING OF OTHERNESS WITH WOJTYLA AND LEVINAS

I would argue that it follows that the performance of action not only reveals the human person to be a moral agent, constituting their very selves in their action (rather than bearing a discontinuity with their self), but determines the very real need for our selves to confront, and be confronted by, the other. The value of our actions in relation to the other is therefore not simply moral in nature; it is constituent of the personalist nature of the human self. I have spent a large portion of this comparison in rst reecting on Levinas, which establishes clearly the inter-subjectivity of his ethics and its reliance on the eneshed nature of the other. Where Levinas disputes the self-effacing recurrence of the subject in Heidegger and bases his concept of the human person in their own skinupon an essential responsibility for others, Wojtyla takes a different, but not contradictory approach. Wojtylas emphasis is not so much in acting for others, but in the acting with others. He determines in the personalistic value of the action the opening up of opportunity for the human self to operate alongside and in conjunction with other persons, who of course, while reecting human nature back to the human self, remain in themselves strangers, with their own thoughts, desires and hopes. Indeed, some may bare the human burden of particular forms of seduction or threat, yet these are aspects for Wojtyla of the disintegration of the self, by the revulsion against the personalist nature each person carries within themselves and which is disclosed in their action. To consider the other, we must do so with an awareness of embodiment which takes into account the concreteness of our own present self, but by an active rejection of the selfrecurrence prevalent in a false sense of being. We will require a reasoned notion of action as self-disclosure, removing from our line of sight the vistas of obtuse self-reference (even on the ontological level) which would only turn us back upon ourselves in a sempiternal journey, disallowing a true responsibility for the other. Levinas meta physic of the ethical is not only a philosophical turn against traditional ontology, but gives shape to a revelation of being that truly fundamentally places the other as central to both our selfunderstanding and to our ethical engagement with the cosmos; in other words, it is a fundamentally moral turn as well. Christian praxis, framed as it is within the context of the theology of Incarnation, will struggle to credibly articulate a philosophical basis for its own ethical action without a corresponding account of the other, in which the giftedness of the body is given its due

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import. The grounded ethic of sacricial love commanded in Scripture would appear to open up this social possibility: . . . And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.47 Wojtylas anthropology answers this need, whereas Levinas provides the philosophical framework in which the phenomenological method provides hope, beyond the ethical impasse of a Heideggerian model of social exchange. To approach the other then, which is both necessary and natural if we accept the personalist basis of action, we will have to re-imagine the body, allow ourselves to be re-enchanted with its natural discourse, re-frame its very otherness as both the stranger who reects our sameness, and the person, in all their unitive and dynamic glory, who shows us the way into that which we cannot recognise nor supersede, the one who presents themselves as our en-eshed neighbour, even within the complexities and strangeness of human community.

Notes
1 Theologies of the body are of course always informed by philosophical approaches with a view to social and political outcomes. A good example of the kind of philosophical complexities involved in this context is the work by David West, Reason and sexuality in western thought (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2005). West nds problematic the Western inheritance of body theory and the treatment of the categories involved in sexual expression and seeks to clear the way for a more complex and layered approach to sexuality and the body. I do not focus on the embodied subject as a sexual and gendered person in this present article, but I take these characteristics of embodied existence seriously. Wests treatment of what he calls the three main constellations in Western philosophical thought transcendent reason and ascetic idealism, hedonist realism and nally romanticism locates failures in each and argues instead for a holistic and multi-stranded understanding of reason and sexuality. Wests striking analysis unfortunately fails to provide for a phenomenology of the person which remains holistic in any kind of objective and ethical sense, preferring instead the existential moral ambivalence of Jean-Paul Sartre. 2 Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the center of the human drama: the philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II, Michael J. McGivney lectures of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 36. Schmitz lists Levinas amongst other non-Catholic personalists who have inuenced Wojtyla, such as Paul Ricoeur and Martin Buber. Of course, of more immediate concern to the young Wojtyla were Immanuel Kant and Max Scheler. 3 John McNerney, John Paul II: Poet and Philosopher (Continuum Intl Publ Grp, 2004)., Forward, p. xi. 4 Michael Walsh, John Paul II: A Biography (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994)., p. 222. 5 Ibid. 6 McNerney, John Paul II: Poet and Philosopher., p. 12. 7 John Paul II, Man and woman He created them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006)., 27:3. 8 John Webster contrasts an authentic theological anthropology with a post-modern deconstructive account of the human person in his essay titled The human person. He argues that a key aspect of the former is precisely the social context of the person. My neighbour is a summons to fellowship, because in him or her I nd a claim on me which is not casual or fortuitous (and thereby dispensable) but rather precedes my will and requires that I act in my neighbors regard. Kevin J Vanhoozer, The Cambridge companion to postmodern theology, Cambridge companions to religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)., p. 233. 9 Michael Purcell, Levinas and theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 74. 10 Simon Glendinning reads in Levinas sensualism a subtle sharing with others, rather than a strictly solitary experience, as some commentators (such as Luce Irigaray) have suggested, Simon Glendinning, In the name of phenomenology (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 168. 11 Heidegger describes his understanding of being as ontologically prior in a dramatically fundamental manner: So whenever an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of Being is other than that of Dasein, it has its own foundation and motivation in Daseins own ontical structure, in which a pre-ontological understanding of Being is comprised as a denite characteristic. Martin Heidegger, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson, Being and time, The Library of philosophy and theology (London: SCM Press, 1962), p. 33. 12 I note the translation of John McNerney of this quote from Levinas in McNerney, John Paul II: Poet and Philosopher. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, Note sul pensiero del Cardinale Wojtyla, Communio 54 (1980). 14 , Existence and existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), p. 72.

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15 Vanhoozer, The Cambridge companion to postmodern theology, p. 16. 16 By establishing ethics as rst philosophy, Levinas is rejecting the exclusion of ethics from fundamental ontology as evidenced in Heidegger, as outlined in Dermot Moran, Introduction to phenomenology (London; New York: Routledge, 2000). 17 Richard A. Cohen has described the Levinasian project as the . . . side of a metaphysical anthropology and humanism against ontology, Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the other (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. xxxi. 18 David Michael Levin, The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment, pp 122149, in Donn Welton, The body : classic and contemporary readings (Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 14546. 19 Ibid., pp. 12223. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than being : or beyond essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 109. 21 Ibid., p. 103. 22 Ibid., p. 108. 23 Livio Melina has commented on the blunted moral sense that rises from the self-contained moral philosophies which fall under the two excesses of either a freedom without truth (especially non-cognitivism) or its antithesis of equally dubious moral heritage, truth without freedom. In both, I would argue that one can nd examples of the kind of ethical self-recurrence that Levinas describes, owing to strands within the Western philosophical inheritance which avoid a true moral interruption to this lack of escape from the oneself. The consequences are wider than simply for the individual: Melina nds its inherent problem given form in culture and in wider society. He writes, A peoples ethos can deform the inborn moral sense and thus obscure the evidence of moral principles in such a way that not only practical judgement, but also moral science itself suffers as a result. Livio Melina, The Truth about the Good : Practical Reason, Philosophical Ethics, and Moral Theology, Communio 26 (1999): p. 657. 24 Levinas, Otherwise than being : or beyond essence, p. 108. 25 Ibid., p. 111. 26 Ibid., p. 109. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 78. 33 Kim Atkins, Self and subjectivity (Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 109. 34 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and innity : an essay on exteriority, Duquesne studies. Philosophical series (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 229. 35 Ibid., p. 230. 36 For an extended analysis of the distinction of Wojtylas published thoughts in these two categories, I suggest Michael Waldsteins introduction to his more recently translated edition of John Paul IIs Theology of the Body (titled Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books & Media, Boston: 2006), which outlines a clear and thoughtful response in understanding the levels of authority which both categories of writing entail (specically pp. 14 - 18). Waldstein, having worked directly from the original Polish texts and their semi-ofcial Italian translations, both rejects the notion that Wojtylas post-Papal works are lacking the integrity of an intended Papal authority (ie they are written for the edication of the whole Church with an authoritative voice) as well as retaining the view that there exists an essential unity in Wojtylas whole intellectual output both before and after his election to the See of Rome. His is therefore a body of work carrying a radical continuity with his more authoritative publications. 37 McNerney, John Paul II: Poet and Philosopher, p. 81. 38 John Paul II, Man and woman He created them: A Theology of the Body, (19:6). 39 Augustine, The city of God against the pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge texts in the history of political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Book XIV, Chapter 11. 40 Ibid. 41 According to Waldsteins translation of the (mostly Polish) original texts of Wojtylas lengthy project, Man and Woman He Created Them, the original author uses the term Beginning - Principle (principio) - no less than 301 times across the course of the 135 addresses which together constitute the entire work. Waldstein also notes that the term appears most frequently in the context of Gods original intention for human love in the divine plan, located in the creation of humanitys rst parents. 42 John Paul II, The Acting Person, trans. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana (Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1979). Action as revelatory of the existentially situated person is a constant theme in his work, but is highlighted succinctly in Part One: Consciousness and Efcacy, pp. 2849 and indicated clearly in the Authors Preface to the English/American edition of 1977. Not withstanding Tymienieckas controversial (mis)translation of Wojtylas work, the emphasis upon action as a moral revelation of the person in themselves remains authentically his own contribution. 43 Ibid., p. 203.

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44 Michele Saracino, On Being Human: A conversation with Lonergan and Levinas, ed. Andrew Tallon, First ed., vol. No. 35, Marquette Studies in Theology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003). Saracino argues that a key theme in postmodern (or contemporary) continental theory is difference, referring to Levinas then as a protagonist of a postmodern attempt to discern and reveal the true nature of difference as the possibility for openness, peacefulness, dialogue and ethical responsibility. By extension, I would suggest that Wojtylas deep theological meditations on human difference, and its connectedness with the personal exchange shown in the life of the Trinity, reveals him as a postmodern voice in contemporary Catholic theology. 45 John Paul II, The Acting Person, pp. 29293. 46 , Love and Responsibility, Rev. ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 32. 47 Matt 22:39 Crossway Bibles., The Holy Bible: English Standard Version containing the Old and New Testaments, Deluxe reference ed. (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Bibles, 2003).