Abstract
This article explores tensions in Karol Wojtyła’s Thomistic personalism, especially in Person and Act (1979), synthesizing Neo-Thomistic realism—stressing stable human nature and ontology—with phenomenological focus on action’s lived experience. Influenced by Garrigou-Lagrange’s Thomism and personalists like Maritain and Guardini, Wojtyła counters idealisms (Kant, Husserl) by grounding consciousness and freedom in the suppositum, yet he reveals action’s efficacy enacting moral transcendence beyond essences. Using Eric Voegelin’s noetic recovery from Greek philosophy, this article argues that Wojtyła’s analysis—consciousness as constitutive mirror, self-determination as self-relation, morality as truth-to-duty shift—highlights fixed metaphysics’ limits, pointing to nature as participatory tension with divine ground. Though Wojtyła prioritizes intellectual normativity against relativism, his insights portray the person as freely responding to transcendent good, akin to Aquinas’s synderesis. This critiques Thomistic readings for missing personalism's fluid self-disclosure, enriching ethics and political theory.