The Integral Experience as the Source of Metaphysics: On an Epistemological, Personalistic, and Ethical Metaphysics

Anna KRAJEWSKA

Department of Ethics, Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland , Poland
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2795-1263

Kazimierz KRAJEWSKI

Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The article examines the conception of epistemological, personalistic, and ethical metaphysics, which is rooted in the integral nature of the original and real human experience. This kind of experience is in fact a co-experience of four particular elements: the experience of being, the experience (living through) of the act of a cognitive grasp of being, the experience of subjectivity, and the moral experience. All these elements exhibit an integral and indivisible unity.
Thus the metaphysics built upon the original human experience is determined by four factors, i.e., (1) the epistemological one involving a propositional judgment (in which the category of truth is inherent), (2) the personalistic one consisting in the constitution of person by way of concomitant reflection (reflectio in actu exercito), which accompanies a cognitive act, (3) the metaphysical one, based upon the reality (actual existence) of both the subject experiencing an object and the object experienced by the subject, and (4) the moral one, constituted by the normative character of propositional cognition and the normative dimension of truth it involves, on the one hand, and by the object of the cognitive act which appeals to the subject, demanding the subject’s affirmation, on the other.

Keywords:

assertion, truth, normative power of truth, person, constitution of person, transcendence, transcendentals, being, an epistemological, personalistic, and ethical metaphysics