Abstract:
The article is an attempt to look at the conception of the person and the act in K. Wojtyla’s work from the methodological and hermeneutic points of view. The point of departure for such a procedure is the interpretation of act as the most elementary medium, through which a person speaks „for the outside” Actus personae is also interpreted as an element of a person’s self-determination in his inner structure. In this way the man’s act assumes the shape of a „bridge”, a „junction” between a human person’s subjective and objective world; it is a peculiar hermeneutic arch between two aspects of the same reality, that is of the human person. In a completely new way the article makes an attempt to interpret the person and the act by means of symbolic hermeneutics as defined by P. Ricoeur, for whom the symbol is a form of expression giving access to the meaning, at the same time indicating something beyond itself. Hence it is this understanding of the symbol, in which we encounter two planes of meaning. The first one is given directly (act), and when we look into its contents we can see that it automatically transfers us to the other plane of meaning (person).