Though Embracing the mystical theology which assumed faith in divine revelation and spoke to the community of believers, Wojtyla and his mentors knew that philosophical analyses of human action and ethics were of the utmost importance in the confrontation with communist theoreticians. To prepare for a university career in a communist society, Wojtyla studied the foundations of ethics in modern Western philosophy, writing his second dissertation on the phenomenology of Max Scheler (1874-1928). Scheler, who was for a time a convert to Catholicism, warned that moral relativism could lead modern culture into a barbarism made more dreadful because of technology. In response to this threat, Scheler adopted the descriptive approach of phenomenology. He proposed that ethics be based on the intuition of values as the objects of feeling. Scheler's style of thought was intuitive and introspective. He excelled at describing subtle states of consciousness such as sympathy, resentment, repentance, love and joy Scheler argued that these states of consciousness put us in touch with objective values. Defending the objectivity of values has absorbed Wojtyla throughout his career.

Phenomenology never displaced the Thomistic structure of Wojtyla's thought, but it has had a lasting influence on his way of thinking. The young Wojtyla doubted that Scheler's proposal could serve as a basis for Catholic ethics because the emotional intuitions of value lack the objectivity of revelation. Nonetheless, Wojtyla admired Scheler's ability to clarify lived experience, and he suggested that one could apply the phenomenological method of reflection to the experience of the believer in attending to revelation. Wojtyla's approach to the human person has been shaped by Scheler's emphasis on human personality and his intuitive style of reflecting on experience and values. The pope's recent encyclical, The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor), returns to some of these concerns and defends the objectivity of values against the threat of moral relativism.

In The Pope's eyes, the greatest threat to Christian identity arises from the subjectivism, rationalism, relativism and indifferentism of much of modern Western culture as expressed by its philosophers and lived by millions of people who never read philosophy. Moral relativism is but one aspect of a broader relativizing trend which undermines the quest for the truth in any form. Cut off from metaphysical and religious foundations, all forms of culture risk being dissolved into forms of competition fueled by the will to power. In the struggle for the soul of modern culture, the dialogue with modern Western philosophy takes on a critical importance. The former philosophy professor is extremely critical of Descartes for seeking to ground philosophy in the human subject; he sees the fruit of this strategy in the later rationalism of the Enlightenment, which abandoned metaphysics, banished God from the world, and left humans to follow their own reason. In the French Revolution reason presided over the reign of terror. The search for freedom and pleasure divorced from responsibility has led to a culture of death in which the most vulnerable are made the victims.

Ricoeur, for example, has a profound respect for the philosophy of limits of Immanuel Kant and for Kant's retrieval of the role of the symbol. Ricoeur invites Christians and secularists alike to a deeper appreciation of religious symbols as evoking more than can be captured in concepts. In welcoming Levinas's and Ricoeur's theories of interpretation as authentic retrievals of the profound meaning of religious metaphors and symbolic language, John Paul is at least implicitly opening the path to a more positive relationship to major elements in modern thought.