Using Persons: the Personalistic Norm and the Modern Landscape

Wojtyla’s first understanding of the verb to use presents the first tangible key to overcoming the absurd isolationist tendencies inherited by the Enlightenment, the Social Contractors, and Modernity.

The Enlightenment ushered in a world enamored with the subjective experience.  The radical skeptics of Cartesian school assert that our senses cannot be trusted, and the only surety is that of mathematical status (such as I exist).  Beyond that, we cannot know for sure that the world around us is how we perceive it.  Because of this, each individual is insurmountably isolated within his own sphere of perception, can only see things from one specific point of view, and cannot invite anyone else into his isolated world.

The Social Contractors take this fundamental principle of isolation and apply it to political thought.  For them, because each individual is an isolated world to themselves, they must only come to community for the purposes of survival.  Man literally gives up his own freedom willingly so that we can artificially construct a society wherein we all agree to not kill each other, and in some limited way look out for each other.  In this construction and imposition of human action upon the violent state of nature, each individual would be slightly less free than in their own isolated world, but would be better suited to pursue the freedoms left to him.

And finally, Modernity (and post-modernity) takes these first two principles and translates them into prescriptive ramifications.  Because each individual is isolated in his own subjectivity and any culture/political state is mere arbitrary construction anyhow, everything is relative, and we all ought to pursue anything we can thus get away with.  Everything, that is, so long as it does not affect any other individual.  In this view, the subjectivity of the individual is the highest - if not the only - moral arbiter, since it is within that subjectivity an isolated human with whom we can never have any sort of communion or shared experience.  In this modern world, the only moral imperative is not to infringe on others’ subjectivity or agency.  Another way to say this would be not not “use” another person.  Everything else is licit.

Wojtyla turns this centuries long developed worldview on its head.  He begins with the premise that the world is essentially objective (that is, full of objects).  Each subjective individual is simultaneously, then, a subject (that is, experiencing the world with agency and individuality) but also an object (that is, existing outside of myself as the object of my intentions, actions, etc.).   Now, in this first definition of the verb to use, Wojtyla echoes an Aristotelian definition: that to use is to regard the object as a means to an end.  

The key to overcoming the absurdities of the modern world comes when he takes this definition and examines it in context of the human person.  The human person is, again, both subject and object.  So, in one sense, we must use other persons at one level or another.  “Does not an employer,” he writes in Love and Responsibility, “use a worker, i.e. a human person, for ends which he himself has chosen?  Does not an officer use the Soldiers under his command to attain certain military ends, planned by himself and sometimes known only to himself (p. 26).”  So, in a sense, there must allow some sense of use of the human person.

However: this sense of use and objectivity in relation to my own person is not where reality ends.  “Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right (p. 27).”  Wojtyla, in order to bridge this gap, articulated what he would refer to as the personalistic norm (itself a variation of the Kantian imperative): that “whenever a person is the object of your activity, remember that you may not treat that person as only the means to an end, as an instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she, too, has, or at least should have, distinct personal ends (p. 28).”  This personalistic norm may seem obvious, but is in fact a profound articulation of the first key to overcoming modernity’s absurdist isolation.

Fleshing out the ramifications of the personalistic norm will be the task of a future article.  At this time, my intent was solely to define it in relation to Wojtyla’s first definition of the word, “to use,” as well as to place it within the “greatest hits” of thinkers contributing to our own modern landscape.