A.   Introduction

It is undeniably the case that intellectual life in the twentieth century took distinctive turns that occasioned new modes of philosophizing.   Only fifty years ago it appeared that philosophy was divested of much of its traditional subject matter, having given it over either to the newly founded social sciences or to the methodologically distinct natural sciences and survived only as an academic meta-discipline, and even as such, was severely fractured into two irreconcilable opposing camps: the analytic (Anglo-American) and the phenomenological (continental). Beyond this narrow definition of the West, philosophy was presumed not to exist.    Philosophers were professors who practiced specialties grounded in either an analytic or phenomenological methodology.   To be sure this situation represented a corrective reaction to much philosophical excess tolerated earlier in the century and in the nineteenth.   Nevertheless there were many who lamented that philosophy's once grand stature as the queen of the sciences was forever dead.  

Hans Jonas was a philosopher of the twentieth century whose work, while more in the phenomenological tradition founded by Husserl, defies simple categorization.   In many respects he epitomizes the spirit of his century; his thought issues from the center of the tumult that arose from the unprecedented crises, political and intellectual, that defined this time.   His philosophy was born of these conflicts and responded to them.   Yet the response of Jonas was always slightly out of step.   One of the most creative contributors to hermeneutics and theories of higher criticism, he stubbornly refused to yield to some of that discipline's new dogma.   Jonas often sought to restore to philosophical legitimacy insights lost to the modern temper. One could say that his response to the intellectual and political cross currents of the twentieth century was not one of acceptance, but it was not one of denial either.    The work of Hans Jonas is important because he relates our tradition to the crises of today finding much in ancient teaching and the tradition it supported salutary in our time.

Typically when people think of the work of Hans Jonas it is under one of two large and seemingly unrelated categories:   the study of the ancient Gnostic religions or issues of contemporary normative ethics -- especially medical ethics.   This misrepresents the coherence of his work and obscures its highly original and profound contributions to the most fundamental debates in philosophy.

This volume was conceived not only to show the breadth of interests represented by Hans Jonas, but more importantly to explore the interconnectedness of those interests.   It was characteristic of how Jonas's mind worked that he should elicit the striking commonalties between ancient gnosticism and twentieth century existentialism and in so doing perhaps say more about the historicity of human experience than anyone else in his generation.   Jonas's work, while always distinguished by impeccable scholarship, was never pedantic.   In his mind philosophical concerns were the concerns of humanity so that the justification for theory had to hold existential relevance.   As a theoretician Jonas was wary of the limitations of philosophy and uttered genuine respect and sometimes envy for the accomplishments and resources of those who were natural scientists, economists, artists, theologians.   Throughout his writings Jonas strove to realize the kind of insight that he felt only philosophy could contribute to understanding, wanting always to be in dialogue with the articulate in other disciplines.   One feature of Jonas's work was his constant allegiance to common sense, a virtue that led to impatience with the tendencies of contemporary philosophy, both in the Anglo-American analytic tradition as well as within his own historical-phenomenological tradition.   It may have been this impatience that despite the philosophical rigor and importance (not to mention intent) of his work that placed him outside the philosophical mainstream.   Or perhaps it was his ready willingness, when fidelity to reason so demanded, to --as he put it-- swim against the stream (as in his celebrated and criticized commission of the "naturalistic fallacy"), that situated him in an intellectual community apart from most philosophers.

The book treats Jonas’ position favorably while challenging one aspect of his method. Following numerous allusions made by Jonas it attempts to place his central ethical argument for the imperative of responsibility in the context of Jewish thought.   In so doing the book finds in Jonas an incipient but necessary theology.  

Jonas explores the traditional themes of philosophy with tools that have been sharpened by the discoveries of modern science.   He draws a line between, on the one hand, that form of philosophical inquiry (non-speculative), which leads to understanding on a level that can be accepted in the same way as can science, and, on the other, modes of philosophical inquiry that are speculative and may not compel the assent of the scientist.

Of his own philosophical authorship Jonas distinguishes speculative and non-speculative strands.   He sees his non-speculative philosophy as the rethinking of scientific claims from the standpoint of traditional philosophical inquiry.   Because the philosopher may ask different questions than the scientist philosophy may add something to scientific understanding.   According to Jonas, this kind of philosophy is the extension and elaboration of natural science and the validity of its claims must be judged in the same fashion as science herself.  

When Jonas turns to speculative philosophy, his claim is that his own philosophical speculations are well grounded by and compatible with rigorous science. His non-speculative philosophy is the foundation for his more speculative.   In other words, he maintains that while his speculations go beyond what can be strictly judged by scientific criteria, and that scientists may not wish to join his pursuit toward these speculative ends, they nonetheless rest upon scientific philosophy and offer (at least tentatively) solutions to questions beyond the ken of rigorous science.   In a sense Jonas makes the same distinction as Kant between theoretical (pure) and practical reason.   For Jonas speculative philosophy articulates the practical content of   "faith."   As Jonas develops his speculations it is clear that they raise theological issues and for the most part hew to the main tenets, if not the specific revealed content, of Judaism.   Thus Jonas is contributing to Jewish theology, arguing its consistency with his scientifically informed philosophical and ontologically grounded ethics of responsibility.   Jonas never calls himself a theologian, indeed he denies it, but it is clear that without theology his ethical project is incomplete.

Jonas claims that by making his philosophical arguments and then showing how theology can be understood consistent with those arguments he strengthens (often by “correction” and clarification) the theological stand, making it available to the modern temper. In this vein he tackles the problem of theodicy offering a Jewish conception of God no longer omnipotent but to an important degree intelligible.    Jonas sometimes seems to be saying that it is only a matter of history and tradition (and indeed personal belief) that leads him to express his speculative philosophy using theological terms and categories; that a fully demythologized account would no longer be theological.   This view reveals Jonas’s belief that his non-speculative philosophy stands on its own, universally valid, supported by reason and scientific evidence.  

In this book it is argued that this is not the case.   It asserts on the contrary that the grounding of Jonas’ philosophical ethics of responsibility is actually theological.   The brute existential necessity that demands human responsibility cannot be located in nature as such but must be sought in an external telos.   Moreover, this teleological principle is for Jonas expressive of Care (in Heidegger's sense) and not oblivious to circumstances in the world.   It is difficult to see how God could be eliminated even from the non-speculative philosophy of Jonas.  

The implications of reading Jonas's philosophy, both the speculative and non-speculative strands, as completing a theological world-view, rather than asserting independently valid arguments, leads to a revision of his ethics of responsibility.  

On this reading the difference between the two strands in Jonas's thought seems to derive partly just from the language of his explanations.   In his non-speculative philosophy Jonas prefers scientific and rationalist discourse.   But this does not provide the full answer because Jonas’ non-speculative writings are not just demythologized versions of the speculative philosophy.   Rather the two types of philosophy have different although closely linked purposes.   The non-speculative writings try to work out some details regarding the abiding practical concerns of humankind.   The speculative writings on the other hand wrestle with the presuppositions of life- and existence-philosophies.

Jonas’ philosophy is deeply imbued by the world historical events through which he lived. Existentialism and the various life-philosophies, not to mention the ideologies, of the 19th and 20th centuries, resonate throughout his work.   The Jewish Question, a concomitant of the Enlightenment project, shapes the crisis of reason, science and philosophy in the 20th century.   For Jonas the Jewish response to the Holocaust cannot be to abandon belief in God and turn instead to science or philosophy, as it was the European presentment of science and philosophy, in ideological costume, which perpetrated the crisis in the first place.

The question motivating Jonas is "Where does one turn now? " The nihilism he perceived in the worldview of Heidegger, his teacher in whose debt, however uncomfortably, he continued to live, is on profoundly ethical grounds simply an unacceptable conclusion.   His answer is to both science and religion, to philosophy and Judaism. Rather than the despairing act of abandoning either his intellectual or spiritual heritage, Jonas seeks to re-embrace both with the courage born of experience.    In seeking to interpret both enlightenment philosophy and Jewish values Jonas mistakenly strives to sustain a distinction between scientific philosophy and religion, preserving validity for both.   His distinction differs from both the medieval and the enlightenment distinctions between faith and reason or philosophy and religion.   He wants a science that does not need religion but which continues to leave room for religion .The relationship, as he sees it, is interpretive, i.e., a mutual heuristic obtains between science and religion.   The problem is, as Jonas constructs it, the relationship is no mere heuristic, but instead, an interpenetrating mutual dependency.    It might be possible to hold science and religion apart if he did not expect from science answers or at least the basis for answers to the profound existential and ethical questions of our day.

By allowing that science has an interpretive relation to the domain of human culture, ethics and even theology, Jonas in the spirit of Spinoza violates one of the standards since the enlightenment of hermeneutical investigation.  

While many Jews asked how they could believe in God after the Holocaust and, finding no good answer, left behind the content of their traditional faith, Jonas asks rather how it was possible for science and philosophy to abandon the search for truth and seem to support the betrayal of the children of Israel.   This is what makes Jonas a philosopher of the first rank.   He does not leave the question on the political or ideological level; nor does he try to create theological apologetics in order to encourage perseverance in the faith.    For Jonas to honor those lost to history's dark times demands nothing less than the search for truth.

This activity, profoundly philosophical in inception and purpose, is not the unique responsibility of Jews.   The crisis, by no means over in his view, does not implicate only Jews but all humanity.   Since most of humanity at his point in history may find religious belief impossible, not only because of the political experiences of the 20th century but also as a consequence of everything learned in modernity, Jonas is careful not to structure his arguments according to a particular revealed tradition, but to appeal to that which is universal.   It is here that Jonas is perhaps misled by his own rhetoric to deny the fundamental theological character of his writing.

Thus this volume seeks to introduce Hans Jonas as a philosopher to a wider audience by trying to bring out as effectively as possible his distinctive worldview.   Tradition, Technology, Responsibility, the three themes here chosen to indicate both the breadth and unity of Jonas's philosophy, shall serve initially to organize his thought and worldview.

Tradition refers to Jonas's trenchant analyses of the ancient creeds and the modern/contemporary experience of them.   Just as he showed ancient Gnostic patterns to resonate in contemporary existentialism, Jonas frequently enlightened our current dilemma in the mirror of antiquity.   One must ask what hermeneutic principle, according to Jonas, permits us to reread the ancient creeds in order better to understand our situation and ourselves?    As will be suggested below, for Hans Jonas the human condition is not a manifestation of essentialist metaphysics, although he does not entirely deconstruct the concept of human nature either. Indeed Jonas's hermeneutics, which gained its first recognition in the demythologizing approach to the Christian New Testament learned from him by his teacher Rudolf Bultmann, has its basis in philosophical anthropology.   Jonas's thought began as a philosophical anthropology, primarily an attempt to identify pervasive values in human experience.   He was from the very beginning as the scholar of Gnostic creeds already a post Nietzchean axiologist in quest of transvaluative value.   Yet the approaches of contemporary existentialism and phenomenology were in the view of Jonas inadequate to this task.   They came up short precisely because of their human centeredness and the artificial moorings of Cartesian dualism to which they were tied.

Technology refers not only to technology in the everyday sense of the term, but also to the creative acting and thinking characteristic of human experience.   As Jonas explored the meanings of these terms in an effort to disclose an underlying source of value he moved away from human science, philosophical anthropology toward the study of the organism as such or philosophical biology. In his philosophical biology the subject was still humanity, however not considered sui generis but from the perspective of the surprising fact of life itself. It is the phenomenon of life, examined under the category of organism, that Jonas investigates most thoroughly in his work, whether the focus is on ancient creed or the dilemmas fostered in the contemporary laboratory or hospital.

Throughout the entire range of human experience Jonas finds the clarification of responsibility to be the fundamental philosophical task.   No consideration of rights or duties alone is adequate to clarify the human condition because that condition is the expression of life itself, whereas rights and duties can only exist and function within human institutions.   Civil society, no less than the computer chip, is an artifact of human technology and it therefore cannot define the domain of our social-political action, being itself constructed under that domain.   Civil society and its associated institutions such as the law do call forth responsibility. But our response to this call must not be measured by unreflective loyalty to earlier social-political models. It is only the hermeneutical study of our social/political/ethical traditions together with understanding technology as the means to fabricate tradition that will permit the discovery of the imperative of responsibility.

At the same time Jonas is aware of the powerful constitutive effect of technology upon human consciousness.   Technology shapes the life world and its institutions thereby allowing us in the present indirectly, mediated by our tools and artifacts, to transvalue the benchmarks and standards by which future generations measure their value. In a prescient critique of the media's influence on all aspects of human existence Jonas observes how the Periclean view of immortal fame is for us no longer even possible. [i] That this changes the meaning of action and therefore responsibility illustrates the extent to which the historical character of our being is formed by technology.

But of course it is this transformation that proscribes the hermeneutical circle into which Jonas destines us to wander. That the imperative is responsibility is clear enough, but concretely what that responsibility is forever eludes us for the very reason that the effects of our technological action cannot be foreseen. The future's opacity is not ameliorated by the evolutionary evidence of the past as biological evolution does nothing to undermine the Kantian hypothesis of freedom.   The fact remains that "man is evermore the maker of what he has made and the doer of what he can do, and most of all the preparer of what he will be able to do next.” [ii]   Yet however much we understand what we have made and done this knowledge only reveals the imperfections of the stage we have built. This is Jonas's dilemma. Morality must enter the domain of making where it has never before ventured but our morality, reflecting as it does our traditional view of ourselves, is without beacon. It is possible, and here Jonas admits to crossing a boundary others may wish not to transgress, as it requires unprovable speculation, viz., that life itself --rather than ethics-- may offer clues and warning signals.

Thus the approach of Hans Jonas finds in the phenomenon of life the fulcrum between ancient creed and contemporary technology that may allow us to define the imperative of responsibility.  

This book is written with a sense of incipient crisis.   In an interview in 1989 [iii] a pessimistic Hans Jonas expressed the slight hope that warning shots from nature, small natural catastrophes, would awaken us to reason just in time to spare us the big catastrophe. Without such a great awakening, Jonas feared, we would finally find ourselves without any choice let alone means to assure a future life where any human values could be guaranteed.   The dawn of the twenty-first century offers little evidence to suggest that these fears were inappropriate or that a technological era driven by free enterprise and free markets will provide the means for our redemption.

Given Jonas’s analysis of the historicity of human experience, grounding it as he does in a scientifically informed reflection on the phenomenon of life, and his introduction of a technologically informed ethics fortified by a revised notion of responsibility, there is a basis to think that the human enterprise may find a redemptive beacon in his worldview.

What follows is largely an explication and critique of the ontological ethics of Hans Jonas. As no one of his works alone adequately puts forth his viewpoint, this exposition is an attempt to construct an extended argument that exhibits the inherent unity of his thought. Given the breadth of Jonas’ interests this may seem an unlikely enterprise to some.   Indeed his writings may leave the impression of a discontinuous authorship, one that over the years moved from the study of ancient religion on to some reflections on biology, to medical ethics and finally to a proposal for a general ethics appropriate to the age of technology.   Yet when read carefully both thematic and methodological integrities are evident from the beginning studies of ancient religions through his final reflections on technology and mortality. When considered as a unified discourse the force of his argument is palpable.

The structure of the argument to be advanced here is easily summarized.   Jonas offers an ontological ethics; one supported by a philosophical biology that advances the premise that matter is self-organizing and itself the cause of life.   This mode of understanding in crucial ways resembles the outlook that dominated in antiquity but was historically overcome by the rise of the new science of the 17th century which made matter into something fundamentally inert activated only by mechanical processes.

Jonas sees in contemporary technology a profound challenge, one that the legacy of ethical theory faces with impotence.   The weakness of ethics derives from, on the one hand, the loss of plausibility for any form of divine command ethics and, on the other, from the metaphysical consequences of modern dualism.   What is called for and what our tradition provides little support for is an ethics grounded in nature.   Rejecting Hume’s disjunction of the “is” and the “ought,” Jonas sets out to restore the possibility of an ontological ethics.   For this task Jonas focuses on the category of “life” which, by his analysis, has been made by modern science and its attendant metaphysical dualism into a condition contrary to the normal state of nature.   This is precisely the opposite of what was generally understood in antiquity, where life was attributed to everything and the absence of life posed the theoretical conundrum.   For Jonas, a philosophy of life is necessary to empower ethics.  

A philosophy of life comprises philosophical biology and philosophy of mind: dualism cannot be simply forgotten. Even though the weight of scientific evidence favors material substance over ideal, the materialist hypothesis does not do justice to the experiences nominally attributed to mind.   Thus a philosophy that understands the phenomenon of life must be a philosophical biology that permits mind as an immanent reality.

A philosophical biology of this sort brings humanity fully into nature while preserving its unique qualities.   Allowing mind as an immanent feature of matter hypothesizes the self-organizing nature of matter.   What dualism calls mind becomes for Jonas the teleology of life, which is based upon the recognition of immanent final causes, which otherwise have been banished from our understanding of nature by modern science.

Jonas wishes to restore a worldview that in some respects mirrors the norm of antiquity.   His profound understanding of ancient religions, especially the movements grouped together by him under the rubric “Gnostic,” allows Jonas to retrieve from those mythologies notions which resonate with the modern temper.   Using his methodology of “demythologizing” he strives to show how ancient wisdom can coexist with the discoveries of modern science.

Of course many of the speculations of religion must be ruled out by science.   But there is a range of theological and metaphysical speculation that, while it cannot be established by science, neither can it be dismissed.   It is at this point where Jonas lays out the possibility of a restored rational natural theology.   Although Jonas clearly does not believe his ontological ethics is dependent upon theology, (that claim of his will be here contested) he often cites points where religious sensibility provides the clearest understanding of the human condition.

First Stage of the Argument – Tradition and the Modern Age:

The argument as it can be recognized today begins innocuously in the study of ancient religion.   Long after his groundbreaking scholarly analysis of Gnosticism had been acknowledged, Jonas offered his own critique of its significance for his own project. [iv] In the total economy of Jonas’s ontological ethics one can discern three key contributions derived from his early studies.   These are, first, his thorough submersion in the texts of ancient creed and early philosophy which called forth a critique of modernity free from the argot of much contemporary theory; second, his recognition of recurring patterns of thought exhibited by all intellectual systems; and third, the ability, due to his phenomenological training, to overcome the standard German historicism while preserving a keen awareness of the longevity of philosophical issues and the historicity of thought and being.

It is this third point most widely acknowledged that led the way for Jonas to develop his distinctive methodology.   This method, devised by Jonas for his studies in Gnosticism and first rigorously applied by Rudolph Bultmann in New Testament studies to discern an underlying kerygma of truth common to competing mythologies, evolved in Jonas’s own work to re-legitimate for the modern age questions of soul, non-subjectivist considerations of feelings and, most importantly, the teleology of life.

Second Stage of the Argument – The Practical Uses of Theory, the Philosophy of Organism, the Question of Technology:

In this stage Jonas explores the human condition.   Challenging the existentialist tradition and anthropocentric theories generally he stakes out the basis for a scientifically defensible ontological grounding for ethics.   Unconvinced, indeed highly skeptical of --if not worried by-- the challenge proffered by Francis Bacon’s   Novum Organum, Jonas re-conceives the future of science with respect to its social utility. [v]   For an informed 20th century thinker what Jonas attempts is quite remarkable.   What he does is to challenge from within the discourse of natural science itself what have been since the rise of modern science in the 17th century some of its most cherished dogma.   Jonas boldly asserts that a natural science that finds the phenomenon of life to at odds with the norms of nature is itself flawed.   Jonas notes the discontinuity between biology and post Newtonian physics and concludes that this has to be a mistake of one sort or another.   Leaving to others the task of reuniting the natural sciences Jonas offers a theory of biology that attests to the primacy of life.   For ethics this means that the foundational source of value is to be located within the natural order among the ends of nature herself.

Martin Heidegger prepared Jonas’s critique of technology.   What Jonas laments about technology is how, in its modern scientific form, it has extended the power of human action beyond our ability to restrain it.   He does not mean that we don’t possess the capability to refuse to deploy technology under certain conditions, but rather that the consequences of technologically aided action persist beyond the horizon of the knowable future.   These consequences are such that they may produce situations where future organisms are mere means to technological   (perhaps unintended) purposes.   Were this to obtain the freedom which organism guarantees for itself would be irreparably abrogated.

Third Stage of the Argument – The Imperative of Responsibility:

At this stage it is clear why responsibility is the watchword of Jonas’s ethics.

In a mood that offers hope while proclaiming pessimism Jonas outlines an ontologically based, social and political ethics that responds to the political and scientifically technological dramas played out on the stage of modernity.   As in stage two Jonas strives to articulate a position that is acceptable without embracing a level of speculation beyond that which can be made consistent with a rigorous scientific worldview. It is here, however, where Jonas’s claims to remain entirely within the domain of rational metaphysics face their most serious challenge.

Jonas advances responsibility as the primary and perhaps an entirely new category for ethics. On his account, no traditional ethics recognizes the potential for taking the kind of irreparable action made possible by the power of modern technology.   Jonas asserts that technology has altered the very nature of human action.

[i] “Imortality and the Modern Temper,” The Phenomenon of Life , p ___.

[ii] The Imperative of Responsibility , p 9.

[iii] “Not Compassion Alone,” Hastings Center Report , vol 25, no 7, 1995,   pp 44 – 45.

[iv] “Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism,”   _____, _____.

[v] “The Practical Uses of Theory,” _____, _____.