Spiritual Substance. The Essence of Man-Person According to Karol Wojtyła

The article points out that, according to Karol Wojtyła, a substantial spiritual soul is the essence of each man. It is the principle of his life and all of his acts. A substantial spiritual soul makes each man a person. The spiritual substance is the source of the immaterial, essentially personal, accidental beings such as cognition and free will. The substantial spirituality of the human soul is the guarantee of the essentially personal dimension of man-person, namely his vertical transcendence. Vertical transcendence, in turn, enables person’s ontic and moral integration. The authoress also mentions several dire consequences of removing a really existing substantial spiritual soul from the modern philosophical anthropology. Here are some of those consequences: the culture of death, discrimination of those who do not show any visible signs of consciousness or self-governance, losing freedom and being a slave to relational accidental beings such as society and socio-economic processes, removal of the objective truth from the realm of inner life, degradation of the human body treated as a purely material organism, clinging to the senses and the visible, even in religious experiences, etc.