Społeczeństwo, państwo, dobro wspólne i polityka w ujęciu M.A. Krąpca
Society, the state, the common good, and politics in M.A. Krąpiec’s thought

Summary/Abstract: This article outlines the philosophical account of social being proposed by M.A. Krąpiec, which reflects his potentialistic construal of the human being as a person. A key element of this is the philosophical notion of the common good, understood analogically in personalistic terms as the common purpose of all human persons, and thus as corresponding to the actualization of man’s personal potential in the form of the intellectual, volitional, and creative development of every human being. The main aim and justification of society and the state is to provide the means for the realization of the common good thus understood. Every social being — as a relational reality — is ontically “weaker” than the existing human person qua subject. Meanwhile, the common good, understood personalistically, constitutes the only fully non-antagonistic good: the personal development of individual human beings does not harm anyone - on the contrary, it enriches everyone. Hence the common good does not consist in a subordinating of the personal good to the good of society understood collectively as a higher-order totality. At the same time, this conception of the common good allows us to point to the rational basis for asserting that various sorts of community without which personal development could not occur exist out of necessity. The philosophical conception formulated by Krąpiec presented here emphasizes the primacy of the person with respect to social being, while simultaneously indicating the necessity of there being diverse communities in the sense of environments enabling personal development — ones that, as such, are also grounded in human nature potentialistically construed. Krąpiec’s conception thus enables us to overcome the dichotomy of individualism vs. collectivism.

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