For those picking up Love and Responsibility and hoping for an easy read, the Pope's opening sentence, “The world in which we live is composed of many objects,” is not a promising start, yet upon reflection the very core of John Paul's philosophy is contained in this deceptively simple, though somewhat opaque, sentence. Before clarifying the meaning of this sentence, the Pope only seems to confuse matters further when he adds: “an 'object,' strictly speaking, is something related to a 'subject'....It is then possible to say that the world in which we live is composed of many subjects.”

Why this talk of objects and subjects? And what are such words doing in a book about love? Because the Pope fears “it is easy to treat everything which is outside the subject, i.e. the whole world of objects, in a purely subjective way, to deal with it only as it enters into the consciousness of a subject, establishes itself and dwells in that consciousness.” The Pope then concludes the first paragraph of his book firmly: “We must, then, be clear right from the start that every subject also exists as an object, an objective 'something' or 'somebody' (his emphasis).”

In plain English, the Pope is all too well aware of our human tendency to view others only in terms of what value they hold for us, and that our perception of others and their needs are often not in sync with their objective, true self and their real needs. The Pope makes clear from the start that each person has a value in and of themselves, and that we must be on guard against our natural inclination to view others only in terms of what they do for us.

The Pope's insistence on keeping in mind the objective reality of others is the basis not only of his teaching on sexual morality but on human dignity in general. The Pope has been a true champion, not only of love, but of human rights worldwide. In our dealings with others, what we want should never take priority over what is best for others. (In understanding the depth of the Pope's passion for respecting human dignity, it is important to have in mind his experience as a young man living in Nazi-occupied Poland and witnessing first-hand all the horrors of that time.)

The meaning of words is important to the Pope, and in the first pages of the book he labors to define important terms. One word dear to the Pope is “person.” As he sees it, “it is not enough to define a man as an individual of the species Homo (or even Homo sapiens). The term 'person' has been coined to signify that a man cannot be wholly contained within the concept 'individual member of the species', but that there is something more to him, a particular richness and perfection in the manner of his being, which can only be brought out by the use of the word 'person.' The most obvious and simplest reason for this is that man has the ability to reason, he is a rational being, which cannot be said of any other entity in the visible world, for in none of them do we find any trace of conceptual thinking.”

A crucial element of the Pope's argument is that persons are not mere animals, “although physiological processes more or less similar to those in man take place within their organisms.” The Pope stresses, “the person as a subject is distinguished from even the most advanced animals by a specific inner self, an inner life, characteristic only of persons.”

This is a key point, as “The person's contact with the objective world, with reality, is not merely 'natural', physical, as is the case will all other creations of nature, nor is it merely sensual as in the case of animals. A human person, as a distinctly defined subject, establishes contact with all other entities precisely through the inner self.”

Contrary to simplistic critiques of Catholicism, the Pope is also an inveterate champion of human freedom: “Man's nature differs fundamentally from that of the animals. It includes the power of self-determination, based on reflection, and manifested in the fact that a man acts from choice. This power is called free will.”

The Pope continues: “Because a human being—a person—possesses free will, he is his own master, sui juris as the Latin phrase has it. This characteristic feature of a person goes with another distinctive attribute. The Latin of the philosophers defined it in the assertion that personality is alteri incommunicabilis—not capable of transmission, not transferable. The point here is not that a person is a unique and unrepeatable entity, for this can be said just as well of any other entity—of an animal, a plant, a stone. The incommunicable, the inalienable, in a person is intrinsic to that person's inner self, to the power of self-determination, free will. No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine.”

The Pope concludes: “It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want—and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact. All true conceptions about education and culture begin from and return to this point.”