Man is Himself Through Truth. In Search of the Foundations of Karol Wojtyła’s and Tadeusz Styczeń’s Personalism

The paper discusses one of the key aspects of Karol Wojtyła’s and Tadeusz Styczeń’s ethics, namely, the dependence of freedom on truth. By building their ethics within the framework of the classic metaphysics, both the thinkers were convinced a range of the intellectual and moral errors of the present times, which are dangerous to man, spring from the breach of that constitutive bond between these fundamental values. The article is a reconstruction of the understanding of the relationship between freedom and truth as underlying the mutually supplementary personalist ethics of Wojtyła and Styczeń, with the dignity of the human person as its conceptual centre. The same triad of values, dignity – freedom – truth, in particular, the truth about the human person, would, for John Paul II, become the criterion of evaluation of the human culture and actions taken in the social dimension.