Pope John Paul II and the dignity of the human being.

• Author: Coughlin, John J.

Since his election in 1978 as the Successor to the Apostle Peter, His Holiness Pope John Paul II has remained one of the principal protagonists on the global stage for the dignity and value of every human being. (1) Although the popular press and media sometimes have been slow to recognize this message, an online search of the Holy Father's copious encyclicals, addresses, and homilies reveals that he has advocated human dignity literally hundreds of times during the course of his twenty-five year pontificate. (2) In fact, long before his election as Pope, Karol Wojtyla was developing his understanding of the dignity of the human person in his philosophical and theological writings. (3) In a 1968 letter to the French theologian Henri de Lubac, Wojtyla wrote

The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even much more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration, planned at times by atheistic ideologies, we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of "recapitulation" of the inviolable mystery of the person.... (4) The belief that each human being possesses a metaphysical value simply in the fact of his or her existence remains at the root of John Paul II's indefatigable defense of human dignity. In this brief essay, my purpose is not to afford a comprehensive presentation and critique of the philosophical and theological foundations of human dignity, but rather to highlight certain features of John Paul II's thinking that raise questions about disturbing trends in the law.

I.

The philosophical foundation for John Paul II's defense of the dignity of the human being begins with two ancient truths. First, it posits the universality of one human nature that transcends the limits of history and culture. One must admit that, historically, the idea of the universality of human nature has stemmed from Aristotelian cosmology, which mistakenly understood the universe as fixed and immutable. (5) Because he desires a philosophical approach consistent with the modern scientific method, John Paul II attempts to retrieve essential aspects of the tradition through the adoption of a radical realism and the human capacity to know it. His philosophical method requires a turn to the human subject and a phenomenological analysis of the somatic, emotional, intellectual, and moral dimensions of human experience. (6) Nonetheless, he refuses to embrace a skepticism that denies the possibilities for the apprehension of truth in the human intellect. Rather, John Paul II's reflection on experience leads to his affirmation of a universal human nature and permanent natural law contained within the human person. (7) In his view, the dignity of the human person, human rights language, and an objective moral order all depend on the universality of human nature. (8)

Second, John Paul II accepts the classical metaphysical view, which understands the human person as characterized by the intellect and free will. (9) In accordance with the modern starting point, John Paul II believes that reflection on human experience reveals the human being as a dynamic and irreducible unity of body and spirit. (10) The intellect signifies the interior consciousness of the human being in which the multi-faceted interplay of somatic, emotional, reasoned, aesthetic, and spiritual awareness form the concept of self in relation to others and to the world. (11) Free will means that the human being may pursue goals identified in the intellect to constitute oneself through action. (12) The interrelatedness of the intellectual and intentional faculties enables the human being to constitute oneself in accordance with the understanding of value recognized through the intellect and appropriated through the intentional act of the will. In Pope John Paul II's understanding, each human person remains "a remarkable psychophysical unity, each one a unique person, never again to be repeated in the entire universe." (13) John Paul II thus understands the dignity of the human being both in an objective and in a subjective sense. The objectivity derives from the universality of human nature according to which every human person possesses the potential for intelligent and free action. The subjectivity flows from the fact that the human being may employ the intellect and will creatively to constitute the individual self.

This understanding of human dignity rejects determinism, empiricism, and idealism. While recognizing the importance of the human body, John Paul II's philosophical understanding refuses to limit the person to mere genetic factors as being determinative of who the person is, and what the person may become. It thus refutes Freudian theory, in both pristine and derivative forms, to the extent that it exhibits a biological determinism. (14) Likewise, it eschews a social determinism in which the human person is simply the sum of environmental factors, which may be predicted and verified by empirical science. It opposes Marxist theories that attempt to create a kind of human person through state manipulation of social conditions and its consequential defacement of the individual person. (15) At the same time, it also stands as a critique of Cartesian dualism between mind and body. In contrast to the disembodied Cartesian concept of the intellect that underlies the work of modern theorists such as Locke and Hume, John Paul II understands the human being as an embodied subject. (16) Nor does John Paul II's understanding of human dignity accept Kantian idealism, which proffers abstract categories, types, and forms. Along with the erroneous Cartesian dualism, idealist abstractions fail to account for the basic and concrete experiences of life. (17)

Reflection on human experience leads John Paul II to affirm reason as a distinctive human capacity that testifies to human dignity. Practical reason affords the recognition of a set of fundamental human goods. (18) Among these basic goods, one might identify, inter alia, life, knowledge, play, marriage, aesthetic experience, friendship, and religion. (19) Through the use of right reason, the human being has the intellectual capacity to recognize primary and secondary principles as well as tertiary norms that logically flow from the basic human goods. (20) Consideration of the basic good of life, for example, points to principles that prohibit the taking of innocent human life and to more specific norms such as an international treaty provision against genocide. This "universal moral law" constitutes a "kind of grammar" that endows any discussion of human rights or system of law with an objective "moral logic." (21)

While the universality of human nature and the objective moral norms derived from it testify to the dignity of the human person, John Paul II has also drawn attention to the subjective and particular experience of cultures and individuals. On the one hand, transcendent human nature renders every human being a "somebody" in a metaphysical sense. (22) On the other, the human being realizes oneself as "more of a somebody" in an intensely personal and subjective way through the particular historical circumstances of one's life. (23) When he addressed the United Nations in 1979, John Paul II was particularly critical of communist and other totalitarian regimes that stifled individual expression and failed to respect the primacy of the conscience of nations and persons. The recognition of a transcendent moral order "safeguard[s] the objective rights of the spirit, of human conscience and of human creativity ..." (24) Upon his return to the United Nations in 1995, the Pontiff expressed caution about the emerging globalization, which may signal that "the world has yet to learn how to live with diversity." (25) In the global environment of the market economy, the legitimate differences of nations, cultures, and persons tend to be subsumed into an unrelenting consumerism. With its materialist reduction of the individual to consumer, this new form of globalization threatens both the objective moral order and legitimate diversity of subjective self-expression. (26)

John Paul II's analysis of human experience then recognizes the intellect and free will as complementary faculties. (27) As a constituent aspect of human dignity, the exercise of free will requires that the person not be restricted by authoritarian regimes and law. This requirement implies a negative conception of freedom as the absence of constraint. According to John Paul II, however, a correct analysis of human freedom entails a balance between negative and positive conceptions of freedom. Positive freedom focuses upon the basic human goods identified by the intellect and the power to pursue these goods in one's life through the exercise of free will. (28) In his early work, Love...