Más allá de la Ilustración francesaEl humanismo polaco de Karol Wojtyła

Abstract

Karol Wojtyła is well known for having been one of the undisputed leaders of the 20th and early 21st centuries, but his intellectual personality and powerful philosophical contribution are much less known. This article shows its cultural roots, which made possible the development of an integral humanism, a humanism that, although it looked with interest towards French Enlightenment ideals, also drew on a rich Slavic tradition of its own, open to new European ideas, but to at the same time maturely critical of some aspects of these. In his younger years, Wojtyła had been intellectually nourished by the work of the Polish romantics, especially the triad formed by Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Norwid, who had lived in close contact with other European countries after the Great Emigration, starting in 1831, and had developed with enormous depth ideals quite different from those of the French Enlightenment, but among which stood out a remarkably complex conception of freedom, both individual and collective.