The Structure of a Person as the Basis for Determining the Common Good as Understood by Mieczysław A. Krąpiec

Abstract

Relying on the tradition of classical philosophy, Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec lists the essential properties of the human person as follows: intellectual knowledge, free will, love, religiosity, subjectivity of law, completeness, and dignity. These properties highlight the spiritual aspect of a human being. The first four properties point to the irreducibility of the person to nature, whereas the last three to his irreducibility to society. It is thus possible to say that the person transcends both nature and society. Moreover, the spiritual dimension of man is integrated with his corporeal life as a result of the fact that the human person is constituted of a spiritual soul and a material body. This article makes an attempt to analyze Krąpiec’s anthropological views in order to show the reasons why some elements of the structure of man as a person—resulting from the human mode of access to truth, goodness, beauty and religion—are essentially significant for de-