Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Thought, Creativity, and the Good

"We are by nature creators, not just consumers. We are creators because we think. And because our thought (our rational nature) is also the basis of our personalities, one could say that we are creators because we are persons.... When we act in a manner proper to a person, we always create something: we create something either outside ourselves in the surrounding world or within ourselves--or outside and within ourselves at the same time. Creating as derived from thinking is so characteristic of a person that it is always an infallible sign of a person, a proof of a person's existence or presence. In creating, we also fill the external material world around us with our own thought and being. There is a certain similarity here between ourselves and God, for the whole of creation is an expression of God's own thought of being.

Although thought is the basis of the creativity in which we express ourselves as persons, this creativity neither ends nor culminates in thought. That which is most characteristic of a person, that in which a person (at least in the natural order) is most fully and properly realized, is morality. Morality is not the most strictly connected with thought; thought is merely a condition of morality."

-Karol Woyjtyla, "Thomistic Personalism" in Person and Community, 171-2


This made my jaw drop.


I need to read more of this guy.

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