The 'Acting' Person in a 'Pulverized' World. Wojtyła’s Anthropological Antidote to Tribalism

In the new century, politics has increasingly become a contest of identities. The impulse is not new—tribes and creeds have long divided humankind—but its modern form is unprecedented. Never before has belonging been so visible, so performative, and so total.

Digital life makes allegiance a continuous self-portrait, and partisanship now defines not only what we think but who we are. Previous ideological ages sought to mold the person; ours tends to dissolve it. Those across the divide are no longer fellow citizens with mistaken views; they are members of another species. Social scientists call this affective polarization, but behind this civic pathology lies something deeper than algorithms or propaganda.

It is, as Karol Wojtyła might have thought, an anthropological crisis: a confusion about what it means to be human.

Half a century ago, the future Pope John Paul II described the modern condition as the “pulverization of the person.” a term that was used in personal letter from Wojtyła to Henri de Lubac (At the service of the Church, 1989).

Having watched two totalitarian systems—one collectivist, one nationalist—reduce human beings to abstractions, he devoted his 1969 philosophical masterwork The Acting Person (Osoba i czyn) to rescuing the reality of the person from the machinery of ideology. His aim was not theological consolation but philosophical reconstruction: to show that human dignity is revealed most clearly in action—in the lived drama of free and responsible choice.

His aim was not theological consolation but philosophical reconstruction: to show that human dignity is revealed most clearly in action—in the lived drama of free and responsible choice.

That insight remains startlingly relevant. For in our own fractured world, the problem is not only political incivility or media bias, but a disintegration of moral perception. We have forgotten how to see one another as persons—centers of freedom, conscience, and transcendence—essential pillars of the civic value of coexistence itself.

Wojtyła located the roots of modern fragmentation in a deep rift within Western thought. Classical metaphysics, from Aristotle to Aquinas, had emphasized being (metaphysics)—the objective nature of man—but articulated it primarily in ontological rather than experiential terms, often leaving the vitality of lived experience in the background. Modern philosophy, from Descartes through Husserl, exalted consciousness (phenomenology)—the inner theater of experience—yet risked severing it from objective moral order.

From these partial visions emerged the twin idolatries of the twentieth century. Collectivisms such as Marxism or Fascism, hypostatized impersonal categories—class, state, history—absorbing the individual into the mass. Radical individualisms, conversely, enthroned subjectivity itself: the self as sovereign, detached from truth or community. Humanity oscillated between submersion and solitude, obedience and emptiness.

Wojtyła’s alternative began not with abstractions but with a concrete observation: man acts. Through the act—czyn—the human being experiences both interiority and objectivity. “Action reveals the person,” he wrote. Every deliberate choice discloses the mysterious unity of consciousness and reality, freedom and truth. When I choose, I do not merely do something; I become someone. In action, the person is both subject and author, the agent through whom moral reality enters the world.

In action, the person is both subject and author, the agent through whom moral reality enters the world.

This synthesis—phenomenology disciplined by Thomistic realism—allowed Wojtyła to reclaim the wholeness of the person against reduction. The human being is neither a cog in a system nor a bundle of impressions, but a self-possessing, self-governing creature capable of determining himself in the light of the good.

The human being is neither a cog in a system nor a bundle of impressions, but a self-possessing, self-governing creature capable of determining himself in the light of the good.

The core of Wojtyła’s anthropology is his distinction between the human what and the human who. The what refers to our species, roles, and functions; the who designates the irreducible center of consciousness and freedom that makes each person unrepeatable. Modern culture, he warned, constantly collapses the who into the what—the pulverization of the person.

Our political life offers daily illustrations. Labels replace persons rather commonly: “deplorable,” “Nazi,” “extremist.” The complexity of a moral agent is flattened into a stereotype. Avatars substitute for faces: social media turn the self into a brand of allegiance. The acting person disappears behind the digital invented mask. Demographics usurp conscience: analysts speak of blocs—race, gender, class—as though human beings were data points rather than free subjects.

This reduction is not merely impolite; it is metaphysical violence.

This reduction is not merely impolite; it is metaphysical violence. To recognize the person is to acknowledge their capacity for self-determination and self-possession—the interior sovereignty through which they act and fulfill themselves. Such recognition is realized in participation: the encounter with others that affirms our shared humanity and the irreducible worth of each “neighbor,” as the Commandment of Love proclaims.

When this capacity for participation is denied, the person becomes alienated—“drained,” as Wojtyła writes, “of his very own humanness” and “personalistic value.” Both radical individualism and totalizing collectivism, though opposite in form, share this effect: they obstruct genuine participation and dissolve the human community into fragments of self or mass.

When this capacity for participation is denied, the person becomes alienated—“drained,” as Wojtyła writes, “of his very own humanness” and “personalistic value.”

The moral cost is immense. In denying the “who,” tribalism effectively abolishes responsibility. Persons are judged not by their actions but by their affiliation. The individual conscience—the inner space where freedom and truth meet, where the person becomes the author of his acts—is drowned in the collective shout.

Yet it is precisely in that interior space of conscience that renewal must begin. For Wojtyła, freedom is not the unbounded assertion of will that tribalism imitates, but the disciplined power of self-determination. It rests on two interlocking capacities: self-possession (I own myself) and self-governance (I can direct myself). “When I will,” he writes, “I am also determined by myself.” Authentic freedom, therefore, is creative, reflective, and responsible.

When conscience falls silent, that interior center collapses into a void. Into it rushes a counterfeit freedom—the freedom of the tribe.

When conscience falls silent, that interior center collapses into a void. Into it rushes a counterfeit freedom—the freedom of the tribe. It offers belonging at the price of surrender: the comfort of outrage shared, judgment outsourced, conscience dissolved in the crowd.

What feels like action is in fact reaction: energy without authorship.

In Wojtyła’s terms, this is not acting but being acted upon—something merely “happening in man,” (vs. "acting of men") where emotion and conformity move the person more than reason or will. True action, by contrast, begins when the self becomes its own cause—when freedom governs impulse and transforms feeling into choice.

The exhilaration of unanimity and belonging feels like power, but it is in fact dependency—the abdication of interior sovereignty.

Consider the digital mob. Outrage travels faster than thought; retweets substitute for moral deliberation. The exhilaration of unanimity and belonging feels like power, but it is in fact dependency—the abdication of interior sovereignty. Party discipline functions similarly: when conformity outweighs conscience, the will no longer determines itself; it is determined by others.

Against this counterfeit freedom, Wojtyła proposes a more demanding one: the courage to act in accordance with truth, even when one’s group—or one’s own impulses—resist it. Conscience, in his view, is not a matter of private opinion but a form of participation in the moral order of reality. It is the inner witness of truth as it claims the person.

Wojtyła then presents freedom as self-determination. Such freedom demands courage: the willingness to follow truth even when it contradicts one’s group or one’s own spontaneous emotivity. Conscience, in this view, is not private opinion but the interior reality where the person encounters and assents to moral truth, discerning a duty toward the good perceived in possible actions.

It forms the vital link between freedom and truth, the space where transcendence begins.

It forms the vital link between freedom and truth, the space where transcendence begins. To act in obedience to a truthful conscience is the highest exercise of self-determination, for it is through such choices that the person fulfills himself—actualizing the structure of self-possession and self-governance that constitutes authentic freedom.

That same interior order extends outward into community. When persons act together while remaining self-determined, they realize what Wojtyła calls participation: the convergence of the good of the person and the good of the community.

Its opposite is alienation, which arises whenever social structures prevent that mutual realization.

Its opposite is alienation, which arises whenever social structures prevent that mutual realization. Collectivism alienates by absorbing the person into the whole; atomistic individualism alienates by sealing the self off from communion. Both produce loneliness disguised as belonging.

Our digital culture multiplies pseudo-participations. Echo chambers simulate community while insulating members from contradiction. “Performative activism” offers moral expression without encounter. Negative partisanship—unity through shared loathing—builds community on sand. These are forms of what Wojtyła would call inauthentic participation: action without self-transcendence.

His question remains piercing: does our acting-together affirm each participant as a free subject, or does it demand conformity and obedience? Does it aim at the common good, or merely the victory of our tribe? The answers determine not only the health of democracy but the health of the soul.

His question remains piercing: does our acting-together affirm each participant as a free subject, or does it demand conformity and obedience? Does it aim at the common good, or merely the victory of our tribe? The answers determine not only the health of democracy but the health of the soul.

Bringing Wojtyła into the Present: Skeptics may ask whether a mid-century Polish philosopher can illuminate twenty-first-century digital politics. The answer depends on what one seeks.

Too abstract for political science? Empirical research can chart polarization’s mechanics—algorithmic incentives, identity clustering—but cannot explain why these dynamics wound the spirit. Wojtyła’s categories provide that moral grammar. They expose how technological and social mechanisms exploit disordered desires: our longing for belonging, our fear of isolation, our flight from responsibility. His thought complements data with diagnosis.

Empirical research can chart polarization’s mechanics—algorithmic incentives, identity clustering—but cannot explain why these dynamics wound the spirit.

Too theological for a secular age? The Acting Person rests on experience before it rests on faith. Wojtyła’s method is phenomenological: he begins with what every human being can verify—the reality of acting, choosing, being responsible. Terms such as self-determination, integration, and participation describe structures of experience, not doctrines of belief.

Blind to systemic injustice? On the contrary, Wojtyła’s personalism grounds social critique more deeply than most structural theories. Injustice, he writes elsewhere, occurs when institutions make it impossible for persons to become themselves through action. Racism, exploitation, and censorship are evil precisely because they obstruct participation and violate the dignity of the acting person. His anthropology supplies not an escape from politics, but its moral foundation.

Racism, exploitation, and censorship are evil precisely because they obstruct participation and violate the dignity of the acting person. His anthropology supplies not an escape from politics, but its moral foundation.

Outdated in the digital age? If anything, prophetic. The internet radicalizes the very disintegration he warned against—detaching communication from embodiment, agency from responsibility, community from presence. Wojtyła’s insistence that the body is the medium of personal expression now reads as countercultural wisdom. To encounter another face to face is to recover reality from the screen.

From this anthropology presented in the The Acting Person flow the virtues our fractured present most lacks.

Solidarity. Not the solidarity of tribe, but what Wojtyła—echoing his later encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987)—called “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the good of all and of each individual.” Solidarity recognizes that our destinies are intertwined beyond ideology.

Dialogue. For Wojtyła, dialogue is not polite relativism but a common search for truth. It presupposes that the other’s perspective may contain a fragment of reality I need. Such dialogue demands humility—the willingness to learn—and courage—the readiness to speak.

Authentic Opposition. To dissent from one’s own camp out of fidelity to conscience is not betrayal but service to truth. The acting person must sometimes stand against the tribe to preserve its moral health.

Primacy of the Neighbor. Politics begins not with systems but with encounter—with the irreducible “thou.” The commandment “love your neighbor” is not sentiment; it is the epistemology of humanity. Only in this recognition—you are not my category but my neighbor—can civic life be reborn.

The Acting Person offers no easy fix for polarization. Its thesis is disquieting: the recovery of civic space begins with the recovery of the self. Systems and algorithms matter, but the decisive frontier is interior. The renewal of politics requires the conversion of persons—from reaction to reflection, from belonging by anger to belonging by love.

Wojtyła’s realism rescues us from the sentimentalism that mistakes civility for virtue and the cynicism that mistakes conflict for destiny. Against both, he holds that the person finds fulfillment neither in isolation nor absorption, but in participation—acting together with others in truth.

To live that truth is arduous. It means encountering the neighbor behind the label, listening before replying, resisting the narcotic of outrage. It means affirming that the human person—every person—is not a means to our ideological ends but a subject of infinite worth.

In a "pulverized" world, this is the quiet revolution still available to us. It begins wherever one human being chooses, freely and consciously, to act in affirmation rather than contempt—to see, in the face of another, not an avatar of the enemy but a reflection of the same mysterious freedom that defines us all. ◳ [gc]