Wonder, Intuition, Romanticism: Wojtyła, Scheler, Wordsworth
Adam POTKAY
Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, The College of William & Mary, Tucker Hall 137, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185, USA , United StatesAbstract
This essay addresses an antinomy of modernity that extends from William Wordsworth and the Romantic era through the phenomenological writings of Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Karol Wojtyła, and into philosophical thought today: the differing claims of emotional intuitionism and discursive rationality as grounds for moral and theistic values. Although Wojtyła argues against Scheler’s ethical emotionalism as a sufficient basis for ethics, as a poet as well as philosopher he appreciates the power of moral and finally theistic intuition and particularly the wonder or reverent amazement we may experience in the natural ordering of things. In this he concurs with Scheler—indeed, with Aquinas—and also with the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, who rooted moral value in intuition or intimation. However insufficient he may have found emotionalism’s claims as a totalizing philosophy, he entertains emotional intuition’s more limited role as “creative and rich in consequences for cognition of human reality.”
Keywords:
Karol Wojtyła, John Paul II, Max Scheler, William Wordsworth, wonder, Romanticism, ethical intuitionism, phenomenologyDepartment of English, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, The College of William & Mary, Tucker Hall 137, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185, USA
