The Spectator’s Notes | 18 February 2016

In his authoritative biography of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel writes lucidly about the unlucid subject of phenomenology. It is a way of thinking which rejects the dry categories of empiricists and the abstractions of idealists, and concentrates instead on ‘the basic experiences of life as they come to us’. Weigel takes the example of ‘girl meets boy’: ‘An empiricist will analyse the brain chemistry of a young woman seeing, hearing and touching a handsome young man … an idealist may worry that the young woman’s commitment to the second categorical imperative [of Kant] (never use another person as a means) may be wavering in the face of other desires. The phenomenologist … will be interested in the experience as a whole, the psychological, physical, moral and conceptual elements moving this young woman.’ What about when married woman meets handsome young cardinal? Then it gets even more interesting.

Edward Stourton’s revelations on Panorama on Monday suggest that the encounter between Karol Wojtyla and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a fellow phenomenologist, subjected this philosophy to a severe real-life test. After a couple of years’ acquaintance in the 1970s, she declared to him, in writing, that she loved him. He refused any illicit relationship, but told her she was ‘the gift of a person’ which, though he was ‘afraid’ of it, was ‘a gift from heaven’. When writing his main philosophical work Person and Act, Wojtyla told a fellow priest that it was ‘devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the PERSON’. Now he confronted that mystery, and its temptations, in the form of a beautiful woman whose thought was close to his, and who was offering him her heart. And then he became Pope! John Paul’s philosophical inquiry in Person and Act was directed towards replacing Descartes’ famous, ‘I think therefore I am’ with ‘I understand therefore I am.’